G7: Currencies to Protect, Countries to Bomb

Vijay Prashad

The members of the G7 just ended their 41st summit. The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US gathered in a great Bavarian palace, the Schloss Elmau. It was a fitting location for the masters of the universe.

They claim that the maintenance of world order is their passtime. In fact, what they are most interested in is the preservation of their power at any cost.

The first G7 summit was held in 1974 in the Chateau de Rambouillet – a grand feudal palace in France. The purpose of that summit was for the G7 states to find a common strategy to tackle the Opec oil cartel and the NIEO – the New International Economic Order.

Opec had limited supply to raise the price of crude oil, which threatened economic growth in advanced industrial countries. The NIEO had passed in the UN General Assembly with support from the Third World states.

It called for a new international economic and political architecture to benefit the poorer nations. The G7 was created to break both Opec and the NIEO. It has largely succeeded.

Swallowing the world whole

After the collapse of the USSR, the G7 drew Russia into its orbit to become the G8 by 1994. The point was to create sufficient consolidation so as to prevent the emergence of a new economic and political pole on the planet – represented by the rise of China.

With the world financial crisis in 2007, the threadbare West turned to the Brics bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) for financial liquidity.

The promise was that if these states, particularly China, delivered funds to the world financial system, the G8 would be suspended in favour of the G20. China paid up. That assurance of closing down the G7 was hastily set aside when the banks felt secure. The G20 was adjourned.

Western confidence rose in the aftermath of the 2011 Nato intervention in Libya. It was now thought that not only was the financial system saved, but that humanitarian interventionism provided the West sufficient legitimacy to use its superior military force to order the planet.

Western pressure against Iran from the mid-2000s intensified as tensions with Russia flashed into the open around Syria and Ukraine. The G8 suspended Russia as member in 2014. In the most recent G7 summit, Russia was the target of overheated rhetoric. The US president, Barack Obama, asked of his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin: “Does he continue to wreck his country’s economy and continue Russia’s isolation in pursuit of a wrong-headed desire to recreate the glories of the Soviet empire?”

If the Soviet empire is long gone, the West’s ambition to drive world policy remain intact. Contradictions in G7 policy affect Europe far more than the US – Two big energy suppliers to western Europe, Iran and Russia, are hurt by sanctions promoted by the US through the G7, and Libya, another big supplier, saw its institutions destroyed by the NATO war and its aftermath.

Europe bears the cost of the G7 excesses. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, could very well have asked Obama if he wanted to wreck Europe’s economy in pursuit of his wrong-headed ambition to perpetuate American hegemony.

The G7, as I discovered while researching my book on the forum, The Poorer Nations, often does not make public its most important debates.

Its public pronouncements in the 1970s were gestures about stability and order. Privately, the leaders discussed in practical terms how to trounce Opec and the Third World bloc by any means necessary, including creating instability.

All mouth, no action

At the most recent meeting, the masters of the universe pledged to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the 21st century – 85 years from now – and end poverty by 2050. There was no programme of action, only empty pledges.

What was discussed in private would have been of far more interest, but we will have to wait a few decades to read the transcripts of the private meetings.

Standing in the anteroom, awaiting an audience, was the prime minister of Iraq, Haider al-Abadi. He was told that the G7 had “agreed to work together to further combat terrorism”. How would they do so? The G7 had no clue. “We don’t yet have a complete strategy,” said Obama in his concluding remarks, “because it requires commitments on the part of the Iraqis”.

For a year now, the US and its allies – backed by the G7 – have been bombing Iraq and Syria, but it seems this has been without any strategy. “We don’t yet have a finalised plan because the Iraqis haven’t given it to us yet,” said Obama.

The masters of the universe claim the right to determine planetary affairs, use military force as it suits them, and yet show utter disdain for their subordinate allies.

Obama turned away from Abadi, who seemed to be eager to say more. Obama fell into an animated discussion with the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, and IMF chief Christine Lagarde. Abadi stood around. No one took note of him. He eventually walked away. He did not realise that he had been dismissed when Obama turned away from him.

The masters of the universe were busy with each other. They have currencies to protect and countries to bomb.

Bombing ISIS Into Existence

John Wight 

The arrival of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) onto the global stage in the summer of 2014 with its invasion of northern Iraq, leading to the group’s declaration of an Islamic caliphate from eastern Syria and across a now non-existent Syrian-Iraqi border, induced panic not only in the region but throughout the world.

Parallels between ISIS and the Khmer Rouge

Their success and sudden growth was and continues to be the sort of crisis that forces us to confront the truth that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. In this regard, we cannot avoid comparisons and similarities between Syria/Iraq today and Cambodia in the 1970s, when similar conditions of chaos and carnage, inflicted on the people of Cambodia as a result of the extension of the war in Vietnam by the United States with a mass bombing campaign that many consider to have been an act of genocide, led to the country’s takeover by the Khmer Rouge.

In 1973 the US dropped more bombs on Cambodia in just a few weeks than it dropped on Japan in the Second World War. This small country across the Republic of Vietnam’s western border, with in 1973 a population of between 7-8 million people, found itself on the receiving end of the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. The number of people killed by the US bombing campaign has never been verified, but it’s thought to have been in the region of 500,000. It was a crime against humanity to rank with any since the Second World War.

The Khmer Rouge at the time was a marginal Maoist cult in Cambodia. Led by Pol Pot, a former Buddhist monk, they had no base of support to speak of and their influence was near non existent. The mass bombing of the country, the destruction and chaos it wrought, changed that.

By 1975 this death cult had managed to take over the country, whereupon they immediately embarked upon one of the most brutal and barbaric campaigns of genocidal violence the world has seen. With the objective of taking the country back to ‘year zero’, an agrarian pure communist society, they forcibly depopulated Cambodian cities and towns, sending people into the country to work on the land in communes. In the process thousands died from disease and starvation, others were worked to death, while thousands more were tortured and executed. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, people who’d been educated, Buddhist monks, non Cambodians, all were slaughtered in the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to purify the country of anything which did not conform to their twisted worldview. It gave rise to the creation of a network of slave labour camps and torture centres throughout the country, in which brutality knew no bounds. By the end of their reign a third of Cambodia’s population had perished. When considering it now it reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s timeless words, vis-à-vis the Holocaust, on the “banality of evil.”

