https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzPJnCXQNAs&feature
Friday, August 14, 2020
Thursday, August 13, 2020
AFTER 300 YEARS, IT’S TIME TO END CAPITALISM, NOT REFORM IT
https://popularresistance.org/after-300-years-its-time-to-end-capitalism-not-reform-it/
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, Clearing the FOG.
August 10, 2020
| , PODCAST
The United States is facing multiple crises with no signs of improvement on the horizon – a deep recession, high unemployment, millions of people soon to be displaced from their homes, a failed healthcare system in the midst of a pandemic, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Professor Richard Wolff, an economist and the author of “Democracy at Work”, about the history of capitalism and how it is inherently unstable. Prof. Wolff posits that the United States is now in a situation where capitalism is unlikely to survive. He describes why that is and the lessons we must learn from the fatal mistakes made when the US was in a similar situation one hundred years ago.
Listen here:
Subscribe to our show on iTunes, SoundCloud, MixCloud or Stitcher.
Review us on iTunes! Click here … Then click on “View in iTunes … Then click “Ratings and Reviews.”
Our Guest:
Professor Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). Wolff was also regular lecturer at the Brecht Forum in New York City. Read more here. Follow his work at Democracyatwork.info and on Twitter at @profwolff.
| , PODCAST
The United States is facing multiple crises with no signs of improvement on the horizon – a deep recession, high unemployment, millions of people soon to be displaced from their homes, a failed healthcare system in the midst of a pandemic, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Professor Richard Wolff, an economist and the author of “Democracy at Work”, about the history of capitalism and how it is inherently unstable. Prof. Wolff posits that the United States is now in a situation where capitalism is unlikely to survive. He describes why that is and the lessons we must learn from the fatal mistakes made when the US was in a similar situation one hundred years ago.
Listen here:
Subscribe to our show on iTunes, SoundCloud, MixCloud or Stitcher.
Review us on iTunes! Click here … Then click on “View in iTunes … Then click “Ratings and Reviews.”Our Guest:
Professor Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City. Earlier he taught economics at Yale University (1967-1969) and at the City College of the City University of New York (1969-1973). In 1994, he was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Paris (France), I (Sorbonne). Wolff was also regular lecturer at the Brecht Forum in New York City. Read more here. Follow his work at Democracyatwork.info and on Twitter at @profwolff.
HOW SOCIALISTS WON OUR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS
By Adam J. Sacks, Tribune Magazine.
August 10, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/how-socialists-won-our-democratic-rights/
The Myth Of Modern Democracy Is That It Was Handed Down From On-High.
In fact, the ruling class resisted extending the franchise at every turn – and it was socialists who fought them for the right to vote.
Since the advent of the modern state, ruling classes have tried to restrain the voting power of workers and those not “well-born.” Contrary to the mainstream story that capitalism naturally gave rise to democracy, establishment powers in nineteenth-century Europe restricted the vote for as long as they possibly could. Only when faced with mass mobilization — or when continent-wide war wiped out working-class males en masse — was it clear that the franchise could no longer be withheld.The particulars of individual European countries varied. In some nations, following intense struggles, workers won limited forms of universal male suffrage before World War I. More commonly, broad suffrage rights appeared only after the war.
But what was consistent were the actors pushing for universal suffrage: trade unions and, crucially, socialist parties. In fact, what has been called the “democratic breakthrough” of the nineteenth century could easily be called the “socialist breakthrough.”
Belgium
On August 10, 1890, seventy-five thousand men and women took to the streets of Brussels to demonstrate for universal suffrage. Like all other putatively democratic nations of the time, Belgium limited the right to vote to male property owners. Workers were entirely shut out of the country’s political life. Over the next twenty-five years, that would change — but not until a series of general strikes convulsed the country and World War I ripped the country to shreds.
In 1890, the year of the first general strike, ruling elites worried that conferring the vote on the working class would give the ascendant socialist movement a batting ram to bludgeon their autocratic citadel. Though founded just five years earlier, the Parti Ouvrier — like its sister parties in the Second International — was steadily growing, fusing workers together into a powerful, coherent political bloc. Party leaders hoped they could pursue a patient reformist course, winning trade union and suffrage rights without resorting to a revolutionary strategy of mass strikes.
But the stubbornness of reality — the powers that be resolutely blocked pro-worker measures in parliament — and the militancy of workers forced the party’s leaders to concede that more radical action was necessary.
