Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s new book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health is not the book of a politician seeking attention. It is the book of a man determined to stake his own life in the resistance against the unfolding bio-terrorist assault on humankind by governments captive of the pharmaceutical industry. He is calling for mass insurrection, and his last word is: “I’ll see you on the barricades.” The book begins like this:
I wrote this book to help Americans—and citizens across the globe—understand the historical underpinnings of the bewildering cataclysm that began in 2020. In that single annus horribilis, liberal democracy effectively collapsed worldwide. The very governmental health regulators, social media eminences, and media companies that idealistic populations relied upon as champions of freedom, health, democracy, civil rights, and evidence-based public policy seemed to collectively pivot in a lockstep assault against free speech and personal freedoms. Suddenly, those trusted institutions seemed to be acting in concert to generate fear, promote obedience, discourage critical thinking, and herd seven billion people to march to a single tune, culminating in mass public health experiments with a novel, shoddily tested and improperly licensed technology so risky that manufacturers refused to produce it unless every government on Earth shielded them from liability. … Conscientious objectors who resisted these unwanted, experimental, zero-liability medical interventions faced orchestrated gaslighting, marginalization, and scapegoating. American lives and livelihoods were shattered by a bewildering array of draconian diktats imposed without legislative approval or judicial review, risk assessment, or scientific citation. So-called Emergency Orders closed our businesses, schools and churches, made unprecedented intrusions into privacy, and disrupted our most treasured social and family relationships.
Kennedy is not a newcomer to this frightening dystopia. “My 40-year career as an environmental and public health advocate,” he writes, “gave me a unique understanding of the corrupting mechanisms of ‘regulatory capture,’ the process by which the regulator becomes beholden to the industry it’s meant to regulate.” From the time he entered the vaccine debate in 2005, he realized that “the pervasive web of deep financial entanglements between Pharma and the government health agencies had put regulatory capture on steroids.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, owns 57 vaccine patents and spent $4.9 billion in 2019 buying and distributing vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) receives 45 percent of its budget from the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), with its $42 billion budget, owns hundreds of vaccine patents and often profits from the sale of products it supposedly regulates. High-level officials receive yearly emoluments of up to $150,000 in royalty payments on products that they help develop and then usher through the approval process.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, “America’s reigning health commissar,” stands at the summit of that Leviathan. From 1968, he occupied various posts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a sub-agency of NIH, of which he became director in 1984. With a $417,608 annual salary, he is the highest paid of all federal employees, including the President. “His experiences surviving 50 years as the panjandrum of a key federal bureaucracy, having advised six Presidents, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, foreign governments, and the WHO, seasoned him exquisitely for a crisis that would allow him to wield power enjoyed by few rulers and no doctor in history.” He has nurtured a complex web of financial entanglements that has transformed the NIH into a subsidiary of Big Pharma. Reaching into the deep pockets of the Clinton and Gates Foundations, he has used his $6 billion annual budget to achieve dominance and control over many agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO). He can make and break careers, enrich or punish university research centers, and dictate the outcome of scientific research across the globe, consistently prioritizing pharmaceutical industry profits over public health.
Kennedy’s book documents Fauci’s “two-decade strategy of promoting false pandemics as a scheme for promoting novel vaccines,” as well as “his actions to conceal widespread contamination in blood and vaccines, his destructive vendettas against scientists who challenge the Pharma paradigm, [and] his deliberate sabotaging of patent-expired remedies against infectious diseases.”
But of course, Kennedy’s book is not about a man: it is about an irremediably corrupt and predatory system created in the U.S. and exported worldwide. Ultimately, however, the system is built and run by humans, and focusing on its most emblematic representative shows its very soul.
Kennedy’s book puts the current crisis in a historical perspective. But it doesn’t tell the story chronologically. It starts with a very long first chapter on the current Covid crisis—a book by itself—, then goes back, from chapter 3, to the 1980s and the search for the AIDS vaccine, the template for today’s pharmaceutical coup. In this review, I will focus on the AIDS episode, because it is the least familiar part of a history covering fifty years, and it helps making sense of what is happening today. It is an incredible story, that I would have had difficulty believing just three years ago, but that our current enslavement now makes utterly credible.
The thirty-year decampment of journalistic scrutiny means that there is still no coherent public narrative chronicling Dr. Fauci’s futile quest for his “inevitable” AIDS vaccine, much less accountability. Industry and government scientists have instead shrouded the scandalous saga in secrecy, subterfuge, and prevarication, obscuring a thousand calamities and a sea of tears deserving its own book. Every meager effort to research the debacle—on Google, PubMed, news sites, and published clinical trial data—yields only shocking new atrocities—a grim, repetitive parade of horribles: heartbreaking tragedies, entrenched institutional arrogance and racism, broken promises, vast expenditures of squandered treasure, and the recurring chicanery of Anthony Fauci, Bob Gallo, and Bill Gates.
Kennedy deserves praise and gratitude for his courage to bring this controversy out into the open, in a clear and well-documented exposé. His book is destined to become a landmark in the struggle for Life and Truth—and in the Kennedy heroic saga. This article reflects only a fraction of what that can be learned from its 480 pages packed with data and references. Since pages numbers in the kindle edition (recommended for its thousand hyperlinks) differ from those in the printing book, I have dispensed with them.
In the first lines of his 2014 book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak (documenting an astonishing 1,135 percent higher rate of autism among children who took hepatitis B vaccines), Kennedy prudently claimed to be “pro-vaccine” and to “believe that vaccines have saves the lives of hundreds of millions of humans over the past century.” Kennedy makes no such disclaimer in his new book. Rather, he sides with the critics of the popular dogma that vaccines played the key role in abolishing mortal contagious illnesses in North America and Europe, citing a 2000 study by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists that concluded: “nearly 90 percent of the decline in infections disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.” The main causes of the dramatic 74 percent decline in infectious disease mortalities in the first half of the twentieth century were improved nutrition and sanitation.
From Kennedy, The Real Anthony Fauci, 2021
This revisionist but objective perspective explains why Fauci and Gates’s obsession with vaccine-preventable diseases has caused negative overall impacts on public health in Africa and Asia, by proportionally reducing assistance streams for nutrition, clean water, transportation, hygiene, and economic development. Gates and Fauci have actually hijacked WHO’s public health agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases, and diverted international aid to wedge open emerging markets for their multinational partners.
To understand their craze for vaccines, Kennedy reminds us of the pioneering influence of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1911, after the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable monopoly” and splintered it into thirty-four companies, John D. Rockefeller inaugurated what Bill Gates would later call “philanthrocapitalism.” He provided large grants to scientists for synthesizing and patenting chemical versions of the molecules identified in traditional medicine. The Foundation provided almost half of the initial budget for the League of Nations’ Health Organization (LNHO) in 1922, and populated its ranks with its veterans and favorites. It imbued the League with its technocratic philosophy of health, inherited by its successor body, the WHO, in 1948.
The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which first set about inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab. By the time John D. Rockefeller, Jr. disbanded it in 1951, the International Health Commission had spent billions of dollars on tropical disease campaigns in almost 100 countries and colonies. These projects had a hidden agenda, according to a 2017 report, U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and the Global Health Agenda: they allowed the Rockefeller family to open developing world markets for oil, mining, banking and other profitable trades, including pharmaceutical profits that grew tremendously when, in the 1970s:
a wave of new technologies, including PCR and super powerful electron microscopes, had opened windows on teeming new worlds containing millions of species of previously unknown viruses to scientists. … The lure of fame and fortune ignited a chaotic revolution in virology as ambitious young PhDs scrambled to inculpate newly discovered microbes as the cause of old malignancies. … Under this new rubric, every theoretical breakthrough, every find, became potentially the basis for a new generation of drugs.
By the mid-1970s, the CDC was seeking to justify its existence by tracking small outbreaks of rabies. “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant. Dr. Fauci’s immediate boss and predecessor as NIAID Director, Richard M. Krause, helped pioneer this new strategy in 1976.” That year was concocted the fake swine flu epidemic. The experimental vaccine was so fraught with problems that the Health and Human Services (HHS) discontinued the jab after vaccinating 49 million Americans. According to news accounts, the incidence of flu was seven times greater among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. Furthermore, the vaccine caused some 500 cases of the degenerative nerve disease Guillain-Barré Syndrome, 32 deaths, more than 400 paralyzations, and as many as 4,000 other injuries. Injured plaintiffs filed 1,604 lawsuits. By April 1985, the government had paid out $83,233,714 and spent tens of millions of dollars adjudicating and processing those claims.
President Ford was filmed receiving a flu inoculation, October 14, 1976 (Wikipedia)
Another scandal broke in 1983, when a NIH-funded UCLA study found that the DTP vaccine developed by Wyeth—now Pfizer—was killing or causing severe brain injury, including seizures and death, in one in every 300 vaccinated children. While protecting children against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, the DTP vaccine had ruined their immune systems, making them vulnerable to a wide range of deadly other infections.
The resultant lawsuits caused the collapse of insurance markets for vaccines and threatened to bankrupt the industry. Wyeth claimed to be losing $20 in downstream liability for every dollar it earned on vaccine sales, and induced Congress to pass in 1986 the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which shielded vaccine makers from liability. (This incentive for unrestricted greed was strengthened in 2005 when George W. Bush signed into law the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act).
In 1984, when Fauci became director of NIAID, the AIDS crisis was spiraling out of control. That proved “a redemptive juncture for NIAID and the launch pad for Dr. Fauci’s stellar rise.” In an April 1984 press conference, NIH scientist Robert Gallo linked AIDS to the virus that was soon to be named HIV. Dr. Fauci then moved aggressively to claim jurisdiction for his agency over the National Cancer Institute (NCI), another sub-agency of NIH. “As the nation’s newly appointed AIDS czar, Dr. Fauci was now a gatekeeper for almost all AIDS research … parroting NCI’s vows to cure cancer, Dr. Fauci promised Congress that he would quickly produce drugs and vaccines to banish AIDS.”
At the same time, he was deliberately spreading contagion terror, warning in a 1983 fear-mongering article that “the scope of the syndrome may be enormous”, since “routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease”—despite the fact that AIDS was almost exclusive to intravenous drug users and male homosexuals. A year later, Fauci was forced to concede that health officials had never detected a case of the disease spread through “casual contact.” Nevertheless, Dr. Fauci’s systematic response was “to amplify the widespread panic of dreaded pestilence that would naturally magnify his power, elevate his profile, and expand his influence. Amplifying terror of infectious disease was already an ingrained knee-jerk institutional response at NIAID.”
Having seized control over AIDS research, Fauci captured the new flood of congressional AIDS appropriations flowing to NIH through the lobbying of a newly organized gay community. By 1990, NIAID’s annual AIDS budget reached $3 billion. In the ensuing decades, the federal government spent over half a trillion dollars in the quest for an elusive vaccine that never materialized. Dr. Fauci pumped up taxpayers’ money into nearly 100 vaccine candidates, with no other result than “massive transfers of public lucre to Dr. Fauci’s Pharma partners,” and a sea of tears for millions of unfortunate human guinea pigs.
NIAID’s lack of in-house drug development capacity meant that Fauci had to farm out drug research to a network of so-called “principal investigators” (PIs), academic physicians and researchers controlled by pharmaceutical companies and acting as liaisons, recruiters and spokespersons.
PIs are pharmaceutical industry surrogates who play key roles promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm and functioning as high priests of all its orthodoxies, which they proselytize with missionary zeal. They use their seats on medical boards and chairmanships of university departments to propagate dogma and root out heresy. … They are the credentialed and trusted medical experts who prognosticate on television networks—now helplessly reliant on pharmaceutical ad revenue—to push out Pharma content.
Dr. Fauci’s choice to transfer virtually all of NIAID’s budget to pharmaceutical PIs for drug development was an abdication of the agency’s duty to find the source and eliminate the explosive epidemics of allergic and autoimmune disease that began under his watch around 1989. … NIAID money effectively became a giant subsidy to the blossoming pharmaceutical industry to incubate a pipeline of profitable new drugs targeted to treat the symptoms of those very diseases.
In the late 80s and early 90s, PIs received every year between 4 and 5 billions of dollars from NIH’s budget. But “legalized bribes” from drug companies and royalty payments from drug products often dwarfed their government funding. Celia Farber’s 2006 Harper’s article, “Out of Control: AIDS and the Destruction of Medical Science,” laid bare the culture of squalor, corruption, and vendetta at Fauci’s AIDS Branch, the Division of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DAIDS).
Despite his miserable track record at reducing illness over the previous decade, Fauci persuaded President Bill Clinton, in May 1997, to set a new national goal for science. In a speech delivered at Morgan State University, Clinton—perhaps not without cryptic irony— imitated Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 moonshot promise, saying, “Today let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade.”
A year later, Bill Gates, who had just founded his International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), sealed a deal with Fauci. “Over the next two decades, that partnership would metastasize to include pharmaceutical companies, military and intelligence planners, and international health agencies all collaborating to promote weaponized pandemics and vaccines and a new brand of corporate imperialism rooted in the ideology of biosecurity.” The story of Gates’ involvement in the vaccine business, of his murderous experiments in Africa and India, and of his rise as the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO (ordering in 2011: “All 193 member states, you must make vaccines a central focus of your health systems”), is told in chapters 9 and 10 of Kennedy’s book.
When Dr. Fauci became head of NIAID, azidothymidine, known as AZT, was the only candidate as an AIDS remedy. AZT is a “DNA chain terminator,” randomly destroying DNA synthesis in reproducing cells. It had been developed in 1964 for cancer, but abandoned as too toxic even for short-term therapy. It was deemed so worthless that it was not even patented. In 1985, Samuel Broder, head of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), claimed having found that AZT killed HIV in test tubes. The British company Burroughs Wellcome then patented it as an AIDS remedy. “Recognizing financial opportunity in the desperate terror of young AIDS patients facing certain death, the drug company set the price at up to $10,000/year per patient—making AZT one of the most expensive drugs in pharmaceutical history. Since Burroughs Wellcome could manufacture AZT for pennies per dose, the company anticipated a bonanza.”
Fauci gave Burroughs Wellcome a monopoly control over the government’s HIV response. But all did not go smoothly. “AZT’s horrendous toxicity hobbled researchers struggling to design study protocols that would make it appear either safe or effective.” Another problem is that community-based doctors were achieving promising results with cheap, off-label therapeutic drugs. Dr. Fauci refused to test any of those repurposed drugs that had no Pharma patrons. When he did put on trial AL721, an antiviral that was far less toxic than AZT, he rigged the studies to fail, and abruptly cancelled Phase 2.
Meanwhile, he accelerated testing of AZT, skipping animal testing and allowing Burroughs Wellcome to proceed directly to human trials. In March 1987, Fauci’s team declared the human trials a success after only four months, and Fauci congratulated himself in front of the press. However, when in July 1987, the official report of Burroughs Wellcome’s Phase 2 trial was published, European scientists complained that raw data showed no benefit in reducing symptoms. FDA conducted its own investigation eighteen months later, but kept its results secrets, until investigative journalist John Lauritsen obtained some of them by using the Freedom of Information Act; the documents showed that the Fauci/Burroughs Wellcome research teams had engaged in widespread data tampering. More than half of the AZT patients suffered adverse reactions so deadly that they needed multiple blood transfusions just to keep them alive. Nevertheless, Fauci kept on lying himself to the top of the world, with little scrutiny from mainstream media.
A key and enduring legacy of the AZT battle was Dr. Fauci’s emergence as the alpha wolf of HHS [Health and Human Services]. His enormous budget, and multiplying contacts on Capitol Hill, the White House, and the medical industry, thereafter allowed him to influence or ignore a succession of politically appointed HHS directors and to bully, manipulate, and dominate HHS’s other sister agencies, most notably FDA.
AZT was not the only subject of interest to Fauci. By June 2003, NIH was running 10,906 clinical trials on new antiviral concoctions in some four hundred clinical trials in ninety countries. Some of those trials seemed pulled out of Dickens’ worst nightmares. The Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization, has documented that between 1985 and 2005, NIAID conscripted at least 532 infants and children from foster care in New York City as subjects of clinical trials testing experimental AIDS drugs and vaccines. AHRP’s investigation revealed that many of those children were perfectly healthy and may not even have been HIV-infected. Yet 80 of them died. In 2004, journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr. Fauci’s secretive experiments on foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities between 1988 and 2002. These disclosures, comments Kennedy, beg many questions:
From what moral wilderness did the monsters who devised and condoned these experiments descend upon our idealistic country? How have they lately come to exercise such tyrannical power over our citizens? What sort of nation are we if we allow them to continue? Most trenchantly, does it not make sense that the malevolent minds, the elastic ethics, the appalling judgment, the arrogance, and savagery that sanctioned the barbaric brutalization of children at the Incarceration Convent House, and the torture of animals for industry profit, could also concoct a moral justification for suppressing lifesaving remedies and prolonging a deadly epidemic? Could these same dark alchemists justify a strategy of prioritizing their $48 billion vaccine project ahead of public health and human life? Did similar hubris—that deadly human impulse to play God—pave the lethal path to Wuhan and fuel the reckless decision to hack the codes of Creation and fabricate diabolical new forms of life—pandemic superbugs—in a ramshackle laboratory with scientists linked to the Chinese military?
Indeed, Kennedy shows in his final chapter, “Germ Games,” that Fauci’s investments in so-called “gain of function” experiments to engineer pandemic superbugs raise “the ironic possibility that Dr. Fauci may have played a role in triggering the global contagion that two US presidents entrusted him to manage.”
Africa is “the venue of choice for companies seeking cooperative government officials, compliant populations, the lowest per-patient enrollment costs, and lax oversight by media and regulatory officials.” In the early 1990s, African dictators rolled out the red carpet for Pharma, cashing in on the lucrative business of farming out their citizens for the booming clinical trial business. And on January 29, 2003, President George W. Bush announced at his State of the Union speech his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Fauci’s new swindle:
On the continent of Africa, nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus. … Yet across that continent, only 50,000 AIDS victims—only 50,000—are receiving the medicine they need. … I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.
Kennedy’s chapter 5, “The HIV Heresies,” opens up with the following note:
I hesitated to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies. But one cannot write a complete book about Tony Fauci without touching on the abiding—and fascinating—scientific controversy over what he characterizes as his “greatest accomplishment” and his “life’s work.”
The controversy illustrates how pharmaceutical industries and health agencies, acting in concert, engineer consensus on incomplete or fraudulent theories, and ruthlessly suppress dissent from even the most gifted recognized scientists. “From the outset,” Kennedy insists, “I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS.” However, there seems little doubt that his basic point is correct:
During the thirty-six years since Dr. Fauci and his colleague, Dr. Robert Gallo, first claimed that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, no one has been able to point to a study that demonstrates their hypothesis using accepted scientific proofs. … Even today, incoherence, knowledge gaps, contradictions, and inconsistencies continue to bedevil the official dogma.
The success story of the HIV-AIDS dogma shows “many of the tactics Dr. Fauci has pioneered to dodge debate—bedazzling and bamboozling the press into ignoring legitimate inquiry of the credo, and undermining, gaslighting, punishing, bullying, intimidating, marginalizing, vilifying, and muzzling critics.” One of Fauci’s victims was Dr. Peter Duesberg, who in 1987 was still recognized as the world’s most accomplished retrovirologist. Duesberg argues that HIV does not cause AIDS but is essentially a “free rider” common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures. HIV, he says, is a harmless passenger virus that has almost certainly coexisted in humans for thousands of generations without causing diseases. While HIV may be sexually transmittable, Duesberg claims, AIDS is not.
Duesberg published his views in a groundbreaking 1987 article, then in a 724-page book,Inventing the AIDS Virus. Kennedy finds that “Duesberg’s rationales appear so clean, so elegantly crafted, and so compelling that, in reading them, it seems impossible that the entire [orthodox] hypothesis did not instantly collapse under the smothering weight of relentless logic.” But Fauci and Gallo never attempted to reply to Duesberg. Blaming AIDS on a virus was the gambit that had allowed NIAID to claim the jurisdiction—and cash flow—away from NCI, and Duesberg was severely punished for endangering this.
Dr. Fauci summoned the entire upper clergy of his HIV orthodoxy—and all of its lower acolytes and altar boys—to unleash a storm of fierce retribution on the Berkeley virologist and his followers. … the AIDS establishment, down to its lowliest doctor, publicly reviled Duesberg, NIH defunded him, and academia ostracized and exiled the brilliant Berkeley professor. The scientific press all but banished him. He became radioactive.
Surprisingly, however, Dr. Luc Montagnier, whose discovery of HIV Gallo had in fact stolen—as he admitted in 1991 after years of litigation—, became Duesberg’s most embarrassing convert, declaring at the San Francisco International AIDS Conference in June 1990, that “the HIV virus is harmless and passive, a benign virus.” He added that, according to his findings, HIV becomes dangerous only in the presence of a second organism, a bacteria-like bug called a mycoplasma. Montagnier, in fact, had never claimed that HIV was the only factor in AIDS, and grew increasingly skeptical of that theory. His repeated questioning of the establishment paradigm signaled the beginning of his vilification, for which his Nobel Prize hardly protected him.
Gallo’s “proof” that the cause of AIDS was a virus—as opposed to toxic exposures— provided the critical foundation stone of Dr. Fauci’s career. It allowed Fauci to capture the AIDS program and launch NIAID as the leading federal partner of the drug-production industry. This explains why Fauci never funded any study to explore whether HIV actually caused AIDS, and took vigorous preemptive action against any such study.
Kennedy cites other dissenting voices on AIDS epidemiology. Dr. Shyh-Ching Lo, the Chief Researcher in charge of AIDS programs for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, was shocked by Anthony Fauci’s unconventional claim that antibodies, normally the sign of a robust immune response, should, with HIV, be the signal for impending death. Since “HIV tests” do not in reality detect the elusive virus but only antibodies, there seems to be an Orwellian inversion at work. Kennedy also quotes Dr. David Rasnick, a PhD biochemist who has worked for thirty years in the pharmaceutical biotech field:
Fauci’s fundamental conundrum is that he has told everybody to diagnose AIDS based on the presence of HIV antibodies. With every other disease, the presence of antibodies is the signal that the patient has vanquished the disease. With AIDS, Fauci and Gallo, and now Gates, claim it’s a sign you’re about to die. Think about it; if the objective of an AIDS vaccine is to stimulate antibody production, then success would mean that every vaccinated person would also have an AIDS diagnosis. I mean, this is fodder for a comedy bit. It’s like someone gave the Three Stooges an annual billion-dollar budget!
The nature of AIDS—a syndrome, not a disease—is itself subject to questions, since it was made to encompass a galaxy of some thirty separate well-known diseases, all of which occur in individuals who have no HIV infection. “In the hands of Dr. Fauci’s opportunistic PIs, AIDS became an amorphous malady subject to ever-changing definitions, encompassing a multitude of old diseases in hosts who test positive for HIV.” Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR tests, pointed out that the PCR was capable of finding HIV signals in large segments of the population who suffered no AIDS symptoms. On the other hand, AIDS commonly occurs in people who test HIV negative, as Geoffrey Cowley documented in a 1992 Newsweek article, followed by Steve Heimoff in the Los Angeles Times.
These very inconsistencies were not a problem for Fauci and his standing army of pharmaceutical mercenaries. Quite the opposite: they opened up Africa’s AIDS bonanza. Researchers funded by Fauci, using PCR tests and murky statistical models, declared that up to 30 million Africans were suffering from AIDS, nearly half the adult population in some nations. While in Western nations, AIDS continued to be a disease of drug addicts and homosexual “poppers” (consumers of the amyl nitrite vasodilator providing relaxation of the anal musculature, packaged into the “popper” container patented by Burroughs Wellcome and advertised in the gay press throughout the AIDS epidemic), mysteriously, in Africa, 59 percent of AIDS cases were women, and 85 percent were heterosexuals.
But in the early 1990s, the character of AIDS changed dramatically with the proliferation of AZT. As they started to give AZT to people who were in fact not even sick but simply positive on the HIV test, AIDS started to look increasingly like AZT poisoning. And the death rate climbed precipitously. According to the Duesbergians, the vast majority of “AIDS deaths” after 1987 were actually caused by AZT. The medication that Dr. Fauci was prescribing to treat AIDS patients actually did what the virus could not: it caused AIDS itself. In 1988, the average survival time for patients taking AZT was four months. In 1997, recognizing the lethal effect of AZT, health officials lowered the dose; the average lifespan of AZT patients then rose to twenty-four months. According to Dr. Claus Köhnlein, a German oncologist, “We virtually killed a whole generation of AIDS patients without even noticing it because the symptoms of the AZT intoxication were almost indistinguishable from AIDS.”
In July 2019, Dr. Fauci made a surprise announcement: he finally had a working HIV vaccine, the potential “nail in the coffin” for the epidemic. He conceded that his new vaccine didn’t prevent transmission of AIDS, but predicted that those who took the jab would find that when they did get AIDS, the symptoms would be much reduced. Kennedy comments:
So confident was Dr. Fauci of the media’s slavish credulity that he assumed, correctly, that he’d never need to answer the many questions raised by this feverish gibberish. That entire odd proposition received zero critical press commentary. His success at slapping lipstick on this donkey and selling it to the world as a Thoroughbred may have emboldened his ruse—a year later—of placing similar cosmetics on the COVID vaccines that, likewise, neither prevent disease nor preclude transmission.
By 2019, the AIDS rope started to wear out. Who still cared about AIDS anyway? The “Covid-19 Pandemic” came as the perfect opportunity for a reset and an update in the pharmaceutical racket. As Winston Churchill reportedly said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. With complicit corporate media blacking out the scandalous track record of his white-coat mafia, Fauci emerged, again, as the good doctor, the savior.
“Is it fair to blame Dr. Fauci for a crisis that, of course, has many authors?” asks Kennedy. To some extent, it is.
Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984. Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch. Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease, exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children. The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens. America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.
Dr. Fauci has done nothing to advance NIAID’s core obligation of researching the causes of chronic allergic and autoimmune diseases that have mushroomed under his tenure. Instead, Fauci has “reshaped NIAID into the leading incubator for new pharmaceutical products, many of which, ironically, profit from the cascading chronic disease pandemic.” Instead of researching the causes of Americans’ failing health, Dr. Fauci funnels the bulk of his $6 billion budget to the research and development of new drugs and vaccines that are largely responsible for weakening our natural immunity. “Of late, he has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism.”
I was reminded of Dr. Knock, the central character of Jules Romains’s famous novel Knock or the Triumph of Medicine, written in 1923. Dr. Knock is a shady medical doctor of dubious competence who professes that “health” is an obsolete and unscientific concept, and that all men are sick and need to be informed about it by their doctor. To advance his plan of converting a whole town into permanent patients, he enlists the help of the school teacher and of the pharmacist, who suddenly sees his clientele booming (watch unforgettable moments of Guy Lefranc’s 1951 film adaptation with Louis Jouvet here and here).