The brutal rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lasted until 1979, when the armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam entered the country to liberate its people.  Washington’s response to Cambodia’s liberation was the imposition of economic sanctions on its new government – an an act of nauseating cruelty against a beleaguered people whose only crime was that they’d been liberated by a country, Vietnam, that had refused to accept its colonial status and thrown off the yoke of US imperialism.

Growth of ISIS due to conditions created by the West

In 2015 the parallels between Cambodia and the Middle East are undeniable. The conditions, as mentioned, out of which ISIS has emerged and proliferated were created by the West’s destabilising presence in the region, with the objective of controlling the huge natural resources located there. The war in Iraq in 2003 devastated the country and opened up its sectarian fissures, while the exploitation of the Arab Spring in 2011 to topple Gaddafi led directly to the eruption of extremism and, along with it, Libya’s descent into lawlessness and fragmentation. After Libya came Syria, where currently ISIS constitutes the dominant faction within an opposition largely made up at this juncture of thousands of foreign extremists – people who hold to a similar barbaric and anti-human ideology that characterised the Khmer Rouge. They are people with no political programme that can be negotiated with, offering the region nothing apart from an abyss of sectarian violence and bloodletting, which is why their defeat and destruction must be treated as non negotiable.

But, alarmingly, the destruction of ISIS shows no evidence of taking place anytime soon. If anything, the group has increased its strength and scope in recent weeks, despite the US-led airstrikes that were introduced with the stated objective of degrading their power and stemming their advance.

Danger of lapsing into conspiracy theory on growth of ISIS

Here, however, we need to be careful. Some on the left are beginning to assert that the lack of vigour on the part of the US and its allies in resisting ISIS is exactly as intended – i.e. part of an imperialist plot to help establish a Sunni caliphate to destroy Assad, Hezbollah, and undermine and weaken Iran. In support of this passages from a recently publicised 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document are being cited, specifically: “If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want.”

The document does not call for a “Salafist principality,” rather it predicts that one could emerge as a consequence of the rise of Salafist influence within the opposition forces fighting the Assad regime.

Weakened state of Washington after Iraq and Afghanistan

The key to understanding the phenomenon of ISIS has to start with the an appreciation of the weakened state of Washington when it comes to its ability to enforce its writ across the globe compared to 2003. The emergence of Russia as a counterweight to Western hegemony, along with China’s increasing global economic footprint, and with it the assertion of territorial claims in the South and East China Seas, has combined with the blowback from the failed occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to leave the US less confident of its power and strength to act unilaterally.

Though undoubtedly a positive development, this has left a power vaccum in the Middle East that has been filled by Washington’s regional allies – Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the other members of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) – who’ve demonstrated a growing willingness to flout Washington in pursuit of their own agendas. The ongoing attempt by Israel and the Saudis to undermine the Obama administration’s efforts to negotiate a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions is proof in this regard, as is the arming and funding and logistical support being given to a third force in Syria in the shape of Jaysh al-Islam by Turkey and the Saudis, whom it’s been reported have recently agreed a common strategy in their ongoing efforts to topple Assad.

Regional agendas of Saudis and Turkey

For the Saudis and other Gulf monarchies, this is part of a Sunni sectarian agenda against what they consider is growing Shia influence, while Erdogan in Ankara is known to have been committed to a robust foreign policy known as neo-Ottomanism, in which Turkey would assert itself not only as bridge between East and West, but as a major regional power, playing a key role in shaping the Middle East. This vision, however, has been contested internally, culminating in the recent electoral reverse suffered by Erdogan’s AKP.

The third force of choice in Washington has always been, of course, the Free Syrian Army, the so-called moderate rebels. But in the context of a conflict that, if it were to end in victory for the opposition, would inexorably see Syria turned into a graveyard for minorities, Muslim and non Muslim alike, support for the so-called moderates has only helped advance the cause of fanaticism and extremism, rather than stem it.

ISIS now a global problem

What is clear at this point is that ISIS is not just Syria’s or Iraq’s problem. It has morphed into a problem for the whole region, and by extension the world. Every success ISIS enjoys attracts more support from disaffected young Muslims in the West and elsehwere, and it is now viewed as a competitor with its former backers in Riyadh when it comes to who commands the most influence and moral authority over the Sunni umma. In other words Wahhabism, legitimised by the Washington and its allies in their close and reprehensible relationship with the Saudis, has given birth to a bastard child in the shape of the Middle East’s version of the Khmer Rouge.

Just as with Southeast Asia in the 1970s, in 2015 the world is suffering at the hands of men in expensive suits, sitting in Western capitals, who view the world as a chessboard – with countries and peoples reduced to chess pieces on that board to be moved around and removed at their whim and fancy.

Reversing Climate Change: What Will It Take?

Jeremy Brecher

On the weekend of September 21, 2014, people in 162 countries joined 2,646 events to demand global reductions in the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that are generating climate catastrophe. An estimated forty thousand marched in London; thirty thousand in Melbourne; and twenty-five thousand in Paris. Some four hundred thousand joined the People’s Climate March through the center of New York City. The climate protection movement had come a long way since 2006, when a march of one thousand through Burlington, Vermont proved to be the largest climate protest in American history. Yet, despite its exponential growth, whether and how the climate protection movement could realize its goals remained an open question.

The Failures of Climate Protection

Climate change poses an existential threat to our species, to every individual, and to all that any of us hold dear. Protecting the earth’s cli- mate is in the long-term interest of all humanity. Yet, efforts to cut carbon and other GHGs to a climate-safe level have been defeated for a quarter-century in arenas ranging from the United Nations to the U.S. Congress.

Those failures are not what most climate protection advocates expected. From the scientific confirmation of global warming in the 1980s, they had laboriously built institutions like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and had painstakingly constructed a consensus among scientists,government leaders, and UN officials around the policies defined as necessary by the IPCC. The UN “framework agreement” was followed by the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Road Map for the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. The world seemed to be proceeding on a rational, if tardy, course to address climate change.

