The U.S. Economy Excels at One Thing: Producing Massive Inequality ~~ RICHARD D. WOLFF

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/the-u-s-economy-excels-at-one-thing-producing-massive-inequality/

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

To grasp the sheer magnitude of U.S. economic inequality in recent years, consider its two major stock market indices: the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 and Nasdaq. Over the last 10 years, the values of shares listed on them grew spectacularly. The S&P 500 went from roughly 1,300 points to over 3,800 points, almost tripling. The Nasdaq index over the same period went from 2,800 points to 13,000 points, more than quadrupling. Times were good for the 10 percent of Americans who own 80 percent of stocks and bonds. In contrast, the real median weekly wage rose barely over 10 percent across the same 10-year period. The real federal minimum wage fell as inflation diminished its nominal $7.25 per hour, officially fixed and kept at that rate since 2009.

All the other relevant metrics likewise show that economic inequality in the United States kept worsening across the last half-century. This happened despite “concerns” about inequality expressed publicly across the years by many establishment politicians (including some in the new Biden administration), journalists, and academics. Inequality worsened through the capitalist downturns after 1970 and likewise through the three capitalist crashes of this century (2000, 2008, and 2020). Nor did the deadly pandemic provoke soul-searching or policies adequate to stop, let alone reverse, the ongoing redistribution of income and wealth upward.

No advanced economics is required to grasp that divisions, bitterness, resentment, and anger flow from such a persistently widening gap between haves and have-nots. Among millions who search for explanations, many become prey for those mobilizing against scapegoats. White supremacists blame Black and Brown people. Nativists (calling themselves “patriots” or “nationalists”) point to immigrants and foreign trade partners. Fundamentalists blame those less zealous and especially the non-religious. Fascists try to combine those movements with economically threatened small-business owners, jobless workers, and alienated social outcasts to form a powerful political coalition. The fascists made good use of Trump to assist their efforts.

U.S. history adds a special sharpness to the search for explanations. The dominant argument for capitalism in the 20th century after the 1930s Great Depression was that it “produced a great middle class.” Real U.S. wages had risen even during the Depression. They were generally higher than elsewhere across the globe, and especially in comparison with those in the USSR. High wages showed the superiority of U.S. capitalism according to the system’s apologists in politics, journalism, and academia. Demolition of that middle class at the end of the 20th and into the new century pained especially those who had bought the apologies.

And indeed, the Great Depression and its aftermath had lessened inequality significantly, enabling such a defense of capitalism to have some semblance of validity. However, for that defense to be persuasive required two key facts to be forgotten or hidden. The first is that the U.S. working class fought harder for major economic gains in the 1930s than at any other time in U.S. history. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) then organized millions into labor unions utilizing militants from two socialist parties and a communist party. Those parties were then achieving their largest-ever numerical strengths and social influences. That is how and why together the unions and the parties won the establishment of Social Security, federal unemployment compensation, a minimum wage, and a huge federal jobs program: all firsts in U.S. history. The second fact is that capitalists in the 1930s and afterward fought harder than ever against each and every working-class advance. The “middle-class” status achieved by a large portion of the working class (by no means all and especially not minorities) happened despite not because of capitalism and capitalists. But it was certainly clever propaganda for capitalism to claim credit for working-class gains that capitalists tried but failed to block.

The reduction of U.S. economic inequality accomplished then proved temporary. It was undone after 1945. Particularly after 1970, capitalism’s normal trajectory of deepening economic inequality resumed through to the present moment. Simply put, capitalism’s basic structure of production—how it organizes its enterprises—positioned capitalists to reverse the New Deal’s reduction of economic inequality. Much of the temporary U.S. middle class is now gone; the rest is fading fast. Over the last half-century, U.S. capitalism brought inequality to the extremes surrounding us now. No wonder a population once persuaded to support capitalism because it fostered a middle class now finds reasons to question it.

In capitalist enterprises, tiny minorities of the persons involved occupy positions of leadership, command, and control. The owner, the owner’s family, the board of directors, or the major shareholders comprise such minorities: the class of employers. Opposite them are the vast majorities: the class of employees. The employer class determines, exclusively, what the enterprise produces, what technology it uses, where production occurs, and what is done with its net revenue. The employee class must live with the consequences of employers’ decisions from which it is excluded. The employer class uses its position atop the enterprise to distribute its profits partly to enrich itself (via dividends and top executive pay packages). It uses some of its profits to buy and control politics. The goal there is to prevent universal suffrage from moving the economic system beyond capitalism and the economic inequality it reproduces.

Deepening U.S. inequality flows directly from this capitalist organization of production—its class system. Occasionally, under exceptional circumstances, rebellious social movements win reversals of that inequality. However, if such movements do not change the capitalist organization of production, capitalists will render such reversals temporary. To solve the extreme inequality of U.S. capitalism requires systemic change, an end to capitalism’s specific class structure pitting employers against employees. If production were organized instead in enterprises (factories, offices, stores) that were democratized—one worker, one vote—as worker cooperatives, economic inequality could and would be drastically reduced. Democratic decisions over the distribution of individual incomes across all the participants in an enterprise would far less likely give a small minority vast wealth at the expense of the vast majority. The same logic that dispensed with kings in politics applies to employers in capitalism’s enterprises.

Against Loving Your Job ~~ Sarah Jaffe

 https://inthesetimes.com/article/alienated-labor-capitalism-jobs-work

“We need a politics of time. A political understanding that our lives are ours to do with what we will.”

ILLUSTRATION BY GALINE TUMASYAN\\\

The ​“labor-of-love myth” — the idea that certain work is not really ​“work” and therefore should be done out of passion instead of pay — is cracking.

There are occasional pleasures to be had on the job, certainly; we should take any opportunity for happiness and connection that we get. I do believe, however, that our desire for happiness at work is one that has been constructed for us, and the world that constructed that desire is falling apart around us.

Work itself no longer works. Wages have stagnated for most working people since Reagan and Thatcher’s time. A college degree no longer guarantees a middle-class job. The pandemic exposed the failures of the U.S. healthcare system and the brutality of ​“essential” work for those who had no choice but to keep going to their jobs despite the heightened danger.

A society where we must work the majority of our waking hours will never deliver us happiness, even if we are the lucky few who have jobs in which we do gain some joy. As feminist activist and scholar Silvia Federici wrote, ​“Nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.”

Capitalist society has transformed work into love, and love, conversely, into work. But we are beginning to change our minds about our priorities, whether capital likes it or not. Surveys find more people rating ​“working hours are short, lots of free time” as a characteristic of a desirable job over time, while their desire for ​“important” work went down. This was true among the highly educated as well as the less educated. 