In 1893, following up on the mass action three years earlier, the Council of Workers declared a general strike. Mass demonstrations broke out in multiple cities, miners cut telegraph and telephone lines, and soldiers chased party leaders through the streets with bayonets drawn. Women chucked rocks and broken pottery at the police behind barricades built by miners.
The militant action worked. Property restrictions were abolished. The leaders of the Parti Ouvrier, including a marble worker named Louis Bertrand who helped found the party, were invited into parliament.
But progress would not occur in a straight line. The elections the next year sent shock waves through Europe when dozens of socialist deputies were elected to parliament rather than the expected handful. The party immediately went to work, drafting laws to support unions and set up disability insurance and pensions. Ruling elites, realising their mistake, pushed through a system of “plural voting” that gave additional weight to citizens living in strongholds of the conservative Catholic Party.
So workers — often over the objections of party leaders — kept up the pressure. When the government tried to deepen inequalities in voting rights, the socialist movement again declared a strike, in 1902. This time over three hundred thousand flooded the streets.
The thrust and parry continued in the subsequent years. Catholic parties, still aided by plural voting, strengthened their majority in 1912 and attacked full universal suffrage in the legislature the following year. Socialist leaders, trying to balance the competing politics of rural miners and urban social-democratic politicians, still held out hope parliament would enact universal suffrage.
Instead, 1913 brought another general strike — the largest in Western European history. Strike funds were set up via a system of coupons, and co-ops and childcare were organised. Le Peuple, a socialist daily, published recipes for soupes communistes to cook in the communal kitchens. Art exhibitions, museum visits, and country hikes drew working-class families together, offering not just respite but cultural nourishment.
The strike didn’t achieve its aim of full and equal universal suffrage. It was only after World War I, in 1919, that plural voting finally fell, and women wouldn’t receive the right to vote until 1948.
Yet those early battles for the franchise had an enormous impact on the consciousness of other socialists around the continent — the Parti Ouvrier, Rosa Luxemburg said, had inspired the entire Second International to “speak Belgian.”
The Russian Empire
During Belgium’s 1902 general strike, the city of Louvain was the site of a frightful massacre: twelve workers eventually died after state officers opened fire. Further east, another government-led mass murder triggered a seminal general strike — the 1905 Russian Revolution.
While in late 1904 liberals and progressives had successfully pressed for workers insurance, the abolition of censorship, and expanded local representative government, the Russian Empire still lacked a federal parliament. In January 1905, strikes erupted in multiple cities, culminating in a peaceful march in St Petersburg of men, women, and children, singing hymns and brandishing a petition demanding an elected parliament. Troops fired on the marchers before they could reach the Winter Palace, killing upwards of one thousand.
Theatrical performances were spontaneously interrupted, and thousands of students and professionals struck in solidarity with the workers. The merchants club, hardly a redoubt of radicalism, barred its doors to guards for their involvement in the massacre.
Within a couple weeks, half of European Russian workers and 93 percent of all workers in Russian-occupied Poland were out on strike. In Lodz, strikers held the provincial governor hostage in a hotel. Throughout the entire empire, the rail network ground to a halt.
Revolution was in the air. The next few months would witness the country’s first open celebration of May Day and the legendary Potemkin Mutiny off the shores of Odessa, later immortalised by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. And by the end of October, the tsar had reluctantly signed the manifesto that established the Duma — and extended the franchise toward universal male suffrage.
Elsewhere in the Russian Empire, radical actions for the vote had even more far-reaching consequences. A general strike in Finland in 1905 led not only to the adoption of universal male suffrage and a unicameral parliamentary system, but also the granting of women the right to vote and to stand for elections — the first country in Europe to do so. Over the coming decade, the country’s workers would use these expanded rights — before the strike, only 8 percent of the population could vote — to press for increasingly revolutionary reforms.
Sweden
Among American liberals, it’s popular to imagine Sweden as a social-democratic utopia, a nation where enlightened values have won out over rank selfishness. But the history of the Swedish workers movement is a testament to the tenaciousness of the country’s ruling class — including its dogged resistance to voting rights.
The political expression of the labour movement, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), formed in 1889 amid a broader surge in worker organising. As elsewhere, those without property lacked basic political rights. The Swedish socialist movement’s goal was to first win political democracy.
In 1902, a two-day general strike for universal suffrage served as a warning shot at the stridently right-wing government. Called by the political parties and never intended to last longer than a couple days, the strike made a strong impression on the government due to its impressive level of mass support. Still, the strike lacked the crucial participation of the trade unions.
