Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series depicts a vital chapter in American history

Fred Mazelis

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, April 3 through September 7, 2015

The current exhibition of the American painter Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City brings together the 60 small works depicting the mass migration of African Americans from the rural US South to the industrial North, and it is noteworthy on that account alone.

The show is doubly impressive, however, for its juxtaposition of Lawrence’s famous series with other painting, photography, writing, music and documentary records of this period. The fuller historical context provides a moving and thought-provoking experience, one that sheds some light on the entire social, political and cultural history of the past century.

In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry.

The demographic shift depicted by Lawrence (1917-2000) is generally considered to have begun in 1915. By the time Lawrence completed his series of paintings, the black population of New York City, for instance, had quintupled in three decades, from 92,000 in 1910 to 458,000 in 1940. Between 1940 and 1970 this total would increase by nearly another four-fold, to almost 1.7 million.

In major Northern industrial centers like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Philadelphia the pattern was the same. By the time the net exodus of African Americans from the states of the former Confederacy had ended, about 1970, around 6 million people had come north. This played an important role in the development of the American working class and transformed nearly every aspect of American life.

Fueling this massive internal movement was the desire to escape rigid Jim Crow segregation, a system of organized oppression and often of murderous violence. The migration could not have taken place, however, without the crucial social and economic changes taking place in the North—the growth of the urban centers and the development of basic industry, which opened up the possibility of jobs, improved living conditions and a better future for the African American workers from the South.

Originally entitled “The Migration of the Negro” upon its completion in 1941, when the artist was only 23 years old, the 60 paintings, along with the captions that were an integral part of the narrative, were equally divided between MOMA in New York and the Philips Collection in Washington DC. In 1993, about six years before he died, Lawrence slightly modified the captions, and the work was renamed “The Migration Series.” The complete set of paintings, in tempera on hardboard, has only occasionally been reunited for special exhibitions. The current show at MOMA is called “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North.”

Lawrence had never been to the US South until shortly after he completed these paintings, but he was nevertheless deeply affected by the “great migration.” He was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to parents who had come from the South. The family moved to New York in 1930, and Lawrence came of age in the depths of the Great Depression and amidst the growth of radical ideas among workers, young people and intellectuals.

Lawrence was shaped in large part by the Harlem Renaissance, as the movement that emerged in the 1920s among African American artists, writers and intellectuals came to be known. He counted among his friends such figures as Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, who gave written expression to the growing anger and opposition to racism and discrimination, in both North and South, and each of whom, for at least a brief period, joined or sympathized with the American Communist Party.

While there is no indication that Lawrence, some years younger than these writers, went as far in his political involvement, there is no doubt that he was formed by this period and atmosphere. He saw his artwork as serving a social and political purpose. Like other young artists, he obtained regular work through the Works Progress Administration, the federal program established in the New Deal years as part of the reforms of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. A precocious and talented artist, Lawrence had already attracted attention prior to the exhibit of the “The Migration of the Negro” in 1941.

Before he set to work on the migration paintings, Lawrence carefully researched the period, working for months at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library (today the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). He later stressed the immediacy of the question of the migration during these years, explaining, “people would speak of these things on the street.” He also developed his ideas and methods by working on narrative cycles of paintings dealing with Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture and anti-slavery leaders Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

In the current show the 60 paintings are presented in a spacious rectangular gallery, with a dozen iPads, on a long table in the center of the room, for more detailed study of the individual panels as they follow a roughly chronological path.

The experience of seeing the paintings together is a compelling one, and it should ideally be viewed as a unit at all times. One is struck by the artistic and historical coherence of the work.

Lawrence worked on the series systematically, with a relatively small range of colors. He began with black, applying the paint to all of the panels in turn. He then proceeded to progressively lighter colors until the series was finished. During this whole process he worked in collaboration with his fellow painter Gwendolyn Knight, whom he had met several years earlier, and who became his wife in 1941.

There is a powerful simplicity to the work. The relative sameness of the figures, and the fact that features are not clearly delineated, calls attention to the universality of these individuals and the story they tell. Individual detail is sacrificed, but something else is gained. The understatement is effective for this narrative. Lawrence’s portrayal of humanity has a dignity but not a false heroism.

The combination of colors, including yellows, browns, greens and reds, is also successful. There is life here, although it is a somber story. Most of the migrants traveled by railway to the urban centers of the north, where they found employment and sometimes improved living conditions, but also new challenges, including other forms of discrimination and exploitation.

Lawrence combined his social commitment with a thorough grounding in art history and technique. He spent many hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art studying the work of Renaissance masters. He also looked to such painters as Stuart Davis and Charles Sheeler, and the Migration Series is a thoroughly modernist work, while at the same time, as one curator expressed it, “history writing in visual form.”

The influence of modernism can be seen in one of the early panels in the show, showing the migrants en route. A small crowd, taking a triangular shape, is mirrored by the image of migratory birds in the sky above. “In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry.”

They were very poor.

The artist portrays the poverty and dignity of his subjects in a panel entitled, “They were very poor.” Two figures sit at a table, their heads bowed in prayer, and two bowls and a pot on the wall nearby testify to their bare subsistence.

Another early panel brings out the working of the Southern “justice” system. Two defendants stand with their backs to the viewer and a scowling judge towers above, no doubt handing down a draconian sentence.

Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this.

One of the most powerfully understated images in the show is that of a lynching, depicted only by a noose, without a body. A grieving figure nearby reflects the permanent loss inflicted by racist violence.

Another painting suggests the mass character of the migration. Three men are pictured talking near a fence, and the caption explains, “people all over the South began to discuss the great movement.”

The labor agent also recruited laborers to break strikes which were occurring in the North.

As Lawrence moves on to depict the challenges facing the migrants in the North, he does not shy away from other big issues. One panel shows a “labor agent” who “recruited laborers to break strikes which were occurring in the North.”

The migrants arrived in great numbers.

The ongoing character of the migration is brought out by the regular appearance of panels portraying working people in motion, accompanied by captions with a similar refrain: “The migrants arrived in great numbers”; “And the migrants kept coming.”

Other paintings show the poor housing migrants faced in the North, the industry (particularly the steel mills in Pittsburgh and Chicago) in which they found employment, and an especially important panel dealing with Northern “race riots.” The caption explains that these were “very numerous…because of the antagonism that was caused between the Negro and white workers.”