A side effect of all this love for work has been that talking about love between people has lost its importance. Instead, our personal relationships are to be squeezed in around the edges, fitted into busy schedules or sacrificed entirely to the demands of the workplace. Love was understood for a long time to be the opposite of work. Love was for the home, for the family, for the couple; the workplace was where you earned what you needed to sustain that love. Love was also presumed to be more important for women than for men; the home was women’s sphere, the workplace men’s. In reality those lines were always blurred; plenty of women always worked, for one thing, even from the very beginnings of industrial capitalism, and plenty of bosses wanted to extend their control into the home. Henry Ford, for example, famously sent investigators into the homes of his workers to make sure they were upstanding, straight and monogamous, and therefore deserving of higher wages.

As the workplace has changed, our ideas about love have also changed. The feminist revolution known as ​“the second wave” notably demanded access to career-track work for women, seeing it not only as a path to financial independence, but to something more interesting to do with one’s day than clean the house and feed the children. And love, as sociologist Andrew Cherlin has documented, has undergone a transformation from married monogamy to something more open, flexible and often, of course, not heterosexual at all. Yet the way we talk about partnership — even the word ​“partner,” increasingly popular as a gender-neutral term, but also one oddly reminiscent of the workplace, the boardroom, the law firm — still reflects the origins of the family as a complementary institution to the job. When our relationships fall apart, we still blame ourselves rather than looking to all the social, institutional pressures that make it nearly impossible to continue them. Love is still just another form of alienated labor.

It’s not just romantic relationships that have suffered under neoliberalism. Friendship, too, is a casualty of the way our working lives are organized. A 2014 study found that one in 10 people in the United Kingdom did not have a close friend; in a 2019 poll in the United States, one in five of the millennials surveyed reported being friendless. The extended lockdown period of the coronavirus pandemic only exacerbated feelings of isolation that so many already had. People have tried to blame the internet for our collective loneliness, but in fact it comes alongside the change in our working lives and the decline of unions and other institutions that gave people a sense of shared purpose and direction beyond just the job. When I asked the union activists at the Rexnord manufacturing plant in Indianapolis what they’d miss when it closed down in 2017, they all mentioned their friends and the union. Not the work itself.

Work will never love us back. But other people will.

Concurrent political and ecological crises can seem overwhelming, but they have also done something else for us: They have created the possibility of imagining ourselves in a different world. If it was previously easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, we have now glimpsed both, and must now begin to think up something new.

As Alyssa Battistoni, a fellow at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, wrote, we cannot move forward ​“without tackling environmentalism’s old stumbling blocks: consumption and jobs”— and our culture of work itself contributes to the problem. Massive reductions in working time are not only desirable (as work is increasingly miserable); they are necessary.

Instead of turning our desires to the objects we can buy with the proceeds from our endless work, what if we turned our desires back onto one another? Spending time with other people has the potential to disrupt the entire economic system. The process of organizing, on the job and off it, is, after all, a process of connection. The first hesitant hello and the chat in the break room are ways of bridging the artificially created gaps between us to gesture toward the power we can have together. A union is only meaningful if the workers in it believe and act like a union, if they are willing to take risks to have one another’s backs. 

To reclaim that space in which to find the connections that matter, we need something more than slight improvements in our individual workplaces or even massive overhauls of labor laws, though we need both of those things desperately. We need a politics of time. A political understanding that our lives are ours to do with what we will. 

Society will always make demands of us, and a world that we built to value the relationships we have with others would perhaps make even more of them. But it would be a world where we shouldered those burdens equitably, distributed the work better, and had much more leisure time to spend as we like. It would be a world where taking care of one another was not a responsibility sloughed off on one part of the population or one gender, and it would be a world where we had plenty of time to take care of ourselves. 

While we have to do our jobs for a living, it makes sense to make demands for better conditions. But alongside those demands, we should always be making demands to reclaim our time.

One of the things that the many social movements of the past decade or so have in common is a reclamation of public space in which to be with other people: the occupied squares of Spain and Greece; Occupy Wall Street; the protests of 2020, exuberantly reclaiming public space after months of lockdown to shout ​“Black lives matter!”

Those spaces were spaces of debate and of action, yes, but they were also spaces of care. The ​“food” and ​“comfort” committees at Occupy made sure not just that people’s basic needs were met but that they felt good in the space. There was singing and dancing, a library for borrowing books. ​“The media often deride the carnival spirit of such protests, as if it were a self-indulgent distraction from the serious political point,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. ​“But seasoned organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until after ​‘the revolution.’ ”

While we have to do our jobs for a living, we should always be making demands to reclaim our time.

The teachers’ strikes that rippled across the United States after 2012 created anew the spaces of connection. The picket lines in Los Angeles and Chicago featured dance routines and new songs. The strike itself is a means of reclaiming time from work, a way to demonstrate the workers’ importance by halting business as usual, but also a way to stake claim to one’s time and creations. In the midst of the strike, utopia is briefly visible. And the mass strike, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote, has the potential to turn the world upside down. 

These moments and spaces are insufficient, perhaps, to completely overhaul the system.

Imagining love alone as capable of change is idealism, it’s true. Freeing love from work, then, is key to the struggle to remake the world. And people are already reclaiming spaces to experiment with what it means to love one another without the demands of capitalist work patterns. Love, Silvia Federici argued, is a power that takes us beyond ourselves: ​“It’s the great anti-individuality, it’s the great communizer.” 

Capitalism must control our affections, our sexuality, our bodies in order to keep us separated from one another. The greatest trick it has been able to pull is to convince us that work is our greatest love. 

Alienation in capitalist society ~~ Paul D'Amato

https://socialistworker.org/2003-2/467/467_09_Alienation.php

(From the Meaning of Marxism)

THE TERM "alienation" in normal usage refers to a feeling of separateness, of being alone and apart from others. For Marx, alienation was not a feeling or a mental condition, but an economic and social condition of class society--in particular, capitalist society.

Alienation, in Marxist terms, refers to the separation of the mass of wage workers from the products of their own labor. Marx first expressed the idea, somewhat poetically, in his 1844 Manuscripts: "The object that labor produces, its product, stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer."

Most of us own neither the tools and machinery we work with nor the products that we produce--they belong to the capitalist that hired us. But everything we work on and in at some point comes from human labor. The irony is that everywhere we turn, we are confronted with the work of our own hands and brains, and yet these products of our labor appear as things outside of us, and outside of our control.

Work and the products of work dominate us, rather than the other way around. Rather than being a place to fulfill our potential, the workplace is merely a place we are compelled to go in order to obtain money to buy the things we need.

"Hence," Marx wrote, "the worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working, he does not feel himself. He is at home when he is not working, and not at home when he is working. His labor is, therefore, not voluntary but forced, it is forced labor.

"It is, therefore, not the satisfaction of a need but a mere means to satisfy needs outside itself. Its alien character is clearly demonstrated by the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, it is shunned like the plague."

In capitalist production, goods are produced for the market in order to get a profit. What matters for the worker, as I've said, is that he or she gets an adequate amount for his or her labor. What is being produced is, in this sense, immaterial.

It is also completely immaterial to the capitalists. So long as whatever they are making can find a market and be sold at a profit, they care not a whit whether they are selling pet rocks or bottled water. In this process, the capitalist sees the worker as merely a component of the production--a commodity (labor) to be squeezed as much as possible.

