Monday, May 31, 2021

Dynamite in the foundations: Alan Woods on the crisis of world capitalism

https://www.marxist.com/dynamite-in-foundations-alan-woods-video.htm

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

At a meeting of leading members of the International Marxist Tendency at the end of January, Alan Woods (editor of marxist.com) provided an overview of the dramatic events unfolding at the start of 2021. The crisis of world capitalism is causing ruptions, dislocation and class polarisation in one country after another. We have also included below an audio recording with the Spanish translation removed. 

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to inflict misery and hardship on ordinary people, while the wealthy enrich themselves even further. The ruling class is pumping trillions into the system to keep it afloat, but even if there are short-term recoveries, this will ensure an even-deeper collapse down the line.

The new year barely began before a far-right mob stormed the US Capitol Building in Washington at the urging of former US president, Donald Trump – turning the centre of Western imperialism into the image of a failed state. These events, coupled with the vastly larger BLM protests last summer, show how deep the polarisation of US society has become.

Elsewhere, big protests in India and Russia demonstrate the same process: the masses' resentment is growing, and the ruling class is failing to govern in the old ways. As Alan explains, every road leads to an unprecedented explosion of class struggle on the world stage.

In this context, the task of Marxists is to present a revolutionary socialist alternative to the millions of radicalising workers and youth who are witnessing with their own eyes the total failure of capitalism to provide them with a decent existence.

(Please go to the link at the top for links to the video and podcast - for some reason they would not "take" on Blogger, NB)

Transcript

These world perspectives are unlike any other I’ve spoken on, like a black cloud hanging over the situation is this unparalleled pandemic, subjecting millions to misery and death. There are almost 100m cases worldwide, and over 2m deaths.

These figures are unprecedented outside a terrible world war. 

The situation is especially bad in poor countries, in Africa, Asia, Latin America. But it also affects some of the richest. In the USA there are over 25m cases, and the number of deaths is creeping inexorably towards half a million. I’m sitting in London, where Britain has the worst number of deaths per head. 3.5m cases, and they’ve just officially admitted to over 100,000 deaths.

In other words, the present crisis is not like an ordinary economic crisis. This is a literal life-and-death situation for millions of people. The starting point of our analysis is capitalism cannot solve the problem: it is itself the problem.

This terrible scourge serves to expose the deep divisions between rich and poor. It’s exposed the deep fault lines that divide society. Between those who are condemned to get sick and die, and those who are not.

It has exposed the wastefulness of capitalism, its chaos and inefficiency, and is preparing class struggle in every country in the world. Governments are fond of military analogies in describing the current situation. They say we are at war with an invisible enemy, this terrible virus. Their solution is all classes and parties must unite – behind the existing government. 

Yes, but a tremendous gulf separates words from deeds. This gulf is between the urgent needs of society, and the mechanisms of the market economy. If we were really at war with the virus, then all governments should mobilise all their resources towards one single task: to mobilise for a global plan of action.

The case for a planned economy, internationalism and international planning is unanswerable. Despite the ideas of Mr Trump, the virus doesn't respect frontiers or border controls. 

From a purely rational point of view, the response would be to ramp up vaccine production, one would have thought. Instead, we have the disgusting spectacle of the row between Britain and the EU over scarce vaccines, while the poorest countries are virtually denied access to any vaccines at all.

The question arises: why is there a scarcity of vaccines at all? Capacity for production needs to be expanded by setting up new factories. Why is this not done? For the simple reason that the big pharmaceutical companies have no interest in massively expanding production, because they’d be worse off. If they ramped up production capacity, so that the whole world was supplied within six months, which is entirely possible, the newly built factories would stand empty immediately after – think about it!

Profits would therefore be much lower than the current situation, where existing plants can produce at-capacity for years to come. Which means the pharmaceutical companies earn big profits, and of course there are constant problems with production and supply. This means shortages everywhere, with millions of doses being unused, and millions dying as a result.

On the other hand, the capitalist class of all countries are pressing for people to get back to work, for production to be restarted. 

Workers are forced back into crowded workplaces, without adequate means of protection, and this is equivalent to passing a death sentence on many workers and their families. 

On the other hand, the economic crisis is the most severe in 300 years, they say. Just between April and June of last year, 400m jobs were lost worldwide. If you take tourism alone, which is important for many poor countries, 120m jobs will be wiped out, they think. The so-called emerging economies are being dragged down with the rest. India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey are all in crisis. South Korea’s economy sank last year for the first time in 22 years. Despite state subsidies worth about $283bn.