With the collapse of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, it became evident that the entire process had been little more than a charade in which world leaders, governments, and businesses pretended to address climate change while pursuing policies that pour ever more GHGs into the atmosphere. Copenhagen revealed a collection of greedy, advantage- seeking institutions whose leaders were unable to cooperate even for their own survival. The charade goes on: last November’s extravagantly hailed U.S.–China climate agreement, in the unlikely event that it is actually adhered to, will result in an estimated temperature rise of 3.8 degrees Celsius—nearly twice the 2-degree increase scientists say is the maximum compatible with human civilization as we know it. It is a suicide pact by the world’s two leading polluters with the rest of the world as collateral damage.

In response to the failures of the official climate protection process, an independent climate protection movement has emerged. It is not controlled by any national or special interest. Instead, it has been organized globally and has demonstrated the capacity to act globally, exemplified by the actions in 162 countries for last year’s People’s Climate March. This movement has broken out of the constraints of lobbying and demonstrating within a legal framework set by governments by instead adopting civil disobedience as an important and legitimate part of its strategy. It has challenged the governments that permit climate destruction, the fossil fuel producing and using industries that conduct it, and the corporations and other institutions around the world that collude with it. In spite of its growth and commitment, the movement’s ability to sharply reduce GHG emissions and establish climate-safe levels of carbon in the atmosphere has so far proven minuscule.

The World Order of Climate Destruction

If protecting the earth’s climate is in the long- term interest of all humanity, why have the efforts to cut GHGs to a climate-safe level been defeated for a quarter-century? The answer lies primarily in our long-evolved world order—the overall patterns by which we have organized our life on earth.

Governments, corporations, and other dominant institutions are not evolved to provide for either the long-term interests or the common interests of the world’s people. These dominant institutions have grown and prospered by pursuing the short-term interests of their citizens and stockholders (or often just a small, dominant elite among them) in competition with the citizens and stockholders of other companies and countries. They are not designed or structured to pursue any wider human or global interest. Moreover, their time horizon is determined not by the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren but by the next election cycle or quarterly report. To their leaders, sustainability means getting through the next couple of years without loss of elections or profits.

Conversely, the institutions supposed to represent global common interests—for example, the United Nations—proved weak and dependent on governments, which ultimately retain formal or de facto veto power over their actions. Most governments, in turn, are subject to the de facto veto power of private economic interests driven to pursue short-term private gain above all else.

Although great powers and corporations are the dominant factors in this process, many other people and institutions pursue short-term self- interest at the expense of climate protection, often in pursuit of their own economic survival. Local communities and workers dependent on fossil fuel industries, for example, have campaigned to weaken climate protection legislation and block international climate agreements. Developing countries have fought to maintain their right to expand their use of coal. Such de facto allies have helped enable the major GHG emitters and their supporters to pursue a hypo- critical path, talking the climate protection talk while walking the GHG walk.

A Global Non-violent Constitutional Insurgency

Faced with the nightmare of climate change, advocates of climate protection are pulled in two contradictory directions. One is to advocate “politically realistic,” increasingly incremental changes, cheering as victories policies that mean devastation for life on the planet. The U.S.–China climate deal and the Obama EPA carbon rule are recent cases in point. This is like incremental reduction in speed for a car that is hurtling toward a cliff; unless the brakes are jammed on, the car will go over the cliff any- way. The other tendency is to identify capital- ism as the cause of climate change and argue that climate change requires a revolution to eliminate capitalism. Whether or not that is a desirable goal, it is difficult to imagine world- wide revolution occurring within a time frame that will forestall utter climate devastation. Nor does there appear to be an abundance of plausible conceptions of how such a revolution might occur or how a post-revolutionary regime might create a climate-safe economy.

Is there another plausible option? In my new book Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival, I propose as a possibility to consider what I call a global non-violent constitutional insurgency. A non-violent insurgency, like an armed insurgency, refuses to accept the limits on its action imposed by the powers that be. Unlike an armed insurgency, it eschews violence and instead expresses power by mobilizing people for various forms of non-violent mass action.

The idea of a constitutional insurgency was developed by labor lawyer and historian James Gray Pope. He describes how the American labor movement long insisted that the right to strike was protected by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids any form of “involuntary servitude.” Injunctions to limit strikes were therefore unconstitutional. Although courts disregarded this claim, the radical Industrial Workers of the World told its members to “disobey and treat with contempt all judicial injunctions,” and the “normally staid” American Federation of Labormaintained that a worker confronted with an unconstitutional injunction had an imperative duty to “refuse obedience and to take whatever consequences may ensue.”

A constitutional insurgency, as Pope describes it, declares a set of laws and policies themselves illegal and sets out to establish law through non- violent mass direct action. It is not formally a revolutionary insurgency because it does not challenge the legitimacy of the fundamental law; rather, it claims that current officials are in violation of the very laws that they themselves claim provide the justification for their authority. Insurgents view their “civil disobedience” as actually obedience to law, even a form of law enforcement.

Such an insurgency, Pope says, “unabashedly confronts official legal institutions with an
outsider perspective that is either absent from or marginalized in official constitutional discourse.” On the basis of its own interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, such an insurgency “goes outside the formally recognized channels of representative politics to exercise direct popular power, for example through extralegal assemblies, mass protests, strikes, and boycotts.” It may hold such actions legal, even though the established courts condemn and punish them.

Climate Protection as a Legal Duty

Is there a claim for a constitutional duty to protect the climate equivalent to the belief that the thirteenth amendment protected the right to strike? One candidate to play that role is the public trust doctrine.

The public trust doctrine has roots and analogues in ancient societies from Europe to East Asia to Africa, and from Islamic to Native American cultures. It was codified in the Institutes of Justinian, issued by the Roman Emperor in 535 AD. The Justinian code defined the concept of res communes (common things): “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind—the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.” The right of fishing in the sea from the shore “belongs to all men.” The Justinian code distinguished such res communes from res publicae, things which belong to the state.
Based on the Justinian Code’s protection of res communes, governments have long served as trustees for rights held in common. In American law, this role is defined by the public trust doctrine, under which the state serves as trustee on behalf of the present and future generations of its citizens. Even if the state holds title to a given resource, the public is the “beneficial owner.” As trustee, the state has a fiduciary duty to the owner—a legal duty to act solely in the owners’ interest. This principle is accepted today in both common law and civil law systems in countries ranging from South Africa to the Philippines and from the United States to India.