Louis Jouvet as Dr. Knock in 1951
To some extent, however, Fauci is himself the product of a civilizational orientation that could only, in the long run, lead to the tyrannical medical technocracy that is now trying to enslave us. Rather than a new Dr. Frankenstein, Fauci is our own monster coming back after us. Kennedy hints at this vast aspect of the question, pointing to the need for deep questioning. The way Americans and Westerners in general have come to view health care has been shaped by the philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation: “a pill for an ill.” In the debate between the “miasma theory”—that emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses—versus the “germ theory”—which blames disease on microscopic pathogens—we have unambiguously opted for the latter. We have signed in for an approach to disease that requires to identify the culpable germ and tailor a poison to kill it. The choice was not forced upon us. We have surrendered responsibility for our health to medical experts and insurance brokers.
As Dr. Claus Köhnlein and Torsten Engelbrecht observe in their book Virus Mania (2007) quoted by Kennedy: “The idea that certain microbes—above all fungi, bacteria, and viruses—are our great opponents in battle, causing certain diseases that must be fought with special chemical bombs, has buried itself deep into the collective conscience.” It is a warlike paradigm, perfectly suited for manufacturing consent on the way to dictatorship. As Kennedy wrote in his preface to Dr. Joseph Mercola and Ronni Cummins, The Truth About Covid-19 (2021), “demagogues must weaponize fear to justify their demands for blind obedience.”
Government technocrats, billionaire oligarchs, Big Pharma, Big Data, Big Media, the high-finance robber barons, and the military industrial intelligence apparatus love pandemics for the same reasons they love wars and terrorist attacks. Catastrophic crises create opportunities of convenience to increase both power and wealth.
I posted this article on Craigslist in ‘Community’ where all the other posts are low rent commercial ads. This is a way for me to pay attention to the ideas in this wise piece of writing advice.
Audio of Article – Mp3
Every Wednesday, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know.
The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit I’ve been accused of writing what I know on a good many occasions. Acquaintances, book reviewers, kind souls who’ve attended public readings, students, they’ve all charged me with writing autobiographical fiction. Sometimes, the critic notes a parallel between my background and that of a character. At other times, the reasoning is fuzzier. A woman at a reading once told me, “I liked your book a lot, but the stories made me think you’d be taller.” I’m never offended; at times, I’ve been weirdly flattered. Comments like these make me think I’m getting away with something.
The facts are these: I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, the part of the country where most every word of fiction I’ve published takes place. I grew up around horses and hurricanes; my father worried about money, occasionally moonlighted to pay the bills, and died young; my mother smoked and paid mightily for it. If you read Corpus Christi: Stories, you’ll undoubtedly recognize elements from my life in the stories; however, very few of the experiences in the book are my own. In early versions of some stories, my impulse was to try to record how certain events in my life had played out, but by the third draft, I was prohibitively bored. I knew how, in real life, the stories ended, and I had a pretty firm idea of what they “meant,” so the story could not surprise me, or provide an opportunity for wonder. I was writing to explain, not to discover. The writing process was as exciting as completing a crossword puzzle I’d already solved. So I changed my approach.
Instead of thinking of my experiences as structures I wanted to erect in fiction, I started conceiving of them as the scaffolding that would be torn down once the work was complete. I took small details from my life to evoke a place and the people who inhabit it, but those details served to illuminate my imagination. Before, I’d forced my fiction to conform to the contours of my life; now I sought out any and every point where a plot could be rerouted away from what I’d known. The shift was seismic. My confidence waned, but my curiosity sprawled. I was writing fiction, to paraphrase William Trevor, not to express myself, but to escape myself. When I recall those stories now, the flashes of autobiography remind me of stars staking a constellation. Individually, the stars are unimportant; only when they map shapes in the darkness, shapes born of imagination, do we understand their light.
I don’t know the origin of the “write what you know” logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: “From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.” If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone. In the game, one kid whispers a message to a second kid and then that kid whispers it to a third and so on, until the message circles the room and returns to the first kid. The message is always altered, minimized, and corrupted by translation. “Bill is smart to sit in the grass” becomes “Bill is a smart-ass.” A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material.
Another confession: part of me dies inside when a student whose story has been critiqued responds to the workshop by saying, “You can’t object to the _________ scene. It really happened! I was there!” The writer is giving preference to the facts of an experience, the so-called literal truth, rather than fiction’s narrative and emotional integrity. Conceived this way, the writer’s story is relegated to an inferior and insurmountable station; it can neither compete with, nor live without, the ur-experience. Such a writer’s sole ambition is for the characters and events to represent other and superior–read: actual–characters and events. Meaning, the written story has never been what mattered most. Meaning, the reader is meant to care less about the characters and more about whoever inspired them, and the actions in a story serve to ensure that we track their provenance and regard that material as truer. Meaning, the story is engineered–and expected–to be about something. And aboutness is all but terminal in fiction.
Stories aren’t about things. Stories are things.
Stories aren’t about actions. Stories are, unto themselves, actions.
To be perfectly clear: I don’t tell students not to ferret through their lives for potential stories. I don’t want, say, a soldier who served in Iraq to shy away from writing war stories. Quite the opposite. I want him to freight his fiction with rich details of combat. I want the story to evoke the texture of the sand and the noise of a Baghdad bazaar, the terrible and beautiful shade of blue smoke ribboning from the barrel of his M-4. His experience should liberate his imagination, not restrict it. Of course I want him to take inspiration where he can find it. What I don’t want–and what’s prone to happen when writers set out to write what they know–is for him to think an imagined story is less urgent, less harrowing or authentic, than a true story.
Take, for example, The Lazarus Project, by Bosnian-born author Aleksandar Hemon. In this superb and wrenching novel, Hemon entwines two narratives–the 1908 murder of Lazarus Averbuch in Chicago, and the present-day journey of a writer named Brik through eastern Europe to research a book about Lazarus. Superficially, the novel seems as entrenched in autobiography as it is in history: Brik, like Hemon, was born in Bosnia, and Hemon lives, like the fictional Brik, in Chicago; Hemon, like Brik, also traveled through Europe to research the project with a photographer friend, and sure enough, both a photographer friend and photographs can be found in the novel. However, The Lazarus Project is far more than the sum of its parts. The raw materials serve Hemon’s fiction in the same way that paint, canvas, and onions served Cezanne’s Still Life With Onions. The goal isn’t to represent an experience, but instead to create a piece of art that is itself an experience. In a recent interview, Hemon, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, said, “I reserve the right to get engaged with any aspect of human experience, and so that means that I can–indeed I must–go beyond my experience to engage. That’s non-negotiable.” Amen.
And what of Lorrie Moore’s masterpiece “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk”? Upon its publication in 1997, many readers assumed Moore’s short story of parents coping with their one-year-old boy’s kidney cancer was nonfiction; after all, her family had endured similar trauma and the mother in the story was, like Moore, a teacher and fiction writer. (At one point, the father encourages the mother to “take notes” on the ordeal so she can write and sell a story to offset the mounting medical expenses.) And yet the story’s potency is attributable to the architecture of fiction, the distance that Moore pries open between her family and the family on the page. A straightforward recounting of the experience would merely confirm what reader and author already know: cancer is horrible, watching children suffer is horrible, etc. To affect the reader, to reveal the fullness and force of such trauma, Moore invokes her imagination. She deploys humor, wordplay, dramatized scenes, a complex (mostly) third-person narration, and an apparatus of irony built on the crucial conceit that the mother lacks the necessary skill and courage to write this story. As she makes her way to see her son after his surgery, her thinking sums up the limitations of simply writing what you know: “How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things . . . One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really.”
Or, speaking of war stories, consider Tim O’Brien’s collection of stories, The Things They Carried. The book renders the myriad horrors, exhilarations, doldrums, and tragedies of the Vietnam War with vividness and intimacy, and because the author is a veteran, the book’s power might be assumed to emanate from O’Brien’s firsthand knowledge. And maybe it does. But in “Good Form,” one of the short-short stories in the collection, the narrator says, “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” I’ve always found an abiding comfort in this claim, and the comfort is compounded by the fact that the narrator is a man who shares so much of the author’s pedigree–his experience in Vietnam, his current literary vocation, even his age and name. O’Brien could have written the “happening-truth” of his experience and called it a day. (In fact, he did just that in his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home.) But by choosing fiction here, especially after having written a nonfiction account of his experiences, he tacitly acknowledges that something is gained by setting imagination loose on history, something profound and revelatory and vital: empathy. Empathy, to my mind, is the channel through which writer and reader can most assuredly connect with the characters. And if personal experience constrains a story, often to the point of dullness and abstraction, then empathy simultaneously sharpens and emancipates it. O’Brien writes:
Here is happening-truth, I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and afraid to look . . .
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
Another deeper, more essential part of me dies when a workshop student says, “What I wanted to do was __________.” The idea of a writer “wanting” to do something in a story unhinges me. At best, such desire smacks of nostalgia and, at worst, it betrays agenda. I feel pity for the characters, a real sense of futility. I’m reminded of Ron Carlson’s hilarious story, “What We Wanted to Do,” in which a group of villagers intends to spill a cauldron of boiling oil on the Visigoths storming their gates. The oil, however, never reaches its boiling point, so when the villagers commence their dousing, the liquid is lukewarm and the Visigoths aren’t so much scalded as they are terribly pissed off. The result is their most vicious attack. The lesson is a good one for fiction writers: stories fueled by intentions never reach their boiling point.
And writing what you know is knotted up with intention, and intention in fiction is always related to control, to rigidity, and more often than not, a little solipsism. The writer seems to have chosen an event because it illustrates a point or mounts an argument. When a fiction writer has a message to deliver, a residue of smugness is often in the prose, a distressing sense of the story’s being rushed, of the author’s going through the motions, hurrying the characters toward whatever wisdom awaits on the last page. As a reader, I feel pandered to and closed out. Maybe even a little bullied. My involvement in the story, like the characters’, becomes utterly passive. We are there to follow orders, to admire and applaud the author’s supposed insight.
Maybe, though, the hardest thing for me to hear in workshop is a student’s claim that he isn’t “comfortable” writing certain stories. The words are almost blasphemous to me, equally saddening and maddening. Usually, the student’s discomfort relates to race or gender, sexuality or class. He feels ill-equipped to write about characters that don’t resemble him in the mirror and bedroom, so he reverts to writing what he knows. I argue that if the subject or character is intimidating, then that’s exactly what the writer should be exploring in fiction. My students worry about being invasive or predatory, and few things frighten them more than charges of appropriation and literary trespassing. But I see an altogether more menacing threat: the devaluing of not only imagination, but also compassion. And if empathy is important to fiction, compassion is invaluable. Compassion is empathy on steroids.
Was Toni Morrison a slave? Did she ever slit a child’s throat? Was Nabokov, in light of his “fancy prose style,” a murderer? Has Haruki Murakami ever constructed a flute from the souls of cats? Yes, Flannery O’Connor limped, but did she ever lose a wooden leg to a huckster Bible salesman? Tim O’Brien served in Vietnam, but, as the narrator of “Good Form” says, “almost everything else is invented.” Even without extended research, I can guarantee Ron Carlson has never spilled oil onto the head of a Visigoth.
All of this recalls for me an interview with Allan Gurganus, the sublime novelist who so thoroughly imagined Lucy Marsden, that oldest living Confederate widow who dished all her secrets. Gurganus says, “As an amateur historian, I’m forever aware that ‘the second story’ of a building once referred to its murals.” I also remember reading that the murals painted on a building’s interior walls usually depicted a tale from history, and thus, if you were on the fourth floor, if you were seeing the fourth mural, you were on the fourth story. In the interview, Gurganus goes on to say, “For fantasists like me, history constitutes the ground floor only, staff entrance. We all enter there but–given our spirit yearnings, our malformed characters, as soon as possible, we ascend.” This seems inviolably true to me, and impossibly inspiring. Writers may enter their stories through literal experience, through the ground floor, but fiction brings with it an obligation to rise past the base level, to transcend the limitations of fact and history, and proceed skyward.
I’m also thinking again about my fiction workshop, those Wednesdays spent talking about people who don’t exist, and how chilled the students are when I discourage them from writing what they know. To reanimate them–or at least salvage my course-evaluation scores–I say fiction is an act of courage and humility, a protest against our mortality, and we, the authors, don’t matter. What matters is our characters, those constructions of imagination that can transcend our biases and agendas, our egos and entitlements and flesh. Trust your powers of empathy and invention, I say. Trust the example of the authors you love to read–Flaubert: “Emma, c’est moi”–and trust that your craft, when braided with compassion, will produce stories that matter both to you and to readers you’ve never met.
The students mostly buy it. Week by week, their stories are arresting and rewarding, and with each revision, I feel more optimistic, more reassured and moved by their work. My students succeed about as often as most writers do, as often as I do–in other words, often enough. As I read their good fiction, though, I sometimes wonder if I haven’t misunderstood something simple and essential. I’ve long believed that what has kept writers, again myself included, from fully transcending their personal experiences on the page was fear of incompetence: I can’t write a plot that involves a kidnapping because I’ve never been kidnapped, etc. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the reason we find it so difficult to cleave our fiction from our experience, the reason we’re so loath to engage our imaginations and let the story rise above the ground floor of truth, isn’t that we’re afraid we’ll do the job poorly, but that we’re afraid we’ll do it too well? If we succeed, if the characters are fully imagined, if they are so beautifully real that they quicken and rise off the page, then maybe our own experiences will feel smaller, our actions less consequential. Maybe we’re afraid that if we write what we don’t know, we’ll discover something truer than anything our real lives will ever yield. And maybe we encounter still another, more insidious threat–the threat that if we do our jobs too well, if we powerfully render characters who are untethered from our experience, they’ll supplant us in the reader’s mind. Maybe we worry that fiction’s vividness will put our own brief and negligible lives into too stark a relief, and the reader, seduced by literature’s permanence, will leave us behind. Maybe we worry we’ll be forgotten. Maybe we’re afraid of what we want most–for our characters to outlive us–and maybe the possibility that the writer, not the reader, will get lost in the pages of a great book is, ultimately, too much for us to bear.
Trade unionists in the 1920s didn’t have much reason for optimism. Labor membership, which had shot upwards amid postwar unrest, crested and then plunged. Observers fretted that technological and cultural changes had rendered the labor movement obsolete and workers apathetic. “Our younger members, especially, have gone jazzy,” one union official lamented in the mid 1920s.
A decade later, strikes were blocking production across the country, and union density was skyrocketing.
After years of malaise in the labor movement, is a similar upsurge possible today?
Renowned labor scholar Beverly Silver thinks so. Chair of the sociology department at Johns Hopkins University, Silver has been a radical advocate for workers her whole life. Her award-winning work, including her pathbreaking Forces of Labor, deals with profound questions of labor, development, social conflict, and war. In a recent interview with Jacobin she explained what labor’s past can tell us about the present state — and future — of working-class struggle around the globe. The last few decades have seen a profound restructuring of the working class in the United States and other advanced capitalist countries. What are the broad contours of that restructuring process, and what are the forces driving it?
Capitalism is constantly transforming the organization of production and the balance of power between labor and capital — restructuring the working class, remaking the working class. So to answer this question I think we need to take a longer-term view.
It makes sense to go back to the mid-twentieth century — to the thirties, forties, and fifties. That’s when we first see the emergence of a very strong mass-production working class in the United States, most paradigmatically in the automobile industry but also in sectors like mining, energy, and transportation, which were central to industrialization and trade.
Pretty much right out of the gate after World War II, capital moved to restructure — reconfiguring the organization of production, the labor process, sources of labor supply, and the geographical location of production. This restructuring was in large part a response to strong labor movements in manufacturing and mining, in logistics and transportation.
An expanded version of David Harvey’s concept of the spatial fix is helpful here for understanding this restructuring. Capital tried to resolve the problem of strong labor movements, and the threat to profitability that labor posed, by implementing a series of “fixes.”
Companies utilized a spatial fix by moving to lower-wage sites. They implemented “technological fixes” — reducing their dependence on workers by accelerating automation. And they have been implementing what we can think of as a “financial fix” — moving capital out of trade and production and into finance and speculation as yet another means of reducing dependence on the established, mass-production working class for profits.
The beginnings of this shift of capital to finance and speculation was already visible in the 1970s, but it exploded after the mid 1990s, following the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton years.
So what looked like a sudden collapse in the power of organized labor in the United States in the eighties and nineties was actually rooted in decades of restructuring on these multiple fronts that began in the mid-twentieth century.
Of course, it is important to point out that there is another side of the coin. These capitalist fixes unmade the established mass-production working class, but they simultaneously made new working classes in the United States and elsewhere. These new working classes are emerging as the protagonists of labor struggles in many parts of the world today. It is no secret that the traditional forms of working-class organization, like trade unions in the United States and social-democratic parties in Europe, are in the midst of a severe crisis. How has capital succeeded in undermining and taming these organized expressions of working-class interest?
If we look back in history at high points of labor militancy, particularly those moments involving left movements tied to socialist and working-class parties, a recurrent set of strategies to undermine the radical potential of these movements is apparent. They can be summed up as restructuring, co-optation, and repression.
So, the kinds of restructuring or fixes I mentioned above — geographical relocation, technological change, financialization — certainly played an important role in weakening these movements. In the meantime, the co-optation of trade unions and working-class parties — their incorporation as junior partners into national hegemonic projects and social compacts — also played an important role. Finally, repression was an important part of the mix all along.
Just taking the United States as an example, in the post–World War II decades we see McCarthyism and the expulsion of left and Communist militants from the trade unions. Then, in the sixties and seventies, strong factory- and community-based movements of black workers — the Black Panther Party, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM) — were brought under control by out-and-out repression.
And today — with the militarization of local police forces and the endless “war on terror” creating a hostile environment for the mobilization of immigrant and black workers — coercion continues to play a major role. One of the big debates today is whether the defining dynamic shaping the global working class is exploitation — workers being squeezed at the point of production — or exclusion — workers being essentially locked out of stable wage labor. What are your thoughts on this debate?
I see them as equally important. Certainly it would be a mistake to write off the continuing importance of struggles against exploitation at the point of production. Indeed, one outcome of the spatial-fix strategy has been to create new working classes and labor-capital contradictions wherever capital goes.
In other words, workers’ resistance to exploitation at the point of production has followed the movement of capital around the globe over the past half-century. Indeed, we are witnessing the latest manifestation of this dynamic with the massive wave of labor unrest now taking place in China.
Once it became clear to corporations that simply moving factories to low-wage sites could not solve the problem of labor control, capital came to rely more heavily on automation and financialization. Automation, while hardly new, has recently been expelling wage workers from production at a rapid clip, increasing the visibility of the exclusionary dynamic. A recent glaring illustration is the news that FoxConn has actually followed through with its threat to introduce a massive number of robots into its factories in China.
Likewise, the movement of surplus capital into finance and speculation is also contributing in a major way to the increasing salience of exclusion. Finance — especially those financial activities that are not adjuncts to trade and production — absorbs relatively little wage labor; more importantly, it derives profits primarily from the regressive redistribution of wealth through speculation, rather than the creation of new wealth. Hence the link made by Occupy between obscene levels of class inequality and financialization.
Automation and financialization are leading to an acceleration in the long-term tendency of capitalism to destroy established livelihoods at a much faster rate than it creates new ones. This was always the predominant tendency of historical capitalism in much of the Global South, where dispossession tended to outpace the absorption of wage labor, and thus where workers increasingly had nothing to sell but their labor power, but little chance of actually selling it.
While this tendency is nothing new, both its acceleration and the fact that its negative effects are being felt in core countries — and not just in the Third World — help explain why the exclusionary dynamic has come to the fore in current debates. To frame the question differently, does it even make sense to think of exclusion and exploitation as separate processes?
Well, Marx certainly didn’t view them as separate phenomena. In the first volume of Capital, he argued that the accumulation of capital went hand in hand with the accumulation of a surplus population — that wealth was being created through exploitation, but at the same time big chunks of the working class were excluded or made superfluous to the needs of capital.
For most of the twentieth century, there was an uneven geographical distribution in terms of where the brunt of exclusionary processes was felt. Indeed, until recently, one of the ways capital maintained legitimacy within core countries was by pushing the weight of the exclusionary processes onto the Third World as well as onto marginalized sections of the working class within the core.
The world working class was divided, with boundaries very much defined by citizenship, race, ethnicity, and gender. Today these boundaries are still quite salient, however. Particularly after the 2008 global financial crisis, the weight of exclusionary processes is being felt more heavily in core countries than in the past — with all sorts of political implications. In your work you’ve thought a lot about the power of workers and the working class. You distinguish between different sources of worker power. Can you talk more about that?
Yes, a major distinction is between structural power and associational power. Associational power is the capacity to make gains through trade union and political party organization. Structural power is the power that comes from workers’ strategic location within the process of production — a power that can be, and often has been, exercised in the absence of trade union organization. Why is it useful to make these distinctions?
Well, take structural power, for example. There are two main types of structural power: workplace bargaining power and marketplace bargaining power.
Most of the time, people think about marketplace bargaining power to understand worker power more broadly. If there’s high unemployment, your marketplace bargaining power is low, and vice versa. Workplace bargaining power — the ability to bring interconnected processes of production to a halt through localized work stoppages — is less emphasized, but is perhaps even more important for understanding sources of workers’ power today.
This is because, if you look at long-term historical trends, workers’ power at the point of production is undoubtedly, on balance, increasing. This is surprising to people. But this increased workplace bargaining power is apparent with the spread of just-in-time methods in manufacturing. In contrast to more traditional mass-production methods, no buffers or surpluses are built into the production process.
Thus, with the spread of just-in-time production in the automobile industry, for example, a relatively small number of workers, by simply stopping production in a strategic node — even, say, a windshield-wiper parts supplier — can bring an entire corporation to a standstill. There are plenty of recent examples of this in the automobile industry around the world.
Likewise, workers in logistics — transport and communication — have significant and growing workplace bargaining power tied to the cascading economic impact that stoppages in these sectors would have. Moreover, notwithstanding the almost universal tendency to think of globalization processes as weakening labor, the potential geographical scale of the impacts of these stoppages has increased with globalization. What about associational power? If workers have no unions or labor parties, doesn’t that undermine their structural bargaining power?
Not necessarily. Take the case of China. Autonomous trade unions are illegal, but there have been some major improvements recently in minimum-wage laws, labor laws, and working conditions. These changes have come out of a grassroots upsurge that has taken advantage of workers’ structural power, both in the marketplace and, even more important, in the workplace.
I think we also have to be honest about the ambiguous structural position of trade unions. If they’re too successful and deliver too much to their base, capital becomes extremely hostile and doesn’t want to deal with them and so moves to a more repressive strategy.
Capital will sometimes make deals with trade unions, but only if trade unions agree to play a mediating role, limiting labor militancy and ensuring labor control. But in order to effectively do that, unions have to deliver something to their base, which brings us back to the first problem. Ultimately, the question is: in what kind of situations does this contradictory dynamic between trade unions and capitalists play out to the benefit of workers? What do you think about arguments that struggles are shifting from the point of production to the streets or community?
This brings us back to the earlier question about the relative importance of exploitation and exclusion in shaping the world working class. Looking at the world working class as a whole today, I don’t think it would be accurate to say that struggles are shifting predominantly to the streets, especially if we are talking about struggles that have a serious disruptive impact on business as usual.
Struggles at the point of production continue to be an important component of overall world labor unrest. At the same time, the excluded — the unemployed and those with weak structural power — have no choice but to make their voices heard through direct action in the streets rather than direct action in the workplace.
The coexistence of struggles at the workplace and struggles in the street has been a feature of capitalism historically, as has the coexistence of exploitation and exclusion. Sometimes these two types of struggles proceed without intersecting in solidarity with each other, especially since, historically, the working class has been divided — both within countries and between countries — in the degree to which their experience is primarily shaped by the dynamics of exclusion or the dynamics of exploitation.
But if we think of major successful waves of labor unrest, they combined, in explicit or implicit solidarity, both of these kinds of struggles. Even the Flint factory occupation and subsequent 1936 and ’37 strike wave — a movement that was fundamentally based on leveraging workers’ power at the point of production — was made more potent by simultaneous struggles in the streets of unemployed workers and community solidarity.
Or, if we think of a recent mass movement that was widely seen as taking place almost entirely in the streets — Egypt in 2011 — it was when the Suez Canal workers leveraged their workplace bargaining power with a strike in support of the mass movement in the streets that Mubarak was forced to step down. It is also interesting to note that the April 6 youth movement that initiated the occupation of Tahrir Square was founded in 2008 to support a major strike by industrial workers.
So a fundamental problem for the Left today, which is also not new, is to figure out how to combine workplace bargaining power and the power of the street — to find the nodes of connection between unemployed, excluded, and exploited wage workers. This is almost certainly easier when the excluded and exploited are members of the same households or the same communities.
In the United States, we can see glimmers of these intersections with the 2015 dockworkers’ strike in California in support of Black Lives Matter mobilizations in the streets, and with the way the community and workplace struggles of immigrant workers intersect. In the United States today, it seems like a major focus of labor organizing and activism is on the lowest-wage workers in the service sectors. What do you make of this? Is this where we should be focusing our energies? Or should we be looking at different kinds of workers in different industries and sectors?
It’s not a mistake to place a big emphasis on these workers. If you’re going to raise the conditions of the majority of the population, you have to raise the conditions of these workers.
I think part of the skepticism inherent in this question is that so far this strategy hasn’t been very successful. Again, thinking about workplace bargaining power is useful here. At Walmart, for example, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hit the retail side. You have to hit the distribution side.
The same goes for fast food. If you hit the distribution side, then you can leverage workplace bargaining power. Otherwise, you are left with a struggle that is confined to the streets. But this also leads us back to the question of how and when workers with strong workplace bargaining power exercise that power in support of broader transformational goals. Along with Giovanni Arrighi, you have argued that the trajectory of the workers’ movements in the United States and other national contexts are profoundly influenced by their relationship to broader movements in global politics, wars, and international conflicts. How have recent geopolitical shifts affected the strength of labor in the United States?
This is a very big and important question. I think a lot of the discussion of labor movements tends to focus on the economic side, but the geopolitical side is equally, if not more, important for understanding the prospects and possibilities for workers and workers’ movements, historically and going forward.
Fifteen years ago, right before September 11, it looked like we were on the verge of a mass upsurge of labor unrest in the United States, with a strong epicenter among immigrant workers. There were a number of major strikes that had been planned or were in progress, and then the dynamic shifted.
The war on terror gave a major boost to coercion and repression in maintaining the status quo, and not just in the workplace, in terms of employer hostility to trade unions, but more broadly, in terms of the impact of the permanent war environment on the prospects for organizing. Coercion and repression seem to be fundamental to capitalism. What’s different today in the relationship between workers, workers’ movements, and geopolitics?
Well, I think to answer this question it is important to place the current permanent war environment within the context of the broader crisis of US world power and hegemonic decline.
And we need to look at the long-term historical relationship between workers’ rights and the reliance of states on the working class to fight wars. Let’s discuss the latter first.
One of the well-known, but not widely discussed, roots of labor strength — or at least the institutionalization of trade unions and the deepening of democratic rights in the United States and in Western Europe, and to some extent globally — was the particular nature of war in the twentieth century, including the industrialization of the means of war and mass conscription.
To fight this type of war, the core powers, the imperial powers, needed the cooperation of the working class, both as soldiers fighting at the front and as workers keeping the factories going. War-making depended on industrial production for everything from armaments to boots. Hence the common wisdom during both world wars was that whoever kept the factories running would win the war.