This would come in part with the 1909 general strike, which lasted a month and convened almost half a million workers. The initial aim was to combat worker lockouts and wage freezes. But as chairman of the transport workers, Charles Lindley, recalled, “In that time there was an almost unlimited faith in the general strike as the decisive means to get universal suffrage.” The economically inspired strike increasingly reflected workers’ democratic political aspirations.
The strike shut down all core export industries in the country, and workers attempted to spread it further. Employers responded with a standard tactic: importing striker breakers. In one case, three unemployed Swedish workers independently organised to bomb a ship that housed strikebreakers coming from Great Britain.
As days turned into weeks, however, strike leaders were forced to retreat, faced with meager strike funds and the prospect of having to divert relief from other workers in an economic recession. Liberals began to turn on the strikers when typographers joined, seeing their participation as an attack on “freedom of speech.” Workers’ families struggled mightily with the mounting deprivation. The Swedish Employer’s Association was therefore in a position by the end to dictate terms — and they did.
But while the strike was in many ways a setback, it is universally recognised today as laying the groundwork for the democratisation of Swedish society. Later that year all men in the country, regardless of their property holdings, gained the right to vote in at least one chamber of federal government. Full political democracy, while distant, was now on the horizon.
Germany
Almost two-thirds of late-nineteenth Germany lay within the Kingdom of Prussia, which had enforced the unification of the German states in 1871. Despite the passage that year of the general, equal, and secret right to vote for all males over age twenty-five, Prussia maintained a system from 1849 that divided voters into three classes based on their tax bracket.
The obviously unequal arrangement — early socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht referred to the Reichstag as the “fig leaf of absolutism” — created a situation where 4 percent of the first class held as many voters as the third class, who made up 82 percent of the eligible voting population. And there was another anti-democratic check on workers’ power: the upper chamber, the Reichsrat, could block any constitutional changes passed by the directly elected representatives of the Reichstag. The Second Reich, Marx declared, was a “police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms.”
Somehow, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) flourished in spite of these adverse conditions. It was the largest socialist party on the continent, the Second International party par excellence. The SPD’s Erfurt Program, ratified in 1891, declared: “The struggle of the working class against capitalistic exploitation is of necessity a political struggle. The working class cannot carry out its economic struggle and cannot develop its economic organisation without political rights.” At the top of the party’s demands: “universal, equal, and direct voting rights via secret vote for all citizens over twenty years of age, regardless of sex.”
The country’s elites were not amused. Following the development of a country-wide strike movement, employers insisted that the kaiser both rescind the vote from all those affiliated with Social Democracy and legally limit strikes. The kaiser, showing no aversion to despotic rhetoric himself, told a group of new military recruits in Potsdam in November 1891:
the current socialist machinations could result that I order you to shoot down your own relatives, brothers, even parents . . . but even then you must follow my orders without any grumbling.
The SPD patiently agitated and organised to become the largest party in the Prussian parliament by 1908. They led repeated mass demonstrations for full suffrage, which were inexorably met with brutal repression.
On the eve of World War I, suffrage rights were still the province of the elite. But for their efforts, the SPD was rightfully recognised as the most consistently democratic force in prewar Germany.
Great Britain
Of all the European countries of the Second International, Great Britain had the least democratic voting system — the proportion of men over the age of twenty-one who could cast a ballot at the start of World War I was smaller than in eight of nine countries for which full data is available.
Mass disenfranchisement was deeply rooted in the country’s political system. At the start of the nineteenth century, in an electoral system marred by extreme gerrymandering, only 4 percent of the population could vote. In the middle of the century, the pro-suffrage demonstrations of the Chartists — the first mass working-class movement in European history — were met with elite antipathy. As late as 1884, access to voting remained unequal between the towns and the countryside — and after reforms altered that undemocratic hindrance, eligible voters still had to prove a base payment in rent to qualify.
The ruling class simply couldn’t countenance approving a measure they thought would give “the rabble” political power: universal suffrage, in the estimation of British statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay, was “incompatible with property . . . and consequently incompatible with civilisation” itself.
Arrayed against Macaulay were the working class and their burgeoning movement. The Labour Party, firmly committed to universal suffrage, agitated for political democracy and was able to wrest some concessions before World War I. In 1911, they pushed for an end to the House of Lords’ veto over legislation.
Finally, on the heels of continent-wide war, universal male suffrage was established, and women won the vote in 1928.
The political order that, in Lenin’s words, had entrapped the working masses in a “well-equipped system of flattery, lies, and fraud” was cracking open.
Fighters For Democracy
The early socialist parties showed an unflagging commitment to universal suffrage — a commitment unmatched by any other party.