Based on legal arguments developed by University of Oregon law professor Mary Christina Wood, youth plaintiffs backed by the legal organization Our Children’s Trust have brought legal actions in all fifty states, the U.S. Federal courts, and several other countries seeking to apply the public trust doctrine to climate protection.6 Not surprisingly, most courts have been unreceptive to their arguments.

The public trust doctrine, however, provides a powerful basis for a constitutional insurgency on behalf of climate protection. It maintains that the atmosphere is the common property of present and future generations. All governments have the highest level of duty to protect it as a public trust and prevent its being wasted either by other governments or by third parties. The public trust doctrine provides a way to clearly define the just duties of each country. The climate protection movement can validly argue that governments are in violation of this duty and that citizens have the right and responsibility to enforce the protection of the atmosphere against climate destruction. Civil disobedience to protect the planet against global warming is an act of law enforcement against governments that are complicit with the wast- ing of the atmosphere.
[The public trust doctrine] maintains that the atmosphere is the common property of present and future generations.

The effort to enforce the law against unlawful governments by means of non-violent civil disobedience constitutes a global constitutional insurgency. It challenges the legitimacy of all governments on the basis of their failure to meet their highest duty, to protect the public trust, and it refutes the claims of polluters that their legal property rights authorize them to go on destroying the earth’s climate.

Such insurgent actions can be mutually supportive with other forms of action. They can stimulate those who choose to work within established channels like electoral politics and lobbying to recognize what is necessary for genuine climate protection, even while they fight for measures that go only a small way toward solving the problem. The insurgency can encourage those who are acting here and now in civil society to convert their own lives and communities to a climate-safe basis. These “inside” and “outside” forces can be linked by coordinating networks that make their efforts synergistic and focus their power on institutions that need to be changed. Such cooperation is likely to involve tension, but each side needs to recognize that they are unlikely to achieve their objectives in the absence of the other.

A Global Insurgency

The destruction of the climate by GHGs is produced in specific locations throughout the earth; it affects specific locations in every part of the globe; it can only be corrected through global solutions implemented in specific locations. The whole must be changed in order to change the parts; changing the parts is necessary to change the whole.
A global insurgency is not so much an effort to overthrow one or another government as it is an effort to transform the world order. That is a daunting objective, but in some ways trans- forming the world order is easier than trans- forming the social and political order of individual nations. World orders are notoriously disorderly and fluid; their structure is maintained primarily by the mutual jostling of independent power centers. They change all the time: where is the division of the world between two Cold War rivals or the global Keynesian economic regulation of fifty years ago? Moreover, unlike national governments operating under constitutions with officials chosen by elections, the world order has not the slightest claim to legitimacy. No electorate has ever consented to superpower rivalry or global neoliberalism — or destruction of the earth’s climate. It is against this illegitimate but mutable world order that a climate protection insurgency is ultimately aimed.

Harbingers of Climate Insurgency

What would a climate insurgency look like? No doubt it would include events like the People’s Climate March and the civil disobedience campaign against the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline. But it would present them as a challenge to the very legitimacy of the governments and corporations that are responsible for climate destruction.

As world leaders descended on the United Nations in the aftermath of the People’s Climate March, across the street representatives of climate change-impacted peoples from around the globe assembled for a People’s Climate Justice Tribunal sponsored by the Climate Justice Alliance. After hearing their testimony, a judicial panel of respected movement figures declared, “Based on the evidence we have heard here today, the nations of our world are in violation of their most fundamental legal and constitutional obligations.” Citing the public trust doctrine, it called on governments “to honor their duty to protect the atmosphere, which belongs in common to the world’s people, and halt their contribution to climate destruction.”

Based on the evidence it heard, the panel concluded that “those who blockade coal-fired power plants or block tar sands oil pipelines are committing no crime.” Rather, they are “exercising their right and responsibility to protect the atmospheric commons they own along with all of present and future humankind.” They are acting to prevent a far greater harm — indeed, “a harm that by virtue of the public trust doctrine is itself a violation of law on a historic scale.”

What would such action look like? On Earth Day 2013, Alec Johnson, a.k.a. “Climate Hawk,” locked himself to a construction excavator in Tushka, Oklahoma, as part of the Tar Sands Blockade campaign to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. Johnson was to be the first
defendant anywhere to make a necessity defense based on the duty of government to protect the climate under the public trust doc- trine. In the statement he prepared for the jury, he asserted,

“The fact that TransCanada was permitted to lay pipe in the ground where I chose that day to obstruct their construction efforts is proof that both the state of Oklahoma and the United States government were in dereliction of their obligations under the Public Trust. I was not in dereliction of my duty, my sacred obligation as a parent, and stand before you proudly innocent of the crimes I’ve been charged with.” He added, “I wasn’t breaking the law that day—I was enforcing it!”

Although Johnson could have been sentenced to up to two years in the Atoka County jail, he in fact received no jail time and a fine of just over $1,000. Johnson commented, “Together with the jury’s very light sentencing the whole trial experience felt like a victory.”

It may also have been the opening shot of the global non-violent constitutional climate insurgency.

Fast-Tracking TiSA

Ellen Brown

It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

— Attributed to Henry Ford

In March 2014, the Bank of England let the cat out of the bag: money is just an IOU, and the banks are rolling in it. So wrote David Graeber inThe Guardian the same month, referring to a BOE paper called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy.” The paper stated outright that most common assumptions of how banking works are simply wrong. The result, said Graeber, was to throw the entire theoretical basis for austerity out of the window.

The revelation may have done more than that. The entire basis for maintaining our private extractive banking monopoly may have been thrown out the window. And that could help explain the desperate rush to “fast track” not only the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), but the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). TiSA would nip attempts to implement public banking and other monetary reforms in the bud.

The Banking Game Exposed

The BOE report confirmed what money reformers have been saying for decades: that banks do not act simply as intermediaries, taking in the deposits of “savers” and lending them to borrowers, keeping the spread in interest rates. Rather, banks actually create deposits when they make loans. The BOE report said that private banks now create 97 percent of the British money supply. The US money supply is created in the same way.

Graeber underscored the dramatic implications:

. . . [M]oney is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There’s really no limit on how much banks could create, provided they can find someone willing to borrow it.

Politically, said Graeber, revealing these facts is taking an enormous risk:

Just consider what might happen if mortgage holders realised the money the bank lent them is not, really, the life savings of some thrifty pensioner, but something the bank just whisked into existence through its possession of a magic wand which we, the public, handed over to it.