I won’t spend much time on economics, though I will later if I have time. From a Marxist point of view, the study of economics is not an abstract question, not an academic question. But it [the economy] has a profound effect on the development of consciousness of all classes, that’s the point. The main thing that we note everywhere now is a crisis, not just of governments, a political crisis, but a crisis of the regime. Particularly in Europe and the USA, I would say.

There are clear indications that the crisis is so severe, so deep, that the ruling class is losing control of the traditional instruments they used in the past for running society. And bourgeois politicians have totally lost control. 

Beginning with the USA, the wealthiest and most powerful country. The world economic crisis has hit the USA very hard. 40m Americans filed for unemployment during the pandemic, as always it’s the poorest who suffer most, and the youth. A quarter of under-25s have lost work. This undoubtedly caused serious alarm in ruling class circles in the USA. 

The state was not supposed to play any part in economic life, perhaps you remember that theory? But, alarmed by the danger imposed by the situation, the ruling class was forced to take emergency measures. They ditched all the old theories that the state must not interfere in the economy, and now in all countries, starting with the USA, the so-called free market economy, capitalism, is really on a life support system, like a coronavirus patient. It only exists because of the crutches of the state. 

Most of this money went straight into the pockets of the rich. But initially it did have the effect of cushioning the effects of the crisis on the poorest layers. But now these supports are being withdrawn. And we have, as a result, the most terrible poverty in the richest country in the world. 

I gave the figures in a recent article that I wrote, horrifying statistics. US families now, many of them, lack enough money to put food on the table. Food banks are proliferating, and millions are sinking into the direst poverty. Many are threatened with losing their homes, because they can’t pay the rent. 

In other words, the gulf between rich and poor has been transformed into an unbridgeable abyss. 

And this has an effect. All this demagogy about the national interest, we must fight together, all in the same boat, etc. Well, let’s spell it out. The masses are prepared to make sacrifices under certain circumstances. In time of war, people are prepared to unite to fight a common enemy, that is true. They are prepared for a period at least, to accept lower living standards. And also restrictions on democratic rights, to some extent, for a period. 

But the existence of unprecedented inequality, the scandalous riches accumulated by the rich… while for example, the IMF estimates that close to 90m people are due to fall below the level of $1.90 a day: the threshold of extreme deprivation. 

Yet, in 2020, the total wealth of the billionaires grew by $1.9tn. That is during the pandemic, during the crisis. The example of Jeff Bezos stands out. He now makes more per second than the typical US worker makes in a week. 

The gulf separating the haves, and have-nots, has stretched into an unbridgeable abyss, as I said. And this is deepening the social and political polarisation, that’s the point. It’s creating an explosive mood of anger in society. Everywhere you look, in all countries, there’s a burning hatred of the rich and powerful: the bankers, Wall Street, and the establishment in general.

This hatred was skillfully channelled by the right wing demagogue Donald Trump. And this has appalled the serious representatives of capital. They rightly saw Donald Trump as a threat because he was deliberately dynamiting the basis of consensus, of all the centre politics they’d been painstakingly building up for decades.

The ruling class is desperate to prevent this polarisation, and put the centre together again. But all of the objective conditions militate against their success. And the events of 6 Jan are a striking demonstration of this. Now they’re saying it was an insurrection, they’re trying to impeach Trump who is accused of organising an insurrection. If it was an attempted insurrection it was a very poor one! More than that, it was a big riot. But nevertheless, it was dangerous for the ruling class, and glaringly exposed deep rifts in the state itself.

The events of 6 Jan in Washington indicate the polarisation of society have reached an unbearable point, a breaking point. The institutions of bourgeois democracy are being tested to the point of destruction. It’s a crisis of the regime, not a normal political crisis. Despite a barrage of media hostility afterwards, 45 percent of registered Republicans though the storming of Capitol Hill was justified. You’re talking about millions! That’s quite significant, but more significant is the fact that 54 percent of all Americans thought the burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct was justified. And let’s not forget that 10 percent of the US population took part in the BLM protests, which is many times more than those who stormed the Capitol.

The spontaneous movement that swept the country after the murder of George Floyd and the unprecendented (sic) events that followed the US elections, if taken together, represent a turning point in the entire situation. Of course, the movement is confused, to put it mildly. It has some reactionary elements, but it isn’t just a black tide of reaction. That’s the nonsense of liberal observers who understand nothing.