In this context worker cooperation was key, and the relationship between war-making and civil unrest was unmistakable. The two biggest peaks of world labor unrest in the twentieth century, by far, were the years immediately following World War I and World War II. The troughs of labor unrest were in the midst of the wars themselves.
It’s also no coincidence that the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement was in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War, and that the height of the Black Power Movement came during and after the Vietnam War.
States sought to secure the cooperation of workers through the mobilization of nationalist and patriotic sentiments, but this was not sustainable without tangible advances in workers’ rights. Thus, expansions of the welfare state went hand in hand with expansions of the warfare state in the twentieth century. Put differently: working-class nationalism could only trump working-class internationalism if states showed that winning wars meant rising standards of living and expanding rights for workers as both workers and citizens. Do you think this is still the case today, in the context of seemingly permanent warfare?
The nature of war has changed today in many respects. Just like capital reorganized production in response to the strength of labor, so has the state restructured the military to lessen its dependence on workers and citizens to wage war. The mass movement against the Vietnam War, and the refusal of soldiers at the front in Vietnam to go on fighting, was a turning point, triggering a fundamental restructuring of the organization and nature of war-making.
We see the results of this restructuring today with the end of mass conscription and the increasing automation of warfare. With the growing reliance on drones and other high-tech weaponry, US soldiers are being removed from direct danger — not entirely, but much more than in the past.
This is a different situation than the one that linked workers’ movements and warfare in the twentieth century. The welfare and warfare states have become uncoupled in the twenty-first century. Whether, under these changing conditions, working-class internationalism will trump working-class nationalism is a critical but unresolved question.
I have focused on the United States in this discussion, but the transformation in the nature of war-making has broader impacts. In the mid-twentieth century, many colonial countries were incorporated into the imperial war process as suppliers of both soldiers and materials for the war effort, leading to an analogous strengthening and militancy of the working class.
Today, in country after country in a wide swath of the Global South, you have a situation in which modern US war-making is leading to the wholesale disorganization and destruction of the working class in places where high-tech weaponry is being dropped. The current “migrant crisis,” both its roots and its repercussions, is a deeply disturbing blowback from this new age of war. In previous periods, rising tides of militancy and organization have tended to bring with them new and powerful organizational forms. In the nineteenth century it was the craft union, in the twentieth century it was the industrial union. Are these forms doomed to historical oblivion, and if so, what might replace them?
They’re certainly not doomed to historical oblivion. In the United States, for example, some of the most successful unions today — in terms of recruiting new members and militancy — are the ones that have their roots in the old AFL, in the craft-worker tradition. Some people say elements of that old organizing style are more suitable to the horizontal nature of current workplaces, rather than the industrial unions associated with vertically integrated corporations.
But this doesn’t mean industrial unions are dead, either. The types of successes that were characteristic of the classic CIO unions — the Flint sit-down strike in the engine plant and the strikes beyond that — relied on the strategic bargaining power of workers at the point of production. I think that there are still lessons to be learned from these successes.
Clearly neither of these forms succeeded in touching the fundamental problems of capitalism, however. As I already mentioned, the problem with trade unions is that, to the extent that they are too effective, capital and the state have no interest in working with them and cooperating. Yet to the extent that they — and this is largely what’s happened — don’t deliver a serious transformation in the life and livelihoods of workers, they lose credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of workers themselves.
I think we constantly see both sides of this contradiction. The trade unions are part of the solution but are not the full solution. One of the ideas that Marx advocated for is imploring trade unions to connect with the unemployed in a single organization. Is that an option in places like the United States? I think that it’s certainly the ideal — it’s what Marx and Engels were talking about in the Communist Manifesto in terms of the role of communists in the labor movement.
It also brings us back to the questions about the relationship between processes of exploitation and exclusion and about the relationship between struggles at the point of production and struggles in the street. For trade unions seeking to follow Marx’s directive, it means thinking strategically about the conditions under which workers with stable waged employment can be drawn into and be radicalized by the struggles of the unemployed and precariously employed, and vice versa. What are the prospects for labor revitalization in the United States? Do you expect to see an upsurge in militancy and organization in the near future?
On the one hand, let me say that I do, just on theoretical grounds, expect an upsurge of labor militancy in the United States, and not just in the United States. On an empirical level, since 2008, we have been witnessing an upsurge worldwide in class-based social unrest, which may be seen in retrospect as the beginnings of a longer-term revitalization. This assessment goes against the prevailing sentiment. It’s interesting to compare the current pessimism to what was being said by experts in the 1920s. At that time, they were looking at the ways in which craft workers were being undermined by the expansion of mass production, and they were claiming that the labor movement was mortally weakened and permanently dead. They were saying that right up until the eve of the mass wave of labor unrest in the mid 1930s.
They didn’t understand that, while it was true that a lot of the craft-worker unions were being undermined, there was a new working class in formation. We see the same thing today — a situation where there is a twentieth-century mass-production working class that’s being undermined, but there is also a new working class in formation, including in manufacturing.
It’s important not to just wipe manufacturing out of the consciousness of what’s happening even in the United States, much less in the world as a whole. Nevertheless, each time new waves of labor unrest erupt, the working class looks fundamentally different, and the strategies and mobilization again are fundamentally different. Who do you think would lead the upsurge this time around? It’s hard to say. What is clearer are the critical issues facing labor today, and to some extent these point to the mass base and leadership needed for a “next upsurge” that is transformational. We’re in a situation where capital is destroying livelihoods at a much faster pace than it’s creating new ones, so we’re experiencing on a global scale, including in core countries and the United States, an expansion of the surplus population, and particularly what Marx referred to in Capital as the stagnant surplus population: those who are really never going to be incorporated into stable wage labor.
Contingent workers, temporary workers, part-time workers, and the long-term unemployed — this whole group is expanding, leading us down the road to pauperism. Notwithstanding the deep crisis of legitimacy this is creating for capitalism, there’s nothing, no tendency within capitalism itself, to go in a different direction. If we are going to change directions, it’s going to have to come from a mass political movement, rather than something coming out of capital itself. There are two other important points to consider. One is that capitalist profitability, throughout its history, has depended on the partial externalization of not only the cost of reproduction of labor, but also the cost of reproduction of nature. This externalization is becoming increasingly untenable and unsustainable, but there’s also no inherent tendency within capital to redirect this.
Moreover, since the treatment of nature as a free good was a pillar of the postwar social compact tying mass production to the promise of working-class mass consumption, no simple return to the so-called golden age of Keynesianism and developmentalism is possible. Second, the historical tendency in capitalism to resolve economic and political crises through expansionist, militaristic policies and war is something we have to take seriously, particularly in the current period of US hegemonic crisis and decline. Getting control over oil, grabbing resources, fighting over sea lanes in the South China Sea — these struggles have the potential for incredibly horrific outcomes for humanity as a whole. To avoid this, a renewed and updated labor internationalism will have to overcome the visible tendencies toward a resurgent and atavistic labor nationalism.
So a consideration of geopolitics — examining the links between militarism, domestic conflict, and labor movements — is where we need to begin and end any serious analysis. The old question of socialism or barbarism is as relevant today as it has ever been.
The Qataris and Saudis were hunting with falcons in southern Iraq in December 2015 when they were seized by armed men from the the powerful Iranian-supported movement known as Ketaeb of God. What an adventure hunting with falcons in southern Iraq must have seemed like to two dozen wealthy Qataris and two Saudi Arabian friends. The hunting party got permission to hunt with their birds of prey from the government in Baghdad. The group, including several members of the Qatari royal al-Thani family, was going to be in the ‘safe’ part of the country far from the fighting against Isis in the north around Mosul. But there are many armed groups in many parts of Iraq that are not under the control of the Baghdad government. The armed groups are called ‘militia’ but they are often more like private armies that carry out the goals of religious or other leaders who are essentially war lords. When not fighting other religious groups or ‘enemy’ targets the militias are often engaged in criminal enterprises with the aim of self enrichment
Southern Iraq is also heavily Shia and Qatar and Saudi Arabia have backed and are backing Sunni militants in Syria and Iraq who are making war on Shia communities. That this wealthy hunting party thought they could go into the heartland of the Shia as Qatar and Saudi Arabia fund and arm Sunni fanatics who make merciless war on Shia shows how out of touch they are. The hunter became the hunted. The 24 Qataris and 2 Saudis were captured by a Shia militia.
The ransom not only involved $500,000,000 in dollars and euros in 23 x-ray proof bags sent to Baghdad airport – the trade involved the release of two surrounded Shia communities in Syria and two surrounded Sunni ‘rebel’ communities being allowed to evacuate to other areas under a truce. The Islamist ‘rebels’ showed what they thought of the truce when a suicide bomber in a truck that seemed to be loaded with supplies and treats for children drove next to the evacuation buses of the Shia civilians. As the bomber called the children off a number of buses to his vehicle he set of an explosion that killed about 170 people and wounded another 350. Qatar backs the Islamist ‘rebels’ who send truck bombers to specifically target Shia children. Another part of the $500,000,000 deal felt through when the Baghdad authorities tried to x-ray and scan the 23 bags that came in on an airplane from Qatar. The bags were cut open and the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros where reveal to the Iraqi authorities who seized the money. The Qatari ambassador to Iraq was on the airplane but had not asked for the bags to be given diplomatic immunity. The Qataris had apparently thought the the hostage takers where working with the Iraqi airport authorities and would pick up the money at the airport.
The Iraq government does not want to give a half billion dollars to help fund a private army that they have no control over. “Hundreds of millions for armed groups? Is this acceptable?” Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi asked later at a press conference. In a special confidential document Mr. Abadi sent on 22 April 2017 told the Dawa Party members that Qatar had requested landing permission for a plane at Baghdad International Airport on 15 April 2017 so that freed hostages from the hunting party could fly home. When the aircraft landed and was routinely inspected airport officials “were surprised that there were 23 large heavy bags that appeared without prior notice or approval.” Going through the x-ray machine “the image appeared black,” meaning the contents were in some kind of lead lined bag to avoid detection.
Strangely the Qatari ambassador to Iraq and a special envoy sent by the Qatari Emir Tamimbin Hamad al-Thani got off the plane but did not ask for diplomatic immunity for the bags of money. Apparently the Qataris thought the kidnappers and militia had their own operatives at the airport who would take the bags upon arrival as the hostages came to the plane.
Even before the bags were opened the airport officials could hear the Qataris talking as if the 23 bags contained money. But opening the bags revealed a great deal of money, “hundreds of millions of dollars and euros.”
The Iraq government confiscated the money even as the Qatar government informed them that it was a ransom payment. The Iraq government had not been informed, and the Iraq government did not want to see a private army get a half a billion in funding.
The following is translated from O Bolsevikos [The Bolshevik] (No. 4, April 2018), newspaper of the Trotskyist Group of Greece (TOE).
Zoe Chrysali, one of the founding cadres of the Trotskyist Group of Greece, section of the International Communist League, died at the age of only 50 of brain cancer at her home in Aspropyrgos after years of health problems. We extend our deepest condolences to her sister Georgia and to all her friends.
Zoe was born and grew up in the working-class district of Aspropyrgos. From an early age she suffered from serious health issues, which she fought to the end with her incomparable tenacity despite the extreme adversity she faced. She was a stubborn person, with a special, sharp sense of humor, passionately insistent in expressing her opinions. She loved to tease and challenge her comrades and friends and was always up for a good fight. She adored music and books.
Having a keen sense of what it is to grow up and live as a woman in backward Greek society, Zoe joined the workers movement to fight against women’s oppression and for female sexual liberation. She understood that only through socialist revolution could women achieve their full emancipation.
Zoe came into contact with the ICL in mid 1999 and was won to the international’s position of principled opposition to the imperialist war against Serbia. In March 2000, she took part in discussions, along with other sympathizers, studying the ICL’s program. From then until 2003, when the TOE became a sympathizing section of the ICL at its Fourth International Conference, she played a leading role in the founding of the Greek section on a number of key questions, including the “Russian Question” and capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and East Europe. In June 2000, she wrote:
“I studied anew Trotsky’s books The Class Nature of the Soviet State, The Revolution Betrayed and the “Declaration of Principles” of the ICL. Thereafter, together with our own discussions, I consider that the positions of the ICL on the question of Afghanistan are consistent with our ideology and I agree with them on the basis of the defense of a bureaucratically degenerated workers state against the threat of the bourgeois counterrevolution.
“In regard to the question of China, what I consider applies is what Trotsky maintained in 1933, when he fought against the conception that the bureaucracy had already destroyed the Soviet workers state: Trotskyists judge that situation as dangerous but not desperate and they consider it an act of cowardice to announce that the revolutionary fight has been lost before the fight and without a fight.”
In 2001, Zoe engaged in the most important fight of her political life, playing a leading role in defense of national minorities in Greece against the then “leader” of the group, who refused to defend oppressed national minorities. This is a vital question for the establishment of a genuine Leninist-Trotskyist party in a Balkan country. The fight that she waged with other comrades on the national question led to a split in the group between the real internationalists and those who had compromised with poisonous Greek nationalism. It was this major struggle that laid the basis for the founding of the TOE. It is no exaggeration to say that without Zoe, there would probably not be a section of the ICL in Greece. In 2002, she went to London and worked with our comrades there, gaining valuable internationalist experience.
In 2005, Zoe withdrew from politics but remained a sympathizer of the TOE for many years. For a while, due to the enormous health problems that she faced, Zoe lost touch with our section and with the international. However, around five years ago she resumed contact with the Greek section. Fully aware that she had only a short time to live, Zoe asked us to arrange a secular funeral for her after she died. In a society in which cremation of the dead is not allowed and in which, for the most part, funeral arrangements—whether secular or religious—are dictated by the family, Zoe wished to make a final statement against religion and the Orthodox church.
It was not easy to carry out this last request, and we had to fight against the religious ceremony that had already been organized. Nevertheless, we succeeded with the valuable help of a sympathizer. In our grief at no longer having Zoe among us, we are comforted a little by the knowledge that we were able to satisfy her last wish. Those who knew her well will laugh and say that even in her death there had to be a little fight. It is more than certain that she deserved it.
We dedicate to our friend and comrade Zoe this issue of our newspaper, which reflects her struggle against the “holy trinity” of Greek capitalism—fatherland, religion and family.
David Harvey’s Jacobin interview on Marx’s Capital A promotion of the “life-style” politics
David Harvey’s Jacobin interview on Marx’s Capital A promotion of the “life-style” politics of the academic left
21 July 2018
(Vimeo – video of David Harvey’s Introduction to Reading Karl Marx’ ‘Capital’ –
The Jacobin magazine, which functions as a kind of house journal for the middle class radical liberal milieu, in particular the Democratic Socialists of America, has published an interview with the academic David Harvey, purporting to show why Marx’s Capital is “still the defining guide to understanding—and overcoming—the horrors of capitalism.”
Harvey, variously described as a social theorist, a historical-materialist geographer and sometimes a Marxist, has attracted a wide following over the past decade in the wake of the global financial crisis due to his online lectures on Capital and a number of books critical of capitalism and its irrationalities.
The interest in his writings and lectures, particularly from among younger people and students, is an expression of the growing hostility to capitalism, increasingly regarded as having failed, and the growing receptiveness towards socialism, coupled with a turn to Marx in the search for answers to the mounting problems and crises caused by the ongoing breakdown of the capitalist order.
But as with all of Harvey’s work, this interview does not provide a clarification or guide to Marx but serves to prevent an understanding of his masterwork, seeking to render him suitable to the political and life-style sensibilities of a middle class “left” audience.
This emerges from the very outset of the interview. Asked to give an overview of the three volumes of Capital, Harvey says: “Marx is very much into detail and it’s sometimes hard to get a sense of exactly what the whole concept of Capital is about.” This has been a recurring theme virtually since the day Capital was published—that it is too difficult and too dense to be comprehended.
Capital is certainly no easy work but that difficulty arises not from Marx but from the fact that capitalism is the most complex form of socio-economic organisation in the historical development of mankind.
However, as Harvey well knows, Marx provided a very clear explanation of the essential thread of his theoretical labours.
In the postface to the second edition of Capital, Marx favourably cited a Russian reviewer of the first edition published in 1867 who had set out the objective logic of his analysis.
The reviewer had begun by citing Marx’s famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859, in which he set out the materialist basis of his method.
There Marx had written: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. … At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing social relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”
Basing himself on this explanation, the Russian reviewer concluded that Marx “concerns himself with one thing: to show, by an exact scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social relations, and to establish, as impeccably as possible, the facts from which he starts out and on which he depends. For this it is quite enough if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over.”
In other words, Capital was the application of the theory of historical materialism, worked out by Marx and Engels in the late 1840s, to the analysis of capitalist society in which the central social relation of production was the buying and selling of the labour power of the new social force, the working class, which this society had brought into being. It was aimed at demonstrating how the very development of the productive forces to which this new social order had given rise inevitably came into conflict with the social relations on which it was based, leading to social revolution and the transition to a new and higher form of society.
While Capital was grounded on a thorough-going scientific analysis of capitalist society, it was not an academic treatise. It was written with the aim of providing the working class, its historical gravedigger, with the theoretical weapons necessary for its overthrow and the transition to a higher socio-economic order, international socialism.
It is highly significant, therefore, that in Harvey’s interview on Capital and its significance, the words “social revolution” and “working class” never appear.
What then is the essential content of the interview? It is the dressing up in Marxist-sounding terminology of the politics of the middle class pseudo-left, focusing on protests against some of the irrationalities and outrages of the capitalist system, concerned not with its overthrow but “life-style changes.” Its role is to seek to divert those seeking answers away from a real grappling with and understanding of Marx’s masterwork.
Harvey presents the three volumes of Capital as something of a jumble, that Marx was saying “in volume one, I deal with this, in volume two I deal with that and in volume three I deal with something else.”
Harvey goes on to say that Marx has in mind “the totality of the circulation of capital” but then points to a problem because Marx did not complete volumes two and three (they were edited by Engels from Marx’s drafts) and so they “aren’t as satisfactory as volume one.”
The upshot of this focus on circulation is twofold. First, it leaves the impression that there is no inherent logic to Marx’s presentation. Second, it downplays the centrality of capitalist production, dissolving it in the process of circulation, a move which, as we shall see, forms a key foundation of Harvey’s political perspective.
Contrary to Harvey, Marx is very clear on the logic of the three volumes, which he sets out at the beginning of volume three.
There he explains that the investigation in volume one concerns the process of capitalist production itself, leaving out the external secondary influences on this process. But as he notes, the analysis does not complete the life cycle of capital and so in volume two he considers how the process of production is supplemented by the process of circulation.
In volume three the issue is to “discover and present the concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole.”
“The configurations of capital, as developed in this volume,” he writes, “thus approach step by step the form in which they appear on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals on one another, i.e., in competition, and in the everyday consciousness of the agents of production themselves.” [1]
The materialist method employed by Marx is to ascend from the most abstract forms to the concrete. Capital, therefore, begins with the cell-form of the capitalist economy, the commodity, in which the product of human labour—the basis of all society—presents itself in the social form of a product produced for exchange.
The significance of this starting point was noted by Lenin:
“In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz. the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this ‘cell’ of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all the contradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this society in the summation of its individual parts, from its beginning to its end.” [2]
From the analysis of the commodity and its value, Marx reveals the origin of money as the material expression of value. The analysis of money discloses the nature of capital as self-expanding value.
The most decisive breakthrough made by Marx was to discover the source of this self-expansion. The issue which had tortured the minds of Marx’s classical predecessors in the science of political economy, in particular its two leading representatives, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was how, on the basis of market relations in which equivalents exchange for equivalents, could a surplus arise? In particular, how out of the most important exchange in commodity-capitalist society, could profit rise, if equivalents were exchanged for equivalents according to the laws of the market.
Marx established that the commodity that the worker sold to the capitalist was not his or her labour, as had previously been maintained, but the capacity to work, or labour power.
Like every other commodity its value was determined by the time taken to reproduce it, that is, it was determined by the value of the commodities needed to sustain the worker and enable the raising of a family to produce the next generation of wage workers.
The surplus value appropriated by the capitalist owner of the means of production, to whom the worker sold his or her labour power, arose from the fact that the value of labour power was less than the value created by the worker in the course of the working day. That is, while it may take, say three hours, for the worker to reproduce the value of labour power, the working day extended for much longer and this additional, or surplus, value fell to capital.
This epoch-making discovery had vast political implications. Marx was by no means the first socialist. Others before him had trenchantly criticised the operations of the capitalist system and pointed to its irrationalities, the increasing exploitation of the working class and widening social inequality. But as Engels explained:
“The socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. It could not explain them, and, therefore could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad.” [3]
It was necessary, Engels continued, to present the capitalist mode of production as necessary during a given historical period and also to present the inevitability of its downfall and to lay bare its essential character. The critics had attacked its evil consequences rather than reveal the secret of the thing itself. This was revealed by the discovery of surplus value.
With these two great discoveries, he concluded, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production, socialism became a science. The next step was to work out the details.
Marx’s discoveries revealed that not only was the working class an exploited class but, in laying bare the source of that exploitation in the social relations of capitalism itself, established that it was a revolutionary class. That is, to secure its own emancipation the working class had to overthrow the entire system of social relations, deriving from wage-labour—on which capitalism was grounded.
One of the most important “details” to which Engels referred, was the way in which the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces under capitalism and the social relations based on wage-labour—the contradiction that was the driving force of social revolution—manifested itself in the capitalist economy.
This was discovered by Marx in his analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He demonstrated that this tendency—the nemesis of the capitalist mode of production whose driving force is profit—arose from the very development of the productive forces to which it gave rise.
The sole source of surplus value and profit, the basis for the self-expansion of capital, is the living labour of the working class. But the more capital grows the greater must be the extraction of surplus value from the working class in order to expand it yet again. To the extent that the extraction of surplus value fails to keep pace with the growth of capital, the rate of profit tends to fall. This leads to a crisis to which capital responds by reorganising production, in order to intensify exploitation in order to continue. But the very development of these crises, growing ever more serious, drives the working class into struggle against the capitalist system and its ruling class.
This is the source of the realities of “everyday life,” as Marx put it, in which we see the vast accumulation of wealth and an enormous growth in the productive forces and the social productivity of labour on the one hand and the growth of poverty, misery and degradation, accompanied by ever widening social inequality on the other.
The discovery of the secret of surplus value as the basis of the capitalist accumulation process and the contradictions arising from it, had, as we noted, far-reaching political implications. It concretised, as Marx had set out in in his early writings, the revolutionary role of the working class.
“It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation, as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society.”[4]
The key to Harvey’s politics is his rejection of and outright hostility to the analysis made by Marx of the revolutionary role of the working class which is central to Capital. Therefore, as far as his “socialism” is concerned it is clouded in the mists of pre-Marxist conceptions.
“Capital has built the capacity, technologically and organisationally, to create a far better world,” he says in the Jacobin interview. “But it does so through social relations of domination rather than emancipation. This is the central contradiction. And Marx keeps saying, ‘Why don’t we use all of this technological and organisational capacity to create a world which is liberatory, rather than one which is about domination?”
Here Harvey follows the road taken by previous “social theorists” who, while identifying some of the irrationalities of the capitalist mode of production, separated Marx’s scientific analysis of capitalism from its central purpose, that is, the arming of the working class for the revolutionary struggles in which it is driven by the crises of the profit system.
The Frankfurt School, for example, sought the agency for social transformation—insofar as it had not completely abandoned such a perspective—in the “cultural criticism” of the irrationalities of capitalism and “consumerism.”
Paul Sweezy, the “independent Marxist”, writing in the 1960s, wrote off the working class in the advanced capitalist countries and glorified the national liberation movements in what was then known as the Third World.
Herbert Marcuse, the darling of the New Left in the 1960s, maintained that the working class had been completely integrated into advanced capitalist society—and was even a potential basis for fascism—and found the agency for social change in the marginalised sections of society.
On the basis of his historical materialist analysis, Marx was well aware of the fact that the advancement in the productive force under capitalism had created the basis for socialist society, free of class exploitation and domination “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
But he rejected as utopian any perspective which sought to bring about this transformation by drawing out the contrast between what was possible under a different form of social organisation and what presently existed in capitalist society. Such a perspective made the socialist transformation a question of the criticism of capitalist society by so-called enlightened individuals.
The crucial question for Marx was what was the social material force—the class—created by capitalist society itself, which would be the agency, the driving force, of this transformation. Today, the point at issue is not that socialism will somehow be more advantageous for humanity—that was already clear in Marx’s day—but that it is an historic necessity if human civilisation is to survive and progress.
The contradictions of capitalism are not, as Harvey attempts to portray them, the contrast between what would be possible under socialism as compared to present reality but are rooted in the inexorable drive of the profit system towards the impoverishment of the working class, the development of authoritarian forms of rule and war, threatening the very destruction of human civilisation, and a relapse into barbarism. For socialism to become a reality and not simply a dream of human advancement, there must be a social force in capitalist society whose material interests drive it forward to its realisation. That force is the working class, that is, the class separated from the control and ownership of the productive forces which is compelled in order to sustain its existence to sell its labour power.
One of the most significant historical developments of the past three decades has been the transformation of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population into proletarians, forced to sell their labour power. Hundreds of millions of peasants in China, India and elsewhere have been transformed into wage workers while in the advanced capitalist countries hundreds of millions of people, employed in what were once considered secure “middle class” occupations, have discovered, through relentless job cuts, downsizing and cuts in their incomes, that they are proletarians with nothing to sell but their labour power, no less than the millions engaged in the factories.
In his criticism of the utopian socialists of his day, Marx pointed to their dreams of experimental realisation of their social utopia as they opposed all political action by the working class.
It is therefore significant that Harvey says nothing in his interview about the resurgent movement of the working class, manifested in the widespread teachers’ strikes in the US, the strike movements in Europe and in countries such as India after decades of suppression by the trade unions and the social democratic and labour parties, and focuses attention on “life-style” movements.
“Now, there are revolts against certain things that are happening,” he writes. “People are beginning to say, ‘look, we want something different.’ I find little communities all around the place in urban areas, and in rural areas, too, where people are trying to set up a different lifestyle. The ones that interest me most are those which use new technologies, like cell phones and the internet, to create an alternative lifestyle with different forms of social relations than those characteristic of corporations, with hierarchical structures of power, that we encounter in our daily lives. To struggle over a lifestyle is rather different than struggling over wages or conditions of labour in a factory.”
Of course Harvey does not leave matters there. He would rapidly lose all credibility in the eyes of those who consider him to be an interpreter and a guide to Marx if he did. And so he maintains that those who are struggling over lifestyle issues, or race, or the environment need to recognise from the standpoint of the totality of capital the relationship between those struggles and how they are related to the forms of production. Putting them all together provides a picture of what a capitalist society is all about “and the kinds of dissatisfactions and alienations that exist in different components of the circulation of capital, which Marx identifies.”
Harvey recognises the struggle of the working class, though it is not so much as mentioned in the interview, but he identifies it as purely the struggle over wages and conditions within a given factory, and thus purely within a trade union perspective.