If money is just an IOU, why are we delivering the exclusive power to create it to an unelected, unaccountable, non-transparent private banking monopoly? Why are we buying into the notion that the government is broke – that it must sell off public assets and slash public services in order to pay off its debts? The government could pay its debts in the same way private banks pay them, simply with accounting entries on its books. What will happen when a critical mass of the populace realizes that we’ve been vassals of a parasitic banking system based on a fraud – that we the people could be creating money as credit ourselves, through publicly-owned banks that returned the profits to the people?

Henry Ford predicted that a monetary revolution would follow. There might even be a move to nationalize the whole banking system and turn it into a public utility.

It is not hard to predict that the international bankers and related big-money interests, anticipating this move, would counter with legislation that locked the current system in place, so that there was no way to return money and banking to the service of the people – even if the current private model ended in disaster, as many pundits also predict.

And that is precisely the effect of the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which was slipped into the “fast track” legislation now before Congress. It is also the effect of the bail-in policies currently being railroaded into law in the Eurozone, and of the suspicious “war on cash” seen globally; but those developments will be the subject of another article.

TiSA Exposed

On June 3, 2015, WikiLeaks released 17 key documents related to TiSA, which is considered perhaps the most important of the three deals being negotiated for “fast track” trade authority. The documents were supposed to remain classified for five years after being signed, displaying a level of secrecy that outstrips even the TPP’s four-year classification.

TiSA involves 51 countries, including every advanced economy except the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The deal would liberalize global trade in services covering close to 80% of the US economy, including financial services, healthcare, education, engineering, telecommunications, and many more. It would restrict how governments can manage their public laws, and it could dismantle and privatize state-owned enterprises, turning those services over to the private sector.

Recall the secret plan devised by Wall Street and U.S. Treasury officials in the 1990s to open banking to the lucrative derivatives business. To pull this off required the relaxation of banking regulations not just in the US but globally, so that money would not flee to nations with safer banking laws.  The vehicle used was the Financial Services Agreement concluded under the auspices of the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The plan worked, and most countries were roped into this “liberalization” of their banking rules. The upshot was that the 2008 credit crisis took down not just the US economy but economies globally.

TiSA picks up where the Financial Services Agreement left off, opening yet more doors for private banks and other commercial service industries, and slamming doors on governments that might consider opening their private banking sectors to public ownership.

Blocking the Trend Toward “Remunicipalization”

In a report from Public Services International called “TISA versus Public Services: The Trade in Services Agreement and the Corporate Agenda,” Scott Sinclair and Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood note that the already formidable challenges to safeguarding public services under GATS will be greatly exacerbated by TiSA, which blocks the emerging trend to return privatized services to the public sector. Communities worldwide are reevaluating the privatization approach and “re-municipalizing” these services, following negative experiences with profit-driven models. These reversals typically occur at the municipal level, but they can also occur at the national level.

One cited example is water remunicipalization in Argentina, Canada, France, Tanzania and Malaysia, where an increasing frustration with broken promises, service cutoffs to the poor, and a lack of integrated planning by private water companies led to a public takeover of the service.

Another example is the remunicipalization of electrical services in Germany. Hundreds of German municipalities have remunicipalized private electricity providers or have created new public energy utilities, following dissatisfaction with private providers’ inflated prices and poor record in shifting to renewable energy. Remunicipalization has brought electricity prices down. Other sectors involved in remunicipalization projects include public transit, waste management, and housing.

Sinclair and Mertins-Kirkwood observe:

The TISA would limit and may even prohibit remunicipalization because it would prevent governments from creating or reestablishing public monopolies or similarly “uncompetitive” forms of service delivery. . . .

Like GATS Article XVI, the TISA would prohibit public monopolies and exclusive service suppliers in fully committed sectors, even on a regional or local level. Of particular concern for remunicipalization projects are the proposed “standstill” and “ratchet” provisions in TISA. The standstill clause would lock in current levels of services liberalization in each country, effectively banning any moves from a market-based to a state-based provision of public services. This clause . . . would prohibit the creation of public monopolies in sectors that are currently open to private sector competition.

Similarly, the ratchet clause would automatically lock in any future actions taken to liberalize services in a given country. . . . [I]f a government did decide to privatize a public service, that government would be unable to return to a public model at a later date.

That means we can forget about turning banking and credit services into public utilities. TiSA is a one-way street. Industries once privatized remain privatized.

The disturbing revelations concerning TiSA are yet another reason to try to block these secretive trade agreements.

For more information and to get involved, visit:

Flush the TPP

The Citizens Trade Campaign

Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch

Eyes on Trade

The End of the Euro is Nigh

Cillian Doyle

Did my dramatic headline catch your eye? Well, if you’re reading this, then I suppose it did. But dramatic headlines aside, the prospect that the Euro, in its current form, could soon become consigned to the scrapheap of history has become strikingly real. And yet somehow, I see no real debate or discussion about this in the Irish media, and believe me – I’ve been looking. My great worry is that if we fail to prepare for this politically then we might as will prepare to fail economically. But let’s back up for a minute.

Some years ago, I remember coming across a quote by Jorg Haider, the late leader of Austria’s quasi fascist Freedom Party, in which he described the recently minted Euro as ‘the new Esperanto money’. I often thought this was a rather prescient remark and one that managed to capture the reckless naivety of the Euro project. Esperanto was an attempt to create a European language, one that would foster peace and do away with the competing national languages of Europe. But it was doomed from the outset. In the absence of a central political authority implementing this, who was going to learn a language that barely anyone spoke? So instead of becoming the lingua franca of Europe, all Esperanto did was become one minor language amongst many.

So what relevance does this story hold for the Euro today? Well, it now seems likely that the Euro could go from being the financial lingua franca of Europe to just one European currency amongst many. This might seem like a large claim, so please – read on.

The Ghost of Currency Unions Past

A multi-country currency such as the Euro, with a single monetary policy but without a political union, was always going to be a recipe for disaster. The proof is in the historical pudding. No currency union hasever survived without a political union. History is replete with examples of this, whether it was: the Scandinavian currency union, the Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungry, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union. The curtain may have fallen on all of these currency unions within different contexts, but the one factor common to them all, is that once the central political authority gave way, so too did the currency union.