Marxists must be capable of determining what is progressive from what is reactionary. We must understand that here, in embryo, we have revolutionary developments in the future. The stupid liberals understand nothig  (sic), they shout about fascism, about which they know nothing. I will quote later from a very perceptive article which shows the far-sighted bourgeois understand what we understand: everywhere, in every country, beneath the surface, there is a mood of anger and resentment against the established order. This mood expresses itself in the collapse of confidence in the official institutions, the parties, the governments, the political leaders, bankers, rich people, the police, the judiciary, existing laws, tradition, religion, morality of the existing system. 

People no longer believe what they’re told by the newspapers and the TV, they compare the huge difference between what is said and what happens, and they realise we’re being sold a pack of lies. This wasn’t always the case. In the past, most people didn’t pay much attention to politics, which goes for workers also. Conversations in the workplaces were usually about football, movies, television programmes. Politics were rarely mentioned, except maybe at election time.

Now, all that’s changed. The masses are beginning to take an interest in politics, because they’re beginning to realise this directly affects their lives, and the lives of their families. This in and of itself is a reflection of a mood of revolution. The institutions of bourgeois democracy were based on the assumption that the gulf between rich and poor could be disguised and contained within manageable limits. But that’s no longer the case. That is precisely the reason for the collapse of the political centre. 

It’s true that because of the complete bankruptcy of the reformists, including the left reformists, this mood has been capitalised upon by right-wing demagogues, so-called populists. Of course, nature abhors a vacuum. This is being interpreted by the stupid liberals and reformists as fascism. But the strategists of capital do understand, very clearly. 

At Christmas time, the FT published an article signed by the editorial board, which showed a very different assessment of the process, and where it would go. With your permission, I’ll quote a few lines:

“Groups left behind by economic change are increasingly concluding that those in charge do not care about their predicament.” 

It’s true, these people – Trump supporters – when they’re interviewed say “Washington doesn’t care about us! We’re the forgotten people!” 

The article continues… 

“[O]r worse, have rigged the economy for their own benefit against those on the margins. Slowly but surely, that is putting capitalism and democracy in tension with one another. Since the global financial crisis, this sense of betrayal has fuelled a political backlash against globalisation and the institutions of liberal democracy...” (this is the fascinating bit!) “Rightwing populism may thrive on this backlash while leaving capitalist markets in place.” And this is the point… “But as it cannot deliver on its promises to the economically frustrated, it is just a matter of time before the pitchforks come out for capitalism itself...” “and for the wealth of those who benefit from it.” 

Now, that’s serious talk, isn’t it? It shows a perfect understanding of the dynamics of the class struggle. How so-called right-wing populism can just be the first stage before a revolutionary explosion. They understand that perfectly well. Even the language is significant. Armed with pitchforks suggests an analogy with the French Revolution, or the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, where the peasants seized London. This tremendous volatility can be observed in many countries, if not in every country.

We saw it just recently in Russia, where the return of Navalny was the signal for an explosion of protests in Moscow and 110 other cities. Places like Vladivostokin the provinces. What does this represent? It’s not yet the Russian Revolution, it’s true. They’re also very heterogeneous demonstrations, lots of middle-class people, intellectuals, liberals – but also a growing number of workers. But these were big demonstrations in a Russian context. It needs to be seen in the context of falling living standards. Between 2013 and 2018, before the pandemic, the annual economic growth was 0.7 percent, basically stagnant. At the end of last year, you saw negative growth of about 5 percent.

Putin the past could boast of some success in the economic field, but not anymore. Unemployment is growing fast and many families are losing their homes. So the question of Navalny is only one element in this situation. Everything indicates as well that Putin’s support is collapsing. Two days after his arrest, Navalny put out a very interesting video, seen by millions, exposing the personal corruption of Putin, showing he’s built a large palace on the Black Sea, and all this is building up an explosive mood. As I say, Russia is not in a pre-revolutionary situation yet, but events are moving very fast now. 

Now at the other end of the world, in India, as I speak we see events that amount to an insurrectionary movement: of the farmers, who staged a tractor march to Delhi on 26 January, a couple of days ago, on Republic Day, where Modi was celebrating with a big military parade. It was impressive to see this on TV, astonishing, to see thousands of farmers fighting with the police to get to the red fort, fighting with heavily armed police, attacked and beaten. Modi has been clearly shaken by that uprising, which gave some idea of the pent-up fury of the masses.

But the weakness of the movement in India is the absence of a serious response from the powerful Indian working class. 