One panel suggests the class divisions and stratification within the African American population. An upper middle class couple is depicted, and the caption reads, “The Negroes who had been North for quite some time met their fellowmen with disgust and aloofness.”

The Negroes who had been North for quite some time met their fellowmen with disgust and aloofness.

As already noted, the other rooms in this exhibition add immensely to the experience, and any one of them could be the subject of another review. The accompanying work includes other paintings by Lawrence as well as by Lawrence’s teacher Charles Alston and other African American painters, including William H. Johnson, Romare Bearden and Charles White.

Attention is also devoted to photography of the period, focusing in part on images from the Depression and the following decade, including important work by Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt, Aaron Siskind, Jack Delano and others. Here the subjects include white workers and immigrants, bringing out some of the broader issues facing the working class during these years.

Included is Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic photograph from Life magazine, “‘The American Way’ and the Flood of ’37.” A line of impoverished African Americans seeks food and clothing in Louisville, Kentucky following the devastating flood, while a huge billboard behind them declares, “There’s No Way Like the American Way.” The show also includes some famous work by Morgan and Marvin Smith, twins who were based in Harlem and worked as a photographic team, including the Smiths’ photos of Harlem residents listening to street corner speakers and other scenes of everyday life.

Two historic film clips are also on view: one of Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, in the famous 1939 appearance after the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented her from appearing at Constitution Hall; and another of Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit,” the famous song about lynching she first introduced in 1939.

Finally, this Migration Series exhibition includes portraits and audio excerpts from musical figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance or the Great Migration: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, Huddie Ledbetter (“Leadbelly”), Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, Josh White, Mahalia Jackson and the classical composer William Grant Still.

The Migration Series illustrates some of the strengths as well as the limitations of the Harlem Renaissance. It was not really a movement with a coherent outlook, but rather reflected the emergence of an African American artistic intelligentsia with a variety of outlooks and ideas.

Some of the figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance saw their role in purely or primarily racial terms. Others were attracted to Marxism, at least to some extent, and recognized the role of racism as a tool to divide the working class. Lawrence was apparently inclined in this direction.

But Lawrence emerged in the heyday of the Popular Front period, in which the Stalinist parties worldwide, including the American CP, subordinated the working class to the needs of the Soviet bureaucracy for an alliance with the liberal sections of the bourgeoisie. Stalinism played a destructive role not only in relation to adherents of the CP but also in broader left-wing circles, including figures such as Lawrence.

It is worth noting that Lawrence, although he continued to paint and produce interesting work for many decades, is best known for the work he completed as a young man. The artistic difficulties he confronted were essentially the same as those faced by a generation of artists after the Second World War. Figurative painters were out of fashion, as were those who concerned themselves with social and historical themes. Later, Lawrence also rejected the “political” art associated with nationalism and identity politics.

These problems were bound up, in a complex fashion, with the history of the 20th century, including the protracted degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the crisis of perspective facing the international working class. In any case, Lawrence’s work on the Migration Series, along with the other achievements included in the current exhibit of this work, raises vital issues concerning the current crisis of culture more generally.

There is also the important historical question of the Great Migration itself. The exhibit somewhat misleadingly states that the population shift ended in 1970 because the achievements of the civil rights struggle meant that African Americans could now enjoy equal rights in the South. This conception goes hand in hand with the approach that sees the main element fueling the migration as racism and discrimination.

In fact, a change took place beginning in the 1970s primarily because of the deepening economic crisis and deindustrialization in the urban centers to which African Americans had flocked. As decent-paying jobs dried up there was no longer the impulse driving migration, and in recent decades there has in fact been a slight “reverse migration,” including retired as well as some younger workers attracted in certain cases by a lower cost of living in the South. The Great Migration and all the subsequent history can only be understood in class terms.

The population shift that is the subject of Jacob Lawrence’s gripping work transformed the US. It anticipated the civil rights struggles centered in the South as well as the urban rebellions in the northern cities of the 1960s. It led to the growth of the industrial working class and, between the 1930s and 1960s, common struggles of black and white workers for better living standards and basic rights.

The end of the internal migration, however, coincided with the end of the period of partial and limited social reform under American capitalism, exemplified first by the New Deal and later by the gains made by the working class as well as the civil rights reforms and the “War on Poverty.”

Today a deep crisis faces the entire working class—a crisis not only of unemployment and poverty, but also of police violence, attacks on democratic rights and the growing threat of world war. Where are the artistic voices who will represent this new situation?

Artists with Lawrence’s sincerity and aesthetic sense don’t come along every day. The influence of selfish identity politics, including a debilitating racialist approach to every aspect of life, has made it far more difficult for artists in recent decades to find their way to the most earthshaking questions. Objective events above all, including a mass movement of opposition to the status quo, will bring about a change in mood and compel a new generation of artists to address themselves, applying all sorts of novel techniques and methods, to the circumstances facing millions. (See the Lawrence exhibit.)

Painter Kehinde Wiley at the Brooklyn Museum: Trappings of empire and power

Clare Hurley

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, February 20–May 24, 2015

A New Republic, a retrospective exhibition of American painter Kehinde Wiley’s work at the Brooklyn Museum, accorded the highly successful, 38-year-old artist an exaggerated importance similar to the exaggeration that characterizes his lavishly decorative portraits. In the latter, Wiley copies European Old Masters paintings, substituting African Americans in contemporary, hip hop street garb in the poses of aristocrats and other wealthy figures of power and privilege.

For example, in Wiley’s Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005), based on Jacques-Louis David’s equestrian portrait of Napoleon I (1801), an African American “urban warrior” in camouflage pants is substituted for the French general and subsequent emperor. Marx famously observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(1852) that “all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” One might add in the case of Wiley’s painting: the third time as kitsch.

Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005)

Wiley describes how growing up in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he would spend weekends in the Huntington Museum of Art studying Reynolds, Gainsborough, Rembrandt, van Dyck and others without seeing anyone that “looked like me.” By painting “black and brown” people into the canon of European paintings, Wiley set out to “confront and critique historical traditions that do not acknowledge Black cultural experience.”