So what lessons can be learned for the Euro today? Well, we can see the array of options that were initially open to us, how these have evolved, and consequently how they have narrowed:

(1) Was the move toward a full political union (an undesirable option for many, myself included).

(2) Was more piecemeal crisis resolution (pretend and extend vs debt forgiveness) although this was never going to address the structural problems.

(3) Was the departure (whether orderly or chaotic) of one or more countries from the Euro, and a radical restructuring of the currency in its current form.

The window of opportunity for option (1) has now passed. There is little desire for further European integration, we need only look to the large volume of Eurosceptic parties elected in the recent European parliament elections for evidence of this. Option (2) initially seemed the most likely scenario, but the utter failure of austerity, coupled with the refusal to countenance debt forgiveness, means that if IMF/Eurogroup cannot compromise or break Syriza’s resolve, then Syriza could end up breaking the currency union. At which point option (3) comes into play.

Some argue that the dissolution of the Euro in its current form could be orderly, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, whilst some think it would be chaotic like the Habsburg Empire, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Some argue (present company included) that devolving macro-economic policy back down to the national level would be a serious boon to both growth and democracy, whilst others say it could be start of economic Armageddon.

Scaremongering aside, yes there would be hardship in the beginning, but faced with more stagnation and decline in the long run, the short term pain would be worth the long term gain. What’s more, it would seem doubtful that we would see a return to 19 or so separate currencies. In the event of collapse, it’s probable that what will emerge is a kind of Euro Mark II, with a number of countries grouped around Germany, whilst some of the peripheral countries introduce a parallel currency to run alongside the Euro whilst trying to arrange an orderly exit.

The Face of Grexit

If Greece leaves the Euro there are a number of things we can expect to see. First off, capital flight will take place from the peripheral countries (Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy) as investors and wealthy individuals, spooked by the risk that these countries could be next in line for an exit, transfer their money into what is perceived as the safe centre i.e Germany. This will necessitate capital management techniques being introduced by the peripheral countries, if they are to stop a run on their banks. Thus banks will have to close temporarily, internet banking websites will have to go black, and the authorities will have to stop people at the airports/ferry ports from trying to smuggle hard cash over their borders.

But it wouldn’t have to be as a chaotic as all of this might sound. In the event of Greece leaving the Euro, the plan is to initiate a parallel (electronic) currency, which would bring about an orderly withdrawal. This is for reasons of both cost effectiveness (not having print paper/mint coins) and for expedience (an electronic currency could be circulated rapidly). For any of the nerds out there, who might be interested in what this would look like, click here. Irish policy makers should also take note!

The Last Waltz

The Euro’s faulty architecture and draconian laws flowed from the pernicious neoliberal ideology that modern capitalist economies are self-stabilizing systems, rather than crisis prone entities which require continuous intervention. Back in March I wrote that we would know the fate of Syriza and the Euro before the July. This day next week the deadly game of brinksmanship will likely reach its denouement. This is the day when the next meeting of the Euro Summit is scheduled to take place.

If Greece is to remain within the fold, and the Euro is to stagger on, then a further crippling austerity package (or some kind of debt forgiveness) will have to be agreed by this date. This is in order to give the Greek and German parliaments the requisite time to ratify any agreement, so that Greece can meet the next tranche of IMF payments in July and August (totalling 6.7 billion) and go on financing any deficits and further interest repayments in the near future.

However, if no agreement can be reached then there will be a rupture, which would surely mark the beginning of a great historical discontinuity. A Greek departure from the Euro would be both the harbinger of a new era for Europe – and the closing of a Greek tragedy.

Electoral Shock in Turkey

Conn Hallinan

Among the many things behind the storm that staggered Turkey’s ruling party in last week’s elections, a disastrous foreign policy looms large. But a major factor behind the fall of the previously invincible Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a grassroots revolt against rising poverty, growing inequality and the AKP’s war on trade unions.

On the eve of the election, the government’s Turkish Statistical Institute(TUIK) found that 22.4 percent of Turkish households fell below the official poverty line of $1,626 a month for a family of four. The country’s largest trade union organization, TURK-IS, which uses a different formula for calculating poverty levels based on incomes below the minimum monthly wage—$118—argues that nearly 50 percent of the population is at, or near, the poverty line.

Figures show that while national income has, indeed, risen over the past decade, much of it has gone to the wealthy and well connected. When the AKP came to power in 2002, the top 1 percent accounted for 39 percent of the nation’s wealth. Today that figure is 54 percent. In the meantime, credit card debt has increased 25 fold, from 222 million liras in 2002 to 5.8 billion liras today

In 2001, Turkey was in a serious economic crisis, with the unemployment rate at 10.8 percent. Today 11.3 percent are out of work, and that figure is much higher among young people and women. TUIK estimates that over 3 million Turks are jobless, but at least another 2.5 million have given up looking for jobs. The total size of the Turkish workforce is 28 million.

Women have been particularly hard hit. Over 227,000 women have been laid off this past year, a higher percentage than men. According to Aysen Candas of the Social Political Forum of Bogazici University, the “situation of women is just horrible.”

While the average rate of employment for women in the 34 countries that make up the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development is between 62 and 63 percent, in Turkey it is 25 percent. According to Candas, in access to jobs, political participation and economic power, Turkish women rank near the bottom of the 126 countries the Bogazici University study examined.

Turkish workers have seen their unions dismantled under the AKP government, and many have lost collective bargaining rights. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, unionized workers have fallen from 57.5 percent of the workforce in 2003 to 9.68 percent today. And, of those unionized workers, only 4.5 percent have collective bargaining agreements. Add to this police repression, the widespread use of the subcontracting system, and a threshold of 3 percent to organize a new union, and there are few barriers to stop employers from squeezing their workforce.

In comparison, Sweden has a unionization rate of 67.7 percent, Finland 69 percent, Italy 35.6 percent and Greece 28.7 percent.

In the last election, the leftwing People’s Democratic Party (HDP) and the social democratic People’s Republican Party (CHP) pounded away at the AKP’s record on poverty and union rights. “During its 12-year rule, the Justice and Development Party has curbed all labor rights though laws that are unlawful, siding with the capitalist class,” CHP parliamentarian Suleyman Celebi told Al-Monitor. “It has besieged workers from all sides, from their right to strike and collective bargain, to their right of choosing their trade unions. The rights of tens of thousands of subcontracted workers have been flouted despite court rulings.”