The farmers’ struggle did have a powerful impact in the factories, but the powerful Stalinist trade union leaders are trying to put the breaks on. Now the fire is under their backsides, Now they’re talking about a four-day general strike, which is significant. In the past they tried to exhaust the workers, as they did in Greece, calling a series of one-day general strikes. This is a trick to blow off steam, and prevent a generalised movement.

Earlier we were discussing the IS of the slogans proposed by comrades in Pakistan and India of a general strike: I hope I will have time to deal with that later on. 

I won’t spend long on the perspectives for the Biden administration, but clearly Wall Street is pinning all its hopes on administration and its vaccination efforts, but Biden will preside over a divided and declining nation. His attempts to buy his way out will only build up the debt in the system, which will prepare a bigger crisis down the line.

I don’t have time to deal much with China, but China is the only major economic power to have had some kind of positive growth. That’s because the Chinese state intervened decisely to counteract both the pandemic and the economic crisis. A kind of state capitalism, if you want to use that expression. And to be fair it’s got results up to now. 

It’s true that China’s growth is at about 2 percent, which is very poor from a Chinese perspective, but they’re now forecasting growth of 8 percent this year. If that is true, then China will outperform the rest of the world. But this very success will be its undoing. This economic growth is based excessively on exports. China is intervening aggressively on the world market and will have to intervene even more aggressively. This will inevitably mean tension between China and the US, which sees China as the main danger – not just Trump, but Biden as well, the Democrats agree. 

Previously, China was a big part of the solution for world capitalism, now it’s a big part of the problem. And the conflict particularly between the USA and China threatens to bring about an even-more-serious trade war, which is the greatest possible threat to world capitalism that exists, because it was the growth of world trade that explains the development of capitalism in the last period. So-called globalisation. Now of course this will turn into its opposite with very negative results for capitalism. 

This in turn will have an effect inside China. There have already been factory closures and unemployment, which have been concealed, but they exist. That explains the reason for Xi Jinping clamping down on Hong Kong. This wasn’t an expression of strength, but of fear and weakness. The Chinese ruling class were concerned this kind of movement would spread to the mainland, and it will, as night follows day. As an international we must be prepared for big events in China, which will happen when nobody expects it, because it is a totalitarian regime, we don’t know what’s happening there. While Chinese state could suppress a small state like Hong Kong, it will not be so easy to control 100 Hong Kongs in mainland China. So we must follow China carefully.

I don’t have time to discuss the economy for long. But it’s important to underline what I said earlier: when the bourgeoisie is faced with losing everything, they will resort to the most extreme methods to defend their system. Everywhere now, they’ve ditched their old arguments about the market, and opted instead for Keynesianism. They’ve lurched like a drunken man from one lamppost to another.

Now they depend, almost exclusively, on the handouts of the state. Ted Grant used to describe Keynesianism as voodoo economics, I think that’s a fair description. The idea that the state has unlimited funds is nonsense. That’s really a desperate policy they’ve adopted everywhere, and it’s led to astronomical, unthinkable debts. This is the greatest danger facing the capitalist system at this time. 

I have the figures here, we will produce this in a document later. But sooner or later, these debts will catch up with them. There’s a ticking time bomb of debt, which is built into the foundations of the economy now. In the long term, the effects will be more devastating than any terrorist bomb. But in the short term, they’re quite happy to continue this. And they even publish articles confidently predicting a rebound. 

Now, as serious people, we must consider these arguments seriously. Is a recovery of some sort possible? Well, first of all, we must understand that the economic predictions of the IMF and World Bank should be taken with a large pinch of salt. In the first place, the present crisis is different from crises of the past because it’s entangled inseparably with the coronavirus pandemic, and nobody can predict with any degree of certainty how long that will last. For this reason, the predictions of the economists cannot be considered more than mere guesswork. The only certainty is all the main indicators are pointing downwards, that much is clear. 

But does that mean a recovery of some sort is completely ruled out? No, you can’t draw that conclusion. In fact at a certain point, some sort of recovery is inevitable. The capitalist system has always moved in booms and slumps. Sooner or later, they’ll find a way out of this also. But we have to look at what kind of recovery we’re talking about. Are we talking about the beginning of a long period of growth and prosperity, or merely a temporary interlude between one crisis and another? 