However, this approach is thoroughly off base. The reason why one doesn’t find “black and brown” people as the subjects of Old Masters paintings is a historical and social question bound up with the development of world capitalism and bourgeois culture, and not simply a supra-historical manifestation of racial prejudice and exclusion of black cultural experience. Furthermore, how many “average” white art students look at 17th and 18th century paintings of kings and aristocrats, Dutch burghers and prelates and see people that look like themselves in an immediate or superficial sense?

Great artwork, and particularly portraits like those by Rembrandt or van Dyck, Velazquez or van Gogh do resonate across the centuries because they communicate some essential insight into the person and social relations depicted, which are at once historically specific while maintaining an intimate familiarity and meaning to contemporary viewers. To relate to a portrait only on the basis of the color or gender of the sitter is woefully purblind. That Wiley does not see anyone “like himself” in great paintings of the past is a comment on his obtuseness and narrow view. But then, one doesn’t get the impression that Wiley is a terribly profound artist, rather that he hit upon a gimmick and has been handsomely rewarded for it.

He began his semi-controversial “street-casting” method of approaching young, working class African American men in the streets of Harlem and asking them to model based on a historical painting or sculpture of their choosing during an artist residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem after he received an M.F.A. from Yale University in 2001.

Many of these paintings are homoerotic; perfectly polished male subjects gaze at the viewer with languid, come-hither expressions. Often based on a female original, as in Femme piquée par un serpent (2008), this queer “subversion of the male gaze” has won Wiley additional kudos in the sphere of identity politics.

Femme piquee par un serpent (2008)

As repainting the canon of Old Masters to include “people of color” grew stale, Wiley expanded his format to include faux gold leaf religious icons and stained glass windows, all featuring young African American men in contemporary street gear in place of the original subject.

Beginning in 2006, he then took his show onto the “World Stage,” traveling to Jamaica, France, Israel, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Nigeria, Senegal and China to find an expanded range of “black and brown” subjects. With an entourage of photographers, art apprentices and other assistants, Wiley went into small villages or favelas [Brazilian slums] asking people to adopt poses based not only on art from the Western European tradition, but also from their own cultures, as in Dogon Couple (2008) based on an 18th-19th century wooden statuette from Mali. In Wiley’s painting, the figures are transformed from an archetypal male and female to a pair of men.

In the “World Stage” paintings, the sitters often wear sports shirts, caps and sneakers that were likely mass-produced in their own countries for Western markets. They are placed against backgrounds based on textiles or other indigenous decorative patterns, which reach around to encompass the sitters like overgrown vines. In The White Slave (2010), a young Sri Lankan man sits in a lotus pose, while the background reproduces a 19th century European painting of a white concubine, in case we missed the anti-orientalist message.

Even aside from the simplistic and reactionary identity politics, there are problematic aspects of Wiley’s prolific artistic output. The paintings are repetitive to the point of being formulaic and tedious. Some of them could, and may well be, painted largely by assistants who allegedly work in undercompensated conditions, though Wiley would not be the only contemporary artist to operate an “art factory” to churn out his lucrative work—Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Ai Wei Wei all do, too.

Shantavia Beale II (2012)

From an aesthetic standpoint, the artificiality of embedding the sitters within the floral background tends to reduce the figures to another decorative element, and with few exceptions, one gets little sense of connection to the actual person portrayed, as one would with a truly compelling portrait from any time period. Without their own context, the sitters lose cultural and historic specificity. Although they may take pride in being the subject of a painting in a museum, they are not present under their own names or identities.

Conceptually, the idea that removed from their actual surroundings and placed in positions of power, Wiley’s sitters are “empowered” is hogwash. At the end of the day, the sitters return to their streets, villages and favelas, perhaps having received some compensation, while Wiley sells their portraits to wealthy collectors starting at $40,000 for the smaller paintings and up to $150,000 for the large ones.

Nor is Wiley particularly original in painting contemporary people and subjects into Old Masters artwork. Postmodernist painting has employed historical pastiche to various ends, some more, some less successful. In the 1990s, a fellow native of Los Angeles, Sandow Birk painted Death of Manuel of an LA gang leader using the composition of Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting of the French Revolution Death of Marat (1793) and transposed scenes of urban conflict into other 19th century Romantic paintings, including Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830).

Another African American artist, Titus Kaphar, recently exhibited The Jerome Project at the Studio Museum of Harlem, a series of portraits of black men all of whom were named Jerome, like Kaphar’s father and who, like him, had been incarcerated. The portraits are on gold leaf panels recalling icons and dipped in tar to cover their mouths, indicating their silencing and disenfranchisement.

Wiley’s portraits have a definite appeal to a certain audience because they show a large range of working class youth who are rarely, if ever, depicted in art. His portraits of women, which he started painting after being criticized for only showing men in positions of power, tend to be more memorable, as are his bronze busts.

Portrait of Mary Hill, Lady Killigrew (2013)

Still, one can’t help but ask, what social conditions are these men on horses with their swords or hoodies like cowls, and women in designer gowns aspiring to? As the world’s handful of international High Net Worth Individuals increasingly resembles the aristocracy of the ancien regime, to what social instincts do Wiley’s paintings appeal? Envy seems a reasonable word to introduce into the discussion.

The presentation of “people of color” as noble and beautiful, graceful and confident has been welcomed as “affirmative,” particularly by elements of the aspiring black American middle class. There is nothing remotely “revolutionary” or subversive in Wiley’s paintings. Napoleon, the product of the bourgeois French Revolution, stood for something greater than himself; he represented social relationships and a “cause” that were frightening to feudal Europe. In the way that Wiley has painted his subjects, without social context, they are entirely isolated, self-referential, unthreatening in any important sense. The painter manages to remove everything penetrating and even critical from the originals.

Whereas the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries “required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content” (Marx), the revolutions of the 21st century will have no use for the “trappings of empire and power” that Kehinde Wiley’s paintings celebrate. The challenge that confronts today’s artists of every color and gender is to find meaningful ways to make use of the cultural developments of the past, in order to create something urgent, contemporary and enlightening.