Moreover, because the aim of production is profit rather than human need, the products of past labor--the machinery and materials, controlled by the capitalists--completely dominate living labor. Workers are literally slaves to the machine and the work process. It controls them, rather than the other way around.

Perhaps one of the most degrading forms alienation takes is the way in which everything can become a commodity to be bought and sold--including sex. There is another aspect to alienation which Marx called the "fetishism of commodities." What he meant by this strange phrase is the way in which the social relation between human beings, in capitalist market production, takes "the fantastic form of a relation between things."

The anarchic, unplanned nature of production for the market means that its participants are unable to exercise any control over it. The result is that the onset of economic boom and the lurch into slump are events that happen independently of the participants. "To them," says Marx, "their own social action takes the form of the actions of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them."

The only way to overcome alienation is for workers to collectively abolish their separation from ownership and control of the means of production, and to use that control to abolish the market and replace it with conscious planning for human need.

Thirty-One Flavors of Fascism ~~ PAUL STREET

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/29/thirty-one-flavors-of-fascism/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Leftists” I know have had their undies tied up in a nasty knot bunch over other leftists’ use of the F-word – fascism – to describe Trump and his backers.

Fascism, seriously? Yes, absolutely, provided we have a reasonable definition. In his incisive 2009 book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, David Neiwert rightly observed that “Fascism is not a single, readily identifiable principle but rather a political pathology best understood (as in psychology) as a constellation of traits. Taken individually,” Neiwert wrote, “many of these traits seem innocuous enough, even readily familiar, a part of the traditional American hurry-burly. A few of them …are present throughout the political spectrum. Only when taken together does the constellation become clear, and then it is fated to take on a life of its own.”

What comprises this collection of characteristics? Here are my top 29 traits of fascism, cobbled together with no claim to originality in concept or phrasing:

+1. Obsessive anti-liberalism co-joined with obsessive antisocialism/anti-communism and anti-conservatism but with an understanding that fascists are willing to engage in alliance with other sectors, especially on the conservative side.

+2. A sense of grave national and social crisis that cannot to effectively met with traditional solutions from liberals and conservatives.

+3. Fairy-tale and vengeful notions of a glorious national past that was betrayed – “stabbed in the back” – by evil liberal and Left elites linked to a sense of the decline of the nation and/or a once properly dominant ethnic or religious group’s power under the destructive impact of class struggle, radicalism, liberal individualism, multi-culturalism, and outside/alien influences.

+4. A quest for national re-birth linked to “palingenetic ultra-nationalism,” meaning, in historian Roger Griffin’s words, a drive “to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing in on a heightened sense of national belonging or national identity.”

+5. The passionate belief that one’s formerly and properly dominant national, ethnic, and/or religious group is being unfairly victimized.

+6. A fierce attachment to one’s national, ethnic, and/or religious group coupled with the belief that any action without legal or moral limits is justified to eliminate perceived threats to the group’s enemies, both internal and external.

+7. Chronic “Us and Them” scapegoating of demonized Others accused of causing great harm.

+8. The dehumanization of racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural Others and political enemies, intimately related to the willingness to abandon past legal and moral norms when it comes to eliminating the threat(s) these demonized Others and enemies are said to pose.

+9. The “right” of the supposedly good and “chosen” people to dominate the supposedly bad Others without since the “right” is conferred by Darwinian and moral superiority.

+10. A fierce and fervent anti-socialism and opposition to Leftists, linked to incessant fearmongering about the real or alleged threat of socialist, communist, and/or left anarchist revolution.

+11. An obsession with the alleged evil of liberals, combined with a false conflation of liberals and “the Left” and the charge that liberals are too weak to stop Left radicals from “taking over the country.

+12. Fear, suspicion, and hatred of large, cosmopolitan cities, seen as fetid hotbeds of demonized Others: racial and ethnic minorities, intellectuals, liberals, leftists, intellectuals, feminists, labor activists, civil and human rights movements, “sexual deviants,” and race-mixers.

+13. A predilection for bizarre, offensive, and dangerous conspiracy theories such as the notion that the Jewish Elders of Zion and George Soros are secretly controlling world events.

+14. Relentless attacks on intellectuals, expertise, and reasoned public discourse.

+15. A relentless cultural and propaganda war on truth: constant assaults on the public’s capacity to perceive reality.

+16. Demonization and shaming of the previously normal bourgeois free press as an “enemy of the [chosen] people” combined with the cultivation of separate propagandistic anti-truth news and commentary avenues to reach the fascist base above and beyond “liberal” and “radical Left” media.

+17. The promotion and glorification of traditional social and political hierarchy beneath revolutionary and transformative claims.

+18. Hyper-masculinist patriarchy attached to “traditional” oppressive gender roles, the degradation of women, and attacks on women’s rights.

+19. Unceasing attacks on the rule of law while upholding the police and military state in the name of law and order: chronic lawlessness in the name of law and order.

+20. Rejection of constitutional and parliamentary checks and balances and aspirations for the introduction of a one-party state.

+21. A Social Darwinian fixation on extreme binaries including triumph vs. defeat, thriving vs, failing, strength vs. weakness, and “greatness” vs. inferiority.

+22. Contempt for the old, disabled, and infirm, seen as “weak” and worthy of premature death along with nonwhites.

+23. Promotion of a cult of personality reflecting the perceived necessity of a natural, always male Leader who alone is seen as capable of redeeming the greatness of the betrayed and victimized Nation/chosen people.

+24. Belief in the superiority of instinct and will over reason and intellectual deliberation and in the preeminence of the Leader’s instincts and will over that of others and over abstract reason.

+25. Constant propaganda to mask objectionable authoritarian, racist, militarist, nativist, and sexist goals with widely accepted ideals like democracy (“the will of the people”) and social cohesion.

+26. Glorification of the military, hyper-militarism, and the exaltation of violence.

+27. Embrace of violence against political enemies and critics.

+28. Performative pomp, theatrical gatherings, recurrent menacing hate rallies, and an attachment to grandiose spectacles meant to promote a sense of greatness for the Nation and/or the favored and supposedly victimized racial, ethnic, national, and/or religious group.

+29. Emotionally potent and extreme statements (the “greatest ever,” the “worst ever,” “amazing,” “horrible” and so on) in defense of the favored/chosen nation/group and in denunciation of demonized Others and “enemies of the people.”

+30. The recurrent purging of those considered disloyal to the Leader and his party.

+31. A false populist posture that obscures service to and alliance with capitalist elites and capitalism.

“The Left” Can Distinguish Itself from Fascists

Trump and many millions of his backers – including but not limited to the fascists who stormed the Capitol in a brazen if failed Trump-instigated effort to cancel the certification of a presidential election and spark a coup three weeks ago – check(ed)-off all 31 of these boxes, as I will show in my next book This Happened Here. (There is not time or space to provide the evidence for this claim here, but my guess is that many readers easily noted numerous examples as they went through the list).