The most optimistic prognosis is based on the existence, at least in the advanced capitalist countries, of what they call ‘pent-up demand.’ There are plenty who are facing genuine impoverishment, but there are also millions of better off families who now have money to spend – that’s a fact. At the end of the pandemic, they’ll be eager to spend in restaurants, bars, foreign holidays etc. This could mean an immediate sharp uptick in the economy after the pandemic, that’s not ruled out, together with further, huge injections of money from the state.

Now let’s be clear: sometimes comrades have a too black-and-white idea on this question. From our point of view, a temporary recovery would not be a bad thing. The pandemic and the consequent rise of unemployment, shocked the working class and led to a certain amount of paralysis, that’s a fact. But even a modest, small recovery of the economic activity, a slight fall in unemployment would have the immediate effect of reactivating the economic struggle, as workers strive to win back everything they’ve lost in the previous period.

And let’s be absolutely clear about it. Such a recovery would be temporary, and extremely unstable, because it’s on an artificial and unsound basis. It would contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. And the higher it climbs, the more severe the fall will be.

But as I said earlier, the question of economics is only of interest from our point of view insofar as it impacts the consciousness of the masses. And here I must confess I feel a little bit uneasy about the way some comrades pose the question of perspectives. It strikes me as a bit mechanical. A comrade writes an article, makes a list of very interesting statistics on hunger, misery, unemployment etc., and then immediately concludes: capitalism is finished, long live the socialist revolution!

Comrades, things are not quite as simple as that, I’m afraid to say, and from a dialectical perspective that method is quite objectionable. You do not inject conclusions into a situation, you cannot assume what is not proven. Don’t assume that people who read these articles agree with what we stay. The conclusions must flow from the analysis, and it must be a serious analysis.

It’s not hard to describe the crisis of capitalism. What is not so easy, and what we have to establish, is to explain how you get from A to B. And this needs to be explained. The main problem is the absence of the subjective factor. The crisis is a fact, and the fact is the workers are learning, but it takes time – it’s a learning process. And the masses will not merely draw the same conclusions that we drew, for theoretical reasons, years ago. The masses can only learn from one thing, that’s experience. As Lenin used to say: “Life teaches.”

But learning from the great book of experience is a slow and painful process. It would be greatly expedited if there existed a mass revolutionary party like the Bolsheviks. An organisation with sufficient numbers to be present and with sufficient authority to be listened to by the workers.

Lenin quoted Hegel, he said the truth is always concrete. Sometimes, the most erudite Marxists have forgotten. Comrades, we must show concretely how to pass from A to B, and B to C and D and E. For this purpose, we must create an appropriate series of transitional demands that protect the health and livelihoods of workers, and place the burden of the crisis on the shoulders of the bosses. We must make appropriate demands, not just for workers in healthcare and frontline services, but for all workers, paid for by the employers. If the bosses say we can’t afford these things, let them open the books and expose the huge amounts of money they’ve got hidden, and the huge injections of money they’ve been given by the state!

It is only by the bosses’ failure to grant these demands that the workers will see the necessity of a transformation of society.

The main problem is one of leadership. The angry mood of the masses cannot find an expression from the leading layers of the class. The trade union leaders are holding the movement back. But with or without them the workers will find a way of expressing themselves. In Italy there is no mass workers’ party, but the mood of the workers grows angrier and more impatient every day. The repeated failures of government are inevitably leading to an explosion of the class struggle. 

This mood is expressing itself not in parliament but on the streets. New layers are being drawn into the struggle. We saw it in France with the gilets jaunes, we saw it in India with the farmers, in a peculiar way we see it in the storming of the Capitol. 

What would the appropriate slogans now be in India? Objectively speaking, all the conditions exist for an all-out general strike. The problem is the Stalinist leaders, as usual, have been dragging their feet. They’re hopelessly corrupt, counterrevolutionary, but you must understand that even the most corrupt and counterrevolutionary leaders can come under the pressure of the working class when it begins to move.

Now the trade union leaders in India are discussing the idea of the four-day general strike. Our position is for an all-out general strike. So what do we do? We’re not the leadership of the movement, but these guys are. We should say to them: ‘very well, let’s have a four-day strike – but less talk, and more action! First: name the day! Start a campaign in the factories, call mass protest meetings, set up strike committees, and draw in the farmers, women, youth and unemployed – and all oppressed sections of society. And link up these organs of struggle at a local and national level. In other words, soviets! If that were done – I don’t say it will be – but if it were, a four-day strike would be transformed into a four-day general strike, which poses the question of power. Once the masses in India are organised for that, no force on earth will stop them.