Australian reports on wealth and poverty: A tale of two countries

Cheryl McDermid

Two reports published in Australia late last month starkly highlighted the growing polarisation between rich and poor. The first, the Australian Financial Review magazine’s 2015 BRW Rich 200 list outlined the rising fortunes of the country’s wealthiest 200 individuals and families. The second, the Salvation Army’s Economic and Social Impact Survey, for the fourth year running exposed the dire and deteriorating conditions endured by welfare recipients.

While the livelihoods of these vastly different layers of society are a world apart there is, in fact, a direct connection between them. The conditions of deprivation and poverty imposed on those at the bottom of society are dictated by the corporate boardrooms and company owners of the Rich 200 list, among others, who determine the austerity measures of both Liberal and Labor governments that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

This process has resulted in the poorest section of the Australian population eking out an existence on an impossible $43.45 per day, while the average daily income of the richest 200 is an obscene $2.7 million. The richest six individuals own more wealth—$55.9 billion—than the bottom 20 percent—1.73 million households.

The top six are Gina Rinehart with $14.018 billion, Anthony Pratt and family $10.759 billion, Harry Triguboff $10.228 billion, Frank Lowy $7.837 billion, Hui Wing Mau $6.890 billion, and Ivan Glasenberg $6.144 billion.

The Rich 200 list reports a record 49 billionaires, up from 39 last year, and reveals the unimaginable wealth of this tiny parasitic layer. Despite a decline of almost $6 billion in the wealth of Australian’s richest person, mining magnate Rinehart, due to the plunge in iron ore prices, the combined wealth of the country’s richest 200 individuals increased by 1.2 percent to $195.6 billion.

The wealth required for entry to the list was also a record $286 million, up from $250 million last year. The first Rich 200 report, published in 1983, required a mere $10 million to make the list, so there has been an almost 30-fold increase in the entry level. Sydney is the preferred city of residence for 18 of the 49 billionaires, with the surrounding state of New South Wales housing 61 of the 200 richest individuals, just beaten by Victoria on 63.

Only six of the top 200 derived their wealth from manufacturing, with Pratt and his family, who control Visy and the US-based Pratt Industries, coming in second on the list, increasing their wealth by a massive 29 percent in one year. According to the Australian Financial Review, Pratt’s “series of big bets on the comeback of the USA manufacturing sector have paid off.” This is, without doubt, attributable in large part to the protracted slashing of American wage levels under the Obama administration.

More than a quarter—53 of the richest 200—derived their wealth from property, with soaring housing prices driving the rapid increase in their stakes. Harry Triguboff, the owner of Meriton, Australia’s largest apartment developer, climbed from eighth in 2014 to third this year, almost doubling his wealth to $10.23 billion. The property price surge that has benefited Triguboff and others on the list so handsomely has resulted in the median house price in Sydney climbing to a staggering $752,000, followed by Melbourne on $567,000. This has effectively priced hundreds of thousands of families and young people out of the housing market.

There are 17 newcomers on the list, the calibre of which is highlighted by the prominence given to one, Tony Denny, who made his $320 million selling used cars in Russia and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Denny was one of the myriad capitalists who flooded into these countries to profit from the cheap labour and opportunities afforded by the Stalinist bureaucrats who oversaw the destruction of the remaining social gains from the Russian Revolution. The staggering decline in the conditions, living standards and life expectancy of the population in these countries was due to the exploitation and plundering carried out by such individuals.

While the top 10’s combined wealth dropped marginally from 2014, due to falling mining export prices, they still owned 37 percent of the total wealth of the richest 200, while the top 20 held 47 percent.

By contrast, the Salvation Army’s survey, conducted in February, was based on the responses of 2,406 families and individuals, whose dependents included 2,486 children, who accessed the charity’s emergency relief and support services. Of the respondents, 88 percent received income support payments, which means that their welfare benefits did not cover the basic necessities of life.

Three quarters of the respondents had been seeking employment for up to two years. These people “experienced more housing stress (75 percent), a higher level of deprivation (49 percent could not afford 11 or more essential items), and consequently lower satisfaction in life,” as measured by a personal wellbeing index.

Significantly 5 percent of the respondents had jobs, but were still forced to seek emergency relief. Of those surveyed, 75 percent were single-parent households, with 53 percent of those with children.

Due to the rising cost of rental accommodation, in which the majority of respondents lived, 59 percent of their total income was spent on housing costs, leaving only $125 per week or $17.86 per day for food, utility payments, medical expenses, transport and clothes.

The percentage of income paid for accommodation was twice the commonly-used benchmark of 30 percent that signifies housing stress. Some 78 percent of respondents suffered extreme housing stress. Three quarters of those surveyed said they had cut down on basic necessities, including meals and paying utility bills, because they could not afford them.

No less than 87 percent of the adults and 60 percent of the children reported severe deprivation, which is characterised as having to go without five or more essential items. Essential items included a substantial meal once a day, medical and dental treatment, having $500 savings in case of emergency and being able to afford a week’s holiday away from home. They reported that they had few options to improve their situation.

The Salvation Army report cited statistics from the 2014 OECD report,Society at a Glance, which stated that “relative poverty in Australia (14.4 percent of the population) is higher than the OECD average of (11.3 percent)” and “10 percent of Australians report they cannot afford to buy enough food.”

While the charity’s report focussed on the most oppressed and vulnerable sections of the working class, the situation is little better for households whose members have jobs. For the 1.8 million workers on the minimum wage of $656.90 per week, it is a matter of survival from week to week. The illness or injury of one or more in the family can mean the difference between making ends meet and not. The Fair Work Commission last week lifted the minimum wage by a miserable $16 per week, the lowest rise for years, while the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry demanded an increase of no more than $5.70.

The gulf between the tiny elite at the top of society and the poorest section of the population will only widen following the federal budget released last month. Treasurer Joe Hockey announced that a further $1.7 billion will be slashed from welfare payments over four years through the relentless persecution of pension and unemployment payment recipients, while providing $5 billion in tax cuts and concessions for small business.

The Labor opposition’s response to the budget was a call for bipartisan measures to impose the further attacks demanded by the corporate elite. This was a declaration that a Labor government would take up where it left off after losing the 2013 election and continue the assault on the working class.