“Leftists” might want to reflect on this list before they leap to protect Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and other far-right hate mongers’ supposed “free speech right” to reach multiple tens of millions of American and world citizens via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and You Tube, and before they rush to defend the fascist minions who breached the Capitol complex and forced Congresspersons to flee for their lives under the banner of Trump’s Big Fascist Steal Lie – on the theory that the repression of the far right will only turn back on the portside. This is not a political tendency – fascism – that anyone on the Left should ever want to see shielded in any way in the world’s most powerful country (or anywhere else). Fascism spells ruin for all humanity. Anyone still saying “It Can’t Happen Here” after the Trump presidency needs to be laughed off the stage.

Do leftists seriously believe they are incapable of defending themselves against whatever repression they may face in connection with the repression that government and media and Internet companies impose on fascists from Trump on down? This list (and/or more abbreviated versions of it) could help portsiders more clearly distinguish their movements from those of the white-nationalist far right. In responding to blowback repression, it is important for leftists to be ready to make the case for how our movement(s) are different from, indeed militantly opposed to, fascism as well as to the capitalist, racist, sexist, eco-cidal, and imperialist order that gives rise to fascism. Already, the New York Times and other major “liberal” corporate media outlets are dropping whatever partial and halting references they were willing to make (accurately if belatedly) to the “F-word” during the final year and post-election climax of the criminal Trump-Pence administration. They are warning against “populism,” “extremism,” “radicalization,” “anti-establishment anger,” and “terrorism” without the slightest specificity about the fascist menace. They make no distinctions between the egalitarian, loving, and solidaristic real populism of the Left and the racist, sexist, nationalist, nativist, authoritarian, hateful, and eco-cidal fake populism of the far right. They falsely conflate the beautiful and liberationist anger, “extremism,” and “radicalism” of the Left with the ugly and oppressive anger, “extremism,” and “radicalism” of the far right. They falsely conflate the just burning of a racist police precinct that hatched a vicious white lyncher (Derek Chauvin) with a murderous fascist assault (the Attack on the Capitol) that was based on the belief that nonwhite votes don’t count.

Comrades, learn how to distinguish your movements for social justice, democracy, and environmental sustainability from fascist white nationalism. Keep my list handy for that task. Be ready at all times to recognize and spit out any of these 31 flavors; don’t swallow.

Meanwhile, if you are one of those lefties I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, hang on for my next CounterPunch essay, titled “The Anatomy of Fascism-Denial: 31 Flavors of Anti-Antifascism.” You’ll really enjoy that one.

THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM ~~ Michael Bakunin

 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/capstate.html

   Is it necessary to repeat here the irrefutable arguments of Socialism which no bourgeois economist has yet succeeded in disproving? What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working. And since neither property nor capital produces anything when not fertilized by labor - that means the power and the right to live by exploiting the work of someone else, the right to exploit the work of those who possess neither property nor capital and who thus are forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both. Note that I have left out of account altogether the following question: In what way did property and capital ever fall into the hands of their present owners? This is a question which, when envisaged from the points of view of history, logic, and justice, cannot be answered in any other way but one which would serve as an indictment against the present owners. I shall therefore confine myself here to the statement that property owners and capitalists, inasmuch as they live not by their own productive labor but by getting land rent, house rent, interest upon their capital, or by speculation on land, buildings, and capital, or by the commercial and industrial exploitation of the manual labor of the proletariat, all live at the expense of the proletariat. (Speculation and exploitation no doubt also constitute a sort of labor, but altogether non-productive labor.)

     I know only too well that this mode of life is highly esteemed in all civilized countries, that it is expressly and tenderly protected by all the States, and that the States, religions, and all the juridical laws, both criminal and civil, and all the political governments, monarchies and republican - with their immense judicial and police apparatuses and their standing armies - have no other mission but to consecrate and protect such practices. In the presence of these powerful and respectable authorities I cannot even permit myself to ask whether this mode of life is legitimate from the point of view of human justice, liberty, human equality, and fraternity. I simply ask myself: Under such conditions, are fraternity and equality possible between the exploiter and the exploited, are justice and freedom possible for the exploited?

     Let us even suppose, as it is being maintained by the bourgeois economists and with them all the lawyers, all the worshippers and believers in the juridical right, all the priests of the civil and criminal code - let us suppose that this economic relationship between the exploiter and the exploited is altogether legitimate, that it is the inevitable consequence, the product of an eternal, indestructible social law, yet still it will always be true that exploitation precludes brotherhood and equality. It goes without saying that it precludes economic equality. Suppose I am your worker and you are my employer. If I offer my labor at the lowest price, if I consent to have you live off my labor, it is certainly not because of devotion or brotherly love for you. And no bourgeois economist would dare to say that it was, however idyllic and naive their reasoning becomes when they begin to speak about reciprocal affections and mutual relations which should exist between employers and employees. No, I do it because my family and I would starve to death if I did not work for an employer. Thus I am forced to sell you my labor at the lowest possible price, and I am forced to do it by the threat of hunger.

     But - the economists tell us - the property owners, the capitalists, the employers, are likewise forced to seek out and purchase the labor of the proletariat. Yes, it is true, they are forced to do it, but not in the same measure. Had there been equality between those who offer their labor and those who purchase it, between the necessity of selling one's labor and the necessity of buying it, the slavery and misery of the proletariat would not exist. But then there would be neither capitalists, nor property owners, nor the proletariat, nor rich, nor poor: there would only be workers. It is precisely because such equality does not exist that we have and are bound to have exploiters.

     This equality does not exist because in modern society where wealth is produced by the intervention of capital paying wages to labor, the growth of the population outstrips the growth of production, which results in the supply of labor necessarily surpassing the demand and leading to a relative sinking of the level of wages. Production thus constituted, monopolized, exploited by bourgeois capital, is pushed on the one hand by the mutual competition of the capitalists to concentrate evermore in the hands of an ever diminishing number of powerful capitalists, or in the hands of joint-stock companies which, owing to the merging of their capital, are more powerful than the biggest isolated capitalists. (And the small and medium-sized capitalists, not being able to produce at the same price as the big capitalists, naturally succumb in the deadly struggle.) On the other hand, all enterprises are forced by the same competition to sell their products at the lowest possible price. It [capitalist monopoly] can attain this two-fold result only by forcing out an ever-growing number of small or medium-sized capitalists, speculators, merchants, or industrialists, from the world of exploiters into the world of the exploited proletariat, and at the same time squeezing out ever greater savings from the wages of the same proletariat.

     On the other hand, the mass of the proletariat, growing as a result of the general increase of the population - which, as we know, not even poverty can stop effectively - and through the increasing proletarianization of the petty-bourgeoisie, ex-owners, capitalists, merchants, and industrialists - growing, as I have said, at a much more rapid rate than the productive capacities of an economy that is exploited by bourgeois capital - this growing mass of the proletariat is placed in a condition wherein the workers are forced into disastrous competition against one another.