I must sum up my remarks. But there is one point we must understand: this will be a long, drawn-out crisis. It will last years, or even decades, with ups and downs. It will be longer due to the absence of the subjective factor.

However, this is only one side of the coin. The fact that it will be long and drawn out doesn’t mean it will be any less turbulent, quite the opposite. The current perspective is for sharp and sudden changes. Processes that took many years to develop in the past can now occur overnight, posing very serious questions before us. And we must be prepared, comrades! The year 2021 will be like no other, the working class has entered a very harsh school, there will be many defeats and setbacks, but from that school the workers will draw the necessary lessons.

The TU leaders are completely out of their depth – they reflect the past, the days when they had an easy life with the bosses, could easily get small concessions for the workers. Now things are very different. They will have to fight for every demand. And the workers find themselves in intolerable conditions, where their lives and those of their families are in danger. 

The unions will be transformed in the course of struggle. One by one, the old right-wing leaders are dying or retiring, or being replaced. A new generation of younger class fighters is beginning to challenge the leadership. The stage is set for the transformation of the unions into organisations of struggle. 

And even the most reactionary and apparently inert TUs will be drawn into this struggle. And we Marxists must be at the front ranks of this struggle, upon which ultimately the success of the socialist revolution depends. Dialectics tells us things can change into their opposites, and we must be prepared for this.

We have the correct ideas, methods and perspectives. Our task is now to turn this into growth, to create a powerful revolutionary army of cadres, that is capable of leading a revolutionary army, capable of leading workers in the struggle for power. 

There is nothing more important in our lives. And together, we can definitely achieve it. 

Saturday, May 29, 2021

The Things You Are Getting Wrong About White Supremacists Is What Allows Them To Grow ~~ Gwen Frisbie-Fulton

White mob before breaking into the US Capitol on January 6th, 2020.
Twitter users helped crowdsource information to figure out who the man carrying zip ties into the Senate chambers to, presumably, take hostages.
White supremacists pose in front of the Vinlander’s house. Photo from South Side Chicago Anti-Racist Action.
Brien James (left in center photo) poses with another Vinlander. Source: ADL
The two crossed meat-cleavers of the American Guard logo references “Bill the Butcher,” a fictionalized version of William Pool, the leader of the Bowery Boys, a New York City street gang infamous for its violent attacks on immigrants. Source: ADL
Trying to find a more contemporary and palatable white nationalism, Brien James ditched the neo-Nazi Vinlanders and founded the Indiana American Guard. He began claiming he was no longer be racist but instead a “nationalist” and a “patriot” — language that we all should be becoming familiar with today. To prove he was no longer racist, Brien started posting content on his social media channels from far-right conservative Blacks like Candice Owens and the Hodgetwins, mixed in with dog-whistle content everywhere else. His kinder, more gentle facade, of course, was mostly talk and his actual agenda didn’t seem to change. The first time I saw Brien James after leaving my neighborhood was nearly a decade later: He marched with his American Guard right into the fray, armed with sticks and batons, in Charlottesville.

Now, the day of the attack on the Capital building, Brien James is the head of the Indiana Proud Boys and talking to journalists — something Briend James of 20 years ago never would have been able to do. The Indy Star interviewed him as if he were just a protestor or another guy with an opinion that needs to be heard in the interest of fair reporting. A quick Google search, however, reveals that just a month ago, James was promoting the Million Maga March in DC (another event that turned into dangerous street violence) with a video that used the fascist Mannerbund Anthem as its soundtrack.
Brien James seemed more inspired on January 6th than he came across in his interview with the Indianapolis Star.

I’m not a journalist and don’t know much about it: I’m just a mom who lived next door to a neo-Nazi and who knows what that does to communities like mine. I am not asking for journalists to be activists, but if the Indianapolis Star and other publications provide a platform without putting people like Brien James in context, and if people in my community continue to focus on outdated tropes without looking harder, then these movements grow and grow and grow until…Well, this week we saw what happens when we let it grow.

The classes of capitalism ~~ Daniel Taylor

https://mronline.org/2021/04/20/the-classes-of-capitalism/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Capitalist society

Capitalist society is divided into different classes, and the relationships between those classes shape the production of wealth, the dissemination of ideas and the nature of politics.

In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote that “society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat”. By bourgeoisie they meant the capitalist class, those who made their living by owning capital, which means both factories and other equipment used in the production process, and the money used to invest in production. By proletariat they meant the modern working class—wage-earners who don’t own land or equipment, and who have to make money by selling their time to capitalists.