There is no possibility of overcoming the unprecedented gulf between rich and poor through the re-election of a Labor government or the parliamentary system itself. What is required is the overthrow of the capitalist profit system that, as Marx explained, creates “the accumulation of wealth at one pole” and “at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

G7 leaders escalate war threats against Russia

Thomas Gaist

During their second day of discussions in the resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps on Monday, the leaders of the major imperialist powers affirmed their commitment to a policy of escalating strategic and military pressure against Russia.

“We need to keep pushing Russia,” Obama said. “Russian forces continue to operate in eastern Ukraine, violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

“The G7 is making it clear that if necessary we stand ready to impose additional significant sanctions against Russia,” Obama declared.

An official communiqué released by the G7 powers—the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, and Canada—reaffirmed Obama’s anti-Russia comments. It warned that the assembled powers would devise “further restrictive measures in order to increase cost on Russia.”

The hypocrisy and recklessness of Obama and his G7 counterparts is breathtaking. They are denouncing Russian “aggression” in Ukraine, which they plunged into civil war by backing a fascist-led putsch last year that toppled a pro-Russian government. Now, US and NATO armed forces are conducting air, sea and ground exercises all along Russia’s borders. In Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea, and the Black Sea, the US and its allies are rehearsing the opening stages of an all-out war with Russia.

Last week, US defense officials testifying before the US House of Representatives indicated that the Pentagon is considering launching pre-emptive strikes against Russian targets, including with nuclear weapons. These statements are no doubt now being carefully studied by the Russian military.

NATO’s recently-formed Rapid Response Force, which has been assembled to serve as the spearhead of a NATO ground war against Russian forces, is set to conduct military exercises in Poland starting today. The so-called “Baltops” exercises are to involve thousands of US-NATO troops and will take place simultaneously in Sweden, Germany and the Baltic Sea.

A quarter century after the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the “Cold War,” Washington is preparing new forward-deployments of its nuclear arsenal to Europe. In an interview with the BBC given the preceding day, British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond made clear that plans for new US nuclear deployments to Europe are far advanced.

Hammond told the BBC Sunday that Britain may soon withdraw from the INF treaty, clearing the way for Britain to serve as a staging area for an American nuclear build-up against Russia, just as it did prior to 1991, when US nuclear weapons were stationed at the Royal Air Force’s Greenham Common base.

“There have been some worrying signs of stepping up levels of activity both by Russian forces and by Russian-controlled separatist forces,” Hammond said. “We have got to send a clear signal to Russia that we will not allow them to transgress our red lines.”

The US and European ruling elites’ strategy of endlessly bullying Russia by threatening it with war and nuclear strikes poses immense dangers to the world’s population. Even assuming that the ruling elites of the NATO powers are not immediately seeking to provoke outright war with Russia, the constant drumbeat of NATO threats and military exercises immensely heightens the danger of war breaking out accidentally.

With thousands of jet fighters, warships, and armored units on heightened alert throughout the region, the world is only a few miscalculations away from a clash between NATO and Russian forces that could rapidly escalate into war.

The immense dangers posed to the world’s population arising from the US and NATO war drive against Russia are being hidden from masses of workers in the United States and worldwide. No one in the official media is asking how many people would die if the military maneuvers being practiced by Russian and NATO forces in their exercises turned into the real thing. Instead, much of the media coverage of the G7 summit focused on controversy over whether Obama was drinking alcohol-free beer yesterday.

The relentless military escalation at this G7 summit testifies to the breakdown and historic bankruptcy of capitalism. Without the unification and mobilization of the international working class in revolutionary struggle against imperialism and war, it is not only likely, but inevitable, that NATO war threats will at some point unleash all-out war.

Russian leaders have already warned that they are on alert for signs of an imminent first strike by NATO and are holding Russian nuclear forces ready to respond to such an attack, should it come.

The second main priority of the assembled leaders was to coordinate the imposition of austerity measures that have already set in motion the collapse of large parts of the European economy.

Even as Obama denounced Putin for “wrecking his country’s economy,” the social cuts, mass layoffs and other “economic restructuring” measures dictated by the Western banks and financial institutions are pushing millions into poverty and ravaging key social infrastructure across Southern and Eastern Europe.

In its official communique, the G7 powers demanded that the Ukrainian government continue to implement austerity policies that, as in Greece, are pushing broad layers of the population into poverty. The Kiev regime must “decisively continue the necessary fundamental transformation in line with IMF and EU commitments,” the joint G7 communique demanded Monday.

In remarks after Monday’s G7 session, German Chancellor Angela Merkel threatened Greece, insisting that it “does not have much time left” to reach a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), European Union and European Central Bank (the “troika”). Such a deal would transfer a new loan of some €7 billion to Athens in exchange for new social cuts to the Greek economy, which has already been eviscerated by years of brutal austerity.

The precise makeup of the social cuts, which are to be directed largely against the salaries and pensions of government workers, were a major topic of discussion at the G7 talks, Merkel said. The German chancellor will reportedly meet for informal discussions with Greek Prime Minister Alex Tsipras during EU meetings with heads of state from Latin America scheduled for later in the week.

Despite criticizing the European Commission’s proposals for the Greek economy as “borderline insulting,” Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis nonetheless affirmed his determination to “come to an agreement” with the troika (the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank) and the big banks.

“It is time to stop pointing fingers at one another and it is time that we do our job,” he said.

Washington’s death squads

Bill Van Auken

In a lengthy article published Sunday, the New York Times provided a glimpse into the criminal and grisly methods employed by Seal Team 6, a secret unit within the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

The unit was made famous by the phony accounts of its assassination of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, cover stories that were blown last month by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who exposed the operation as the cold-blooded murder of an unarmed and decrepit individual who had been fingered by Pakistani intelligence.

What the Times account makes clear—whatever the newspaper’s intentions and its undoubted vetting of its material with the Pentagon and the White House—is that in the pursuit of its global interests, the United States government has become ever more dependent upon the murderous operations of secret death squads.

The newspaper quotes a Pentagon spokesman as saying that the number of missions carried out by Seal Team 6 and other special operations units has risen to the “tens of thousands” since 2001. The victims killed by Seal Team 6, whose very existence the US military refuses to acknowledge, number in the thousands, the vast majority of them unidentified individuals with no link to any plot or threat against the US itself.