Their dedication was at once ethical and practical. On the one hand, they were determined to overturn structures of domination and inequality wherever they existed. And in the political sphere, workers were vassals, subject to the decisions of officials they had no hand in choosing.
On a more practical level, the early socialists recognised the potency of the ballot. Their fight for universal suffrage joined the political and economic struggles, transforming the vote into an object of radical tactics and revolutionary élan. It tied together the different factions of the movement in the pursuit of a tool (the vote) that workers could use as part of the broader class struggle. Their aim was to create a “true democracy,” from the bottom-up, in the tradition of Marx.
Today, socialists mustn’t forget their historic role in struggling for political democracy. So many of even the liberal democratic parts of liberal democracy came about thanks to the battles socialists waged against the feudalistic leftovers of the Old Regime and the new capitalistic oligarchy.
We should reject faux-radical pronouncements that dismiss voting as inconsequential and, instead, meld the fight for universal suffrage with the fight for socialism and radical democracy. The vote was a historic conquest for the working class. It remains a “paper stone” in the hands of the disenfranchised.
https://popularresistance.org/how-socialists-won-our-democratic-rights/
The Myth Of Modern Democracy Is That It Was Handed Down From On-High.
In fact, the ruling class resisted extending the franchise at every turn – and it was socialists who fought them for the right to vote.
Since the advent of the modern state, ruling classes have tried to restrain the voting power of workers and those not “well-born.” Contrary to the mainstream story that capitalism naturally gave rise to democracy, establishment powers in nineteenth-century Europe restricted the vote for as long as they possibly could. Only when faced with mass mobilization — or when continent-wide war wiped out working-class males en masse — was it clear that the franchise could no longer be withheld.The particulars of individual European countries varied. In some nations, following intense struggles, workers won limited forms of universal male suffrage before World War I. More commonly, broad suffrage rights appeared only after the war.
But what was consistent were the actors pushing for universal suffrage: trade unions and, crucially, socialist parties. In fact, what has been called the “democratic breakthrough” of the nineteenth century could easily be called the “socialist breakthrough.”
Belgium
On August 10, 1890, seventy-five thousand men and women took to the streets of Brussels to demonstrate for universal suffrage. Like all other putatively democratic nations of the time, Belgium limited the right to vote to male property owners. Workers were entirely shut out of the country’s political life. Over the next twenty-five years, that would change — but not until a series of general strikes convulsed the country and World War I ripped the country to shreds.
In 1890, the year of the first general strike, ruling elites worried that conferring the vote on the working class would give the ascendant socialist movement a batting ram to bludgeon their autocratic citadel. Though founded just five years earlier, the Parti Ouvrier — like its sister parties in the Second International — was steadily growing, fusing workers together into a powerful, coherent political bloc. Party leaders hoped they could pursue a patient reformist course, winning trade union and suffrage rights without resorting to a revolutionary strategy of mass strikes.
But the stubbornness of reality — the powers that be resolutely blocked pro-worker measures in parliament — and the militancy of workers forced the party’s leaders to concede that more radical action was necessary.
In 1893, following up on the mass action three years earlier, the Council of Workers declared a general strike. Mass demonstrations broke out in multiple cities, miners cut telegraph and telephone lines, and soldiers chased party leaders through the streets with bayonets drawn. Women chucked rocks and broken pottery at the police behind barricades built by miners.
The militant action worked. Property restrictions were abolished. The leaders of the Parti Ouvrier, including a marble worker named Louis Bertrand who helped found the party, were invited into parliament.
But progress would not occur in a straight line. The elections the next year sent shock waves through Europe when dozens of socialist deputies were elected to parliament rather than the expected handful. The party immediately went to work, drafting laws to support unions and set up disability insurance and pensions. Ruling elites, realising their mistake, pushed through a system of “plural voting” that gave additional weight to citizens living in strongholds of the conservative Catholic Party.
So workers — often over the objections of party leaders — kept up the pressure. When the government tried to deepen inequalities in voting rights, the socialist movement again declared a strike, in 1902. This time over three hundred thousand flooded the streets.
The thrust and parry continued in the subsequent years. Catholic parties, still aided by plural voting, strengthened their majority in 1912 and attacked full universal suffrage in the legislature the following year. Socialist leaders, trying to balance the competing politics of rural miners and urban social-democratic politicians, still held out hope parliament would enact universal suffrage.