But as workers are coming to realise, on the basis of their experiences, even struggles which begin on this limited basis rapidly extend to embody broader, political, issues. Workers fighting for improved wages and conditions are immediately confronted not just with the management of the individual corporation or firm within which they work but the apparatuses of the trade union bureaucracy and behind them the capitalist government and the state.
Every struggle of the working class, whether it begins over wages, social conditions, health, pensions or today the increasing use of internet censorship to try to prevent them organising themselves, places them more and more directly in conflict with the entire capitalist organisation of society and raises the question of political power, that is, which class is to rule. As Marx put it, every class struggle is, therefore, a political struggle.
The political aim of Harvey’s work now comes into clearer focus. It is aimed at subordinating the struggles of the working class to the politics of the pseudo-left and middle classes concerned with questions of sexual orientation, life style and individual, not class, identity.
This political orientation makes clear why Harvey, insofar as he deals with questions of political economy and the structure of Capital, seeks to downplay the centrality of production and dissolve it into the question of the circulation of capital.
He maintains that if one really wants to understand Marx’s conception of capital, “then you can’t just understand it as just being about production. It’s about circulation. It’s about getting it to the market and selling it, then it’s about distributing the profits.”
The issues related to circulation and the distribution of profits are, of course, vital to an understanding of the capitalist economy, its movement and contradictions. But the key point at issue is this: what is the essential determinant of the structure of society, its political relations and state apparatus and the driving force of its development.
In volume three of Capital, Marx directly addresses this question as follows:
“The specific economic form in which the unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production and hence also its specific political form.”
It is in the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers, Marx continues, “in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.”[5]
As Marx goes on to point out, the same economic forms can display variations and gradations in the political forms of rule, depending on a series of external factors and historical circumstances. But there is no question that the essential content of these various political forms is the mode in which surplus labour is pumped out of the immediate producers.
Volume one of Capital is concerned with the way in which under capitalism, a specific historical mode of production, this unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the immediate producers, the working class, through the system of social relations based on wage labour to yield surplus value.
Harvey wants to de-emphasise or outright dissolve this fundamental structural foundation by pointing out that there is more to capitalism than simply the production of surplus value—there is also the process of realisation, detailed in volume two and distribution in volume three.
However, the essential foundation of capitalism is in production—not the production of commodities as such, or the means of production, the production of the material needs of society as a living organism—but the production of surplus value which forms the essential driving force of this society.
Volume two is concerned with the relationships pertaining to realisation. But this, it must be emphasised, is the realisation of the surplus value, its transformation from the commodity form back into money so the process of surplus value extraction can begin again. Likewise, volume three is concerned with the distribution of this surplus value among the various owners of property in the form of profit, interest and rent.
In his recent writings, Harvey has drawn out the connection between his focus on the process of circulation and realisation and his downplaying of the centrality of the production of surplus value and his political perspective.
In his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, Harvey writes:
“Struggles at the point of valorisation inevitably have a class character … Those at the point of realisation focus on buyers and sellers and trigger fights against the predatory practices and accumulation by dispossession in the market place … Such struggles are not well theorised. In the field of social reproduction issues of social hierarchy, gender, sexuality, kinship and family and the like become much more predominant and the primary political focus shifts to the qualities of daily life rather than the labour process. These struggles have often been ignored in the Marxist literature.”
What follows from this dissolving of the centrality of the production of surplus value within the capitalist system is that “the social and political struggles against the power of capital within the totality of capital circulation take different forms and call for different kinds of strategic alliances if they are to succeed.”[6]
There is no question what kind of “strategic alliances” Harvey has in mind—alliances with sections of the radical petty bourgeoisie and its concern for life-style politics and even sections of the bourgeoisie itself.
This is done on the basis of a misrepresentation of Capital, implying that it was not directed to politically and theoretically arming the working class for social revolution but was aimed at merely drawing out the irrationalities of capitalist society.
By this means, Harvey is seeking to misdirect those who are turning to Marx and have followed his own work in the hope that it might provide a guide. He seeks to divert them away from a struggle in the working class, to mobilise it as an independent revolutionary force, and channel them into the milieu of pseudo-left and middle-class radical politics and there to fight for “strategic alliances” that ensure the continued domination of the bourgeoisie and capital.
Notes:
[1] Marx, Capital Volume 3 (London: Penguin, 1991) p. 117 [2] Lenin, Collected Works Volume 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961) p. 360 [3] Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969) p. 38 [4] Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975) pp. 44–45 [5] Marx, Capital Volume 3 (London: Penguin 1993) p. 927 [6] David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) p. 48
Eugene Victor Debs in 1912 from the documentary “American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs.” (Indiana State University Library archives / First Run features)
In my earliest days entering activism, Eugene Debs – the great American socialist – became my first hero, so when I heard about the Yale Strom’s movie American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs I knew I had to go. With Strom’s collection of photos and recordings of speeches, it’s easy to see why people flocked by the thousands to hear Debs speak. In fact, in 1912 a sold out crowd at Madison Square Garden gave Debs’ a 29 minute standing ovation after his speech.
The timing could not be better for this movie as there is currently a resurgence in interest in socialist ideas. Pushed by the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016, and now continued primarily in the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), looking back to the life of Eugene Debs is looking to the socialist heritage of the USA.
The small New York City theater I went to would not receive the kind of attention Debs received in Madison Square Garden, only a handful of note-taking Debs’ fans attended, but it did leave me understanding this period of American socialism much better, and for anyone interested in Debs it should be a must see. The Many Stages of Eugene Debs’ Political Development
We are given a close look at the many stages of Debs, and his political development; from a Democratic craft union leader to a union fighter who built the first mass industrial labor union to a five-time Socialist Party presidential candidate who was jailed multiple times for his beliefs, there are lessons to be learned throughout his life.
Debs’ got his start in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he became a key figure as a labor leader of the railroad workers. But his politics at the start were far from the socialist ideas he later developed. In fact, the film correctly points out that Debs did not side with the workers in the 1877 railroad strike actions, where he suggested negotiating rather than going on strike.
It was Deb’s key role in constructing the American Railroad Union (ARU), which organized all railroad workers into one union, and the subsequent Pullman strike, which shut down railroad across the Eastern United States which lead to Debs’ first stint in jail. It also inspired him to a take a socialist view of the world. Although Debs had previously never focused on theory, he spent his six months in jail immersing himself in Marxist literature. This was due, in part, to the many visitors, inspired by his work, discussing Marxism with him. The most notable of these was Victor Berger, who later helped Debs create the Socialist Party. The experience of the federal government smashing the Pullman strike shattered Deb’s belief that all workers had to do was organize into a bigger and stronger union in order to have a decent life.
Debs was a tireless campaigner for the interests of the working class and as a Socialist Party organizer, travelled from city to city on a small train nicknamed the “Red Special” speaking to crowds of thousands about the evils of capitalism. The archival footage was really able to capture the energy and excitement of the crowds.
Debs and the Socialist Party reached their height during the 1912 Presidential campaign, where Debs received nearly a million votes – 6% of the popular vote. This momentum played a huge role in getting a wave of Socialists elected all over the country.
Unfortunately, this success wouldn’t be enough to overcome the obstacles created by World War I, where many socialists gave in to pressures and accepted the war, causing a giant rift in the party. Debs stood firmly against the war, so much so that he was once again sentenced to prison. It was from his prison cell that Debs made history by receiving just under a million votes for president in 1920.
Debs’ Spoke the Language of People
This film does a remarkable job of showing Debs’ effect on people. Not only do we learn of Debs’ character, but we travel back in time to see what life was like then. We’re given many cultural touch points that show us how well Debs ideas captured the imagination of people – such as references and quotes from popular figures such as poets, musicians, and religious leaders as well as workers themselves.
In his folksy manner, he spoke the language of the country. When he spoke it was as a worker to workers, engaging them through their own experiences; he met the workers where their understanding was. This can be summed up in his famous statement “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” This is one of the big reason people would pile in wherever he was speaking by the thousands.
There are many examples shown in this film where Debs was able to communicate with workers, and overcome challenges the Socialist Party and trade unions had faced for years. This was especially displayed in Debs’ struggle for black equality. There was an underlying racism held by many white socialists, which Debs rebelled against. To relate to black southern workers, Debs would often invoke religious language – “What is socialism, merely Christianity in action.”
In another example, the film highlights Debs ability to capture the attention of Polish workers, despite the fact that they didn’t understand many of his words.
I was especially inspired by Debs’ role in organizing prisoners during his time in jail. Despite his poor health, Debs became a leader amongst the prisoners. When he was freed they gave him loud cheers, similar to the cheers heard around the country with traveling on the “Red Special.” Class Position Against War
In 1918, Debs gave an iconic anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, which would land him in jail for violating the wartime espionage law. This speech, as well as his appeal to the jury, are regarded as some of the most powerful speeches ever made. He explains who benefits from the war when he tells the working people “the master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose – especially their lives.”
Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In poor health and isolated, as he was eventually moved to a maximum penitentiary where he could not read socialist literature or communicate with anyone outside, Debs as well as his loved ones struggled during this period. The film does a remarkable job of revealing the struggles of his family at this time too, something I had not considered nor seen before. We’re shown how much his parents, his wife Kate, and his brother, were devoted to his political work.
It was from this jail cell that Debs, inmate 9653, received nearly one million votes for president (about 3.4% of the popular vote). Despite such a remarkable feat, Debs was still disappointed the turnout (by percentage of popular vote) was lower than his history 1912 campaign – due largely to the factions over the war creating a rift in the party.
Uneven Leadership
We study Debs today not just for his story, but because the lessons learned during his life remain relevant. Unfortunately, this film fails to acknowledge some of Debs’ mistakes, particularly during the rift in the Socialist Party created by members taking a nationalist view and supporting WWI. While Debs was very vocal about his opposition to the war, he refused to take a leadership role in confronting those supporting the war, and so he withdrew from party disputes. Debs could have used his influence, as the most popular person in the party, to fight for his ideas, but he believed an all-inclusive party was more important than fighting for his positions and ideas.
In 1956 James Cannon wrote “The Debs Centennial” where he referred to Debs’ inaction and unwillingness to take a leading role in the party during the faction fight. He said “Debs’ mistaken theory of the party was one of the most costly mistakes a revolutionist ever made in the entire history of the American movement.” As the most influential Socialist Party member of his day, he could have played a huge role in turning the Socialist Party to oppose WWI, which would have given an organizational strength to the antiwar sentiment that did exist.
We owe so much to Debs for his work, and this film really conveys this. However, as socialists we must be critical of even our most inspirational leaders to learn the lessons of history so we may be armed for current and future struggles. It is to all those who suffer under this rotten capitalist system that we owe this.
Who Would Debs be Today?
This film is hugely successful at revealing who Debs was, but even takes it a step further. Throughout the movie we see flashpoints of movements in other times. For example, when pointing out Debs’ commitment to liberating black workers the film cuts to clips of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The end of the film shows a collage of modern movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, which serve as a reminder that the horrors of the capitalist system Debs was fighting still exist today.
Today’s political situation is ripe for the growth of socialism. Just this year there has been huge growth in socialist organizations, most notably DSA who has grown to over 20,000 members. With such a dramatic shift, Debs’ ideas, and the lessons we’ve learned from his leadership, can reach a whole new generation, even 92 years after his death.
Bernie Sanders has also played a huge role in the growth of socialist ideas. Although he hasn’t yet drawn the same conclusions as Debs about the need to be independent of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders named Debs as a huge influence, even creating a documentary on him. From Bernie’s popularity we have an opportunity, in the spirit of Debs, to argue for the need for a working-class party, independent of big business, to challenge the capitalist system. Debs laid out this need when he said “as a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.”
The film has been released on DVD and is available on Amazon.
LA Times Review
Timed to May Day and International Workers’ Day, on May 1, comes the documentary “American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs,” directed by Yale Strom. The film opens with the assertion that Debs was the only presidential candidate to be jailed for his platform, and the documentary then wends its way toward this event.
“American Socialist” is a fairly straightforward biographical documentary of Debs, the radical, forward-thinking Socialist leader active during the turn of the century. He got his start as a railroad union leader, was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, and rose through the ranks of the Socialist Party in the United States, which was focused on rights for workers and farmers. He ran for U.S. president five times, once from a prison cell while serving a sentence for sedition because he publicly opposed World War I, and he still managed to garner nearly a million votes.
Though Debs is a legendary and influential character, the style of “American Socialist” fails to come to life. It decidedly apes the style of Ken Burns’ documentaries, with archival photos, narrated voice-over passages, plus various contemporary talking heads.
It feels rooted in the past, despite the freshness of Debs’ ideas. But “American Socialist” is an exhaustive primer on his life, executed in a traditional style that doesn’t necessarily match the revolutionary thoughts of the man and the movement.
Like most modern “knowledge” workers, I spend my days in an open office. That means I also spend my days amid ringing phones, the inquisitive tones of co-workers conducting interviews, and—because we work in a somewhat old, infamous building—the pounding and drilling of seemingly endless renovations.
Even so, the #content must still be wrung from my distracted brain. And so, I join the characters of trend pieces everywhere in wearing headphones almost all day, every day. And what better to listen to with headphones than music? By now, I’ve worked my way through all the “Focus” playlists on Spotify—most of which sound like they were meant for a very old planetarium—and I’ve looped back around to a genre I like to call “soft, synthy pop songs whose lyrics don’t make much sense:” Think Miike Snow rather than Michael Jackson.
But lately I’ve been wondering, am I just replacing one distracting noise with another? Worse yet is the possibility that the constant soundtrack is poisoning my writing, with the lyrics somehow weaving into and scrambling my thoughts before they ever hit the keyboard. I try to tune it out, but after all, I’m still, I’m still an animal!
To find out, I retreated to my safe space, Google Scholar.
It contained bad news for anyone, like me, who believes background music is some sort of special hay that makes the writing horse trot. It turns out the best thing to listen to, for most office workers, is nothing.
An early study called “Music—an aid to productivity,” appropriately found that music could be just that. But the study subjects in that experiment were doing rote factory work, examining metal parts on conveyor belts. The boost in productivity the researchers noticed happened because the music simply made the task less boring and kept the workers alert. This also helps explain later studies finding that music helped surgeons perform better. “Most of what a brain surgeon spends their time doing is drilling through the skull bone,” said Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and author of This Is Your Brain on Music. “In that case, it’s a situation like being a long-distance truck driver. If nothing goes wrong, the task itself is somewhat boring and repetitive, so you need something that will keep you psychologically aroused.” (Of course, at some point the surgeon will have to start doing stuff to the brain itself, at which point you’d hope they would hit pause.)
When silence and music were put head to head in more cognitively complex tests, people did better in silence. In a study from the 1980s, researchers gave subjects the option to listen to either upbeat or soft music of their preferred genre, or nothing, while counting backward. The people who listened to their favorite, upbeat tunes did worst of all, and those who heard silence did best.
The more engaging the music is, the worse it is for concentration. Music with lyrics is dreadful for verbal tasks, Levitin said. Music with lots of variation has been found to impair performance—even if the person enjoys it. A just-out conference paper showed that music and speech, compared with white noise, made study subjects more annoyed and hurt their scores on memory and math tests.
Some studies—one that used meditative Koan music and another that used quiet classical music —showed slightly positive effects of background noise on task performance. But lyric-free music is less distracting, and some of the people whose performance was improved may have come up with subconscious mental hacks to avoid getting sidetracked by music. One study that had middle-schoolers listen to the Billboard singles from 2006—Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” and such—while reading found nearly three-quarters of them did worse on a comprehension test. But those that didn’t might “have developed cognitive strategies that enable them to focus on study tasks despite competing background stimuli,” the authors wrote.
The reason this doesn’t work for most people, Levitin said, is most people can’t pay attention to very much at once. Lyrics can soak up precious attention, as can flashing lights or a really bad smell.
“You’ve got semantic information that you’re trying to use when you’re reading a book, and you’ve got semantic information from the lyrics,” Nick Perham, a psychologist at the University of Wales Institute told Edutopia. “If you can understand the lyrics, it doesn’t matter whether you like it or not, it will impair your performance of reading comprehension.”
The effect of music on concentration might be worse for older people, or those who naturally prefer quiet. One experiment had extroverts and introverts listen to, among other songs, INXS’s “A New Sensation,” which made it more difficult for introverts, but less so for extroverts, to memorize images and read a passage. (Extroverts also tend to play background music while they work more than introverts do, so perhaps they’re just more accustomed to it.) Another recent study of 42 children found that white noise helped those with ADHD concentrate. The authors chalked it up to a concept called stochastic resonance— the idea that lower-than-average dopamine levels in the brains of people with ADHD means they might need a bit more noise from the external environment in order to steady their concentration skills.
So, I asked Levitin, if listening to music while working is so bad, why do so many of us do it? Simple: We like it, and we can’t tell it’s messing us up. As one small recent study found, people prefer listening to music over office noise or silence, even though it didn’t help them think any better.
If you simply can’t go a day without your beats, “take a break every few hours and listen to music for 15 minutes,” Levitin said. (There’s some evidence that listening to music between tasks can boost performance.) Then go back to your silent cave and order this chit-chat stoplight to passively aggress against your noisy colleagues instead.
We print below the first part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League Central Committee member Don Alexander at a February 24 Black History Month forum in New York City.
I was just handed a piece of paper with a quote by James P. Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, that I want to start with. It’s from his speech on the way to prison in 1943, when 18 Trotskyist and Minneapolis Teamsters union leaders were jailed for opposing imperialist World War II. Cannon said, “The grandest figure in the whole history of America was John Brown” (printed in Speeches for Socialism [1971]). Over the years, a number of comrades have paid tribute to John Brown in North Elba, New York, where he is buried, and have given talks on different aspects of the Civil War and Reconstruction. We raise the slogans “Finish the Civil War!” and “For black liberation through socialist revolution!” to express the historic tasks that fall to the revolutionary party. Acting as the tribune of the people, a revolutionary workers party will fight for the interests of all the oppressed—black people, Latinos, women, Asians, immigrants and others. It will lead the working class to carry out a third American revolution, a proletarian revolution, the only road to the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist society.
The existence of black chattel slavery in the United States had a peculiar character. “Chattel” means personal property; it meant to own people like cattle to trade or kill. Comrades and friends will recall that veteran Trotskyist Richard S. Fraser underscored in his writings some 60 years ago how the concept of race was central to the development of American capitalism. He outlined how the material basis of black oppression drew upon a precapitalist system of production. Slavery played an important role in the development of British industrial capitalism and U.S. capitalism. British textile owners received Southern cotton, which was shipped by powerful New York merchants. New York merchants used some of this money to send manufactured goods to the South. Although slavery and capitalism were intertwined, they were different economic systems. There is an excellent presentation by comrade Jacob Zorn called “Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism” (printed in WV Nos. 942, 943 and 944, 11 and 25 September and 9 October 2009).
I will add that the conflation of slaves with skin color didn’t exist in ancient slavery. But with regard to the U.S., the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass put it well: “We are then a persecuted people not because we are colored, but simply because this color has for a series of years been coupled in the public mind with the degradation of slavery and servitude.” Black people constitute a race-color caste, with their color defining their so-called inferior status. In the majority, black people are forcibly segregated at the bottom of this racist, capitalist system, deemed pariahs and outcasts. Anti-black racism is ruthlessly promoted by the ruling class to keep the working class divided and to conceal the common class interests of working people against their exploiters.
Today, the filthy rich capitalists’ huge profits rest upon the backs of working people—black, immigrant and white. The rulers’ system of “checks and balances” has been and always will be that they get the checks while they balance their bone-crushing, anti-worker, anti-poor budgets on our backs! The multiracial working class, with a strategic black component, has the social power and the interest to champion the fight not only for black freedom, but of all the oppressed and to break the chains of wage slavery. Whether or not this is understood at the moment, the fight for black freedom is an inseparable part of the struggle for the emancipation of the entire working class from capitalist exploitation. The working class cannot take power without confronting and defeating centuries of black oppression. We say that those who labor must rule!
The Road to Harpers Ferry
In reflecting on John Brown, fellow abolitionist Harriet Tubman once said: We didn’t call him John Brown, we called him our “savior” because he died for our people. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, military veteran Robert F. Williams, who organized armed self-defense against the Klan and was driven out of the country on trumped-up kidnapping charges, carried around with him a copy of A Plea for Captain John Brown, an 1859 speech in defense of Brown by Henry David Thoreau. Malcolm X also praised John Brown. The notion that John Brown was crazy, an insane mass murderer and a fanatic, is still peddled in bourgeois academia and cinema. The truth is that John Brown was a revolutionary who saw deeper than any other abolitionist that it would take a revolution, a bloody war to uproot slavery. John Brown did not dread that war. He did not deprecate it. He did not seek to avert it. And that is one reason why the bourgeoisie still looks at him with disdain and hatred.
Along with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, John Brown was part of the revolutionary wing of the abolitionist movement who saw the outlines of what was coming in the struggle to destroy chattel slavery. Abraham Lincoln was a good leader during the Civil War who, under pressure, did eventually make it an official war against slavery. John Brown’s final push against slavery had been to lead a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. For this, he and several of his followers were publicly executed by the State of Virginia in December 1859.
Summing up for the world his last thoughts before his hanging, John Brown hurled a bolt of lightning toward his captors and executioners, proclaiming that this land must be purged with blood—there needed to be revolution. He was almost 60 years old, which is quite amazing. How did John Brown become a revolutionary abolitionist dedicated to the destruction of slavery through force? From where did he think he would get the forces to accomplish his goals? What is the significance today of his struggle for black freedom?
John Brown was born in 1800. He was a generation removed from the first American Revolution which, while getting rid of British colonial oppression, left slavery intact and in most states gave suffrage only to propertied white males. He was deeply religious and raised by parents who hated slavery. His father Owen Brown, who had a significant influence on John, was a pacifist and a Calvinist as well as an active abolitionist, a stationmaster and conductor on the Underground Railroad. Fueled by Protestant beliefs, his family was tough and resourceful.
Owen subscribed to abolitionist papers like TheLiberator, which John grew up reading. John Brown worked with his father on the Underground Railroad, gaining valuable experience for his future revolutionary activities. While herding cattle when he was 12 years old, John witnessed a young slave boy being pummeled mercilessly by a slaveholder with an iron shovel. This incident shook him to the core. John picked up on the fact that in contrast to the slave boy, he himself was treated very well by the slaveowner. This only infuriated John more. He knew that the slave boy was horribly oppressed and had nothing, not a mother and not a father. From that point on, John Brown declared eternal war on slavery. Brown fervently believed in the “divine authenticity of the Bible.” His prayers were combined with a call to deliver the slaves from bondage. But he was not sitting back and waiting for his pie in the sky. As black historian Benjamin Quarles put it in Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (1974): “Prayer to Brown was a prelude to action, not a release from further involvement.” In his last days, he cursed hypocritical preachers and their offers of consolation, saying they should be praying for themselves.
John Brown and Abolitionism
I would like to briefly touch on the abolitionist movement. The U.S. abolitionist movement was part of the broader bourgeois radicalism in the 19th century, developing from radical elements of the Protestant Reformation and the 18th-century Enlightenment. It was also a product of the limitations of the first American Revolution, which continued the enslavement of half a million people. By John Brown’s time, the number of slaves had grown to four million.
In the beginning of his political awakening, John Brown admired the anti-slavery Quakers and also closely read TheLiberator, which was put out by the most famous abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison of Boston. Some of the first abolitionists like Garrison had belonged to the American Colonization Society that formed in 1816. The Colonization Society was a racist alliance between abolitionists and slaveholders promoting the settlement of black Americans in Africa. The underlying purpose of the colonization scheme was to drive free blacks out of the country. Free blacks were viewed with suspicion that they might stir up slave rebellions. Black abolitionists, who saw the organization as anathema, bitterly and vigorously resisted colonization because it told black people that they should leave the land of their birth. Starting in 1817, a series of black abolitionist conventions was organized in various cities in order to defeat this racist program, in what came to be known as the Negro Convention Movement. After attending the 1831 National Negro Convention, William Lloyd Garrison became radicalized and eventually sharply repudiated colonization. This gained him respect, admiration and support among abolitionists—especially black abolitionists.
There was considerable racism in the abolitionist movement. However, radical abolitionists had a wider vision for human emancipation. As we stated in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 5 (February 1988): “Although slavery was their preeminent concern, these radical bourgeois egalitarians also fought for many other pressing political issues of the time, such as free education, religious tolerance and workers’ rights.” The women’s suffrage movement first began as a fight within abolitionism over the role of women anti-slavery activists. Women’s rights leaders such as Angelina Grimké and her sister Sarah, who came from a slaveholding family, were staunch fighters for black freedom. They were clear on the connection between black and women’s oppression. Angelina said: “I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.” The radical egalitarianism embodied in this principled position also animated John Brown’s hatred of all oppression.
The beginning of the formation of white abolitionist organizations was the establishment of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Formed in 1832, it was galvanized by Nat Turner’s slave revolt a year prior, which killed some 60 white people. The revolt was followed by the execution of Nat Turner and his followers, and the massacre of a considerable number of black people.
William Lloyd Garrison represented the “moral suasion” wing of the abolitionists. Garrison also thought that the North should secede from the South, which objectively meant leaving the slaves helpless and defenseless. Although he sincerely hated slavery and wanted to see it destroyed, he stood for passive resistance. He rejected political action and instead put forward a futile program to appeal to the conscience of slaveowners to liberate their slaves. Garrison’s slogan of “No Union with Slaveholders” placed the struggle against slavery on the level of particular evils of individual slaveholders.
Frederick Douglass, who started out as a Garrisonian, strenuously objected to this slogan, recognizing that behind it was a defeatist strategy. He counterposed an aggressive fight against slavery. He instead raised in its place the slogan, “No Union with Slaveholding.” This was not a word play, but a different program and outlook. Douglass understood that the slaveholding system had to be destroyed, mainly through political means.
John Brown followed the debates and struggles of the abolitionists closely, especially those of the militant black abolitionists such as the young minister Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker, who advocated that the slaves rise up against their hated oppressors. According to social historian Robert Allen in his book Reluctant Reformers (1975), David Walker “was a free black who operated a small business in Boston, and in his spare time acted as a local agent for Freedom’s Journal, a black anti-slavery newspaper.” Walker argued that a “God of justice and armies” would destroy the whole system. His pamphlet, the Appeal, called for the immediate abolition of slavery.
But Walker was contradictory. He combined a militant stance of resistance to slaveholders with a call for the masters to repent and to voluntarily relinquish the slave system. He had explicit instructions on what the slaves must do when they rose up for their freedom: “Make sure work—do not trifle, for they will not trifle with you—they want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us in order to subject us to that wretched condition—therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed.” The Southern planters wanted him captured dead or alive and enacted state bans on anti-slavery literature. Reportedly, both Walker’s Appeal and Henry Highland Garnet’s address to the 1843 National Negro Convention appeared together in a pamphlet that John Brown paid to produce. Brown would incorporate the spirit of Walker’s Appeal in his attempt to win black people to his revolutionary plans.