The report says the secretive unit has grown to 1,800 personnel and boasts a “ballooning” budget and an ever-expanding remit. It details Seal Team 6’s exploits in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2008, when it carried out continuous night raids, killing, on average, 15 individuals each night and frequently as many as 25, while in most cases finding no one identified as a target.

Neither those hunted nor the many more who were killed posed any threat to the American people. They were targeted because they were identified as potential impediments to US policy, specifically to Washington’s attempt to prop up the corrupt and unpopular regime under Hamid Karzai that the US installed in Kabul.

The Times provides a sanitized account of one of these raids, carried out on December 27, 2009, as part of the Obama administration’s Afghan “surge,” in which the American military death squad murdered eight schoolboys—ages 11 to 17—along with a 12-year-old shepherd boy and an Afghan farmer.

At the time, a local school principal recounted the massacre: “First, the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him, they shot him as well.”

Describing this period, a Seal Team 6 former officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, stated, “These killing fests had become routine.”

The Times reports that in Afghanistan, the Team 6 operatives “engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own.” It adds, “At times, Seals cut off fingers or patches of scalp from dead militants for DNA analysis.”

What is described here are not the actions of rogue soldiers or a band of lawless mercenaries, but rather a unit that is touted as the most elite within the US armed forces. Its methods and its crimes are the methods and crimes of the US government, the Obama administration and America’s capitalist ruling establishment.

The unit is given what amounts to blanket immunity for its crimes, with investigations of its activities almost invariably going no further than JSOC, itself a secretive command dedicated to “counter-insurgency” methods that routinely translate into war crimes.

Civilian officials at the Pentagon give these operations a wide berth, and, as Harold Koh, the State Department official who drafted pseudo-legal rationales for the Obama administration’s drone assassination program, told the Times, “This is an area where Congress notoriously doesn’t want to know too much.”

The Obama administration’s reliance upon these operations has become so pervasive that former US senator from Nebraska Robert Kerrey told the Times, “They have become sort of a 1-800 number anytime somebody wants something done.” Kerrey knows whereof he speaks, having participated as a Navy Seal in war crimes in Vietnam as part of the infamous Operation Phoenix program of torture, massacres and mass assassinations that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of men, women and children—the program on which much of today’s operations is modeled.

To the extent that the Times piece expresses any reservations concerning the operations of Team 6 and similar units, it is in regard to their efficacy. The newspaper complains that the wall of secrecy that surrounds this death squad operation makes it difficult “to fully assess its record and the consequences of its actions.”

Left unexplored is the far more significant question of what the ever-growing reliance on death squads, “kill lists” and assassinations says about the nature of the American government itself. The use of such methods is not new, and Vietnam was by no means exceptional.

In El Salvador, Washington trained and equipped death squads that carried out horrific violence against that country’s civilian population, accounting for a large share of the 75,000 people killed in the attempt to crush resistance to the US-backed dictatorship. This bloodbath is now touted within the Pentagon as a counterinsurgency success story.

But now these methods have become institutionalized as never before. They are the preferred method of the White House and Washington’s massive military and intelligence apparatus for the elimination of perceived enemies anywhere on the planet.

War crimes abroad go hand-in-hand with a frontal assault on democratic rights within the United States itself. Unprecedented levels of social inequality and a ruling capitalist oligarchy that is determined to reverse its economic decline at the expense of the working class are wholly incompatible with democratic forms of rule.

This already finds expression in the militarization of the police in the US and the routine use of violence and deadly force against the most oppressed layers of the population. How long will it be before units like Seal Team 6 are given “kill lists” of enemies of the state to be hunted down not in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq or Yemen, but rather at workplaces and homes within the United States itself?

Sri Lanka: Brain Drain, 'Connection Culture' and National Development

Asanga Abeyagoonasekera

“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”

John Quincy Adams

Realising the extent of inequality in the present world is an aspect many sidestep. Poverty, prosperity and patterns of growth are among the top factors for this inequality.

The world we live in has not changed much. Comparisons of the 30 richest countries and the 30 poorest nations have remained same for the past 20 or in some cases, 50 years. Some nations grow rapidly and experience rapid collapse. Of the 30 poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, South Asia and East Asia, some nations still struggle at per capita income below $2500; meanwhile the richest nations’ per capita income has been $20,000-$50,000.

Analysis is required as to why barring a few nations, many have failed or are struggling to achieve purchasing power parity similar to that of the US and Western Europe.

Populations from poorer countries choose migration as the most preferable option as their political and economic institutions consistently fail to deliver a better standard of living and/or employment. Last week, 734 Rohingya migrants rescued from a boat off the coast of Myanmar are now in refugee camps crammed into warehouses by the Myanmar Police. This situation is same for many other nationalities including Sri Lankans in labour camps in many countries.

During the author’s recent visit to Slovenia, it was established that the biggest issue for the country was unemployment and brain drain. Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia are nations with high levels of migrant workers without jobs who seek employment in other states in Europe. Slovenia loses the best of their labour force’s talent to migration.

Similarly, Sri Lanka is also losing many of its youth who leave the country, both legally and illegally, for better economic prospects. A recent conversation with a politician in Sri Lanka produced a shocking response regarding the brain drain issue. He explained, “brain drain is good[.] When they go it’s good for us [because] we don't need to look after them [and] those countries will do our job.”

The only way a nation can reverse this situation is by strengthening the internal political and economic institutions that are currently weak. If politicians create hope for the youth, chances that they would remain in their own nation and contribute to economic development are higher.

Better institutions such as in the rich nations may not satisfy the environment of the poor nations as the existing institutions are better off as they are controlled, sometimes by the powerful in the society who will disagree as to which ones should remain and which ones must change. Existing institutions in a poor nation probably support a political culture where everyone has to have political support to climb the ladder of prosperity. It could well be the reason why individuals such as Thomas Edison with over 1000 patents or Steve Jobs who started Apple at 21 or Bill Gates who started Microsoft at 22 never emerged. Individual growth supports achievements without political connection.  Innovation and financial support was readily available for these individuals’ prosperity.

An intellectual of a global repute whom this author met made a comment about the political environment that exists in Sri Lanka. When he inquired from another Sri Lankan as to how he could contribute to the country, the answer was, “Don't worry, anything can be done because I know the top and lot of politicians.”