Instead, 1913 brought another general strike — the largest in Western European history. Strike funds were set up via a system of coupons, and co-ops and childcare were organised. Le Peuple, a socialist daily, published recipes for soupes communistes to cook in the communal kitchens. Art exhibitions, museum visits, and country hikes drew working-class families together, offering not just respite but cultural nourishment.
The strike didn’t achieve its aim of full and equal universal suffrage. It was only after World War I, in 1919, that plural voting finally fell, and women wouldn’t receive the right to vote until 1948.
Yet those early battles for the franchise had an enormous impact on the consciousness of other socialists around the continent — the Parti Ouvrier, Rosa Luxemburg said, had inspired the entire Second International to “speak Belgian.”
The Russian Empire
During Belgium’s 1902 general strike, the city of Louvain was the site of a frightful massacre: twelve workers eventually died after state officers opened fire. Further east, another government-led mass murder triggered a seminal general strike — the 1905 Russian Revolution.
While in late 1904 liberals and progressives had successfully pressed for workers insurance, the abolition of censorship, and expanded local representative government, the Russian Empire still lacked a federal parliament. In January 1905, strikes erupted in multiple cities, culminating in a peaceful march in St Petersburg of men, women, and children, singing hymns and brandishing a petition demanding an elected parliament. Troops fired on the marchers before they could reach the Winter Palace, killing upwards of one thousand.
Theatrical performances were spontaneously interrupted, and thousands of students and professionals struck in solidarity with the workers. The merchants club, hardly a redoubt of radicalism, barred its doors to guards for their involvement in the massacre.
Within a couple weeks, half of European Russian workers and 93 percent of all workers in Russian-occupied Poland were out on strike. In Lodz, strikers held the provincial governor hostage in a hotel. Throughout the entire empire, the rail network ground to a halt.
Revolution was in the air. The next few months would witness the country’s first open celebration of May Day and the legendary Potemkin Mutiny off the shores of Odessa, later immortalised by filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. And by the end of October, the tsar had reluctantly signed the manifesto that established the Duma — and extended the franchise toward universal male suffrage.
Elsewhere in the Russian Empire, radical actions for the vote had even more far-reaching consequences. A general strike in Finland in 1905 led not only to the adoption of universal male suffrage and a unicameral parliamentary system, but also the granting of women the right to vote and to stand for elections — the first country in Europe to do so. Over the coming decade, the country’s workers would use these expanded rights — before the strike, only 8 percent of the population could vote — to press for increasingly revolutionary reforms.
Sweden
Among American liberals, it’s popular to imagine Sweden as a social-democratic utopia, a nation where enlightened values have won out over rank selfishness. But the history of the Swedish workers movement is a testament to the tenaciousness of the country’s ruling class — including its dogged resistance to voting rights.
The political expression of the labour movement, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), formed in 1889 amid a broader surge in worker organising. As elsewhere, those without property lacked basic political rights. The Swedish socialist movement’s goal was to first win political democracy.
In 1902, a two-day general strike for universal suffrage served as a warning shot at the stridently right-wing government. Called by the political parties and never intended to last longer than a couple days, the strike made a strong impression on the government due to its impressive level of mass support. Still, the strike lacked the crucial participation of the trade unions.
This would come in part with the 1909 general strike, which lasted a month and convened almost half a million workers. The initial aim was to combat worker lockouts and wage freezes. But as chairman of the transport workers, Charles Lindley, recalled, “In that time there was an almost unlimited faith in the general strike as the decisive means to get universal suffrage.” The economically inspired strike increasingly reflected workers’ democratic political aspirations.
The strike shut down all core export industries in the country, and workers attempted to spread it further. Employers responded with a standard tactic: importing striker breakers. In one case, three unemployed Swedish workers independently organised to bomb a ship that housed strikebreakers coming from Great Britain.
As days turned into weeks, however, strike leaders were forced to retreat, faced with meager strike funds and the prospect of having to divert relief from other workers in an economic recession. Liberals began to turn on the strikers when typographers joined, seeing their participation as an attack on “freedom of speech.” Workers’ families struggled mightily with the mounting deprivation. The Swedish Employer’s Association was therefore in a position by the end to dictate terms — and they did.
But while the strike was in many ways a setback, it is universally recognised today as laying the groundwork for the democratisation of Swedish society. Later that year all men in the country, regardless of their property holdings, gained the right to vote in at least one chamber of federal government. Full political democracy, while distant, was now on the horizon.
Germany
Almost two-thirds of late-nineteenth Germany lay within the Kingdom of Prussia, which had enforced the unification of the German states in 1871. Despite the passage that year of the general, equal, and secret right to vote for all males over age twenty-five, Prussia maintained a system from 1849 that divided voters into three classes based on their tax bracket.