Transforming into a Revolutionary
As I mentioned earlier, as a young man, John Brown was an Underground Railroad operator. The Underground Railroad was bringing to the fore the most conscious elements of anti-slavery black radicalism. The great significance of the Underground Railroad, an interracial network of activists who were willing to risk their lives, was not the number of slaves it freed—which was perhaps 1,000 slaves per year out of a population of four million slaves. Its importance in the long run was that it crystallized a black abolitionist vanguard in the North. As the historian W.E.B. DuBois wrote, it “more and more secured the cooperation of men like John Brown, and of others less radical but just as sympathetic.”
In pursuing his growing commitment to black freedom, at age 34, John Brown wrote a letter to his brother about his aspiration to establish a school for black people. He understood the revolutionary implications of this: “If the young blacks of our country could once become enlightened, it would most assuredly operate on slavery like firing powder confined in rock, and all the slaveholders know it well.” In the 1830s and ’40s, John Brown moved around a lot to earn a living and support his family. He went to Springfield, Massachusetts, and became more familiar with the lives and struggles of black people. Brown moved to North Elba in upstate New York, where well-known and wealthy radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith had donated land to be used by black people for farming. Brown forged ties with Smith as well as with radical black New York abolitionists like James McCune Smith and the Gloucester family of Brooklyn. He had many unsuccessful business pursuits, as a tanner, a land surveyor, a wool merchant. His travels while doing business enabled him to gain indispensable knowledge of the different strands of abolitionism in the Midwest and Northeast. From what he observed, he wasn’t impressed with the talkathons of abolitionist meetings. He never joined them because he disdained mere talk.
Brown was never able to set up a school, but he pressed on with teaching black people history and how to farm and carry out self-defense against slave catchers. His belief in social equality was clear. He shocked one white visitor to his home, who observed that black people were eating at the same table with the Brown family. The Browns showed respect to the black people there by addressing them as Mister and Missus.
John Brown kept his ear close to the ground, the better to follow and assimilate the thoughts of free and fugitive black people. Under the guise of a black writer, he wrote to a black abolitionist paper, the Ram’s Horn, to offer his frank opinions on how best to push forward black self-improvement. He didn’t hide his observations or criticisms of what he considered to be negative behaviors of some black people, ranging from flashy dressing to smoking—surely in accordance with his strict Calvinist morality. At the same time, he struggled to win them to the understanding that they should not meekly bow down to white racist aggression, but should resist it.
There was one major development that accelerated his transformation into a professional revolutionary. It was the 1837 violent killing of Elijah Lovejoy, the editor of an anti-slavery newspaper in Alton, Illinois. Lovejoy was attacked by a pro-slavery mob, which also hurled his printing press into the river. His murder shocked the abolitionist movement. Lovejoy was the first abolitionist martyr—and it could happen to any of them.
John Brown’s developing revolutionary social consciousness cost him some racist “anti-slavery” friends. As the biographer Tony Horwitz noted: “The Browns believed in full equality for blacks and were determined to fight for it” (Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War [2011]). The family’s resistance to segregation came to a head when they fought for integration in a Congregational church they attended. During a revival meeting, black people in attendance were seated in the rear of the church. At the next church service, Brown and his family gave up their seats and led the black worshippers to sit in theirs, located in the family pew. The deacons of the church were outraged and later wrote to them that they should find somewhere else to worship. This vile racism led John to distance himself from the institution of the church.
Preparing for Battle
Consciously wanting to link up with militant black abolitionists, John Brown put Frederick Douglass high on his list. Douglass and Brown had their first meeting in 1847 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Brown had avidly read Douglass’s abolitionist paper, TheNorth Star (later Frederick Douglass’ Paper), and went on to share his developing plans. According to Horwitz:“Brown pointed to a map of the Allegheny Mountains, which run diagonally from Pennsylvania into Maryland and Virginia and deep into the South. Filled with natural forts and caves, these mountains, Brown said, had been placed by God ‘for the emancipation of the negro race’.”
This meeting was a turning point in Douglass’s evolution from a protégé of Garrison into a revolutionary abolitionist. Brown fought to convince him of the futility of non-resistance to the slaveholders. He told him that the only thing the slaveowners appreciated was sticks upside their heads—something like that. Five years later, Douglass would abandon his naive faith in pacifist non-resistance. He began to openly state that slavery could be destroyed only through bloodshed, which shocked his former comrades. Going forward, several challenges loomed for both revolutionary abolitionists, Douglass and Brown: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the further expansion of slavery to the Western territories like Kansas, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The last involved a slave named Dred Scott who sued for his freedom on the basis that he had resided in a free state for many years. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled against Scott and went on to assert that black people, free or slave, were not U.S. citizens. In the words of Taney, which are echoed by today’s modern-day slaveholders—the ruling class in this country—black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Let me say a few things about the continued expansion of slavery. The South’s cotton production was booming in the 1840s and ’50s. It supplied most of the world’s demand, outstripping other American exports combined. Northerners wanted slavery to stay put where it was.
Many white laborers were primarily concerned with having to compete with black people for jobs, not with the inherent brutality against and degradation of slaves. Some Northern states, such as Ohio and Illinois, had long enacted “Black Laws” that set controls on freed blacks and deterred black people from migrating there. Meanwhile, there were bloody land grabs under way, such as during the 1846-48 Mexican-American War, when the United States seized about half of Mexico’s territory. The appetites of slaveowners and prospective ones were whetted. The question was sharply posed: Could Southerners carry “their” property into new territories? Would those territories be free or slave?The Compromise of 1850, which was contentious in Congress, concluded that California would be a free state, while the question of Utah and New Mexico was left to the white settlers to decide. Along with this, the new Fugitive Slave Act (the first was enacted in 1793) now mandated that ordinary citizens were required to aid in the capture and return of runaway slaves, even forming posses to do so. Northerners in effect became deputized slave catchers.
Douglass had plenty to say about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. In 1852 he remarked: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers. A half dozen or more dead kidnappers carried down South would cool the ardor of Southern gentlemen, and keep their rapacity in check.” Anti-slavery fury was swelling in the North, and in places like Boston, slave catchers were set upon and fugitives freed. However, because the full power of the federal government lay behind the enforcement of the law, militant abolitionists were not always successful.For his part, John Brown responded to the Fugitive Slave Act by forming a secret self-defense organization to fight slave catchers.
The organization was called the United States League of Gileadites, named after Gideon, a figure in the Old Testament who repelled the attacks of enemies who far outnumbered his forces. Brown drew up a fighting program for the League called “Words of Advice.” In the League’s manifesto, he offered such tactics as “when engaged do not work by halves, but make clean work with your enemies…. Never confess, never betray, never renounce the cause.”With a plan slowly germinating in his mind, John Brown was gathering the forces for the raid on Harpers Ferry. As then-Trotskyist George Novack wrote about Brown in January 1938 (printed in the New International), “By establishing a stronghold in the mountains bordering Southern territory from which his men could raid the plantations, he planned to free the slaves, and run them off to Canada.” Accordingly, Brown did a serious investigation of the terrain, including circling on a map figures on slave concentrations throughout the South. This information was discovered after he was captured at Harpers Ferry.
John Brown also prepared through reading and travel. A number of his business pursuits enabled him to go to places outside the U.S. like England, for example, where in 1851 he went seeking better prices for his wool. A key part of his trip to Europe was to inspect military fortifications, like at Waterloo where Napoleon met defeat. He studied military tactics and especially guerrilla war in mountainous terrain. He read books on Nat Turner’s revolt, the Maroons—the runaway slaves in Jamaica and other places who waged guerrilla warfare—and Francisco Espoz y Mina, the guerrilla leader in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. He also had books on Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, and a biography of the leader of the English Revolution of 1640, Oliver Cromwell. Brown was familiar with and recited for his friends and followers the story of Spartacus, who led a slave rebellion against Roman rule. His preparations for war meant that he didn’t spend a lot of time with the rest of his family in North Elba.
They understood and agreed, knowing that while he was away, it was their duty to resist the slave catchers, even if it meant imprisonment or death. Brown cared deeply for his family’s welfare and tried to alleviate some of their brutal poverty. He did what he could to support them as they all endured incredible hardships and suffered many setbacks. For example, John himself fathered 20 children and lost nine of them before they reached age ten, including three on three consecutive days. The Brown family knew that the cause of the slaves’ emancipation transcended their personal lives and they stuck it out, together. For John Brown, slavery was the “sum of villanies,” the ultimate atrocity against human freedom. And the fight lay ahead.
I’m sure that most of you have heard that what’s so terrible about the abolitionist John Brown was that he was a heartless, bloodthirsty killer. These are longstanding bourgeois lies. The real John Brown fought for armed slave rebellion and organized armed struggle against the slave system in “Bleeding Kansas” in the 1850s.
In 1855, John Brown joined his four oldest sons who had migrated to Kansas to fight against it becoming a slave state and win the territory for the “free-soilers.” The free-soilers had been associated with the short-lived Free Soil Party, whose platform called both for barring slavery from western territories and for the federal government to provide free homesteads to white settlers. In 1854, many of the Party’s former members had gone on to join the newly established Republican Party, which was born on the platform of “free soil” and “free labor.”
It was a period of turmoil. Congress had just passed a new law called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the terms of the 1820 Missouri Compromise that was supposed to limit slavery’s expansion. Sponsored by a Northern Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, the law allowed the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. According to Karl Marx, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had “placed slavery and freedom on the same footing.” As he described it, “For the first time in the history of the United States, every geographical and legal limit to the extension of slavery in the Territories was removed” (“The North American Civil War” [1861]). The Kansas-Nebraska Act was nothing more than a signal for pro-slavery Missourians next door to invade and, through terror and violence, open Kansas to slavery.
At this point it was clear that there wouldn’t be, and couldn’t be, any lasting “compromises.” From the early days of the republic there evolved several sham “compromises” between the North and South. The first of these concessions, coming out of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, made slaves three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning representatives to Congress; this gave the Southern slaveowners control of Washington. Now, the fundamental and irreconcilable class interests between the slavocracy and the Northern industrial bourgeoisie were coming to a head. One or the other would prevail. War was coming and Kansas was the next arena.
After some initial hesitation, Brown sought the approval of his black supporters and garnered the support of several radical abolitionists before joining his sons in Kansas. He decided that it was best to go there because it would be more important ultimately for the cause of freedom. From that point, his determination hardened and grew in the fight against slavery.
John Brown brought weapons and ammunition with him to Kansas to equip an anti-slavery militia where he was captain. He and his sons confronted a well-armed pro-slavery group of Missourians appropriately called the Border Ruffians, who were pouring into the state to terrorize free settlers. The free settlers needed an infusion of fresh blood to beat back a highly organized campaign of intimidation and murder. John Brown, his sons and supporters waged several successful battles in their defense. His militia retaliated for a number of murders of free settlers—in one night raid they killed five pro-slavery sympathizers near Pottawatomie Creek. Brown’s force struck fear into the hearts of the marauding pro-slavery bands.
Both the governor of Missouri and President James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat, offered rewards for Brown’s capture. Buchanan and other Northerners with Southern sympathies were called “doughfaces” because they were “half-baked and malleable.” Without John Brown’s intervention, which strengthened the free settlers’ morale and military defenses, a lot worse could have happened. It was not impossible that Kansas could have become a slave state.
Brown fought in Kansas throughout 1856. Toward the end of his stay, a Missouri slave crossed the border into Kansas, seeking help from anyone to keep him and his family from being sold. What do you think John Brown did? He led his militia to where the slaveholder was back in Missouri. His forces freed a number of slaves, eleven in all, including the family that was imperiled. A slaveowner was also killed. Brown’s militia seized horses and supplies to facilitate their escape and transport with the final destination being Canada. The local, state and federal authorities were outraged and over $3,000 was put on Brown’s head.
In the end, the slaves made it to Canada because of John Brown. In a frenzy, some of his abolitionist “friends” denounced him—not for seizing the slaves, but for the seizure of the slaveowners’ other personal property. And it’s not surprising, because some of these abolitionists were capitalists, for whom capitalist private property was sacred. For his part, John Brown had no trust in politicians from either political party. As author Stephen B. Oates noted in To Purge This Land With Blood (1970), Brown “hated the Democrats because he believed their party was dominated by the South and despised the Republicans because they were too ‘wishy-washy’ on the slavery issue.”
Roll Call for Harpers Ferry
The next arena for Brown was Chatham, Ontario. Chatham was a small town just east of Detroit and was a terminus on the Underground Railroad where thousands of fugitive slaves and free blacks resided. Living nearby in St. Catherines was Harriet Tubman. I’ll get back to her in a minute.
In Chatham in May 1858, John Brown convened a secret convention to debate the way forward and to finalize plans for the coming assault on and seizure of the federal armory and arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The primary aim of the convention was to seek recruits for this action. One of the more important parts of the convention was a programmatic document he submitted—the Provisional Constitution. It was no mere empty exercise, but the basis for a selection of an abolitionist vanguard for revolutionary war. John Brown was making plans for a future provisional egalitarian free-state government in the mountains.
Brown’s Provisional Constitution was seriously debated. Some delegates argued that the best time to have a coordinated attack somewhere in the South would be when the U.S. government was at war. But the argument to delay was defeated. There were delegates who rejected any reference to the flag of the United States as a symbol of freedom; they said, this is my oppression, the American flag. Brown argued that the flag was an expression of America’s early democratic ideals—a vote was taken and he won. It became the flag against slavery during the Civil War, but today it is the flag of imperialist plunder and mass murder, racial oppression and anti-immigrant bigotry.
When his business was finished in Chatham, he finalized his plans for Harpers Ferry. Brown tirelessly gave speeches to raise money for his war preparations, for the consummation of his life’s work to free the slaves. In need of more money for arms and supplies, he contacted a radical abolitionist group that he relied upon: the “Secret Six,” which included Franklin Sanborn and Gerrit Smith, who were animated by his Kansas exploits. However, he never revealed to them the specific target of his next strike.
Brown knew that in order to attract significant black support, it was vital to win over Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Tubman was key to recruiting followers among the many freedmen and fugitives who had settled in Canada beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Law. Through her courageous Underground Railroad work, Tubman had extensive knowledge of the planned Appalachian route. Showing deep appreciation of her leadership skills, Brown called her the “General” or “He.” Tubman fully embraced Brown’s plans. She was organizing people to go with her, but she fell ill and didn’t make it. Unceasing toil and hardships, on top of terrible spells of unconsciousness and injuries sustained from beatings by slaveowners, had taken their toll. John Brown was deeply disappointed.
John Brown was about to lead 21 men to what would be in effect the first battle of the Civil War. As the time for action arrived, Brown met one last time with Frederick Douglass. It didn’t go well. He revealed his plans for seizing the armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Douglass sharply disagreed and said that they were falling into a “perfect steel-trap” and would be crushed. They argued for several hours, and Douglass turned down the offer to go. However, at the meeting was a friend, an ex-slave named Shields Green, who was one tough fighter and became highly esteemed by John Brown and his associates. When questioned about going or staying, Green remarked: I think I’ll go with the Old Man. Four other black men went—Osborne Anderson, John Copeland, his uncle Lewis Leary and Dangerfield Newby (who in his 40s was the oldest black man to go). Newby was sturdy and immovable and joined to help get his wife and children out of slavery in Virginia.
Putting his plan into effect required meticulous preparation and sheer courage. To hide his forces from the eyes of the prying enemy, Brown required the assistance of trustworthy collaborators. His first pick was his wife Mary, for whom he had tremendous respect. It’s clear from his letters and correspondence that they shared and discussed the political news of the day. Brown’s 15-year-old daughter Annie and 16-year-old sister-in-law Martha were assigned to hold down the secret farmhouse five miles from Harpers Ferry, keeping watch and feeding soldiers. The men were John Brown men, so they knew how to help and keep the place clean. Though when they didn’t, they were set straight. The men were confined in a tiny place and stuffed in an attic. There they studied together, argued about the history of slavery and discussed Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. They were nearly broken by tension and their discipline was weakened, but the courageous young women kept up their morale and cohesion.
The whole thing could have been blown when one of the neighbors, who had a habit of showing up unannounced, caught a glimpse of a black man in the farmhouse. She suspected that Annie was helping runaways and challenged her to an explanation, but Annie denied it. Annie devised a plan to silence her neighbor by providing her and her children with food and helping them with other tasks as long as necessary.
In a very interesting biography of the women in John Brown’s family called The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism (2013), author Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz describes Annie’s “trial-by-fire inauguration into abolitionist activism.” Annie herself later described this as the most important period of her life. As Laughlin-Schultz remarked, “Though she did not march to Harpers Ferry in October 1859, Annie’s work in the Maryland countryside may have allowed Brown’s raiders to do so, and the work of Mary and Ruth [his wife and daughter] at North Elba helped smooth over the Brown men’s absences.”
The aim of John Brown was this: to procure arms, free slaves in the nearby area, lead his army into the mountains where they could establish a liberated area and, if need be, wage war against the slave masters. From a military point of view, Brown’s plan for Harpers Ferry was futile. His son Owen said it was like Napoleon trying to take Moscow. One of the reasons it failed was that Brown didn’t fully carry out his plans, which he admitted to afterwards. He also believed he was overly solicitous to his prisoners and relied on some of them to ward off the enemy’s blows. In the end, Brown’s forces killed five people but lost ten of their own. They held control for 36 hours, surrounded by gunmen from nearby towns and hamlets and eventually by federal troops. The troops were dispatched by President Buchanan, under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, the future commander of Confederate forces during the Civil War (you know, the “honorable” man according to White House chief of staff John Kelly). Brown and most of his associates were rounded up and captured, though several managed to escape. Those who were not killed on the spot were railroaded and later hanged by the vindictive courts of Virginia.
The Aftermath
While they were defeated in the end, John Brown and his men certainly fought. The raid at Harpers Ferry was a bold but unsuccessful action staged by a small, determined, interracial revolutionary band. What soon followed was what abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison termed “the new reign of terror” against black people in the South and against any Northerner who dared raise his head. Southerners were conjuring up fears of more Nat Turner revolts.
Harpers Ferry also caused fright and panic among some of John Brown’s so-called radical abolitionist friends in the Secret Six—they burned their correspondence with him. Gerrit Smith claimed insanity and briefly checked into an asylum while others fled for Canada. Some of them had probably been, to put it mildly, surprised when they found out that the plan was an assault on a federal arsenal and armory. It was euphemistically described by Brown, referring to the Underground Railroad, as “Rail Road business on a somewhatextended scale.” Secret Six member Thomas Wentworth Higginson refused to capitulate. He had told Brown before the raid that he was “always ready to invest in treason,” and didn’t burn his papers or correspondence. He later led a black regiment in the Civil War.
Frederick Douglass solidarized with the raid in a piece called “Capt. John Brown Not Insane” (Douglass’ Monthly, November 1859):
“Posterity will owe everlasting thanks to John Brown…[for he] has attacked slavery with the weapons precisely adapted to bring it to the death…. Like Samson, he has laid his hands upon the pillars of this great national temple of cruelty and blood, and when he falls, that temple, will speedily crumble to its final doom, burying its denizens in its ruins.”
Douglass had a price placed on his head by the federal government and used a pre-planned trip to England to escape.
John Brown knew that the pro-slavery federal government and its State of Virginia hangmen were close to finishing him off. While imprisoned, Brown was unbowed and wrote and answered many letters to family, friends and supporters (who mostly endorsed his action only some time after the fact). Above all, he pushed very hard for financial help to his family. He said that had he interfered on behalf of the rich, the oppressors would have poured praise upon him. Instead, his whole life had been devoted to fighting for the liberation of the slaves, and now he was willing to pay the ultimate price.
As I said, John Brown despised the ruling-class politicians of his day. For their murderous, cruel and unjust laws, he denounced the government as being filled with “fiends in human shape.” Before his death, in a letter to the abolitionist wife of George L. Stearns, Brown stated his wishes to be escorted to the gallows not by some pro-slavery clergyman but by poor blacks, his people: “I have asked to be spared from having any mock; or hypocritical prayers made over me, when I am publicly murdered: & that my only religious attendants be poor little, dirty, ragged, bare headed, & barefooted Slave Boys; & Girls led by some old grey headed Slave Mother.”
Following his execution, there were memorial services of black and white abolitionists in several cities. There was international impact. French writer Victor Hugo had written a rousing appeal to stop his execution and that of his followers. (The British abolitionists sat on their hands.) Brown’s death was also keenly felt in Haiti, the country with the first and only successful slave revolution in the Western Hemisphere, which was against the French slaveholders in 1791. Haitians, who saw in John Brown the great revolutionary and liberator of black slaves, Toussaint L’Ouverture, organized gatherings and fundraisers for the Brown family in every corner of the country. In addition, there were German workers—the Red ’48ers—European refugees who came to the U.S. following the failure of the 1848 revolution, who ended up playing an important role in building up the Union Army. Alongside black people in Cincinnati, they marched to memorialize John Brown.
John Brown gave his all and championed the struggles of the oppressed worldwide, including the 19th-century Hungarian, Greek and Polish struggles against national oppression. And it was his revolutionary war that opened the road to the annihilation of slavery. As radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips noted: “History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harper’s Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hill, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,—it does not live,—hereafter.”
George Novack wrote a tribute to John Brown, published in January 1938 in the New International, journal of the revolutionary Trotskyists at that time, the Socialist Workers Party. He captured the dialectical development of events, noting how a seemingly stable and eternal slavocracy contained the seeds of its own destruction: “Through John Brown the coming civil war entered into the nerves of the people in the many months before it was exhibited in their ideas and actions.”
His Body Moldering in the Grave —His Soul Marching On
The Civil War broke out less than two years after the execution of Brown and his comrades. The Civil War was the last great bourgeois revolution, the last progressive war of the U.S. bourgeoisie. Instead of a confederation of states, it consolidated a unified capitalist market under a United States of America.
In the fires of secessionist rebellion and total war, Douglass called for arming the slaves. For his part, Lincoln was reluctant to wage what he called a “remorseless revolutionary struggle” to crush the slaveholders. Facing ongoing military reverses, Lincoln changed in the course of the war. He was compelled to deploy powerful black arms—ultimately 200,000 black soldiers and sailors—who were critical in tipping the balance of forces against the slavocracy. At the war’s end more than 600,000 Americans lay dead.
We are told that slavery was a “stain” on this “great” capitalist democracy. This suggests it was an aberration, a deviation from an essential goodness. This is a perfumed lie. Slavery was a barbarous economic system built into the very foundations of U.S. capitalism. Its legacy stamps every aspect of social and economic life. The slaves were liberated through the Civil War. But with the undoing of subsequent Radical Reconstruction, the most democratic period in U.S. history for black people, the promise of black equality was crushed through Klan terror and defeated by political counterrevolution. This led to the consolidation of black people as an oppressed race-color caste toward the end of the 19th century.
John Brown considered himself to be an instrument of “God.” He believed that it was part of God’s will for him to liberate the slaves through force, unlike those preachers who pontificated about solace and consolation to the oppressed. We are atheists and dialectical materialists, and we base our revolutionary Marxist outlook firmly upon science. This means explaining the world from the world itself, not from some nonexistent “higher power.” In the face of natural occurrences, early human beings devised a system of mystical explanations for what they didn’t understand. Earthquakes, famines, sickness and death were not attributed to the workings of a material, physical world—a world that existed prior to and independent of human consciousness. In contrast to a materialist view, an idealist view maintains ideas, opinions and thoughts as primary and material reality as secondary. In his writings, Karl Marx asserts that “man makes religion, religion does not make man,” that “religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering,” and that religion is the “opium of the people.”
When the hour of action arrived, John Brown’s advice was to be quick, not to trifle. That is good advice. Importantly, he also struggled firmly to win revolutionary abolitionists to the fight for black freedom. He knew his foibles well and wrote about them. But what comes through from those who knew him was not a sense of superiority, but his kindness. Though we should proceed with historical care in analogies, one could say that there was a similarity he shared with Oliver Cromwell—the great 17th-century Puritan revolutionary of England. Brown would, as Trotsky noted of Cromwell, hesitate at nothing to smash oppression.
We of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) seek to build Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties that will hesitate at nothing in the fight to put the wealth of the world created by labor into the hands of labor itself through proletarian revolutions across the globe. Guided by a firm, revolutionary vanguard party, the workers will forge the class-struggle leadership of labor by ousting the agents of the bourgeoisie within the workers movement.
In racist capitalist America, we will remember those like John Brown and many others who waged war to throw off the shackles of the oppressed. Capitalism cannot be reformed—no ruling class ever has relinquished its power, its profits and accumulated wealth without a fight and it never will. This understanding is contrary to the illusions spread by the reformist socialists, such as the International Socialist Organization and Socialist Alternative, that you can pressure the Democrats to reform capitalism.
We understand that class struggle is the motor force of history. But this is not all. Even before Marx and Engels, bourgeois historians were writing about class struggle in France and elsewhere. We Marxists seek to extend this to recognizing the necessity for proletarian power, for proletarian dictatorship that will eliminate capitalism. We fight to end the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, as part of a transition to a classless society of material abundance.
We stand for the full integration of black people into an egalitarian socialist order, for revolutionary integrationism. This means integrated class struggle, mobilizing the social power of the proletariat to lead the fight against all manifestations of racial oppression, against racist police terror, against segregated education, against the hated Confederate flag of slavery and finally, to victory over the exploiters.
We fight to win a new generation of conscious workers and militant youth to take up the banner of genuine Marxism: Trotskyism. As a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party acting as a tribune of the people, we have no interests separate from the working class and oppressed. We fight for a communist future. We say: Remember John Brown and all our revolutionary heroes and heroines! We say: Finish the Civil War! For a third American Revolution! For black liberation through socialist revolution!
Il y a 140 ans, le 18 mars 1871, la classe ouvrière parisienne se soulevait et instaurait son propre Etat, un Etat ouvrier éphémère dans une seule ville. Alors qu’une bonne partie du gouvernement et de l’armée capitalistes s’étaient déjà enfuis de Paris, les ouvriers balayèrent ce qui restait et commencèrent à exercer le pouvoir. Cela ne dura que quelques semaines, jusqu’à fin mai 1871. La Commune fut un avant-goût de ce qu’Engels, dans son introduction de 1891 au livre de Marx la Guerre civile en France, appela la « dictature du prolétariat ». Lénine a attentivement étudié la Commune : il a révisé et publié la deuxième édition russe de la Guerre civile en France. Il a utilisé les leçons de la Commune dans l’Etat et la révolution, écrit peu avant le début de la Révolution d’octobre 1917, et dans la Révolution prolétarienne et le renégat Kautsky, écrit après cette révolution. Comme Lénine, nous devons tirer la leçon fondamentale de la Commune : contrairement à la Révolution russe victorieuse, elle n’avait pas de direction à la hauteur de la situation et elle s’est terminée par un massacre.