This culture of connections needs to change. Individuals without any political connection should be able to achieve in life. One should not need a letter from a politician to get an employer to extend an employment term.

This sort of debacle should stop for rapid development in nations. Qualifications and achievements should be the sole criteria to earn a position. A key factor that helped countries such as Singapore transform from poor countries to well-performing nations was that they ensured education and qualifications were primary criteria to be politicians or to represent people in the parliament and many other government positions. The highest-paid salaries in the world ensured they didn’t steal from every tender or project. The crux of the issue is changing the political culture – a difficult task due to the level of entrenchment of this problem.

People’s power still exists to bring about this change. An example is the 2015 presidential election. The upcoming general election will be a crucial moment to make our society a better place. Electing the best to our nation’s parliament will ensure boat people are not generated, and the country’s youth don’t have to leave our nation just for want of a better life.

Falun Gong: The Fear Within

Vijay Shankar

In April 1999, a decade after the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, an encore of the 1989 tragedy unfolded at the same venue. The scale of proportions was the same and so were State anxieties that unleashed mass persecution. In the event, the State came down with its bludgeons on over 10,000 followers of  the Buddhist inspired Falun Gong spiritual movement; government assessment placed the number of practitioners at over 70 million. The number of casualties in the crackdown and the subsequent repression which continues to date remains uncorroborated, however estimates suggest over 3,700 deaths in re-education labour camps and custodial torture and a shocking 65,000 in fatal organ harvesting.

Falun Gong philosophy is centred on the Buddhist concept of Dharma Chakra and its morality driven by truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. The Movement’s only plea is to be given recognition, not as some “lunatic fringe” (as State intelligentsia had labelled them), but as a legitimate entity of the People’s Republic of China. So what was it about these gentle devotees that brought upon the ire of the Communist Party of China (CPC)? It certainly could not have been their deep breathing and smooth flowing rhythmic exercises that invited brutal battering, extrajudicial imprisonment in the tens of thousands, psychiatric abuse, torture, alleged fatal organ harvesting and a continued repression that has forced millions of adherents underground.

Most puzzling is the persistent severity of the crackdown and the vicious denunciation of the Movement (membership said to be more than the CPC) as a heretical one. Particularly so, when the labour is pacific in nature and is neither irreverential nor has it set out to desecrate the Communist State. At which time why the Central Committee of the Politburo considers it a menace to the “stability and unity” of the Middle Kingdom remains perplexing. Despite persecution, the fact is that Falun Gong, even today, remains the preferred life style choice of millions of mostly elderly Chinese many of whom are in positions of power. 

Stability of political dispensation and territorial unity is considered to lie at the heart China’s national interests. To the CPC, it is non-negotiable and any event that is perceived to even remotely endanger these interests, sets into motion an extreme response. The extraordinarily brutal reaction to root out Falun Gong, an idea that can be traced back to two millennia of Chinese civilisation, in the name of upholding recently imported principles of Marxism-Leninism, is all the more inexplicable when one notes that these latter principles have long since been buried when the State adopted “State-Controlled Capitalism” to drive their economic policies. Is it that the politics of commercialism and economic change can surge ahead, divorced from the politics of the State without undermining stability and unity? Or will we in the immediate future witness devolution of economic activities sacrificed at the altar of centralised political power? And what of the State’s abiding belief in the idea of Da yitong or the imperial concept which saw politics and socio-economics as two sides of the ‘Great Systemic Whole’ which never quite collapsed with the Qing Dynasty in 1912?

It is significant that today the political dispensation in China, with its siege mentality, repressive social policies and a self-ordained (almost imperial) historical mandate; finds itself at odds with the consequences of its economic vigour, and any social dynamic that seeks to make moral interpretations contrary to that by the CPC. Falun Gong is convinced that the practice of atheism has enabled the Communist Party to interpret freely what is virtuous and what is good or bad. Such a flexible approach is abhorrent to the movement for it gives to the ruling elite the powers to blur the distinction between the corrupt and law-abiding. Morality then becomes an act of mass belief that the Party is invariably “truthful, magnificent and exalted.” Falun Gong practitioners, on the other hand, evaluate right or wrong based on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. And this is where the rub comes, for to the CPC any form of spirituality gives people an unchanging standard of good and bad. This obviously hinders the Party’s perpetual efforts to ‘unify’ people’s thinking in order to ‘stabilise’ their own position. The consequences of sharing, the hitherto monopoly on societal power, may explain the fears within.

Thus far China’s splendid economic surge and its exhortations to its people to find ‘goodness’ in getting rich fast has muzzled the impulse to pluralism in political thought and indeed has postponed the need to reckon with the contradictions between central political power and economic vitality. However, as the current economic downturn shrivels political options, the probability of a face off between an ‘old State’ against new societal impulses becomes a reality. It is true that the Peoples Liberation Army may tip the balance, as with the Tiananmen Square uprising of a quarter a century earlier, the old State (albeit in mauled circumstances) may triumph; but this only puts off the inevitable.

In 1859, John Stuart Mill, the British political economist, suggested in his philosophical work On Liberty that “a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” Repression against the Falun Gong represents one more such dwarfing in a litany which began with Mao’s invasion of Tibet, the “Great Leap Forward,” the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the massacre of Uighurs, Tiananmen Square massacre and the Umbrella Revolution. In each of these seismic episodes the State responded brutally to societal events as it shielded its all-consuming hankering for political power; at the same time the incidents exposed a deepening fear within.

Whether today we can distinguish the concluding steps of a despotic regime in a last ditch attempt to turn back the clock on economic reforms and cling to autocratic power; or the emergence of a new political order that is in sync with the socio-economic vitality of the Chinese people, remains an arguable proposition.

The New Colonialism

Carl Finamore

A glorious feature of our world, poets and artists remind us, is the bountiful array of different shades, colors and hues of the human race. Our differences are truly worth celebrating. How dull and boring to all be of the same spirit.

“To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety,”Leonardo da Vinci poetically acclaimed 500 years ago.

Alas, in our time, the great Renaissance master would be greatly dismayed to discover, it is giant corporations and uber-rich investors that abound and it is where varieties and differences among us are enjoyed only to the extent that they can be exploited.