The obviously unequal arrangement — early socialist leader Wilhelm Liebknecht referred to the Reichstag as the “fig leaf of absolutism” — created a situation where 4 percent of the first class held as many voters as the third class, who made up 82 percent of the eligible voting population. And there was another anti-democratic check on workers’ power: the upper chamber, the Reichsrat, could block any constitutional changes passed by the directly elected representatives of the Reichstag. The Second Reich, Marx declared, was a “police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms.”
Somehow, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) flourished in spite of these adverse conditions. It was the largest socialist party on the continent, the Second International party par excellence. The SPD’s Erfurt Program, ratified in 1891, declared: “The struggle of the working class against capitalistic exploitation is of necessity a political struggle. The working class cannot carry out its economic struggle and cannot develop its economic organisation without political rights.” At the top of the party’s demands: “universal, equal, and direct voting rights via secret vote for all citizens over twenty years of age, regardless of sex.”
The country’s elites were not amused. Following the development of a country-wide strike movement, employers insisted that the kaiser both rescind the vote from all those affiliated with Social Democracy and legally limit strikes. The kaiser, showing no aversion to despotic rhetoric himself, told a group of new military recruits in Potsdam in November 1891:
the current socialist machinations could result that I order you to shoot down your own relatives, brothers, even parents . . . but even then you must follow my orders without any grumbling.
The SPD patiently agitated and organised to become the largest party in the Prussian parliament by 1908. They led repeated mass demonstrations for full suffrage, which were inexorably met with brutal repression.
On the eve of World War I, suffrage rights were still the province of the elite. But for their efforts, the SPD was rightfully recognised as the most consistently democratic force in prewar Germany.
Great Britain
Of all the European countries of the Second International, Great Britain had the least democratic voting system — the proportion of men over the age of twenty-one who could cast a ballot at the start of World War I was smaller than in eight of nine countries for which full data is available.
Mass disenfranchisement was deeply rooted in the country’s political system. At the start of the nineteenth century, in an electoral system marred by extreme gerrymandering, only 4 percent of the population could vote. In the middle of the century, the pro-suffrage demonstrations of the Chartists — the first mass working-class movement in European history — were met with elite antipathy. As late as 1884, access to voting remained unequal between the towns and the countryside — and after reforms altered that undemocratic hindrance, eligible voters still had to prove a base payment in rent to qualify.
The ruling class simply couldn’t countenance approving a measure they thought would give “the rabble” political power: universal suffrage, in the estimation of British statesman Thomas Babington Macaulay, was “incompatible with property . . . and consequently incompatible with civilisation” itself.
Arrayed against Macaulay were the working class and their burgeoning movement. The Labour Party, firmly committed to universal suffrage, agitated for political democracy and was able to wrest some concessions before World War I. In 1911, they pushed for an end to the House of Lords’ veto over legislation.
Finally, on the heels of continent-wide war, universal male suffrage was established, and women won the vote in 1928.
The political order that, in Lenin’s words, had entrapped the working masses in a “well-equipped system of flattery, lies, and fraud” was cracking open.
Fighters For Democracy
The early socialist parties showed an unflagging commitment to universal suffrage — a commitment unmatched by any other party.
Their dedication was at once ethical and practical. On the one hand, they were determined to overturn structures of domination and inequality wherever they existed. And in the political sphere, workers were vassals, subject to the decisions of officials they had no hand in choosing.
On a more practical level, the early socialists recognised the potency of the ballot. Their fight for universal suffrage joined the political and economic struggles, transforming the vote into an object of radical tactics and revolutionary élan. It tied together the different factions of the movement in the pursuit of a tool (the vote) that workers could use as part of the broader class struggle. Their aim was to create a “true democracy,” from the bottom-up, in the tradition of Marx.
Today, socialists mustn’t forget their historic role in struggling for political democracy. So many of even the liberal democratic parts of liberal democracy came about thanks to the battles socialists waged against the feudalistic leftovers of the Old Regime and the new capitalistic oligarchy.
We should reject faux-radical pronouncements that dismiss voting as inconsequential and, instead, meld the fight for universal suffrage with the fight for socialism and radical democracy. The vote was a historic conquest for the working class. It remains a “paper stone” in the hands of the disenfranchised.
US CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AT HOME AND ABROAD
https://popularresistance.org/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-home-and-abroad/
By Bill Hackwell and Alicia Jrapko, Resumen English.