Origines de la Commune
L’idée de « commune » remonte au Moyen Age. A l’époque féodale, quand les villes se développaient en centres d’échanges, les citadins (artisans, marchands, et la bourgeoisie dont le nombre croissait) cherchaient parfois à obtenir une charte de franchise qui les exonérait des droits féodaux et leur permettait d’avoir une commune, c’est-à-dire une sorte de gouvernement municipal autonome « en commun ». Plus tard, pendant la Révolution bourgeoise française, une « commune » fit son apparition à Paris et servit de base à Maximilien Robespierre, le plus radical des jacobins, en 1792-1793. Elle avait pris le nom de « commune insurrectionnelle ». Elle était favorable au suffrage universel masculin et était basée sur les citoyens armés de Paris. En 1871, les ouvriers prenaient modèle sur ces exemples passés. Dans la Guerre civile en France, Marx écrivait : « C’est en général le sort des formations historiques entièrement nouvelles d’être prises à tort pour la réplique de formes plus anciennes, et même éteintes, de la vie sociale, avec lesquelles elles peuvent offrir une certaine ressemblance. Ainsi, dans cette nouvelle Commune, qui brise le pouvoir d’Etat moderne, on a voulu voir un rappel à la vie des communes médiévales […]. » La nouveauté de la Commune de 1871 tenait à sa nature révolutionnaire prolétarienne.
Pour comprendre les acteurs de la Commune de Paris, nous devons commencer par nous intéresser aux révolutions de 1848 qui l’ont précédée, quand une vague de soulèvements contre la réaction monarchique et féodale avait déferlé sur l’Europe continentale. En France, un monarque du nom de Louis-Philippe d’Orléans gouvernait depuis 1830 en défendant les intérêts des capitalistes financiers et industriels. En février 1848 un soulèvement de masse renversa la monarchie orléaniste et mit au pouvoir un gouvernement provisoire bourgeois dans lequel figuraient quelques représentants des socialistes et des ouvriers. Sous la pression des ouvriers, le gouvernement provisoire mit en place ce qu’on appelait les Ateliers nationaux, qui étaient une forme d’aide sociale pour les chômeurs parisiens. La principale opposition de gauche au gouvernement provisoire était dirigée par Auguste Blanqui, dont les partisans devaient plus tard jouer un rôle dans la Commune. En avril 1848, le gouvernement provisoire organisa des élections à une Assemblée constituante (à laquelle Blanqui était opposé). Une majorité de la population française, la paysannerie réactionnaire, vota pour le « Parti de l’ordre », une coalition de la droite monarchiste soutenue par la bourgeoisie. L’un de ses dirigeants était un certain Adolphe Thiers, qui sera plus tard le boucher de la Commune. En juin 1848, l’Assemblée constituante démocratiquement élue déclara la suppression des Ateliers nationaux, provoquant un soulèvement ouvrier à Paris. Il fut violemment réprimé par l’Assemblée. Des milliers d’ouvriers et d’opprimés furent tués – un avant-goût de ce qui adviendra avec la défaite de la Commune.
En France mais aussi dans toute l’Europe, la classe ouvrière s’était affirmée en 1848 comme une force de classe indépendante, et la bourgeoisie avait montré qu’en tant que classe elle était devenue contre-révolutionnaire. Au cours des siècles précédents, pendant les grandes révolutions bourgeoises, la bourgeoisie avait renversé les monarchies féodales. Mais en 1848, elle s’était alliée aux éléments féodaux réactionnaires pour écraser les ouvriers. Initialement, Marx et Engels, avant de participer aux révolutions de 1848, envisageaient la possibilité que le parti prolétarien s’allie avec l’opposition bourgeoise républicaine pendant une révolution démocratique bourgeoise (du moins en France et en Allemagne). Mais en 1850, dans leur célèbre Adresse du comité central à la Ligue des communistes, Marx et Engels, tirant les leçons de 1848, affirmèrent que le parti ouvrier devait agir indépendamment de la bourgeoisie et de la petite bourgeoisie et proclamèrent que pour les ouvriers, « leur cri de guerre doit être : la révolution en permanence ! »
Juste avant 1848, Marx et Engels avaient été pour beaucoup dans la création d’une organisation qui s’appelait la Ligue des communistes, qui était un petit groupe de révolutionnaires communistes avec pour programme le Manifeste du Parti communiste. Mais quelques années après les révolutions de 1848, la Ligue des communistes se désintégra. A l’époque de la Commune, en 1871, Marx et Engels étaient les dirigeants de ce qui s’appelait l’Association internationale des travailleurs, également connue sous le nom de Première Internationale ; elle avait été créée en 1864 et reflétait le renouveau du mouvement ouvrier en Europe après la défaite des révolutions de 1848. Contrairement à l’organisation de cadres qu’était la Ligue des communistes, la Première Internationale était constituée de multiples courants idéologiques, révolutionnaires comme petits-bourgeois. L’idéologie de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon était très influente dans la section française de l’Internationale. Proudhon était un des pères idéologiques de l’anarchisme, une idéologie petite-bourgeoise reflétant les intérêts des petits artisans et non du prolétariat industriel. Les proudhoniens étaient des « mutuellistes », qui rejetaient les grèves ou la participation à la lutte « politique ». Ils pensaient que la société devait se composer de petits propriétaires et luttaient pour des « sociétés de secours mutuel » qui dispenseraient des crédits bon marché ou gratuits, et leur arme était la « lutte économique ». Blanqui (qui n’avait pas adhéré à l’Internationale) était lui aussi très influent dans le mouvement ouvrier français. Pour Engels, c’était un « révolutionnaire de la génération précédente », parce que les origines de son idéologie remontaient aux communistes jacobins radicaux d’après la Révolution française de 1789. Blanqui croyait à la politique conspiratrice, c’est-à-dire organiser une petite minorité dans des cellules secrètes, pour ensuite apparaître au grand jour et tenter de provoquer une révolution par une insurrection armée. En 1839, avec un millier de ses disciples, il tenta de mettre en pratique cette conception, avec le résultat auquel on pouvait s’attendre : lui et un certain nombre de ses partisans se retrouvèrent immédiatement en prison.
La Première Internationale comptait aussi dans ses rangs un certain nombre de syndicalistes anglais. En Angleterre, contrairement à ce qui se passait dans le reste de l’Europe, les syndicats étaient un mouvement de masse, mais avec une orientation politique démocratique bourgeoise. L’Internationale incluait aussi plusieurs anciens militants allemands de la Ligue des communistes, et un mélange d’éléments éclectiques, dont un certain nombre d’Italiens et de Polonais. L’anarchiste Mikhaïl Bakounine avait fait alliance avec la Première Internationale en 1868-1869, tout en maintenant en parallèle et secrètement sa propre organisation, l’« Alliance internationale de la démocratie socialiste », ce qui était une source de tensions permanentes avec Marx et Engels. Comme les proudhoniens, les bakouniniens considéraient que la source du changement social était la petite bourgeoisie et non la classe ouvrière. Bakounine croyait que l’Etat bourgeois pouvait simplement être aboli, et il était contre l’idée de dictature du prolétariat, ainsi que contre toute « autorité ». Comme l’écrira plus tard Engels, pour Bakounine « l’autorité – l’Etat – voilà le grand mal ». Comme Proudhon, Bakounine rejetait la « lutte politique » au profit de la « lutte économique ». Pour en savoir plus sur ces questions, Joseph Seymour a écrit une série d’articles formidables sur les communistes des premières années et les révolutions de 1848, qui ont été publiés dans Young Spartacus (1976-1979) sous le titre « Le marxisme et la tradition communiste jacobine ». On trouvera aussi des détails intéressants sur Proudhon et Bakounine dans la brochure spartaciste Marxisme contre anarchisme.
Paris et le développement industriel
Dans la période qui suivit les insurrections de 1848, le prolétariat industriel s’était développé en Europe occidentale à un rythme rapide, conséquence du développement de l’industrie elle-même : dans les deux décennies qui séparent la défaite de 1848 et la Commune, la production industrielle et le commerce extérieur français avaient doublé. En 1840, il n’existait que quelques chemins de fer hors de Grande-Bretagne et des Etats-Unis, mais en 1870 il y avait en France près de 20 000 kilomètres de voies ferrées, des milliers de kilomètres de lignes télégraphiques, et la construction navale avait connu un développement considérable. L’or de la « ruée vers l’or » californienne affluait en Europe. Le capital financier s’était développé avec la création en France de banques géantes comme le Crédit lyonnais et le Crédit foncier, qui finançaient l’expansion industrielle et des grands projets immobiliers.
Même si la classe ouvrière parisienne était restée en grande partie de nature artisanale, ou organisée en petits ateliers (c’était une des raisons de l’influence de Proudhon), le développement en France (et dans une mesure limitée à Paris) d’un prolétariat industriel significatif représentait un changement par rapport à l’époque d’avant 1848, quand Marx et Engels pensaient que le prolétariat, particulièrement en France et en Allemagne, avait besoin de davantage de temps pour se développer économiquement en tant que classe. Comme l’écrivait Engels dans son introduction à la Guerre civile en France de Marx, en 1871, « même à Paris, ce centre de l’artisanat d’art, la grande industrie avait […] cessé d’être une exception », et Marx « dit très justement » que la guerre civile « devait aboutir finalement au communisme, c’est-à-dire à l’exact opposé de la doctrine de Proudhon ».
La croissance de l’industrie s’était accompagnée d’une expansion rapide de la population urbaine. La population parisienne avait plus que doublé entre 1831 et 1872. Pendant les deux décennies précédant la Commune, le préfet de Paris, le baron Haussmann, avait remodelé de fond en comble l’urbanisme parisien. Avant lui, de nombreux quartiers de Paris étaient très différents de ce qu’ils sont aujourd’hui et ressemblaient davantage à ceux de la plupart des villes médiévales : minuscules ruelles, maisons hétéroclites entassées les unes contre les autres dans le centre-ville, rues mal éclairées qui étaient autant de coupe-gorge crasseux, et la classe ouvrière et les pauvres étaient affligés de toutes sortes de maladies. La classe moyenne « respectable » vivait dans la peur du centre-ville, qui était aussi le centre historique des révoltes contre la classe dirigeante. Haussmann fit raser cette partie de la ville et la remplaça par les « grands boulevards », larges, avec de grands carrefours à angles droits où il serait plus facile de faire manœuvrer la troupe et de mater des barricades. Haussmann lui-même écrivait : « C’était l’éventrement du Vieux Paris, du quartier des émeutes, des barricades, par une large voie centrale, perçant, de part en part, ce dédale presque impraticable […]. » Les ouvriers furent chassés du centre-ville vers les faubourgs comme les collines de Belleville et de Montmartre, qui devinrent par la suite les bastions de la Commune.
La guerre franco-prussienne
L’événement déclencheur de la Commune de Paris fut la guerre franco-prussienne de 1870. Pendant la plus grande partie du XIXe siècle, l’Allemagne n’était pas un pays unifié. Pendant la Révolution de 1848, Marx et d’autres socialistes avaient combattu pour l’unification de l’Allemagne. Mais quand en 1848 la bourgeoisie allemande fit alliance avec la réaction féodale, ceci eut pour conséquence la survivance de nombreux petits Etats germanophones, dont certains étaient dominés par la noblesse locale, tandis que d’autres étaient sous le contrôle de l’étranger. Le plus puissant des Etats allemands était la Prusse, où régnait la monarchie des Hohenzollern. Au milieu des années 1860, sous le roi Guillaume 1er, un chancelier allemand à poigne du nom d’Otto von Bismarck arriva aux affaires. Bismarck affronta successivement le Danemark et l’Autriche pour le contrôle des provinces germanophones, accélérant ainsi un processus d’unification allemande officialisé par la création en 1867 de la Confédération de l’Allemagne du Nord. Pour achever l’unification allemande, Bismarck devait défier à l’ouest la domination française : il provoqua Napoléon III et l’incita à déclarer la guerre à la Prusse en menaçant de placer sur le trône d’Espagne un roi issu de la noblesse prussienne (la France aurait alors été encerclée par des régimes favorables à la Prusse).
L’arrivée au pouvoir de Louis Napoléon Bonaparte (le neveu de Napoléon 1er) avait été la conséquence de l’écrasement de l’insurrection du prolétariat français en juin 1848. Il avait été président de l’Assemblée nationale de 1848 à 1851, mais il avait fait un coup d’Etat et dissous l’Assemblée nationale en décembre 1851. Une année plus tard, il proclamait le Second Empire et se couronnait empereur Napoléon III. A propos des deux Napoléon, Marx, dans le 18-Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte, écrivait ironiquement : « Hegel fait quelque part cette remarque que tous les grands événements et personnages historiques se répètent pour ainsi dire une deuxième fois. Il a oublié d’ajouter : la première fois comme tragédie, la seconde fois comme farce. »
Le 19 juillet 1870, Napoléon III déclarait la guerre à la Prusse, et la guerre franco-prussienne commençait. Dans une déclaration sur la guerre, rédigée par Marx sous le titre de « Première adresse du Conseil général », l’Internationale se rangeait militairement du côté de l’Allemagne, du point de vue de l’internationalisme révolutionnaire. Marx argumentait qu’il s’agissait d’une guerre défensive et il soutenait l’unification de l’Allemagne tout en étant politiquement opposé à Bismarck et à Napoléon III. Marx lançait aussi une mise en garde : « Si la classe ouvrière allemande permet à la guerre actuelle de perdre son caractère strictement défensif et de dégénérer en une guerre contre le peuple français, victoire ou défaite, ce sera toujours un désastre. »
Mais en quelques semaines, la Prusse occupait sans difficulté une partie de la France. Un coup décisif avait été porté quand l’armée française fut écrasée lors de la bataille de Sedan, dans l’est de la France, les 1er et 2 septembre 1870 ; plus de 80 000 soldats et officiers furent faits prisonniers, dont Napoléon III. La nouvelle de la défaite et de la capture de Napoléon III provoqua dans toute la France des manifestations ouvrières contre la monarchie napoléonienne, pour la république et contre la capitulation devant les Prussiens. Le matin du 4 septembre, les ouvriers parisiens envahirent le Palais-Bourbon, siège de la Chambre des députés. Les masses chassèrent physiquement les députés et Léon Gambetta, un politicien républicain bourgeois, fut forcé d’annoncer l’abolition de l’Empire de Napoléon III et de proclamer la Troisième République. Les ouvriers conduisirent un certain nombre de députés à l’Hôtel de ville, où un « gouvernement de la Défense nationale » fut formé.
A partir de ce jour, le 4 septembre, le « gouvernement de la Défense nationale » fut tenaillé par « la peur de la classe ouvrière ». Il était « composé en partie d’orléanistes [monarchistes bourgeois] notoires, en partie de républicains bourgeois, sur quelques-uns desquels l’insurrection de juin 1848 a laissé son stigmate indélébile » (Marx, la Guerre civile en France, 1871). Malgré son nom, le groupe des politiciens bourgeois du « gouvernement de la Défense nationale » était peu désireux de combattre les Prussiens ; il voulait principalement mater la révolte ouvrière. Comme devait le déclarer plus tard Jules Favre, à l’époque ministre des Affaires étrangères, le gouvernement de la Défense nationale avait pris le pouvoir pour repousser les forces de l’anarchie et empêcher une révolte honteuse à Paris.
Début septembre, quelques jours après la défaite française à Sedan, la Première Internationale publiait la « Seconde adresse du Conseil général » de Marx, qui saluait la proclamation de la république en France et dénonçait l’invasion du pays par la Prusse. L’Internationale exigeait que l’Alsace et la Lorraine, où est parlé un dialecte allemand mais qui se considéraient depuis longtemps comme françaises, ne soient pas annexées par l’Allemagne. Marx mettait aussi en garde contre le danger d’une insurrection des ouvriers français parce qu’il pensait qu’elle serait prématurée (cependant, quand la Commune fut plus tard proclamée, Marx, Engels et l’Internationale furent les premiers à prendre fait et cause pour elle). Ceci dit, les forces hétérogènes qui composaient l’Internationale n’avaient pas toutes la même attitude : Marx et Engels critiquaient la section française de l’Internationale pour avoir publié une déclaration « chauvine » adressée au « peuple allemand » au nom du « peuple français », c’est-à-dire sur une base nationaliste bourgeoise et non du point de vue de l’internationalisme prolétarien. Cela a continué à être une faiblesse politique des éléments qui devaient plus tard diriger la Commune. Comme le fera remarquer Lénine : combiner « patriotisme et socialisme » fut « l’erreur fatale des socialistes français » ; la bourgeoisie française aurait dû porter « la responsabilité de l’humiliation nationale ! L’affaire du prolétariat est de lutter pour affranchir le travail du joug de la bourgeoisie par le socialisme. »
Le siège de Paris et l’armistice
Après le 4 septembre 1870, les Français continuèrent la guerre contre les Prussiens, mais sous un commandement bourgeois hésitant. Les Prussiens encerclèrent bientôt Paris. La ville fut assiégée et au bout de quelques semaines la famine régnait. En octobre 1870, non seulement les masses ouvrières mais aussi la bourgeoisie avaient déjà dû se résoudre à manger de la viande de cheval. (La classe ouvrière avait commencé à en manger pendant la crise industrielle de 1866). A la mi-novembre, on mangeait des animaux de compagnie, et même des rats et des pigeons voyageurs. L’écrivain Victor Hugo se vit attribuer des morceaux de cerf et d’antilope du zoo. Le combustible de chauffage aussi vint à manquer et les ouvriers et les pauvres de Paris se mirent bientôt à grelotter de froid. Pour couronner le tout, début janvier 1871, les Prussiens bombardaient la ville sans répit.
Pendant cette période, à l’automne-hiver 1870-1871, eurent lieu d’autres révoltes d’éléments ouvriers, et le gouvernement bourgeois fit quelques timides tentatives d’attaques contre les Prussiens. Le 31 octobre 1870, arriva de province la nouvelle que la deuxième armée française avait été battue à Metz, et Thiers arriva à Paris pour négocier un armistice avec Bismarck. Mais les ouvriers français étaient opposés à un armistice, et le 31 octobre, ils se révoltèrent dans plusieurs villes. Lors du soulèvement parisien, les dirigeants les plus radicaux, dont Blanqui, prirent en otage des membres du « gouvernement de la Défense nationale ». Les socialistes firent promettre au gouvernement d’organiser des élections pour une Commune, mais il s’agissait là d’une promesse fallacieuse. Il l’avait faite uniquement pour apaiser la colère populaire et gagner le temps nécessaire à ses troupes pour surprendre et désarmer les ouvriers qui avaient pris en otage le « gouvernement de la Défense nationale ». Après l’échec du soulèvement, et alors que le siège de Paris se poursuivait, le gouvernement commença à négocier en secret avec les Prussiens.
Finalement, fin janvier 1871, la majorité de la population française était à bout de forces. Le 28 janvier, Jules Favre, membre du « gouvernement de la Défense nationale » se rendit à Versailles pour négocier un armistice avec les Prussiens. Les termes de cet armistice étaient draconiens : le paiement à la Prusse d’une indemnité de 200 millions de francs, dont le premier versement devait avoir lieu dans les deux semaines ; reddition immédiate de la plupart des forts entourant Paris ; remise des armes et des munitions de l’armée (mais pas de la Garde nationale) ; annexion de l’Alsace et de la Lorraine par l’Allemagne ; et tenue des élections pour une Assemblée nationale.
Les élections à l’Assemblée nationale eurent lieu le 8 février 1871. Celle-ci était dominée par des monarchistes élus par les paysans conservateurs des campagnes. (L’Assemblée et ses partisans étaient appelés les « ruraux » par les ouvriers insurgés des villes). Adolphe Thiers, qui en 1848 était un dirigeant du « Parti de l’ordre » qui avait massacré les ouvriers, fut nommé chef du gouvernement par cette Assemblée nationale réactionnaire. Comme les Prussiens étaient toujours à Versailles, l’Assemblée nationale siégeait à Bordeaux. Un mois plus tard, le 1er mars, les Prussiens défilèrent symboliquement sur les Champs-Elysées, mais ils se retirèrent peu après de Versailles, tout en continuant à occuper la région à l’est de Paris et le nord de la France, en gage du paiement des réparations de guerre qui leur étaient dues.
La Garde nationale
Je voudrais m’arrêter un peu sur la Garde nationale. La Garde nationale de Paris était une force distincte de l’armée française. L’existence de la Garde nationale remonte au tout début de la Révolution française de 1789, quand elle s’était constituée comme une milice citoyenne bourgeoise. Elle avait été abolie pendant la brève restauration de la monarchie des Bourbons et rétablie en 1830. Par la suite, la composition de classe et la taille de la Garde nationale avaient fluctué en fonction des circonstances politiques. Pendant la Révolution de 1848, par exemple, elle s’était transformée, passant d’une petite force bourgeoise conservatrice à une milice de 250 000 hommes, dans laquelle les bataillons composés de pauvres et d’ouvriers formaient une écrasante majorité. Après la défaite de 1848, elle redevint une petite milice bourgeoise. A la proclamation de la Troisième République, le 4 septembre 1870, la police parisienne s’était enfuie, et la Garde nationale était devenue la principale force armée qui restait à Paris. Et donc, pendant le siège prussien de l’hiver 1870-1871, les ouvriers parisiens de la Garde nationale étaient armés parce qu’il n’y avait pas d’autre force pour repousser les Prussiens. Les effectifs de la Garde nationale augmentèrent à nouveau, atteignant 300 000 hommes. Pendant le siège, toutes les ressources disponibles dans Paris furent mobilisées pour fabriquer des munitions, et les ouvriers, grâce à une souscription ouverte par Victor Hugo, donnèrent de l’argent pour fabriquer des canons.
Fin janvier 1871, après la signature de l’armistice avec les Prussiens, la bourgeoisie française ne disposait plus que de 15 000 soldats loyaux – les autres étaient prisonniers de Bismarck. Parallèlement, il y avait dans la Garde nationale parisienne 300 000 ouvriers en armes, dont une proportion non négligeable de rouges. Thiers devait désarmer les ouvriers parisiens pour obtenir des banquiers français l’argent nécessaire à effectuer le premier versement aux Prussiens prévu par l’armistice. Comme il l’expliquera plus tard, « les gens d’affaires allaient répétant partout : “Vous ne ferez jamais d’opérations financières, si vous n’en finissez pas avec tous ces scélérats, si vous ne leur enlevez pas les canons”. »
Les ouvriers de la Garde nationale avaient immédiatement commencé à s’organiser en opposition à l’armistice de janvier 1871. Les bataillons de la Garde nationale commencèrent à créer des comités électoraux sur une plate-forme républicaine de gauche pour les élections du 8 février. Quand les monarchistes remportèrent les élections à l’Assemblée nationale, la Garde nationale appela à de nouveaux meetings et continua pendant environ un mois, de début février à début mars, à organiser les ouvriers parisiens. Thiers nomma un officier connu pour sa brutalité « général » de la Garde nationale. Opposés à ce choix, plusieurs dirigeants de la Garde nationale (affiliés à la Première Internationale) se révoltèrent le 3 mars 1871, nommèrent une direction provisoire de la Garde nationale et appelèrent à des élections à un comité central. Comme l’écrivait Marx, le soulèvement de Paris « ne date pas du 18 mars, bien qu’il ait remporté ce jour-là sa première victoire sur la conspiration ; il date du 31 janvier, du jour même de la capitulation ».
Début mars, les élections au Comité central de la Garde nationale furent annoncées par des affiches rouge vif placardées dans tout Paris, qui demandaient aux citoyens de s’organiser dans leur quartier et dans leur arrondissement. En réponse à la campagne de la Garde nationale, l’Assemblée nationale réactionnaire prétendit que Paris était livré à l’incendie et au pillage. Les Prussiens ayant quitté Versailles, le gouvernement français quitta Bordeaux et s’installa dans cette ville plutôt qu’à Paris par peur des masses plébéiennes. L’Assemblée décréta également des mesures de représailles contre les ouvriers et la petite bourgeoisie des villes. Elle supprima l’indemnité versée aux gardes nationaux, qui était une des rares ressources de la plupart des Parisiens. L’Assemblée apporta aussi son soutien aux propriétaires qui exigeaient le paiement de tous les arriérés de loyer depuis le début du siège, une mesure qui concernait une grande partie de la population. Elle exigea aussi le règlement avec intérêt de tous les impayés dans un délai de quatre mois, ce qui touchait en particulier la petite bourgeoisie des boutiquiers.
Ces mesures provoquèrent l’indignation générale, mais l’étincelle de l’insurrection ouvrière de Paris se produisit au petit matin du 18 mars 1871. Thiers, qui manquait de soldats, avait envoyé discrètement à Paris des bataillons de l’armée pour voler les canons de la Garde nationale. Détail symptomatique du manque d’organisation consciente qui régnait au sein de la Garde nationale, les canons n’étaient pas gardés. A l’aube, lorsque des crémières virent l’armée en train d’essayer d’emporter un des canons, payés avec le propre argent des ouvriers, elles alertèrent la Garde nationale et s’interposèrent physiquement, en reprochant aux soldats d’agir contre la République. Les gardes nationaux commencèrent à affluer et fraternisèrent avec les simples soldats, les gagnant à leur cause. Quand le général Lecomte, qui les commandait, donna l’ordre de tirer sur la population désarmée, les soldats refusèrent d’obéir ; le général et un autre officier furent arrêtés par les soldats et la Garde nationale. Très vite, partout dans Paris, l’armée désobéit aux ordres et fraternisa avec les masses parisiennes. Plus tard dans la journée, Clément Thomas, un politicien bourgeois qui avait soutenu la brutale répression du soulèvement ouvrier de juin 1848, fut reconnu dans la rue. Le général Lecomte et lui furent alignés contre un mur et fusillés par les insurgés.
Après le soulèvement du 18 mars et la mutinerie de l’armée, le gouverneur de Paris s’enfuit à Versailles, et le Comité central de la Garde nationale commença à exercer le pouvoir et à décréter immédiatement des mesures favorables aux masses laborieuses. Le 21 mars, il suspendit la vente des objets déposés en gages – les prêts sur gages avaient été un des rares moyens de survie des Parisiens pauvres pendant le siège. Il abrogea plusieurs mesures réactionnaires de l’Assemblée nationale, notamment en accordant des délais supplémentaires aux débiteurs et en interdisant les expulsions pour non-paiement de loyer. Même s’il avait le pouvoir entre les mains, le Comité central de la Garde nationale commença à proposer des élections pour une commune, dans l’illusion qu’il serait possible de négocier avec les maires d’arrondissement bourgeois, qui tous soutenaient Thiers. Au bout de quelques jours, les maires bourgeois et leurs partisans s’enfuirent à Versailles pour y rejoindre l’Assemblée nationale.
La Commune et la dictature du prolétariat
C’est ainsi que le Comité central de la Garde nationale se retrouva à la tête de Paris, avec entre ses mains tout l’appareil matériel du pouvoir. Il était, selon la formule de Trotsky, un Conseil de Députés des ouvriers armés et de la petite bourgeoisie. Mais le Comité central de la Garde nationale ne se considérait pas lui-même comme une autorité révolutionnaire centrale. Marx argumentait qu’étant donné que la bourgeoisie venait juste de s’enfuir, était désorganisée, et n’avait pas beaucoup de soldats, le Comité central, au lieu d’appeler à des élections pour une commune, aurait dû « marcher tout de suite sur Versailles », mais que « par scrupules de conscience, on laissa passer le moment opportun ». Autrement dit, au lieu d’anéantir ses ennemis, le Comité central chercha à prendre sur eux un ascendant moral et laissa les Versaillais tranquilles. Cela a ainsi permis à ces derniers de se ressaisir et de préparer l’écrasement ultérieur de la Commune.