     For since they possess no other means of existence but their own manual labor, they are driven, by the fear of seeing themselves replaced by others, to sell it at the lowest price. This tendency of the workers, or rather the necessity to which they are condemned by their own poverty, combined with the tendency of the employers to sell the products of their workers, and consequently buy their labor, at the lowest price, constantly reproduces and consolidates the poverty of the proletariat. Since he finds himself in a state of poverty, the worker is compelled to sell his labor for almost nothing, and because he sells that product for almost nothing, he sinks into ever greater poverty.

     Yes, greater misery, indeed! For in this galley-slave labor the productive force of the workers, abused, ruthlessly exploited, excessively wasted and underfed, is rapidly used up. And once used up, what can be its value on the market, of what worth is this sole commodity which he possesses and upon the daily sale of which he depends for a livelihood? Nothing! And then? Then nothing is left for the worker but to die.

     What, in a given country, is the lowest possible wage? It is the price of that which is considered by the proletarians of that country as absolutely necessary to keep oneself alive. All the bourgeois economists are in agreement on this point. Turgot, who saw fit to call himself the `virtuous minister' of Louis XVI, and really was an honest man, said:

     "The simple worker who owns nothing more than his hands, has nothing else to sell than his labor. He sells it more or less expensively; but its price whether high or low, does not depend on him alone: it depends on an agreement with whoever will pay for his labor. The employer pays as little as possible; when given the choice between a great number of workers, the employer prefers the one who works cheap. The workers are, then, forced to lower their price in competition each against the other. In all types of labor, it necessarily follows that the salary of the worker is limited to what is necessary for survival." (Reflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses)

     J.B. Say, the true father of bourgeois economists in France also said: "Wages are much higher when more demand exists for labor and less if offered, and are lowered accordingly when more labor is offered and less demanded. It is the relation between supply and demand which regulates the price of this merchandise called the workers' labor, as are regulated all other public services. When wages rise a little higher than the price necessary for the workers' families to maintain themselves, their children multiply and a larger supply soon develops in proportion with the greater demand. When, on the contrary, the demand for workers is less than the quantity of people offering to work, their gains decline back to the price necessary for the class to maintain itself at the same number. The families more burdened with children disappear; from them forward the supply of labor declines, and with less labor being offered, the price rises... In such a way it is difficult for the wages of the laborer to rise above or fall below the price necessary to maintain the class (the workers, the proletariat) in the number required." (Cours complet d' economie politique)

     After citing Turgot and J.B. Say, Proudhon cries: "The price, as compared to the value (in real social economy) is something essentially mobile, consequently, essentially variable, and that in its variations, it is not regulated more than by the concurrence, concurrence, let us not forget, that as Turgot and Say agree, has the necessary effect not to give to wages to the worker more than enough to barely prevent death by starvation, and maintain the class in the numbers needed."¹

     The current price of primary necessities constitutes the prevailing constant level above which workers' wages can never rise for a very long time, but beneath which they drop very often, which constantly results in inanition, sickness, and death, until a sufficient number of workers disappear to equalize again the supply of and demand for labor. What the economists call equalized supply and demand does not constitute real equality between those who offer their labor for sale and those who purchase it. Suppose that I, a manufacturer, need a hundred workers and that exactly a hundred workers present themselves in the market - only one hundred, for if more came, the supply would exceed demand, resulting in lowered wages. But since only one hundred appear, and since I, the manufacturer, need only that number - neither more nor less - it would seem at first that complete equality was established; that supply and demand being equal in number, they should likewise be equal in other respects. Does it follow that the workers can demand from me a wage and conditions of work assuring them of a truly free, dignified, and human existence? Not at all! If I grant them those conditions and those wages, I, the capitalist, shall not gain thereby any more than they will. But then, why should I have to plague myself and become ruined by offering them the profits of my capital? If I want to work myself as workers do, I will invest my capital somewhere else, wherever I can get the highest interest, and will offer my labor for sale to some capitalist just as my workers do.

     If, profiting by the powerful initiative afforded me by my capital, I ask those hundred workers to fertilize that capital with their labor, it is not because of my sympathy for their sufferings, nor because of a spirit of justice, nor because of love for humanity. The capitalists are by no means philanthropists; they would be ruined if they practiced philanthropy. It is because I hope to draw from the labor of the workers sufficient profit to be able to live comfortably, even richly, while at the same time increasing my capital - and all that without having to work myself. Of course I shall work too, but my work will be of an altogether different kind and I will be remunerated at a much higher rate than the workers. It will not be the work of production but that of administration and exploitation.

     But isn't administrative work also productive work? No doubt it is, for lacking a good and an intelligent administration, manual labor will not produce anything or it will produce very little and very badly. But from the point of view of justice and the needs of production itself, it is not at all necessary that this work should be monopolized in my hands, nor, above all, that I should be compensated at a rate so much higher than manual labor. The co-operative associations already have proven that workers are quite capable of administering industrial enterprises, that it can be done by workers elected from their midst and who receive the same wage. Therefore if I concentrate in my hands the administrative power, it is not because the interests of production demand it, but in order to serve my own ends, the ends of exploitation. As the absolute boss of my establishment I get for my labor ten or twenty times more than my workers get for theirs, and this is true despite the fact that my labor is incomparably less painful than theirs.

     But the capitalist, the business owner, runs risks, they say, while the worker risks nothing. This is not true, because when seen from his side, all the disadvantages are on the part of the worker. The business owner can conduct his affairs poorly, he can be wiped out in a bad deal, or be a victim of a commercial crisis, or by an unforeseen catastrophe; in a word he can ruin himself. This is true. But does ruin mean from the bourgeois point of view to be reduced to the same level of misery as those who die of hunger, or to be forced among the ranks of the common laborers? This so rarely happens, that we might as well say never. Afterwards it is rare that the capitalist does not retain something, despite the appearance of ruin. Nowadays all bankruptcies are more or less fraudulent. But if absolutely nothing is saved, there are always family ties, and social relations, who, with help from the business skills learned which they pass to their children, permit them to get positions for themselves and their children in the higher ranks of labor, in management; to be a state functionary, to be an executive in a commercial or industrial business, to end up, although dependent, with an income superior to what they paid their former workers.

     The risks of the worker are infinitely greater. After all, if the establishment in which he is employed goes bankrupt, he must go several days and sometimes several weeks without work, and for him it is more than ruin, it is death; because he eats everyday what he earns. The savings of workers are fairy tales invented by bourgeois economists to lull their weak sentiment of justice, the remorse that is awakened by chance in the bosom of their class. This ridiculous and hateful myth will never soothe the anguish of the worker. He knows the expense of satisfying the daily needs of his large family. If he had savings, he would not send his poor children, from the age of six, to wither away, to grow weak, to be murdered physically and morally in the factories, where they are forced to work night and day, a working day of twelve and fourteen hours.