At the time that Marx and Engels wrote those words, capitalists and workers were still an emerging minority of the world population. Capitalism hadn’t yet totally transformed the social structures inherited from medieval society; much of the world’s population was still made up of peasants, nobles, and others who lived mostly in pre-capitalist class relationships. In our time, just as Marx and Engels predicted, the production of wealth all around the world is almost totally determined by the interactions of wage-earning “proletarians” and the profit-making “bourgeoisie”: workers and capitalists.

To be a capitalist is to live by owning the means of production. But in capitalism, nobody can live purely by owning factories, mines, office blocks or farms. The process of producing wealth is too complex, its production facilities are too vast, and the output of any facility is too specialised for anyone to live just by their ownership of wealth-producing technology. A medieval peasant might have been able to live mostly on the things they produced from their own little farm, but their capitalist equivalent, the corporate master of the agribusiness sector, can’t live by operating enormous mechanised dairy farms and drinking the billions of litres of milk they produce. Bosses must hire workers to operate the machinery, so that they can sell the products and make a profit.

So capitalists need a pool of potential workers to hire—people who are compelled by poverty to sell their capacity to labour in exchange for hourly pay, and who have to keep coming back to survive day by day. In short, capitalists can’t exist as a class without most of the population being relatively impoverished and unable to survive without selling themselves to bosses. And the day-to-day existence of capitalists consists of transmitting orders to workers, dominating the labour process to make sure that workers produce maximum profits.

A glance at Australia’s rich list gives a sense of who the most successful capitalists are, and how they live through owning and controlling the key wealth-producing resources. Gina Rinehart is perhaps one of the most famous capitalists in the country. She makes a living by owning and controlling mines, particularly those producing iron ore. Anthony Pratt’s Visy company produces packaging materials needed to store, organise and distribute goods—from cardboard boxes and glass bottles to fibre pallets used to stack products in warehouses. Harry Triguboff and Frank Lowy control the construction of the buildings in which we live and work: apartment blocks and commercial shopping centres. These four individuals together have accumulated around $40 billion through their control of capital.

By picturing each capitalist and their industry, we can also picture their opposite: the workers, who don’t own the production equipment, but whose labour produces the goods sold for profit. Rinehart’s mines need miners, engineers and transport workers to operate and maintain the equipment, dig the iron ore from the earth and to help transport it to refineries. Pratt’s container business requires thousands of factory workers turning raw materials into containers. Triguboff and Lowy’s real estate companies need construction workers pouring cement, operating cranes and fitting out the shops and flats.

These are just a few of the most prominent and successful capitalists in Australia. But almost all the wealth of modern society is produced under the control of people like them, who use their control of the means of production to dominate the labour of workers they hire. Modern capitalism produces intricate relationships between working-class people all around the world, but their interactions are limited and determined by whether they produce profits for capitalists—we produce without controlling our work, without knowing each other and without being able to consciously coordinate the process beyond an extremely limited range.

Celebrating the Paris Commune of 1871

The production and sale of a McDonald’s burger in a cardboard container requires the coming together of tens of thousands of workers around the world. There are the McDonald’s workers themselves, who we see putting the finishing touches on the product and serving it. But before that takes place, we need the labour of agricultural workers who rear the cattle, and who grow and harvest the vegetables; the workers in the abattoirs and meat plants slaughtering the cows and processing them into ground beef; the manufacturing workers producing the flavouring agents and sauces, as well as the industrial dyes and cardboard packaging; the workers in all the mines and power plants providing raw materials for the processes, shipping the outputs to the next destination in the web of production; and many others.

Although they are mostly invisible in the corporate media, working-class people doing jobs like these are the majority of the population in most countries. Wage labourers heal the sick in hospitals, raise children in nurseries and teach them in schools, build homes and produce the wealth we all need to live.

The relationship between workers and bosses is the most important one in our society. Most of us live by producing wealth under the control of others, earning an hourly wage and cooperating with our workmates. A small minority experience the opposite: they accumulate wealth by controlling our labour, giving orders and competing against other bosses, both domestically and internationally.

These different experiences create different interests, and when the different classes assert their power, they fight for different things. Privatisation of healthcare, education and other vital services obviously harms workers, forcing them to pay market rates for the things they need to survive. But it’s often good for capitalists—privatisation opens more options for them to buy and control wealth-producing equipment, which they can use to make profits, while making workers even more dependent on their job in order to pay for the necessities of life.