This is vividly displayed in the Free Trade discussions now being choreographed in Washington by President Barack Obama.

Behind all the false rhetoric of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), there are substantial differences in our world that U.S. corporations are very eager to take advantage of – their greater access to capital, their more advanced technology, their vast marketing networks and their globally integrated distribution chains.

Very impressive differences, indeed, but what really whets the appetite of investors most are the wide variety of labor costs across borders.

This is very essence of underdevelopment, the haunting legacy of colonialism and imperialism, and where 2.2 billion people lived on less than US $2 a day in 2011.

And, it is they who have been targeted for even further exploitation. Free Trade is, in fact, the new colonialism.

Dreadful social conditions, exacerbated by grotesquely underpaid labor, provides fertile ground for industrialized countries to expand tenfold their other superior assets. It is, therefore, totally appropriate and commendable to add international labor standards to Free Trade agreements as many “Fair Trade” activists advocate.

For example, opposing Free Trade agreements that contribute to the plunder of the earth’s resources, that profit from extreme poverty and that benefit from violations of basic rights of workers to organize and bargain.

But even more can be done, much more, including proposing a whole new way of looking at international trade–it is a concept I will term “Equal Trade.”

Different Values of Human Labor

Do millions of foreign workers making commodities for Walmart, circuits for Apple and shoes for Nike have less value than production workers in the U.S.?

How about Mexican manufacturing workers making auto parts for General Motors or textile workers in Bangladesh, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, India and Vietnam, is the time and labor of these workers less valuable than the time and labor of auto and textile workers in the U.S.?

Yes and No.

Workers do, in fact, have different exchange values on the capitalist competitive world market when measured by variances in their customary living standards, productivity and wages and benefits.

But, their labor time when measured as the value of a human being, their social worth so to speak, is absolutely the same – of equal value.

As a result, workers should not be economically penalized or socially stigmatized because of their lower productivity which, itself, is almost exclusively a matter of less technology and not at all about being lazy or taking too many lunch breaks.

On the contrary, as stated earlier, underdevelopment is the disturbing consequence of colonialism and imperialism, further acerbated by today’s increased monopolization of technology and concentration of capital in the advanced industrialized countries.

Thus, both our reform demands on Free Trade, and our separate and independent vision of genuinely Equal Trade, should aim to eliminate the historically repugnant distinction between “inherent market value of labor” and “intrinsic, individual social worth.”

Exporting Solidarity 

We should, therefore, not only add International Labor Organization (ILO) standards to any Trade Agreements but we should also incorporate borrowed language from the Davis–Bacon Act of 1931, a U.S. Federal Law that requires paying local prevailing wages, the average wage in the area, on federal public works projects for laborers and mechanics.

Similar “prevailing wage” laws have been passed through the years by state and local governments and the same requirement has even been expanded beyond construction jobs to all foreign workers with work visas, regardless of their industry or job classification.

For example, U.S. guest workers must be offered wage and benefit payments consistent with the local area’s economy for their particular job.

Thus, the argument goes, the hiring of a foreign worker should not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.

However, this leaves untouched unfair competition with workers overseas whose lower wages and benefits definitely puts downward pressures on the living standards of U.S. workers.

“Bad trade agreements that do not have worker protections” Karl Kramer, campaign co-director of the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition, told me, “and rely on moving manufacturing and production to low-wage areas of the world are causing a vicious spiral to the bottom, without a safety net for those displaced from their livelihoods.”

And, it is precisely these outsourcing threats Kramer describes that are regularly aimed at U.S. workers who chafe at continuous pressures to lower working conditions, wages and benefits.

For example, while it is widely disputed just how many job losses result directly from the NAFTA free trade agreement enacted 22 years ago, it is indisputable that since, over five million manufacturing U.S. jobs have been lost and 57,000 plants closed.

A very unsettling statistic, to say the least.

Prevailing Wage for All Workers

In any case, elementary international labor solidarity requires struggling to raise the living conditions of working people everywhere, thus eliminating being used as competing pawns on the global investors’ chess board.

I would, therefore, suggest incorporating “prevailing wage” language into all trade agreements stipulating, for example, “that workers in all forms of production within the various countries targeted for investment by U.S. companies must meet the comparable prevailing wages and benefits of similar production in the U.S., where the investments originated.”

This would eliminate a major incentive to offshore jobs by exploiting as a competitive advantage the vastly lower wages and benefit of workers in foreign countries.

One would hope American workers threatened with displacement would see the mutual benefits of this international solidarity proposal.

By the same token, U.S. export traders should not continue to enjoy their enormous competitive edge over poorer countries who have inferior technology, little or no financial support from their government and far less access to private capital.

Local producers, including small famers, in countries that face a surge of U.S. exports should have access to comparable amounts of capital, state subsidies and technology as American exporters in exchange for a requirement that business entities would pay prevailing wages comparable to those in the U.S. and that they would allow for full labor rights to organize and bargain.

This would, again, level the playing field, reduce trading advantages due to poverty and allow the axis of trade to be focused on the actual use value and quality of the product and not on the uneven exchange rate due to exploitation.

It would also allow for products more natural to local areas to be produced closer to home, eliminating wasteful added labor of exporting from developed countries hundreds or thousands of miles away.

This is the case in Mexico where the domestic corn crop has been eviscerated by the massive flooding into their market of U.S. government-subsidized corn. It has been blamed for the displacement of two million campesinos over the last two decades who had been the crop’s main producers for centuries.

“It’s been roughly a tripling, quadrupling, quintupling of U.S. corn exports to Mexico, depending on the year,” said Timothy A. Wise, the director of research and policy at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. 

A Revolution in Trade

Demanding a level playing field of all working people across the globe that would in essence “export” the wage and benefit standards of U.S. workers is certainly a far more effective and decent expression of international solidarity than the AFL-CIO chauvinistic, frequently racist and continually futile, politically bankrupt “Buy American” campaign.

Yet, obviously, Equal Trade is a very radical proposal with enormous obstacles in its path while the economy remains in private hands.

For sure, the idea projects a vision of a new society where a world community of peoples acting together replaces the corporate, competitive world of nation states in which we currently live.

But, is that not worth thinking about? After all, it’s not only the poets who should think about reshaping our world.