     If it happens sometimes that the worker makes a small savings, it is quickly consumed by the inevitable periods of unemployment which often cruelly interrupt his work, as well as by the unforeseen accidents and illnesses which befall his family. The accidents and illnesses that can overtake him constitute a risk that makes all the risks of the employer nothing in comparison: because for the worker debilitating illness can destroy his productive ability, his labor power. Over all, prolonged illness is the most terrible bankruptcy, a bankruptcy that means for him and his children, hunger and death.

     I know full well that under these conditions that if I were a capitalist, who needs a hundred workers to fertilize my capital, that on employing these workers, all the advantages are for me, all the disadvantages for them. I propose nothing more nor less than to exploit them, and if you wish me to be sincere about it, and promise to guard me well, I will tell them:

     "Look, my children, I have some capital which by itself cannot produce anything, because a dead thing cannot produce anything. I have nothing productive without labor. As it goes, I cannot benefit from consuming it unproductively, since having consumed it, I would be left with nothing. But thanks to the social and political institutions which rule over us and are all in my favor, in the existing economy my capital is supposed to be a producer as well: it earns me interest. From whom this interest must be taken - and it must be from someone, since in reality by itself it produces absolutely nothing - this does not concern you. It is enough for you to know that it renders interest. Alone this interest is insufficient to cover my expenses. I am not an ordinary man as you. I cannot be, nor do I want to be, content with little. I want to live, to inhabit a beautiful house, to eat and drink well, to ride in a carriage, to maintain a good appearance, in short, to have all the good things in life. I also want to give a good education to my children, to make them into gentlemen, and send them away to study, and afterwards, having become much more educated than you, they can dominate you one day as I dominate you today. And as education alone is not enough, I want to give them a grand inheritance, so that divided between them they will be left almost as rich as I. Consequently, besides all the good things in life I want to give myself, I also want to increase my capital. How will I achieve this goal? Armed with this capital I propose to exploit you, and I propose that you permit me to exploit you. You will work and I will collect and appropriate and sell for my own behalf the product of your labor, without giving you more than a portion which is absolutely necessary to keep you from dying of hunger today, so that at the end of tomorrow you will still work for me in the same conditions; and when you have been exhausted, I will throw you out, and replace you with others. Know it well, I will pay you a salary as small, and impose on you a working day as long, working conditions as severe, as despotic, as harsh as possible; not from wickedness - not from a motive of hatred towards you, nor an intent to do you harm - but from the love of wealth and to get rich quick; because the less I pay you and the more you work, the more I will gain."

     This is what is said implicitly by every capitalist, every industrialist, every business owner, every employer who demands the labor power of the workers they hire.

     But since supply and demand are equal, why do the workers accept the conditions laid down by the employer? If the capitalist stands in just as great a need of employing the workers as the one hundred workers do of being employed by him, does it not follow that both sides are in an equal position? Do not both meet at the market as two equal merchants - from the juridical point of view at least - one bringing a commodity called a daily wage, to be exchanged for the daily labor of the worker on the basis of so many hours per day; and the other bringing his own labor as his commodity to be exchanged for the wage offered by the capitalist? Since, in our supposition, the demand is for a hundred workers and the supply is likewise that of a hundred persons, it may seem that both sides are in an equal position.

     Of course nothing of the kind is true. What is it that brings the capitalist to the market? It is the urge to get rich, to increase his capital, to gratify his ambitions and social vanities, to be able to indulge in all conceivable pleasures. And what brings the worker to the market? Hunger, the necessity of eating today and tomorrow. Thus, while being equal from the point of juridical fiction, the capitalist and the worker are anything but equal from the point of view of the economic situation, which is the real situation. The capitalist is not threatened with hunger when he comes to the market; he knows very well that if he does not find today the workers for whom he is looking, he will still have enough to eat for quite a long time, owing to the capital of which he is the happy possessor. If the workers whom he meets in the market present demands which seem excessive to him, because, far from enabling him to increase his wealth and improve even more his economic position, those proposals and conditions might, I do not say equalize, but bring the economic position of the workers somewhat close to his own - what does he do in that case? He turns down those proposals and waits. After all, he was not impelled by an urgent necessity, but by a desire to improve his position, which, compared to that of the workers, is already quite comfortable, and so he can wait. And he will wait, for his business experience has taught him that the resistance of workers who, possessing neither capital, nor comfort, nor any savings to speak of, are pressed by a relentless necessity, by hunger, that this resistance cannot last very long, and that finally he will be able to find the hundred workers for whom he is looking - for they will be forced to accept the conditions which he finds it profitable to impose upon them. If they refuse, others will come who will be only too happy to accept such conditions. That is how things are done daily with the knowledge and in full view of everyone.

     If, as a consequence of the particular circumstances that constantly influence the market, the branch of industry in which he planned at first to employ his capital does not offer all the advantages that he had hoped, then he will shift his capital elsewhere; thus the bourgeois capitalist is not tied by nature to any specific industry, but tends to invest (as it is called by the economists - exploit is what we say) indifferently in all possible industries. Let's suppose, finally, that learning of some industrial incapacity or misfortune, he decides not to invest in any industry; well, he will buy stocks and annuities; and if the interest and dividends seem insufficient, then he will engage in some occupation, or shall we say, sell his labor for a time, but in conditions much more lucrative than he had offered to his own workers.

     The capitalist then comes to the market in the capacity, if not of an absolutely free agent, at least that of an infinitely freer agent than the worker. What happens in the market is a meeting between a drive for lucre and starvation, between master and slave. Juridically they are both equal; but economically the worker is the serf of the capitalist, even before the market transaction has been concluded whereby the worker sells his person and his liberty for a given time. The worker is in the position of a serf because this terrible threat of starvation which daily hangs over his head and over his family, will force him to accept any conditions imposed by the gainful calculations of the capitalist, the industrialist, the employer.

     And once the contract has been negotiated, the serfdom of the workers is doubly increased; or to put it better, before the contract has been negotiated, goaded by hunger, he is only potentially a serf; after it is negotiated he becomes a serf in fact. Because what merchandise has he sold to his employer? It is his labor, his personal services, the productive forces of his body, mind, and spirit that are found in him and are inseparable from his person - it is therefore himself. From then on, the employer will watch over him, either directly or by means of overseers; everyday during working hours and under controlled conditions, the employer will be the owner of his actions and movements. When he is told: "Do this," the worker is obligated to do it; or he is told: "Go there," he must go. Is this not what is called a serf?