D’autres villes françaises avaient déjà connu au moins un soulèvement depuis septembre 1870. Après le 18 mars, des communes s’étaient créées à Lyon, à Saint-Etienne et au Creusot, un centre de l’industrie lourde. Cependant, le Comité central, et plus tard le conseil de la Commune, étaient attachés aux idées anarchisantes de « fédération » et d’« autonomie », et comme devait l’expliquer Trotsky, ils s’efforçaient de « remplacer la révolution prolétarienne, qui se développait, par une réforme petite-bourgeoise : l’autonomie communale. La vraie tâche révolutionnaire consistait à assurer au prolétariat le Pouvoir dans tout le pays. Paris en devait servir de base […]. Et, pour atteindre ce but, il fallait, sans perdre de temps, vaincre Versailles et envoyer par toute la France des agitateurs, des organisateurs, de la force armée ».
Mais malgré ces faiblesses, la Commune de Paris représentait le noyau d’un Etat ouvrier. Selon la formule de Marx et Engels, la classe ouvrière ne pouvait pas « se contenter de prendre telle quelle la machine de l’Etat et de la faire fonctionner pour son propre compte », elle devait briser ce qui restait de l’Etat bourgeois et le remplacer par sa propre dictature de classe, la « dictature du prolétariat ». Et c’est précisément ce qui s’est passé. Le 28 mars, deux jours après que la Garde nationale avait organisé les élections pour la Commune, le nouveau conseil de la Commune, le gouvernement du Paris prolétarien, se réunit. Son premier décret fut la suppression de l’armée permanente et son remplacement par le peuple en armes. Il transforma aussi la bureaucratie d’Etat en diminuant les salaires et en rendant tous les responsables révocables à tout moment. Jean-Baptiste Millière, un proudhonien de gauche membre de la Commune, la décrit en ces termes : « La Commune n’est pas une Assemblée Constituante, elle est un conseil de guerre. Elle ne doit avoir qu’un but : la victoire ; qu’une arme : la force ; qu’une loi : celle du salut public ». (cité par Trotsky dans Terrorisme et communisme, 1920). Dans le Manifeste du Parti communiste déjà, Marx et Engels affirmaient que les ouvriers devaient avoir leur Etat, c’est-à-dire le prolétariat « organisé en classe dominante ». Après l’expérience de 1848, ils avaient acquis la conviction qu’il fallait briser la machine d’Etat bourgeoise, mais par quoi la remplacer demeurait abstrait. C’est en prenant la Commune comme modèle qu’ils arrivèrent à une conception claire de ce à quoi ressemblerait la « dictature du prolétariat ».
Je veux dire quelques mots sur ce qu’est la « dictature du prolétariat ». La Commune avait donné un aperçu de l’avenir, mais c’est seulement en octobre 1917, sous la direction des bolchéviks, qu’une révolution ouvrière complètement aboutie vit le jour – quand ouvriers et soldats organisés en conseils (analogues à la Commune elle-même) et dirigés par le Parti bolchévique renversèrent la classe capitaliste et instaurèrent l’Etat ouvrier soviétique, la formation sociale la plus avancée de toute l’histoire de l’humanité. Les révisionnistes de tous poils déforment la signification de la « dictature du prolétariat » pour dépeindre la Commune comme une paisible démocratie bourgeoise, et rejettent ainsi les leçons fondamentales de la Commune et de la Révolution bolchévique. Le premier porte-parole de ce révisionnisme fut Karl Kautsky, un dirigeant du SPD allemand et de la Deuxième Internationale qui abandonna la base de l’internationalisme marxiste pour soutenir sa propre classe dirigeante pendant la Première Guerre mondiale. Plus récemment, un autre révisionniste, Daniel Bensaïd, dirigeant aujourd’hui décédé du Secrétariat unifié, a recyclé (sans le citer) un certain nombre d’arguments de Kautsky dans un article reproduit dans Tout est à nous ! La Revue, publiée par le Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA).
Pour paraphraser Kautsky, celui-ci argumentait que contrairement à la Révolution bolchévique, à laquelle il était opposé et qu’il considérait comme un « putsch », « la Commune de Paris a été la dictature du prolétariat ; or, elle a été élue au suffrage universel, c’est-à-dire sans que la bourgeoisie ait été privée de ses droits électoraux, c’est à dire “démocratiquement” » (Lénine, la Révolution prolétarienne et le renégat Kautsky). De même, Bensaïd argumentait que la « forme » de la « dictature du prolétariat » dans la Commune restait « celle du suffrage universel » (Tout est à Nous ! La Revue, n° 19, mars). Autrement dit, ils s’efforcent tous les deux de réduire la « dictature du prolétariat » de la Commune à une question de « démocratie » et de « suffrage universel » en général. En tant que marxistes, nous savons qu’il n’existe pas de « démocratie » sans contenu de classe. Tout en défendant le maximum de démocratie sous le capitalisme, nous sommes conscients que le « suffrage universel » est une forme de démocratie bourgeoise, c’est-à-dire une forme de la domination de la classe capitaliste. Lénine et Trotsky, dans leurs ouvrages de référence en réponse à Kautsky (la Révolution prolétarienne et le renégat Kautsky et Terrorisme et communisme), faisaient remarquer que la bourgeoisie s’était déjà enfuie de Paris à l’époque des élections pour la Commune, et que bien qu’il y ait eu des élections sur la base du suffrage universel, celles-ci reflétaient fondamentalement un vote de classe, celui du prolétariat. Ce qui définissait la « dictature du prolétariat » de la Commune, c’était la suppression de l’armée permanente bourgeoise et son remplacement par les ouvriers en armes.
Peindre la Commune sous les couleurs de la démocratie bourgeoise, c’est faire l’apologie du capitalisme et escamoter les leçons marxistes essentielles de la Commune. Considéré à l’échelle nationale, le « suffrage universel » ne représentait pas les intérêts de la classe ouvrière. L’Assemblée nationale réactionnaire, amenée au pouvoir le 8 février, avait été élue sur la base du « suffrage universel », et elle a cherché à écraser la Commune qui avait renversé la domination de classe bourgeoise. En fait, à l’époque de la Commune, certains soi-disant « socialistes » ont soutenu la démocratie bourgeoise contre les ouvriers. Parmi eux figurait Louis Blanc, une figure historique qui s’est opposée aux communards parce que ceux-ci s’étaient « insurgés contre l’Assemblée la plus librement élue ». Les véritables prédécesseurs de Kautsky et de Bensaïd sont les « socialistes » bourgeois de ce genre et non pas les communards.
Les membres de la Commune, et ce que la Commune a accompli
Un des principaux problèmes de la Commune, une fois arrivée au pouvoir, fut l’influence petite-bourgeoise et anarchoïde au sein de sa direction, avec comme conséquence que les différents éléments de la Commune étaient réticents envers le centralisme et « l’autorité ». Comme l’explique Trotsky, la Commune fourmillait de « socialistes bourgeois ». Et Marx regrettait que « la Commune me semble perdre trop de temps avec des bagatelles et des querelles personnelles. On voit qu’il y a encore d’autres influences que celles des ouvriers. » Toutefois, la Commune, s’étant emparée du pouvoir d’Etat, était poussée par cette logique à appliquer des mesures conformes aux intérêts des ouvriers et de la petite bourgeoisie, parfois en contradiction avec les programmes dont ses participants se réclamaient.
Qui étaient les représentants élus au conseil de la Commune ? Il y avait là des personnalités très diverses, qui oscillaient entre un Charles Delescluze, radical bourgeois jacobin et une quarantaine de membres de la Première Internationale, dont la plupart étaient influencés par Proudhon, et dans une bien moindre mesure par Mikhaïl Bakounine. (La principale contribution de Bakounine en 1870-1871 fut de tenter de diriger un soulèvement à Lyon fin septembre 1870 : il y proclama l’abolition de l’Etat bourgeois, après quoi l’Etat ne tarda pas à écraser son soulèvement). Il y avait aussi à la Commune un certain nombre de partisans de Blanqui, ainsi que d’autres éléments hétéroclites comme Félix Pyat, aventurier petit-bourgeois et calomniateur de Marx, que l’Internationale avait publiquement désavoué en 1870.
Un collaborateur de Marx dans l’Internationale joua un rôle important. Léo Frankel, joaillier de métier, était à la Commune et y défendit les réformes les plus progressistes qui furent instaurées concernant la classe ouvrière. Il réclama l’abolition du travail de nuit pour les boulangers, et demanda que les ateliers qui n’étaient pas en activité soient placés sous le contrôle des coopératives ouvrières et des syndicats. Il argumenta que la Commune ne devait pas accepter de passer des marchés avec les entrepreneurs les moins-disants qui faisaient pression à la baisse sur les salaires, mais qu’elle devait traiter uniquement avec des coopératives ouvrières. Il ne fut pas suivi sur ce point, mais la Commune accepta d’instaurer un salaire minimum.
Le conseil de la Commune comptait une dizaine de partisans de Blanqui. Mais le 17 mars, juste avant sa tentative pour dérober les canons de la Commune, Thiers avait préventivement fait arrêter Blanqui (qui était alors âgé), afin d’empêcher les ouvriers parisiens de se rassembler derrière lui. Les blanquistes étaient des conspirateurs. Leur position était bien résumée par un des dirigeants blanquistes de la Commune, Raoul Rigault : « Avec Blanqui, nous obtiendrons tout, sans Blanqui, rien. » Et ils passèrent le plus clair de la révolution à chercher à le récupérer. Les historiens bourgeois continuent à attaquer la Commune de façon haineuse et hystérique (ceci afin de faire passer les ouvriers pour des bandits sanguinaires) pour ce qui était une mesure parfaitement défendable, à savoir l’arrestation d’un certain nombre d’otages, dont l’archevêque de Paris Georges Darboy, qu’ils espéraient échanger contre Blanqui. (Plus tard, pendant que les Versaillais écrasaient la Commune, Darboy et plusieurs dizaines d’autres otages furent fusillés.) En fait, c’est Thiers qui a cherché à transformer l’archevêque en martyr de la cause contre-révolutionnaire ; Darboy lui-même avait plaidé auprès de Versailles pour que l’échange ait lieu, et écrivit : « Il est acquis que Versailles ne veut ni d’échange ni de conciliation ».
Parmi les autres réformes réalisées par la Commune, citons : la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat, l’expropriation des biens de l’Eglise, et l’enseignement public gratuit. La Commune appliqua également ce qui correspondait à un programme de « pleins droits de citoyenneté pour les immigrés » comptant parmi ses éminents membres un certain nombre d’étrangers, dont les Polonais Jaroslaw Dombrowski et Walery Wroblewski qui faisaient partie de ses cadres militaires les plus compétents, et Léo Frankel, que je viens de mentionner, qui était né en Hongrie et avait travaillé avec le mouvement ouvrier allemand. Les femmes jouèrent aussi un rôle important dans la Commune. L’« Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et l’aide aux blessés » fut fondée par Elisabeth Dmitrieff, qui connaissait Marx et ses filles et qui avait été envoyée à Paris par Marx. Avec l’appui de Frankel, son Union confectionnait des vêtements pour la Garde nationale, afin d’engager les femmes et les maintenir aux côtés de la révolution. Louise Michel, peut-être la femme la plus célèbre de la Commune, organisa un service d’ambulancières qui soignaient les blessés jusque sous les balles, et qui permit aux communards blessés d’échapper aux religieuses hostiles qui dirigeaient à l’époque les hôpitaux.
Pour Marx, une des plus graves erreurs de la Commune fut de ne pas prendre le contrôle des banques. Le 20 mars, le Comité central de la Garde nationale, à court d’argent, alla trouver les Rothschild pour qu’ils lui ouvrent un crédit à leur banque ; ils « prêtèrent » au nouveau gouvernement ouvrier parisien un million de francs. Toutefois, la Banque de France disposait de plusieurs milliards de francs, des lingots d’or, des bons du Trésor et des titres en tous genres. Sans les banques, tous les capitalistes auraient été mis à genoux devant la Commune. Lissagaray, un des meilleurs historiens de la Commune, qui travailla plus tard avec Marx à Londres, écrivait à ce sujet : « Depuis le 19 Mars, les régents de la Banque vivaient comme les condamnés à mort, attendant chaque matin l’exécution de leur caisse. De la déménager à Versailles, on n’y pouvait songer. Il aurait fallu soixante ou quatre vingt voitures et un corps d’armée. » Les proudhoniens de la Commune, prosternés devant la sacro-sainte propriété privée, ne voulaient pas toucher à la Banque de France.
Ceci étant dit, comme je l’ai indiqué, certains aspects de la politique de la Commune étaient en contradiction directe avec le programme dont se réclamaient certains de ses membres. Quand elle organisait la grande industrie et la production à grande échelle, la Commune s’engageait dans la voie de la socialisation, en opposition directe avec le programme proudhonien favorable à la petite propriété privée. Les blanquistes croyaient aux méthodes conspiratrices et voulaient construire une organisation secrète, pourtant dans la réalité leurs déclarations pendant la Commune appelaient à une fédération libre de communes, une grande organisation nationale.
L’acte le plus symbolique de la Commune, qui a souvent suscité l’ire des historiens bourgeois, fut peut-être la destruction de la colonne Vendôme. Dans une atmosphère de liesse, on vendit au public des tickets pour assister au spectacle de l’abattage de ce monument aux conquêtes militaires de Napoléon 1er. Le 16 mai, la Commune la détruisit en symbole de son opposition au militarisme bourgeois. Le peintre Gustave Courbet était parmi les plus célèbres partisans de son déboulonnage. Un autre symbole durable dont l’origine remonte à la Commune est l’Internationale, l’hymne du mouvement ouvrier international, écrit après la défaite de la Commune par le poète-ouvrier Eugène Pottier, qui avait lui aussi siégé au conseil de la Commune. Comme l’écrira plus tard Lénine, la Commune avait été une « fête des opprimés », et d’ailleurs, le 21 mai, beaucoup de communards s’étaient rassemblés pour un concert en plein air sous le chaud soleil printanier, quand les Versaillais commencèrent à se faufiler dans Paris pour entamer leurs massacres systématiques.
Désorganisation et défaite sanglante
Les initiatives militaires de la Commune furent contrariées par le fait qu’elle était dépourvue d’une direction militaire compétente, et aussi par la rivalité continuelle avec la Garde nationale, qui n’avait abandonné à la Commune qu’une partie de ses pouvoirs. Il n’y eut jamais de commandement unifié des forces armées. Les communards n’avaient pas immédiatement marché contre Thiers à Versailles en mars ; celui-ci et les forces de la contre-révolution commencèrent alors à se regrouper. A partir de début avril 1871, les Versaillais bombardèrent Paris en permanence et, après avoir conclu un accord avec Bismarck, ils obtinrent de lui la libération de 60 000 soldats français prisonniers, qui vinrent s’ajouter aux troupes loyalistes qui encerclaient Paris. Après une série de sorties très mal conduites contre les Versaillais, entre début avril et début mai, la situation bascula le 9 mai quand les communards perdirent le fort d’Issy, une position clé entre Paris et Versailles. Après Issy, le fort de Vanves tomba à son tour. Finalement, le 22 mai, un traître ayant informé les troupes versaillaises que la Porte de Saint-Cloud était sans défense, celles-ci commencèrent à s’infiltrer dans Paris.
Au cours des semaines précédentes, l’armée de la Commune s’était retrouvée totalement désorganisée. Elle n’avait pratiquement pas de commandement effectif ni de discipline, et face au bombardement sans répit par les Versaillais, des voix de plus en plus nombreuses s’élevaient pour réclamer une direction forte, centralisée et dictatoriale. Le 1er mai, un certain nombre de communards, s’inspirant de la vieille Révolution française bourgeoise à l’époque des jacobins, avaient constitué une succession de « comités de salut public ». La Commune se divisa entre une majorité et une minorité où figuraient plusieurs partisans de l’Internationale. Trotsky a fait remarquer que la création du Comité de salut public avait été dictée par la nécessité d’une « terreur rouge », et décrit les différentes mesures prises pour tenter de défendre la Commune. Mais il note aussi que « la réalité en était paralysée par l’esprit de conciliation informe des éléments dirigeants de la Commune, par leur désir de concilier par des phrases creuses la bourgeoisie avec le fait accompli, par leurs oscillations entre la fiction de la démocratie et la réalité de la dictature ». Finalement, fin mai, au fur et à mesure qu’un quartier après l’autre tombait aux mains des Versaillais, la Commune se désintégra totalement. Delescluze, le vieux jacobin malade qui avait été élu chef du dernier « comité de salut public », alla participer aux combats sur une barricade où il fut tué.
Après l’entrée des Versaillais à Paris, les communards se battirent désespérément. Mais la Commune fut écrasée rue par rue. Hommes, femmes et enfants furent massacrés sans distinction. Les derniers combats eurent lieu dans les quartiers ouvriers sur les hauteurs de Belleville et Ménilmontant. C’est au mur des Fédérés, au cimetière du Père Lachaise, que 200 communards qui avaient combattu jusqu’au bout furent alignés et exécutés. Aujourd’hui, nous continuons à nous rassembler en ce lieu pour rendre hommage à nos camarades disparus. Des dizaines de milliers de communards, plus de 30 000 personnes, furent massacrés par les Versaillais pendant cette dernière semaine de mai. Dans une prison, tellement de gens furent exécutés que le sang coulait dans les caniveaux.
Beaucoup de ceux qui n’avaient pas trouvé la mort pendant le massacre initial connurent un sort pire encore. Certains furent emmenés à Versailles sous les insultes et les crachats, parqués en plein air ou dans des geôles où ils moururent de faim, de soif, de choléra ou de gangrène. D’autres furent entassés sur des barges transformées en prisons où ils étaient ligotés et enfermés dans d’étroites cellules. Certains furent condamnés à la déportation en Nouvelle-Calédonie, une colonie désolée située dans l’océan Pacifique, à l’est de l’Australie, où ils souffrirent de malnutrition, de malaria et d’épuisement dans des bagnes, si toutefois ils avaient survécu au voyage dans des cages à fond de cale. Acte particulièrement vicieux et revanchard, le peintre Courbet, fut tenu pour responsable de la démolition de la colonne Vendôme et condamné en guise de représailles à verser plusieurs centaines de milliers de francs pour sa reconstruction. Pour éviter la ruine, il fut contraint de peindre sans répit, mais l’argent qu’il recevait pour chaque tableau vendu allait directement à l’Etat. Finalement, il s’enfuit en Suisse où il mourut dans la misère en 1877. Pour marquer le triomphe de la réaction, en haut de Montmartre, une des collines où les communards avaient livré combat, on érigea une énorme église blanche ; cette basilique, symbole de la bourgeoisie française contre-révolutionnaire et du triomphe de la religion, est aujourd’hui encore visible à des kilomètres à la ronde.
La Commune et la Révolution bolchévique, la « dictature du prolétariat », sont présentées dans l’histoire bourgeoise comme brutales et sanguinaires. Mais la véritable cruauté de la classe bourgeoise au pouvoir est montrée par la manière dont elle a traité les communards après la défaite de la Commune. Elle montre aussi combien les bolchéviks avaient raison, et l’importance d’avoir une direction révolutionnaire qui se bat pour gagner.
Pour revenir à la Première Internationale, après la défaite de la Commune le livre de Marx la Guerre civile en France eut un grand retentissement, et les divergences s’aggravèrent entre ses différents courants politiques (et notamment avec Bakounine) pour savoir qui était le mieux fondé à se réclamer de la Commune. En 1872, la Première Internationale s’était déjà en pratique désintégrée. Dans une lettre adressée à Friedrich Sorge en 1874, Engels écrivait qu’il avait bon espoir que la prochaine internationale « sera directement communiste et que ce sont justement nos principes qu’elle arborera ». Mais ce ne fut pas l’internationale suivante, la Deuxième, qui devait brandir ouvertement l’étendard du communisme, mais la Troisième Internationale de Lénine, proclamée en 1919 et le produit de la victoire de la Révolution bolchévique de 1917. De la Commune à la Révolution russe, c’est là notre continuité, le précurseur de la Quatrième Internationale trotskyste.
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One Hour of the Music of the Paris Commune of 1871 – Mp3
Nous reproduisons ci-dessous en traduction une présentation au Spartacus Youth Club de New York sur la Commune, légèrement revue pour publication. La présentation a été faite pas S. Williams, membre du comité central de la Spartacist League/U.S.
In Kevin MacDonald’s much-denounced “Culture of Critique” model, Jews are supposedly motivated to undermine anything that promotes a sense of European nationalism and unity, because this aids Jewish ethnic interests. In the words of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society head Leonard Glickman, when asked why HIAS was importing Muslim Somali Bantus into America: “The more diverse American society is the safer [Jews] are.”
The predictable result: a massive rise in anti-Semitic attacks in countries such as France, whose immigrants are overwhelmingly Muslim, and an exodus of, for example, French Jews, to Israel. This exodus has been so enormous that it is influencing Israeli politics [How Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in France are influencing Israeli politics, by Don Murray, CBC, May 1, 2020].
On some level, if we accept MacDonald’s model, promoting mass immigration in the West may be a Jewish “evolutionary strategy.” But this doesn’t seem to be so obviously the case with the kind of mass immigration of young Arab males that is being promoted by George Soros. It’s as if Soros wants to create chaos—Hell on Earth—for everybody: Jew and Gentile alike. And, it seems, he especially wants this for Orthodox Jews, who are the most likely to be targeted, due to their appearance.
Well, there is a strain in Jewish theology that would make sense of such behavior: Sabbatean Frankism. Its followers pretend to be normal Jews—or are Crypto-Jews, passing as Christians or Muslims—while attempting to be as thoroughly evil as possible. Could this make sense of the life of a man who damages the interests of Jews just as much as he does those of European Gentiles?
According to Jewish historians, in 1648, Sabbati Zevi (1626–1676), a Turkish Sephardi Rabbi, proclaimed himself the new Messiah and garnered an enormous following in the Jewish communities of Turkey and Eastern Europe. His movement was so influential that it culminated in Sabbati asking the Sultan to hand him Jerusalem (although Sabbati backed down to avoid being executed and converted to Islam for the same reason) [Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah, by David Halperin, 2007].
According to historian Amir Engel [Gershom Scholem: An Intellectual Biography], Sabbati preached a “Gnostic” theology, whereby the world was the province of an evil god. Sabati’s followers were “sparks of light” of a good god, imprisoned in the universe of this wicked deity. You could only be “redeemed” by breaking all worldly laws, meaning that you had to be as “evil” as possible and sow chaos wherever you went
With Sabbati’s apostasy, the movement died down, but some ardent adherents believed that Sabbati was still the messiah and that one should pretend not to be a Jew, or not to follow his ideas, while secretly following them. This was known as being a “Dönmeh” [The Messianic Idea in Judaism,by Gershom Scholem, 2011, p.142].
The Sabbatean movement was revived by a Polish Jew called Jacob Frank (1726–1791). The son of a businessman, he met various Dönmeh on business trips to Greece and, upon his return to Poland, came to the conclusion that he was the messianic successor to Sabbati Zevi. At its height, Frank had 50,000 followers in Poland and elsewhere.
Frank took Nihilism much further than Sabbati. Very much the Aleister Crowley of Jewish thought, Frank encouraged ritualistic orgies, enticing women to leave their husbands and breaking up families [Heretic of the Month: Jacob Frank, by Jay Michaelson, American Jewish Life Magazine, April 2007]. After Frank’s death, his children continued to lead the movement and it supposedly still exists today, although—with its Dönmeh pedigree—it is extremely secretive [see Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbataian Heresy, by Alexander Kraushar, 2001].
Some of Frank’s sayings speak volumes: “The way to life is not easy, for it is the way of nihilism—destruction; and it means to free oneself from all laws, conventions, and religions to adopt every conceivable attitude and to follow one leader step by step into the abyss” [quoted in The Influence of Sabbatean Frankism on the World,by Russ Winter, Winter Watch, October 16, 2020].
But asking about Frankism can hardly be “anti-Semitic.” The Frankists themselves oppose everything that Orthodox Judaism promotes. And Jewish scholars, and Jewish encyclopedias, are clear that Frankism is certainly very real [Frankism, by Pawel Maciejko, The Yivo Enclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, 2010]. Indeed, Frankism has been argued, by some Jewish scholars, to have been specifically influential on the “rabbinical elite” [Schmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 2011, p. 66] and thus on elite Jews.
Jewish people are potentially just as much, the victims of the Nihilistic evil that is sowed by Frankism as Gentiles. And Jews are just as much, if not more, the victims of what George Soros’s activities are doing than Gentiles.
So, I think it’s worth at least asking the question: Is George Soros a Sabbatean Frankist?
Are we facing the apocalypse envisaged by the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope?
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness buries All.
My older sister had a job at a downtown Boston department store on Washington Street in 1963 at Christmas time. Neisner’s had a ‘lunch counter’ for fast food where she worked. She came home with the ‘Bonanza – Christmas on the Ponderosa’ long playing ‘record’ disc. The family played the songs every Christmas.
Years later when a brother had transferred the songs to a CD a guest at a Christmas dinner with my family said innocently to a young husband who had married into the family, “I never heard these songs before.”
“Get used to it,” the young man said as he lifted a spoonful of pie to his mouth. His words seemed to have a hushed tone and an air of resignation that did not indicate relish. He had spent several Christmas seasons with the family.
The album is designed to be an American frontier 1880 Christmas party with songs from characters from the television series in the 1960’s.
Dimon says he regrets comment on JPMorgan outlasting China Communist Party
Scott Murdoch and Matt ScuffhamWed, November 24, 2021, 8:23 AM·4 min read
By Scott Murdoch and Matt Scuffham
HONG KONG/NEW YORK (Reuters) -JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said on Wednesday he regretted his remarks that the Wall Street bank would last longer than the Communist Party of China (CPC), moving quickly to avoid any longer-term fallout. The capitalist wants to eliminate the communist party.
Dimon’s comments had risked jeopardizing JPMorgan’s growth ambitions in China where it won regulatory approval in August to become the first full foreign owner of a securities brokerage in the country.
China experts in the United States said his quick apology should ensure no serious damage was done.
Dimon was simply expressing the capitalist idea that capitalism is the pinnacle of human civilization and that communism and socialism will be overthrown.
“I regret and should not have made that comment. I was trying to emphasize the strength and longevity of our company,” Dimon said in a statement issued by the bank. Which implies that he sees the Communist Party of China as being a passing phenomenon.
Dimon realized immediately after he made the comment that it was a mistake, according to a source familiar with his thinking. After seeing the reaction, he decided to express regret, the source said. He said the ‘quiet part’ out loud. Capitalist companies are moving to China to overthrow the Chinese Communists.
In a later statement, Dimon said: “It’s never right to joke about or denigrate any group of people, whether it’s a country, its leadership, or any part of a society and culture. Speaking in that way can take away from constructive and thoughtful dialogue in society, which is needed now more than ever.” So… it’s racist to oppose communist parties?
Referring to the matter in a comment posted on Twitter on Thursday, the outspoken editor of nationalistic tabloid Global Times, Hu Xijin, said: “You don’t have to regret actually.