Erdogan has increasingly come under criticism for relying on force to deal with opponents, like the crushing of Istanbul’s Gezi park demonstrations in 2013. And his drive to change the constitution from a parliamentary system to an American-style powerful executive apparently did not sit will with the majority of Turks.

The AKP’s bread and butter has always been bread and butter: it handed out free coal, food, and financial aid to the poor, but as economic disparity grew and unemployment climbed, it was the Left that seized upon those themes, forcing Erdogan to defend spending $615 million plus for his lavish, 1,000 room presidential palace, and his $185 million presidential airplane.

With the economy in the doldrums, the AKP fell back on foreign policy and Islam.

“Islamization” has been a major AKP theme, but one that may have misfired in this election. A recent book by Turkish scholar Volkan Erit argues that Turkey is becoming less religious and more secular, particularly among the young. In any case, religion did not trump Turkey’s growing international and regional isolation, Erdogan’s fixation with the war in Syria, or his sudden reversal on making peace with the Kurds.

He refused to come to the aid of the besieged Syrian Kurds at Kobane last year, and his back peddling on a peace agreement with Turkey’s Kurds alienated even conservative Kurds, who abandoned the AKP and voted for the leftwing HDP.

A corruption scandal that implicated several of Erdogan’s family members also hurt the AKP’s image and caused some foreign investors to pull back, further damaging the economy.

And as far as the AKP’s foreign policy goes, what was once a strength is now a liability.

In the past four years Turkey has gone from a regional peace maker—“zero problems with neighbors” was the slogan that wags have since changed to “zero neighbors without problems”— to odd man out, so isolated that it lost out to Venezuela in a bid for a UN Security Council seat.

It is not talking with Egypt, has an icy relationship with Iran, is alienated from Iraq, at war with Syria, and not on the best of terms with Russia and China. In fact its only real allies in the Middle East are the Gulf Monarchies, although in an indirect way it is teaming up with Israel to overthrow the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad.

The AKP has tried to make this isolation into a virtue—Erdogan’s chief foreign policy advisor Ibnahim Kalin called it “precious loneliness”—but voters saw it less as a virtue than as alienation.

Its exports are down sharply because it has estranged its leading trade partners Iran and Iraq, and, by choosing the losing side in the Libyan civil war, it is out $28 billion in Libyan construction contracts. Its plans for expanding into sub-Saharan Africa are now on hold, and Libya owes Turkey $5 billion, money it is not likely to see in the near future.

The Syrian war is not popular with the average Turk and, with the influx of some two million refugees from that conflict, less so by the day. The Turkish Army opposes any involvement in Syria, because it sees nothing ahead but a quagmire that would ally Turkey with the al-Qaeda linked Nusra Front.

In short, the AKP lost the election because almost 60 percent of the Turks opposed its domestic and foreign policies.

What happens now, however, is tricky, and not a little dangerous.

The AKP took a beating, dropping from 49.8 percent to 40.8 percent, and losing 53 seats in the parliament. Not only did the Party not get their magic 330 seats that would allow Erdogan to change the constitution, at 258 seats the AKP needs a coalition partner to rule.

They are not likely to find one on the Left.

The Leftwing HDP—formerly largely a Kurdish-based party—shattered the 10 percent ceiling to serve in the Parliament, taking 13.1 percent of the vote and electing 79 representatives. The HDP’s breakthrough came about because the Party allied itself with other Left and progressive parties in 2012—much as Syriza did in Greece—and campaigned on an openly left program.

Led by the dynamic Selahattin Demirtas, its candidates included many women, as well as gays and lesbians. Some 40 percent of HDP’s parliamentarians will be women and openly gay candidates will serve in the new Grand Assembly. “We, the oppressed people of Turkey who want justice, peace and freedom, have achieved a tremendous victory today,” Demirtas said in the election’s aftermath.

The AKP’s traditional opponent, the social democratic CHP, came in at 25.9 percent, a slight improvement over 2014, and an increase of seven seats. The Party now has 132 representatives in Parliament.

The danger comes from the performance of the right-wing National Action Party (MHP), which won 16.9 percent of the vote and picked up 28 seats. It now has the same number of seats as the HDP. The MHP is sometimes called “The Gray Wolves” after a neo-fascist hit squad that routinely assassinated left-wingers, academics and Kurds in the 1970s and ‘80s, and still has a shadowy presence in Turkey. The MHP claims it supports parliamentary rule, but the party’s commitment to democracy is suspect.

At this point the MHP’s leader Devlet Bahceli says he has no interest in a coalition with the AKP, but the authoritarian streak that runs through both parties might just bring them together. If they do unite, peace with the Kurds will vanish, and engaging in internal dissent will be an increasingly risky business.

But Turkey has tamed its formally coup-obsessed military, gone through several elections and, in spite of setbacks like Gezi Park, is a democratic country. It is also one that is in trouble at home and abroad, problems that the Right is notoriously bad at solving, but for which the Left has programmatic solutions.

It may be that the parties will deadlock, in which case new elections will have to held. In the meantime, the Turkish lira is at a record low, the stock market has tumbled 8 percent, and neither the economic crisis nor the foreign policy debacles are going away. Stay tuned, the future of a major player is in the balance.

Whatever Happened to the Proletariat?

David Rosen

The Left Forum was held in New York on the May 29^th-31^st weekend and thousands attended.  It offered numerous panels led by academics, activists and independent thinkers of every strip as well as film screenings and public plenaries.  Everyone ran into someone they knew from a past life or started a new friendship.  While a lot of grey-haired veterans of the ‘60s were present, a strong turn out of millennials confirmed that the left is alive in America.

The one thing missing from the gathering was “the proletariat.”  Remember in The Communist Manifesto when Marx warns: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”  The word proletariat was never formally mentioned during the weekend.

What happened to the proletariat?

The Forum was a joyous gathering hosting diverse discussions involving critical social, political and intellectual issues.  Topics ranged from Black Lives Matter to anti-fracking, the national security state and the $15-hr minimum wage to the Islamic State, Cuba and even Victor Serge.  In one panel on women & the Red Scare, 99-year-old Miriam Moskowitz talked about having been railroaded by the FBI, convicted of espionage and served 2 years in a federal penitentiary; her conviction was overturned, yet she has not received justice, an exoneration.  Individually, each session had value.