     M. Karl Marx, the illustrious leader of German Communism, justly observed in his magnificent work Das Kapital² that if the contract freely entered into by the vendors of money -in the form of wages - and the vendors of their own labor -that is, between the employer and the workers - were concluded not for a definite and limited term only, but for one's whole life, it would constitute real slavery. Concluded for a term only and reserving to the worker the right to quit his employer, this contract constitutes a sort of voluntary and transitory serfdom. Yes, transitory and voluntary from the juridical point of view, but nowise from the point of view of economic possibility. The worker always has the right to leave his employer, but has he the means to do so? And if he does quit him, is it in order to lead a free existence, in which he will have no master but himself? No, he does it in order to sell himself to another employer. He is driven to it by the same hunger which forced him to sell himself to the first employer. Thus the worker's liberty, so much exalted by the economists, jurists, and bourgeois republicans, is only a theoretical freedom, lacking any means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter falsehood. The truth is that the whole life of the worker is simply a continuous and dismaying succession of terms of serfdom -voluntary from the juridical point of view but compulsory in the economic sense - broken up by momentarily brief interludes of freedom accompanied by starvation; in other words, it is real slavery.

     This slavery manifests itself daily in all kinds of ways. Apart from the vexations and oppressive conditions of the contract which turn the worker into a subordinate, a passive and obedient servant, and the employer into a nearly absolute master - apart from all that, it is well known that there is hardly an industrial enterprise wherein the owner, impelled on the one hand by the two-fold instinct of an unappeasable lust for profits and absolute power, and on the other hand, profiting by the economic dependence of the worker, does not set aside the terms stipulated in the contract and wring some additional concessions in his own favor. Now he will demand more hours of work, that is, over and above those stipulated in the contract; now he will cut down wages on some pretext; now he will impose arbitrary fines, or he will treat the workers harshly, rudely, and insolently.

     But, one may say, in that case the worker can quit. Easier said than done. At times the worker receives part of his wages in advance, or his wife or children may be sick, or perhaps his work is poorly paid throughout this particular industry. Other employers may be paying even less than his own employer, and after quitting this job he may not even be able to find another one. And to remain without a job spells death for him and his family. In addition, there is an understanding among all employers, and all of them resemble one another. All are almost equally irritating, unjust, and harsh.

     Is this calumny? No, it is in the nature of things, and in the logical necessity of the relationship existing between the employers and their workers.

Raising their banner high: Fascism, imperialism, and anti-communism at the Capitol Hill riots ~~ Qiao Collective

https://mronline.org/2021/01/22/raising-their-banner-high-fascism-imperialism-and-anti-communism-at-the-capitol-hill-riots/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

On January 6th, 2021, in a premeditated plan of action to “stop the steal” of the November presidential election about to be certified by Congress, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Met with a conciliatory Capitol Police force who literally “opened the gates” with a wink and a nod, the mob swarmed the seat of U.S. power, occupying the House and Senate chambers and taking selfies in the abandoned offices of Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic opponents.

The “insurrection” was a naked declaration of white supremacist extremism: from Auschwitz sweatshirts to absurdist Viking costumes, the aesthetics of racial fascism dominated the landscape. Yet, in addition to explicit symbols of white supremacy, the landscape was littered with curious symbols of international solidarity: flags representing the former South Vietnam, India, Japan, pre-revolution Cuba, and Hong Kong and Tibetan independence, among others, were all spotted in various footage of the chaos.

This multicultural dimension of an overtly white supremacist demonstration is not a contradiction: rather, it reflects the convergence between imperialism abroad and fascism at home. Liberal commentators expressed self-righteous dismay at the vandalizing of “our” “iconic symbol of democracy,” worrying about what the events would do to the U.S.’ hallowed image as the shining “city on the hill.” Republican detractors were perhaps more explicit in their deployment of a racist American exceptionalism: Marco Rubio likened the events to that of a “third world country,” while former U.S. President George W. Bush compared the chaos to a “banana republic.”

But the smattering of international flags from U.S. client states, overthrown monarchies, and anti-communist bastions conveys a different truth: the Capitol “insurrection” marks not the importation of some decontextualized trope of Third World instability, but the return of the very tactics the U.S. empire has used to obstruct elections, seed color revolutions, and depose left-leaning political leaders across the world during the so-called era of “Pax Americana.” In Malcolm X’s famous conception, the storming of the Capitol is not an unfathomable assault on U.S. democracy, merely the “leader of the free world’s” imperialist chickens coming home to roost.

Eurocentric World History As Fascist Apologia

Liberal commentators have framed Trump and his supporters’ “assault on democracy” as antithetical to U.S. democratic norms, likening their violence to a creeping authoritarianism from which the real authoritarians—China, Russia, Iran, or Venezuela—ostensibly seek to profit. But the liberal framing of fascism as antithetical to U.S. democracy sidesteps the rich body of radical thought which identifies imperialism and colonialism as the through lines between liberal democracy and fascism.

Writing in 1950, Martinique anti-colonialist Aimé Césaire eviscerated the self-righteous Western repudiation of Nazism, arguing that the Allied powers—the leaders of modern imperialism—had in fact “tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them…because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” As agents of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery, the so-called bastions of democracy in the post-WWII era had in fact “cultivated” the very Nazism they posed as irreconcilable with their own political economic systems. Indicting capitalist exploitation as the guiding logic of fascism, Césaire declared: “At the end of capitalism…there is Hitler.”

Césaire wrote in a political moment in which the Allied powers, under the leadership of the ascendant U.S. empire, scurried to conflate the horrors of Nazism and fascism with the international communist movement. Consolidating a hegemonic capitalist-imperialist system with the U.S. at its helm required painting communism—epitomized by the Soviet Union—as a form of “totalitarianism” nearly identical in form to Nazism. Such a move enabled the U.S. to pose growing movements for decolonization and socialist revolution in Korea, Cuba, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and beyond as forms of creeping totalitarianism, justifying the U.S.’s endless stream of Cold War invasions, occupations, mass killings, and embargoes as a righteous defense of “freedom.”

President Harry Truman, who oversaw the closing of World War II and its transition into the Cold War, consistently conflated the fights against Nazism and communism. Contrasting Western inaction to Hitler’s rise with the “courage and decisiveness” with which the U.S. “moved against the Communist threat,” Truman praised U.S. intervention in Korea, declaring:

Where free men had failed the test before, this time we met the test.

In reality, Truman’s lofty rhetoric concealed the U.S.’s ready deployment of fascist forces to cement its imperial authority. Under the pretenses of global democratic leadership, the U.S. actively recruited and rehabilitated German and Japanese fascists who proved useful for the U.S. empire. For instance, Japanese war criminals who conducted biological experiments on Chinese prisoners and facilitated the “comfort women” system of sexual slavery over China, Korea, and the Philippines evaded trial by the Soviet Union in exchange for sharing research secrets with the U.S. Meanwhile, the political infrastructure of Japanese colonialism in “postcolonial” South Korea and the Philippines was often retained and redeployed under U.S. leadership, offering a near-seamless transition between Japanese colonial fascism and U.S. “democratic stewardship” in East and Southeast Asia. And under Operation Paperclip, thousands of high-ranking Nazi scientists were airlifted from Germany to the United States to work for the U.S. military in the campaign for U.S. scientific supremacy over the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race.