August 10, 2020
| EDUCATE!
Above photo: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating Ceremony.
This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9 as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity. Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki Japan that came just 3 days after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then-Democratic President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000 people on one day and turned right around and did it again in Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings. US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire bombings.
The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent superpower. It also served as an example that the US would commit any murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to be true time and time again. Even now in decline, the US has never apologized for this unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the nations of the world. Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima. Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”
The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was then and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent neo-liberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the benefit of their majorities. In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits a sliver of privileged society.
The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan. As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Since its inception, the US has been ingrained with a motor force of violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in its way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement to a limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.
The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist accumulation, especially for the southern colonies. At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population consisted of Black slaves. Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish was to secede from the British Empire. In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in the inferiority of any race not white and Christian. The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets today of all the major cities and towns of the US are a resounding echo of resistance that comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from Africa.
The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God to exercise their Manifest Destiny. The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that keeps the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas where there is not even running water.
On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations bill, the biggest ever and $2 billion more than last year. The United States spends more on national defense than the next 11 largest militaries combined. A well-intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized food programs. Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example of the growing social and health needs.
Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes right down the drain. It does not recycle through the economy rather it is equipment and operations meant to destroy and terrorize and the only part of it that is re used is the militarization of police forces in the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.
When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction of having had a war going everyday of his 8 years in office. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its twentieth year. The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies, aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into endless wars that’s intent is to make sure that a country is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.
This of course is not the only type of criminal warfare in the Empire’s arsenal. Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity as military attacks. No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US-orchestrated UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of sanctions on around one-third of the countries of the world ranging in severity starting with the 60-year-old unilateral blockade of Cuba for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away, to the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars of their assets out of banks and organizing coup plots against the democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.
Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country, barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize, escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now have been demanding real justice and equality. The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science-based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal police policy has exposed the system like never before. The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change will be the catalyst for real change to happen. It will not come from a government that does not reflect their interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home and abroad, to become a thing of the past.
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Above photo: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating Ceremony.
This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9 as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity. Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki Japan that came just 3 days after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then-Democratic President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000 people on one day and turned right around and did it again in Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings. US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire bombings.
The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent superpower. It also served as an example that the US would commit any murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to be true time and time again. Even now in decline, the US has never apologized for this unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the nations of the world. Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima. Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”
The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was then and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent neo-liberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the benefit of their majorities. In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits a sliver of privileged society.
The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan. As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Since its inception, the US has been ingrained with a motor force of violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in its way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement to a limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.
The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist accumulation, especially for the southern colonies. At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population consisted of Black slaves. Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish was to secede from the British Empire. In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in the inferiority of any race not white and Christian. The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets today of all the major cities and towns of the US are a resounding echo of resistance that comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from Africa.
The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God to exercise their Manifest Destiny. The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that keeps the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas where there is not even running water.
On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations bill, the biggest ever and $2 billion more than last year. The United States spends more on national defense than the next 11 largest militaries combined. A well-intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized food programs. Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example of the growing social and health needs.
Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes right down the drain. It does not recycle through the economy rather it is equipment and operations meant to destroy and terrorize and the only part of it that is re used is the militarization of police forces in the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.
When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction of having had a war going everyday of his 8 years in office. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its twentieth year. The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies, aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into endless wars that’s intent is to make sure that a country is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.
This of course is not the only type of criminal warfare in the Empire’s arsenal. Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity as military attacks. No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US-orchestrated UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of sanctions on around one-third of the countries of the world ranging in severity starting with the 60-year-old unilateral blockade of Cuba for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away, to the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars of their assets out of banks and organizing coup plots against the democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.
Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country, barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize, escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now have been demanding real justice and equality. The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science-based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal police policy has exposed the system like never before. The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change will be the catalyst for real change to happen. It will not come from a government that does not reflect their interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home and abroad, to become a thing of the past.
THE NEOLIBERAL VIRUS
https://popularresistance.org/the-neoliberal-virus/
By Ben Debney, Counterpunch.August 10, 2020
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To date, and to the extent that alleged political leaders have even tried to come to terms with the origins of the COVID-19 crisis at all, they have sought to do so in xenophobic terms; though not the only perpetrator on that count, Donald Trump has been most prominent in looking to characterize COVID-19 as a ‘Wuhan virus.’ Describing COVID-19 in these terms suggests that the pandemic has an ethnic origin, that it is the result of some racial deficit on the part of the Chinese that the world is now subject to the pandemic.