The conference confirmed that the left serves two important roles: it articulates a critical perspective on key issues and it champions individual and collective activism.  Unfortunately, the left is playing a mostly defensive role, trying to preserve lost gains as global economic reorganization remakes the country.  As many presenters made clear, the tyranny of finance capital, old-time racism, carbon polluters and the national-security state dominates American politics.

Sadly, the conference offered no revolutionary vision to inspire the vast American populace to change the system.  A host of trying concerns knit together a loose confederation of different interests that share one underlying belief: there’s a need to create a more equitable society, one based on a more humane, non-racist and environmentally-sound redistribution of wealth.  Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the Democratic Party’s quality conscious, articulate this vision.

The media regularly reports on political bribery scandals, secret campaign funds and luxury speaking-engagement junkets.  Today’s ruling class, the 1 percent is not – in Marx’s words – “trembling.”  Like robber barons of old, today’s ruling class is laughing all the way to the bank.

* * *

For a century, the concept of proletariat anchored radical analysis and politics, theory and practice.  Its now all but disappeared.

From European revolutionaries of 1848 to victims of the ‘50s Red Scare, it was a concept understood by radicals of every strip.  The proletariat was the vanguard of struggle, at once the most advanced sector of the capitalist system in terms of generating profit as well as the most exploited.  Given Marx’s dialectic thinking, the proletariat prefiguring a utopian future, suggesting new forms of social organization.  Today, the proletariat has vanished from radical discourse.  But has it disappeared from the historical stage?

Marx was a student of Hegel and believed in the dialectic, that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction.  In the Communist Manifesto, he defines the proletariat in the following terms:

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Who was Marx’s proletariat?  He was an industrial workingman (we’re dealing with 19^th century conventions):  “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman.  He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”  He also was an individual, a man:  “The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.  Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”  The proletariat knew the system was rigged.

Often forgotten, for Marx the proletariat was not the “dangerous class,”the lumpen-proletariat.  He called the lowest class, “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society ….”  He did acknowledge, that they “may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”

The same year Marx issued the Communist Manifesto, 1848, Pierre Proudhon, France’s leading revolution and an anarchist, insisted,

“the proletariat must emancipate itself without the help of the government.”  He saw the proletariat remaking society: the “problem before the labouring classes . . . [is] not in capturing, but in subduing both power and monopoly, – that is, in generating from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labour, a greater authority, a more potent fact, which shall envelop capital and the state and subjugate them.”

The proletariat was a shared concept among the 19^th and early-20^thcentury left.  Where Marx called for the end of exploitation, Proudhon called for an end to domination; where one saw class, the other saw hierarchy.  Both saw the proletariat as the revolutionary force that could overthrow the tyranny of the capitalist system, both exploitation and domination.  The proletariat was at once the most exploited sector of capitalist society and, in breaking its chains, ushered in a utopian, “communist,” society.

No one speaks in these terms anymore.  Over the last quarter-century, the political imagination of the American left has withered, become instrumentalized into do-good activism.  Not that this activism is unimportant.  Battles against racist cops, antiabortion ravers, environmental criminals, corrupt banksters or revolving-door government cons are but a few of the fronts in with the broad left is confronting a system in crisis.

In Marx’s day, the proletariat was the industrial working class.  Remember, it’s 1860s London of the early factory system and steamship imperialism.  Marx identified the proletariat as those who generated the most surplus value (i.e., profit) and, thus, experienced the greatest degree of exploitation.  They had the most to loose, thus most challenged the owners of the means of production, the capitalist.

Is there a proletariat today?

* * *

Once upon a time, the left — whether Marxists, socialists, anarchists or social democrats — shared a common understanding of the proletariat.  It meant the most exploited, thus most pivotal, thus the most revolutionary sector, of the working class.  But it also meant something more, a force that prefigured new forms of cooperative social relations, communism.

The Bolshevik Revolution killed the proletariat.  First under Lenin, then under Stalin, the centralized party, claiming leadership as the vanguard of the working class, superseded the proletariat.  In the U.S., from the 1930s to 1950s, the proletariat became just another sector of the fragmented working class, organized by often-corrupt unions and those aligned with the Soviet Union, thus decried as “national security threats.”  The proletariat was jettisoned from political discourse during the tumultuous ‘60s like so much historical dead weight.

Now, a half-century later, is there is a proletariat in the U.S. today?  It’s easy to say, “No!”  The traditional industrial working class has all but disappeared and the social struggle is varied and diverse.  The left seems bound together with little but a shared hope that activist intervention and grassroots politics can contain the next crisis let alone right the wrongs that so oppress contemporary American social life.

But if “Yes,” who is it?  Is it the increasing number of inner-city African-Americans and others fighting police lynchings?  Is it the increasing number of rural and suburban Americans fighting fracking?  Is it the growing number of whistleblowers and journalists defending the right to know?

Often overlooked, is the new proletariat the legions of contingent – i.e., freelancers, contractors, consultants — workers hungry for a paycheck and willing to work for what’s been dubbed “the sharing economy?”  There are the estimated 9,000 companies identified with the new for of high-tech innovation.

This new form of exploitation, of turning oneself into a commodity, is spreading throughout the economy.  Its gaining ground within transportation, with companies like Uber and Lyft; apartment rentals with Airbnb; good and services, like designer clothes from RentTheRunway; and odd jobs with TaskRabbit.  And don’t forget adjunct faculty, the exploited intellectual labor force who keeps the billion-dollar collage education racket functioning.

Once upon a time, in Marx’s day, workers sold their labor power; today, everyone sells their personal surplus value, whether a room in their apartment, their car as a driver or their blood by the liter.  Today, nothing is not for sale.

More troubling, capitalism has evolved from an industrial to a financial system, from a nation-state operation to a global enterprise.  The revolutions of 1848 that inspired Marx and Proudhon took place at the dawn of industrial capitalism, a century-and-a-half ago, and the world has changed since then.  However, the tyranny imposed as the fundamental conditions of modern life – exploitation and domination – persist. The question remains: What happened to the proletariat?