The spread of racist and nationalistic ideas confuses and disorganises workers, making it harder for them to unite with other workers to fight for their own interests. But patriotism is great for capitalists, as it convinces at least some of their oppressed employees that the bosses are on their side, and the real enemy is foreign workers.

To promote their interests and convince workers that what’s good for the bosses is good for everyone, capitalists establish think tanks, media outlets and political parties, like Australia’s Liberal party. Organised and funded by society’s wealthiest elites, they promote the most ignorant and backwards ideas: climate denial, racism, sexism and extreme nationalism. While trying to confuse the population with these capitalist superstitions, they strengthen the powers of police and spies, and undermine the rights of workers to organise and resist their bosses at work.

Classes reveal themselves most clearly when they fight for more power. More power for capitalists means a divided working class with fewer rights in a society riddled with more prejudice and ignorance. When workers fight to assert their power, they push society in the opposite direction. The most basic but important form of workers’ resistance—going on strike for higher pay—requires a spirit of cooperation and solidarity among people who might have little material wealth, but who are willing to risk their livelihoods to stand in solidarity with one another and achieve a better standard of living for their fellow workers. The capitalist production process requires the linking-up of dozens, hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of workers. So when workers go on strike and organise together, they create a spirit of solidarity and grassroots democracy that cuts against the individualism and isolation of capitalist society.

In most media depictions, the class dynamics of capitalism are invisible. The media tends to focus more on the middle classes, the intermediaries who sit somewhere between capitalists and workers. Capitalism constantly creates people with one foot in each class, and despite them being a minority of the population, they are massively over-represented in the media. Some are intellectuals, such as academics and journalists: they don’t own the means of production, but they are allowed quite a lot of independence and autonomy in their jobs, and they often feel like part of an elite with a responsibility for producing important and far-sighted ideas. Others are owners of small businesses, who aren’t as rich and powerful as their bigger capitalist rivals, and who might resent big business influence and dominance in their industry—like the corner store owners who can’t compete with the big supermarkets. Then there are middle managers, who might be poorly paid, but live by giving orders to workers on behalf of the capitalist bosses.

These middle classes will always exist in capitalism, but when a major class struggle breaks out, they are relatively powerless. Unlike the capitalist class, they don’t decide what happens on a grand scale. Unlike the working class, they can’t usually affect the economy by going on strike, and they have no collective power to create a new, better society. The politics of the middle classes can veer wildly towards anything that seems to promise them power, or to protect them from other, more powerful classes. They can easily fall for the pro-capitalist lies of right-wing parties, believing that they could get rich if only the free market were unleashed and trade unions were crushed. Others are attracted to elitist politics that emphasise the importance of educated intellectuals rather than ignorant mobs; that often goes hand-in-hand with supporting a powerful and dictatorial capitalist state.

Two particularly important middle classes are generated directly from the struggle between workers and bosses: cops and the bureaucrats who hold paid positions in trade unions. Both are often made up of people with working-class backgrounds and are usually presented as blue-collar workers on TV.

But cops are essentially mobile, armed bosses. Bosses can control us at work, and fire us if we disobey them. But when we’re in the streets, the ruling class need another way to control us. Cops have the power to discipline and brutalise working-class people even when they aren’t at work; their daily life consists of wielding power over others with the threat of violence.

Union bureaucrats emerge out of workers’ organisations. When workers strike and organise, they build unions to harness their collective power. As those unions grow, they develop paid bureaucracies. But because those bureaucracies exist only because of the struggle between workers and bosses, they have an interest in stabilising the system to maintain their own important role within it. That’s why the paid officials of trade unions often want to limit the radicalism of workers’ struggles, channelling them into “respectable” and legal paths that promote collaboration with bosses, often selling-out workers’ struggles or promoting the electoral interests of centre-left parties like the Australian Labor Party as an alternative to workers’ struggles.

But despite the influence these middle classes wield in political and intellectual life, it is the struggle between the bosses and the workers that will decide the fate of humanity. Capitalism is shaped by the interaction between the capitalists, who own the means of production, and the working class, who live by producing all of society’s wealth. Capitalists control our working lives, our politics and the ideas that dominate society. Beneath the capitalists are an array of noisy middle classes, who are presented in the mainstream media as representing ordinary, everyday people, and whose beliefs and opinions often pass for the most enlightened and interesting on offer. But the entire system depends on the labour of the working class, and that gives the working class the power to not only strike back at the bosses, but to create a new world based on collective solidarity and cooperation, rather than domination and competition.