Suffice to say that these claims are completely unevidenced. They are also consistent with other attempts by Trump and those who slavishly follow his example to demonize groups who, for whatever reason, the trigger to their fragile megalomania—the Mexicans Trump, with no sense of shame or irony, slanders as rapists being but one example of many. As yet another incarnation of the politics of scapegoating on this count, the ‘Wuhan Virus’ line is nothing new.
On the contrary, it reflects a continuation of the kind of nativism and xenophobia that has been deployed against various victims of European colonialism for a good 400 years—not to mention more historically recent incarnations of hate propaganda, such as that directed against the Chinese during the 19th century. The particularly notorious example of the Mongolian Octopus reflects the crucial value of virulent racism to the settler-colonial project in Australia, a product of scaremongering by those with the power to engineer consent over the so-called ‘Yellow Peril.’
In the Australian case, the Chinese became a convenient punching bag for political frustrations denied more constructive outlets following the suppression of the Eureka Rebellion by police riot in 1854. Such developments reflected broader social tendencies with an ancient vintage; as one variation on the politics of scapegoating, that kind of nativism and xenophobia served as what historian Frank Van Nuys calls a ‘national safety valve’—a means of diverting class tensions onto victims suited to victimisation by virtue of their numerical marginality, and consequent inability to defend themselves.
This was true 100 years ago and it remains true to this day. What the ‘Wuhan Virus’ xenophobisms perpetrated by Donald Trump and others like him cannot account for, more than anything else is the role of neoliberal ideology in bringing the COVID-19 crisis about. Neoliberalism can be characterized, amongst other things, by a doctrinaire preoccupation with market deregulation and accompanying mythology, with all the supporting evidence of children’s fairy tales, that market mechanisms left to themselves can best guarantee social happiness and prosperity.
In reality, neoliberals fear checks on the absolute power of capital. Not making a distinction between being criticized and being attacked, and habitually conflating their own grotesque class privileges with individual freedoms, the transnational corporate capitalist class who sponsor this ideology and defend its hegemony portray regulation as threats to freedom—even as the deregulation of wet (wild animal) markets in China brings us up to 700,000 people dead globally, and millions more suffering. To this interpretation, only the freedoms of the One Percenters count; the rest belong to unpersons.
The fact of the matter is that it was neoliberal ideology, manifest in the encouragement of deregulated wet markets by the Chinese government as a means of spurring economic growth at any cost, and the deforestation that put infected animals within reach of wet marketeers, that is the root cause of the current pandemic.
The crucial difference between these facts and the ‘Wuhan Virus’ mythology, the interpretation of choice for those who benefit the most in the globalised neoliberal economy (or better yet, who are the only ones who benefit at all) is the adoption by the Chinese Communist Party of extreme free-market capitalism (which then becomes the particularly thorny question for the left of how state communist movements come to embody all they claim to oppose). Proponents of the ‘Wuhan Virus’ mythology have no more to say about this than they do the demonstrable origins of COVID-19, and their broader ideological, social and historical context.
If all of the above follows, then, it makes far more sense to characterise COVID-19 as a ‘Neoliberal Virus’; it was the conditions wrought by the global dominance of neoliberal ideology that drove the emergence of wet markets, along with the deforestation that brought infected wildlife within reach of wet marketeers, as noted. While Wuhan might have been the place where the Neoliberal Virus first appeared, it was also the social relations characteristic of neoliberalism that made that possible, and those are by no means limited to Wuhan—much less to say China.
As the ‘Wuhan Virus’ mythology demonstrates, it is no more in the nature of current socio-political arrangements to honestly and diligently address root cases of social problems in the present than in earlier stages of historical development. Then, as now, scapegoating or ‘Othering’ discourses look to manage crises in the interests of defending an ever-more unstable status quo. If the underlying instability associated with class tensions and class struggle of a century ago wrought anti-Chinese nativism at the national level, its use internationally today only serves to demonstrate how much more deeply entrenched the dynamics driving the root causes a century ago have become in the intervening period.
The inevitable result of this systematic and pervasive negligence, militant ignorance, and preferencing of the path of least resistance over the path of responsibility is that the world only becomes ever more chaotic. If the scapegoating of a century ago sought to manage social crisis in the name of, to borrow from James Madison, defending ‘the minority of the opulent from the majority, its continued use is testament to the continued value for transnational corporate imperialists of divide and conquer strategies for vassal states, populations and classes. The only innovation is in constructing environmental racisms to address the ecological crisis the moneyed elites of a century ago bequeathed to the world of today.
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