The historical collaboration and convergence between German and Japanese fascism and U.S. imperialism continues to be suppressed through counterfactual renderings of World War II and Cold War history. For instance, in 2019 the European Parliament adopted a resolution “on the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe,” promoting the historical memory of “crimes committed by communist, Nazi and other dictatorships” as the basis of “the unity of Europe.” Left out of this “historical” rendering, of course, are some inconvenient truths: that for every U.S. soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same; or that at the time of Japan’s surrender, more than half of the Japanese military’s 3.5 million deployed soldiers were occupied fighting Chinese communist and nationalist troops.

Western imperial history has rendered communism the ideological successor of fascism rather than the primary actor responsible for its defeat. But as the Trump era exposes the blurred line between bourgeois democracy and fascism, these anti-communist myths are finally collapsing under their own weight.

International Fascism Comes Home

In footage livestreamed just before Trump supporters took the U.S. Capitol building, Jake Angeli—the “Q Anon shaman” who donned a horned fur hat and would soon strut behind the Congressional dias—offered a dubious call for internationalist action:

To the people of Venezuela: know you can take your country back too. We are setting the example… you can put an end to communism and globalism. You, too can take back your nation from this evil. You can win your country back!

The irony should not be lost: the same Trump extremists who have been condemned by the great majority of both Democrats and “rule of law” Republicans express solidarity with the bipartisan project of U.S. regime change against Venezuela’s democratically-elected president Nicolas Maduro. Though President-elect Biden has labeled Capitol Hill rioters as “[bordering] on sedition,” he nonetheless shares their conviction that socialist figures such as Maduro are, in his own words, “thugs and dictators.” That the interests of far-right insurrectionists and the status quo power elite coalesce around support for anti-communist regime change speaks to imperialism’s thorough monopoly on the spectrum of political possibility in the U.S. landscape.

Liberal media has clung to a comical obtuseness about the internationalist identifications of the Trump rioters, refusing to read the appearance of South Vietnamese, Hong Kong independence, and Batistan Cuban flags as a convergence of U.S. imperialism abroad and white supremacy at home. Quartz, for instance, mused that “it’s unclear why many of these flags appeared.”

But it is no surprise that the flags of U.S. client states, anti-communist regimes, and pre-revolution puppet states accompanied the sea of MAGA hats and Confederate flags at the Trump riots. Writing from San Quentin prison before his murder in 1971, Black revolutionary and political prisoner George Jackson described U.S. fascism as a logical outgrowth of U.S. imperialism and anti-communism. In Blood in My Eye, Jackson opined:

We have been consistently misled by fascism’s nationalistic trappings. We have failed to understand its basically international character… One of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.

If fascism, as Jackson argued, “is international capitalism’s response to the challenge of international scientific socialism,” then anti-communism is the glue that binds the broad fascist coalition behind the pro-Trump mobs. Take, for instance, the small crowd in Miami’s Little Havana that gathered on January 6th. Waving flags of the Republic of Cuba, which until the 1959 revolution functioned as a de facto colony of the U.S. under legislation such as the Platt Amendment, protesters condemned what they considered a “stolen” election. Across the country in San Jose, California, which is home to a large population of the Vietnamese diaspora, organizers of the “Vietnamese Movement for Trump” similarly waved signs saying “America will never be a socialist country,” with many a testimony about their “escape” from communists at the close of the Vietnam War. In uncritically embracing the language of American freedom (“We’re lucky we’re here”), these actors willfully obscure the use of “democracy” at home to facilitate fascist U.S. occupation and intervention the world over.

Indeed, the Trump coalition has long brought together a “diverse” assemblage of immigrants and “exiles” who hear in Trump’s MAGA slogan echoes of their own restorationist agenda to reinstate the U.S.-backed puppet governments of their various countries of origin. From “Iranians for Trump” who wave the flag of the Pahlavi dynasty—a monarchy widely understood to be a puppet of British and U.S. neocolonialism—to Hong Kong interventionists’ calls for Trump to “make Hong Kong great again,” these right-wing actors wield the language of “diversity” and “authenticity” to add a veneer of progressivism to their programs of imperialist clientelism.

Sinophobia and fascist anti-communism

Likewise, it is no surprise that the flags of India, Japan, and Australia—which together with the U.S. comprise the “Quad” anti-China security alliance—also appeared at the Capitol Hill mobs. If anti-communism binds this diverse group of Trump sympathizers, anti-Chinese sentiment appears to be a driving engine powering the dangerous coalition.

Perhaps the most explicit symbol of the convergence of fascism and Sinophobia was found not on Capitol Hill, but in Tokyo, Japan. Hours before the “stop the steal” convening took Capitol Hill by storm, Japanese sympathizers held a parallel march through downtown Tokyo. There, a myriad of pro-Trump, Imperial Japanese, and anti-China regalia decorated the crowds, with U.S. and Japanese flags alongside the “rising sun” flag of imperial Japan and “anti-Chinazi” flags popularized by the right-wing Hong Kong protests. That Tokyo’s “stop the steal” rally brought together both explicit homages to Imperial Japan (and the colonial occupations and Nazi alliance it oversaw) and a popular slur conflating Nazism with the rule of the Communist Party of China only speaks to the depraved logic and willful ahistoricism inherent to both fascism and anti-communism.

Similarly, the presence of flags representing Tibetan, Hong Kong, and “East Turkestan” independence movements at Trump rallies across the country is yet another symptom of the convergence between imperialism abroad and fascism at home (ironically, protesters waved the Hong Kong flag designed by the Communist Party of China in preparation of Hong Kong’s return to China). Just as Hong Kong protesters waved signs calling on President Trump to “make Hong Kong great again,” Trump rioters on Capitol Hill waved the Hong Kong flag, forming a visual shorthand reflecting a transnational alliance of right-wing agitators, colonial nostalgists, and white supremacists.

Confronting a “multicultural” empire

Understanding the international quality of fascism and anti-communism is crucial to confronting the lies that the U.S. tells about itself, including its role as a proud “watchman on the walls of world freedom.” A closer look, however, reveals the “walls of world freedom” to be merely the window dressing of a multicultural empire.

On January 7, Indian American Republican activist Vincent Xavier tweeted photos of a diverse crowd at the Capitol Hill protests. The caption read: “American patriots – Vietnamese, Indian, Korean & Iranian origins, & from so many other nations & races, who believe massive voter fraud has happened joined rally yesterday in solidarity with Trump.” The far-right, like the U.S. empire more generally, has succeeded in instrumentalizing right-wing diaspora populations to provide a multicultural facade to what remains fundamentally a project of racial capitalism.

That a select cross-section of native informants and compradors are willing to prostrate their countries of origin to the U.S. machine in exchange for political power will never change the reactionary nature of American exceptionalism and its Trumpian iterations. If we are to move from the facile belief that “it” cannot happen “here,” we must first grasp the international dimension of fascism and its primary manifestations in U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, and racial slavery. Behind the gross conflation of fascism and communism is a more unsettling truth: if liberalism breeds fascism, anti-communism ignites it.