“The CPC has succeeded in its sphere far more than JP Morgan’s. As a member of the CPC, I don’t mind your company riding the wave of CPC’s popularity.”
A day earlier, Hu said: “Think long-term! And I bet the CPC will outlast the USA.”
Speaking at a Boston College series of CEO interviews on Tuesday, Dimon said: “I made a joke the other day that the Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year – so is JPMorgan. I’d make a bet that we last longer.”
“I can’t say that in China. They are probably listening anyway,” he added.
Beijing’s approval for JPMorgan to take full ownership of its securities business was a milestone in the opening of China’s capital markets after years of gradual moves and pressure from Washington.
Beijing sees the involvement of foreign banks as important for China’s domestic financial development, academics say. However, they add, Western companies doing business in China still need to tread carefully.
“Dimon’s apology shows the degree of deference foreign businesses have to show to the Chinese government in order to remain in its good graces and maintain access to the country’s markets,” said Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University.
“I don’t think this will have any longer term consequences,” said Leland Miller, chief executive at data firm China Beige Book and an expert on China’s financial system.
Asked by Bloomberg about Dimon’s comments at a news conference on Wednesday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian replied: “Why the publicity stunt with some grandstanding remarks?,” according to an English language transcript of the remarks. Dimon is saying that he is better than the Chinese Communists.
BACKLASH
Global executives typically choose their words carefully when discussing China, where foreign companies have occasionally been subject to backlash for perceived offenses.
Swiss bank UBS ran into trouble in 2019, after a remark by one of its senior economists about food inflation and swine fever was interpreted as a racist slur. He was suspended for three months and UBS lost a plum role on a bond deal for a state-backed client.
Earlier this year, Swedish fashion giant H&M’s and U.S.-based Nike Inc faced a backlash from Chinese state media and ecommerce platforms after expressing concern about allegations forced labour had been used to produce cotton in Xinjiang.
“The Chinese government has amply demonstrated its willingness to curb or in some cases shut down foreign businesses’ operations in the country if they challenge the government openly or even engage in perceived or indirect slights,” said Cornell’s Prasad.
A week ago Dimon was granted an exemption by the Hong Kong government to visit the Chinese-controlled financial hub without needing to quarantine.
Visitors to the city from most countries must stay in hotel quarantine for two to three weeks at their own cost.
Dimon was in Hong Kong for 32 hours after arriving by private jet.
“Jamie Dimon’s best and worst trait is that he speaks his mind,” said Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo.
“It typically works well for him and makes him more authentic and appreciated by investors. But sometimes it gets him into trouble.”
(Additional reporting by Megan Davies and David Henry in New York, Yew Lun Tian in Beijing, and Anirban Sen in Bengaluru; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Christopher Cushing)
The following article was originally published in three parts in the Militant in 2013 on September 23, September 30, and October 7.
Part 1: How Korean workers and farmers began resistance to U.S. domination, forced partition of nation
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Korean people’s triumph over Washington’s murderous 1950-53 war to conquer that country. The consequences of that war — and the unresolved national division of Korea — continue to reverberate across the Pacific and the world class struggle today.
This summer a Socialist Workers Party leadership delegation of Tom Baumann, James Harris, and me visited Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, to join celebrations there of the July 27, 1953, cease-fire that registered that historic victory.
Among the anniversary events was the inauguration of a new building and park that substantially expand the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, first built in 1953. Although most of the new exhibits were not yet open to the public, we visited the outdoor pavilions displaying captured U.S. and South Korean planes, helicopters, tanks, armored vehicles and ordnance from the Korean War, as well as from military actions by Washington and Seoul right up to recent years.
“Although I’d read the ‘list’ of leaders many times I had never noticed Debs absence until yesterday.”
From the paper no. 216 :
‘As Leninists we do not disregard the revolutionary proletarian traditions of our own country.
The 1966 “Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League” states: ‘We also look for inspiration to the example of such revolutionists in the United States as F.A. Sorge. Vincent St. John. DanielDe Leon. Louis Fraina and James P. Cannon’ (Spartacist No.8. November- December 1966). The name of Debs is conspicuously and deliberately absent from this list. Unlike his contemporaries such as left-wing leaders De Leon and St. John, Debs’ career cannot serve as an inspiration for revolutionaries today. Even before 1919 Debs. despite his good intentions. was the honest socialist face hehind which the aspiring Eberts and Noskes of the American SP. the Victor Bergers and Morris Hillquits actually ran the party.’
Also: “And despite his genuine desire for party unity, Debs did nothing to prevent the right wing from driving out the revolutionary syndicalists. In his usual manner he kept aloof from the Haywood-Hillquit fight and did not even attend the critical 1912 convention. In fact, after 1904 Debs didn’t attend any SP conventions, on the grounds that he hated to see socialists fighting with one another.”
In the same issue a quote from Cannon:
“Debs’ refusal to take an active part in the factional struggle, and to play his rightful part as the leader of an organized left wing, played into the hands of the reformist politicians. There his beautiful friendliness and generosity played him false, for the party was also an arena of the struggle for socialism. Debs spoke of ‘the love of comrades’-and he really meant it-but the opportunist sharpers didn’t believe a word of it.
They never do. They waged a vicious, organized fight against the revolutionary workers of the party all the time. And they were the gainers from Debs’ abstention. “Debs’ mistaken theory of the party was one of the most costly mistakes a revolutionist ever made in the entire history of the American movement. The strength of capitalism is not in itself and its own institutions; it survives only because it has bases of support in the organizations of the workers.
As we see it now, in the light of what we have learned from the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, nine-tenths of the struggle for socialism is the struggle against bourgeois in- fluence in the workers’ organizations, including the party. The reformist leaders were the carriers of bourgeois influence in the Socialist Party, and at bottom the conflict of factions was an expression of the class struggle. Debs obviously didn’t see it that way. His aloofness from the conflict enabled the opportunists to dominate the party machine and to undo much of his great work as an agitator for the cause. Debs’ mistaken theory of the party was one of the most important reasons why the Socialist Party, which he did more than anyone else to build up, ended so disgracefully and left so little behind.”
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
A hundred years ago, in New York City, 20,000 people marched down Fifth Avenue in protest against one of the greatest public health policy experiments in history. One of them was wearing a sign featuring an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” beside the slogan, “Wine was served.” There were posters of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Another read: “Tyranny in the name of righteousness is the worst of all tyrannies.”
For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.
Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.
Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.SUGGESTED READINGDid Sweden get Covid wrong?
This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.
The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”
Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.
At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.
But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.SUGGESTED READINGThe new public health despotism
This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.
The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. TheNew York Times, Guardian, BBC, TheTimes, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.
And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.
DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.
From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.
Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.
The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.
If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.
It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.
Boston, Massachusetts: The recently elected Michelle Wu has been hailed as a breakthrough because she is the first elected female mayor. She is also described as a ‘person of color.’ But, when it comes to her ethnic background every news article I search leaves out exactly where in Asia her roots are. Why?
Michelle Wu was born in Chicago to parents who had come from Taiwan to study in Chicago. So, is Michelle Wu Taiwanese? There are hardly any Taiwanese left on the island of Taiwan having been pushed aside for the millions of Han Chinese who arrived there over the centuries that Taiwan was a part of China. Does her father or mother speak Taiwanese? Doubtful, hardly anyone speaks that marginalized language.
I was curious to see if her parents spoke so-called ‘Mandarin’ the main Chinese language, or did the speak so-called Cantonese centered around Hong Kong and ‘Canton.’ But as I searched news articles to see what her background was I found my curiosity was not matched by professional reporters interests.
I live in Boston. Is this the first Chinese American mayor? How dare I ask?
In the local news papers and news organizations and television stations no one calls Michelle Wu Chinese.
Michelle Wu is ethnically from Asia. That’s all you need to know.
I was puzzled.
Then I had an epiphany. The question of whether Taiwan is a part of China is a part of US Imperialism’s preparation for war with China. The US and US media will not admit, or highlight, that Taiwan was a part of China for longer than Hawaii has been a part of the US. Taiwan has been a part of China for longer than Nantucket island has been a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The official name of Taiwan is ‘The Republic of China on Taiwan.’ When the Nationalist where defeated by the Communists in China in 1949 they retreated across the straights and hoped that Uncle Sam would put them back in power. That didn’t happen, so the rulers of Taiwan hope to keep going as an independent country supported by the US until the inevitable collapse of communism in China. Any day now…
So, the US media have a job to do. Hide Michelle Wu’s connection to the Taiwan question. To say that she is ethnically Han Chinese and descended from Chinese who colonized Taiwan for centuries won’t do. To say that she is of Taiwanese descent is simply untrue. So, time for DoubleThink.
Michelle Wu is Asian, next question. Or Michelle Wu is the first Boston mayor from the Eastern Hemisphere.
War propaganda doesn’t have to make sense. Apparently.
(I just hope I get close enough to her to shout out a question in Chinese and see if she responds to Mandarin.)
Boston had a First ‘Woman of Color’ Mayor Already, But She Was Only ‘Acting’ Mayor so we get another ‘first’
………………..
National Public Radio – NPR Was Not Happy With The Election
NPR’s portrayal of the mayoral race as a kind of race war was slated online. “Imagine the kind of worldview one has to think this way – hyper race consciousness, obsession with racial hierarchies, and merit & fairness inversion,” author Peter Boghossian tweeted. “Now imagine an entire channel devoted to promulgating this ideology. That is what NPR has become.”
„Sie verfluchten uns – nicht mit einem gewöhnlichen flüchtigen Fluch, sondern mit langen, sorgfältig durchdachten, umfassenden Flüchen, die unsere ganze Karriere umfassten und in die ferne Zukunft gingen und alle unsere Beziehungen umfassten und alles bedeckten mit uns verbunden – gute, substanzielle Flüche.“ aus „Drei Männer in einem Boot“.
Als ich diese Zeile aus einem Hörbuch von „Drei Männer in einem Boot“ hörte, musste ich daran denken, wie oft ich beleidigt wurde, als ich auf der Straße stand und Passanten revolutionäre Flugblätter und Zeitungen anbot.
Ich lebe in der Stadt. Die meisten Passanten ignorieren jemanden, der in der Innenstadt steht und Flugblätter anbietet. Sie blicken vorbei und sehen den Flyer nur noch als Teil der urbanen Szene. Flugblätter können Trolleys für Touristen anbieten, Restaurants oder politische Themen können für alle Interessierten zur Hand sein. Und manche sind interessiert oder wollen eine Wegbeschreibung oder sind gelangweilt und halten für einen Moment inne. Aber einige sind wütend als Gegner oder die ewig wütenden.
Dann beginnt der Spaß.
Leute, von denen ich nie wusste, dass sie existieren, rezitierten spontan meine Berufsaussichten, meine Arbeitsleistung, mein zukünftiges Einkommen. Meine Intelligenz wurde angezweifelt. Mir wurde vorgeworfen, „nicht zu wissen, was ich tue“.
Andere könnten über meine sexuelle Orientierung, meine sexuellen Aktivitäten oder deren Fehlen, meine Beziehungen zu Sexualpartnern spekulieren. Einige spekulierten über meine Schwestern. Einige meinten, meine Eltern hätten sich geirrt, als „der beste Teil von mir über das Bein meines Vaters tropfte“ und dass die einzige Lösung für meine Mutter eine Abtreibung gewesen wäre.
Einige meinten, dass ich tatsächlich mit nahen Verwandten auf der mütterlichen Seite meiner Familie kopuliert hatte. Andere fragten, warum ich nicht arbeite, warum ich keine Arbeit habe und warum ich arbeitsunfähig bin.
Diese prägnanten, schneidenden Beobachtungen wurden von umherziehenden Propheten mit Hemingway-artiger Kürze und Shakespeares Gravitas geliefert. Wahrlich eine Kunstform. Ich war oft in Ehrfurcht. Ich hatte nie an diese Leute gedacht, und sie hatten meine Nummer und malten mich als Mal-für-Nummer-Kitschkunstwerk. Worte als Kunstform Performance-Kunst auf der Straße. Nur eine Aufführung….
And I say to my people’s masters: Beware, Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people, who shall take what ye would not give. Did ye think to conquer the people, Or that Law is stronger than life and than men’s desire to be free? Liars, Hypocrites, Tyrants….
« Ils nous ont maudits, non pas avec une simple malédiction superficielle, mais avec de longues malédictions complètes, soigneusement pensées, qui embrassaient l’ensemble de notre carrière, et s’en allaient dans un avenir lointain, et incluaient toutes nos relations, et couvraient tout. connecté avec nous – de bonnes malédictions substantielles. de « Trois hommes dans un bateau ».
Quand j’ai entendu cette ligne d’un livre audio de « Trois hommes dans un bateau », j’ai dû penser aux nombreuses fois où j’ai été insulté alors que je me tenais dans la rue à offrir des tracts révolutionnaires et des journaux aux
J’habite en ville. La plupart des passants ignorent quelqu’un qui se tient dans le centre-ville et qui offre des tracts. Ils jettent un coup d’œil au-delà et voient simplement le dépliant comme faisant partie de la scène urbaine. Les prospectus peuvent proposer des chariots pour les touristes, les restaurants ou les questions politiques peuvent être à portée de main pour quiconque est intéressé. Et certains sont intéressés, ou veulent des directions, ou s’ennuient alors ils s’arrêtent un instant. Mais, quelques-uns sont en colère en tant qu’opposants, ou perpétuellement en colère.passants.
C’est alors que le plaisir commence.
Des personnes dont je ne connaissais pas l’existence se lançaient dans des récitations impromptues de mes perspectives d’emploi, de mes performances professionnelles, de mes revenus futurs. Mon intelligence a été mise en doute. On m’a accusé de “ne pas savoir ce que je faisais”.
D’autres pourraient spéculer sur mon orientation sexuelle, mes activités sexuelles ou leur absence, mes relations avec des partenaires sexuels. Certains ont spéculé sur mes sœurs. Certains ont suggéré que mes parents se sont trompés lorsque «la meilleure partie de moi a coulé sur la jambe de mon père» et que la seule solution aurait été que ma mère se fasse avorter.
Certains ont suggéré que j’avais, en effet, copulé avec des parents proches du côté maternel de ma famille. D’autres m’ont demandé pourquoi je ne travaillais pas, pourquoi je n’avais pas de travail et pourquoi j’étais inapte au travail.
Ces observations concises et tranchantes ont été livrées par des prophètes ambulants avec une brièveté à la Hemingway et une gravité shakespearienne. Vraiment une forme d’art. J’étais souvent en admiration. Je n’avais jamais pensé à ces gens, et ils avaient mon numéro et m’ont peint comme une peinture par numéro d’œuvre d’art kitsch. Les mots en tant qu’art de la performance dans la rue. Une seule représentation….
罗斯·杜萨特 (Ross Douthat) 回顾了埃尔布里奇·科尔比 (Elbridge Colby) 的新书《拒绝的战略：大国冲突时代的美国防御》(The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict，上个月为《泰晤士报》)，并在 9/11 之后为华盛顿特区增添了一些色彩和历史：
科尔比与约翰·J·米尔斯海默 (John J. Mearsheimer) 等现实主义现实主义者以及您的真实主义者很相似，相信中国是不同的。我记得几年前与米尔斯海默共进晚餐，当时他预测中国辩论有可能分裂现实主义和克制联盟，这令人担忧。
一方面放大……在前总统唐纳德特朗普周围，无论好坏，美国右翼在中国问题上已经分裂，以及台湾是否应该被北京的共产党人吃掉。那些被取消文化虐待的人，例如著名的前特朗普演讲撰稿人 Darren J. Beattie，认为在当前的“美国政权”下没有什么值得保留的，而 Beattie 的 Revolver News 创业公司的口气与这种观点相符。如果要摊牌，那是民间的，而不是国际的，似乎是党的路线。
“Ci hanno maledetto, non con una comune maledizione superficiale, ma con maledizioni lunghe, attentamente ponderate e complete, che abbracciarono l’intera nostra carriera, e se ne andarono in un lontano futuro, e includevano tutti i nostri parenti, e coprivano ogni cosa connesso con noi: maledizioni buone e sostanziali”. da “Tre uomini in barca”.
Quando ho sentito quella frase da un audiolibro che leggeva “Tre uomini in barca” ho dovuto pensare alle numerose volte in cui sono stato insultato mentre stavo per strada offrendo volantini e giornali rivoluzionari ai passanti.
Io vivo in città. La maggior parte delle persone che passano ignorano qualcuno che sta in centro offrendo volantini. Guardano oltre e vedono il volantino come parte della scena urbana. I volantini potrebbero offrire carrelli per turisti, ristoranti o questioni politiche potrebbero essere a portata di mano per chiunque sia interessato. E alcuni sono interessati, o vogliono indicazioni, o sono annoiati, quindi si fermano un attimo. Ma alcuni sono arrabbiati come avversari, o perennemente arrabbiati.
È allora che inizia il divertimento.
Persone che non sapevo esistessero si lanciavano in recite estemporanee delle mie prospettive di lavoro, delle mie prestazioni lavorative, dei miei guadagni futuri. La mia intelligenza era messa in dubbio. Sono stato accusato di “non sapere cosa stavo facendo”.
Altri potrebbero speculare sul mio orientamento sessuale, sulle mie attività sessuali, o sulla loro mancanza, sulle mie relazioni con i partner sessuali. Alcuni hanno speculato sulle mie sorelle. Alcuni hanno suggerito che i miei genitori hanno sbagliato quando “la parte migliore di me è gocciolata lungo la gamba di mio padre” e che l’unica soluzione sarebbe stata che mia madre abortisse.
Alcuni hanno suggerito che avevo, in effetti, copulato con parenti stretti dal lato materno della mia famiglia. Altri mi hanno chiesto perché non stavo lavorando, perché non avevo un lavoro e perché ero inadatto al lavoro.
Queste osservazioni concise e taglienti sono state fornite da profeti vaganti con brevità hemingwayana e gravità shakespeariana. Veramente una forma d’arte. Ero spesso in soggezione. Non avevo mai pensato a queste persone, avevano il mio numero e mi dipingevano come un dipinto per numero di opere d’arte kitsch. Le parole come forma d’arte performativa in strada. Una sola esibizione….
“They cursed us—not with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with us—good, substantial curses.” from ‘Three Men in A Boat.
When I heard that line from an audio book reading of ‘Three Men in A Boat’ I had to think of the numerous times I was insulted as I stood on the street offering revolutionary leaflets and newspapers to passersby.
I live in the city. Most of the people walking by ignore someone standing downtown offering leaflets. They glance past and just see the leafleteer as part of the urban scene. Handbills might offer trolleys for tourists, restaurants, or political issues might be at hand for whoever is interested. And some are interested, or want directions, or are bored so they stop for a moment. But, a few are angry as opponents, or the perpetually angry.
That’s when the fun starts.
People I never knew existed would launch into impromptu recitations of my job prospects, my job performance, my future earnings. My intelligence was doubted. I was accused of “not knowing what I was doing.”
Others might speculate on my sexual orientation, my sexual activities, or lack thereof, my relations to sex partners. Some speculated on my sisters. Some suggested that my parents erred when “the best part of me dripped down my father’s leg” and that the only solution would have been for my mother to have an abortion.
Some suggested that I had, indeed, copulated with close relatives on the maternal side of my family. Others asked why I wasn’t working, why I didn’t have a job, and why was I unfit for work.
These concise, cutting observations were delivered by perambulating prophets with Hemingwayesque brevity and Shakespearean gravitas. Truly an art form. I was often in awe. I had never given these people a thought, and they had my number and painted me as a paint by number work of kitsch art. Words as an artform performance art in the street. One performance only….
La production pour le profit : anarchie et pillage
Capitalisme et réchauffement climatique
Pour la révolution socialiste ! Pour une économie planifiée internationalement !
L’article ci-dessous a été publié en deux parties dans le journal de nos camarades américains Workers Vanguard (n° 965 et 966, 24 septembre et 8 octobre 2010).
Il ne fait aucun doute que globalement la Terre se réchauffe. Selon les chiffres publiés en juillet [2010] par la National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration américaine, la température globale des continents et de la surface des océans enregistrée en juin était la plus élevée depuis les premières mesures en 1880 ; ce mois de juin [2010] est le 304e mois consécutif où l’on enregistre une température supérieure à la moyenne du XXe siècle. Et les glaces de l’Arctique fondent à une vitesse record. Bien sûr, ces températures élevées peuvent être attribuées pour une bonne part à l’évolution périodique et naturelle des températures des océans et de la pression atmosphérique. Mais un autre facteur est à l’œuvre derrière la tendance globale au réchauffement. La grande majorité de la communauté internationale des climatologues, non seulement le Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat (GIEC) de l’ONU mais aussi l’académie des sciences aux Etats-Unis et dans la plupart des autres pays, considèrent que le facteur en question est anthropique (d’origine humaine) : les gaz à effet de serre.
Des groupes réformistes comme l’International Socialist Organization (ISO) américaine se sont emparés de la question du « changement climatique » pour supplier (de concert avec les écologistes libéraux) les grandes puissances capitalistes d’unir leurs efforts pour réduire les émissions de gaz à effet de serre – un objectif que d’importants secteurs des classes dirigeantes capitalistes se sont engagés à atteindre. C’est ainsi que l’ISO, Greenpeace et compagnie avaient placé de grands espoirs dans la conférence sur le climat qui s’est tenue en décembre 2009 à Copenhague sous la houlette de l’ONU, laquelle est au fond un nid de brigands impérialistes et de leurs victimes.
On a parlé d’un nouveau « mouvement international pour la justice climatique » quand des dizaines de milliers de personnes ont afflué dans la capitale danoise – essentiellement dans le but d’exiger des grandes puissances qu’elles acceptent de contrôler les émissions de gaz à effet de serre et d’aider financièrement les pays du tiers-monde. Parmi les actions de protestation, il y a eu une manifestation de plus de 100 000 personnes après la première semaine du sommet, au cours de laquelle un millier de manifestants ont été arrêtés par des forces de police lourdement armées. Peu après, des milliers de délégués observateurs appartenant à des organisations aussi peu « radicales » que Greenpeace ont été exclues pour les derniers jours de la conférence.
Le sommet, que certains avaient surnommé « Hopenhagen » [jeu de mots sur « Copenhague » et « hope », espoir], s’est terminé sans que ses objectifs affichés ne soient atteints, c’est-à-dire sans que soit renouvelé l’engagement pris par les pays industrialisés signataires du protocole de Kyoto en 1997 (qui n’a jamais été ratifié par les Etats-Unis) de réduire leurs émissions, et de fixer des plafonds d’émissions pour tous les autres pays. Ce résultat était prévisible. Pour commencer, dans chaque pays la classe capitaliste est divisée sur cette question. Au fond chaque gouvernement capitaliste est chargé de protéger ses propres « intérêts nationaux ». La poignée de pays impérialistes qui dominent le marché mondial sont en concurrence les uns avec les autres pour le contrôle des sphères d’exploitation dans le monde entier, et dans leur insatiable course aux profits ils ont déjà mené deux guerres mondiales dévastatrices.
Une réduction significative des émissions aurait très certainement un coût économique substantiel que peu de gouvernements capitalistes sont prêts à payer, en particulier dans un contexte de ralentissement économique mondial. La principale activité humaine responsable du rejet de gaz à effet de serre est également la principale activité qui fait tourner la machine de l’économie moderne : la combustion d’énergies fossiles, comme le pétrole et le charbon. L’importance des sources d’énergie bon marché est telle que la concurrence impérialiste pour les combustibles fossiles, et en particulier pour le pétrole, a joué un rôle depuis le siècle dernier dans le déclenchement de nombreux conflits militaires. Les pays qui ont la mainmise sur le robinet du pétrole, ou qui ont accès à de grandes réserves de charbon, ont un intérêt matériel direct à maintenir le statu quo.
Les Etats-Unis, le plus gros émetteur au monde de gaz à effet de serre par habitant, en sont un bon exemple. Des entreprises américaines géantes comme ExxonMobil occupent une place centrale dans le cartel mondial du pétrole. L’Allemagne et la France, les principales puissances de l’Union européenne (UE), ne peuvent pas en dire autant. Ainsi, une augmentation du prix du pétrole sur le marché mondial non seulement enrichit un secteur dominant de l’économie américaine mais accroît également les dépenses énergétiques de leurs concurrents français et allemands. Les Etats-Unis et l’Europe se sont affrontés pendant des années à propos de la mise en œuvre du protocole de Kyoto, parce que le plafond nominal des émissions défini dans les accords affectait plus directement les Etats-Unis.
Malgré leurs divergences, les impérialistes, avec les Américains en tête, se sont unis dans les récentes négociations sur le climat pour faire pression sur la Chine, un Etat ouvrier bureaucratiquement déformé, afin surtout de freiner sa formidable croissance industrielle. Après avoir convaincu l’UE d’imposer des plafonds de réduction plus contraignants aux pays les moins développés, les Etats-Unis ont refusé de soutenir tout accord qui ne prévoirait pas un contrôle rigoureux des émissions chinoises. On voit derrière ces manœuvres l’objectif stratégique des impérialistes : détruire l’Etat ouvrier chinois et soumettre de nouveau ce pays à une exploitation capitaliste à outrance. Contrairement aux écologistes et aux pseudo-socialistes qui se joignent aux attaques contre la Chine, nous sommes pour la défense militaire inconditionnelle de la Chine contre l’impérialisme et la contre-révolution capitaliste.
Pour les marxistes, la maîtrise du réchauffement climatique d’origine humaine est au fond un problème d’ordre social et non technique. Le marxisme est incompatible avec l’idéologie écologiste, qui accepte le principe de l’inviolabilité de la domination de classe capitaliste, un système où le moteur de la production est la recherche du profit, et où les richesses de la société sont monopolisées par une minuscule classe dirigeante bourgeoise. Nous luttons pour une société qui offrira davantage, et non pas moins, aux travailleurs et aux masses paupérisées de cette planète. Notre but est d’éliminer la pénurie matérielle et d’augmenter qualitativement le niveau de vie de tous. Pour y parvenir, nous luttons pour des révolutions socialistes qui exproprieront la bourgeoisie dans les pays capitalistes, et pour la révolution politique prolétarienne en Chine et dans les autres Etats ouvriers bureaucratiquement déformés. Ces révolutions jetteront les bases de la construction d’une économie mondiale planifiée et collectivisée. Une fois la production libérée de la quête du profit, la puissance créatrice des hommes se déploiera pleinement pour construire une société dans laquelle la pauvreté, la malnutrition, les inégalités et l’oppression appartiendront au passé.
Quand les prolétaires de tous les pays seront au pouvoir, l’énergie sera produite et utilisée de la façon la plus rationnelle, la plus efficace et la plus sûre possible, et de nouvelles sources d’énergie seront développées. Nous n’écartons pas par avance le recours aux combustibles fossiles ni à toute autre source d’énergie, qu’elle soit nucléaire, hydroélectrique, solaire, éolienne ou autre. Rien que pour mener à bien la modernisation et le développement du tiers-monde, où aujourd’hui des milliards de personnes sont condamnées à la misère, il faudra très certainement une très forte augmentation de la production d’énergie à l’échelle mondiale.
Il est futile de tenter de résoudre les problèmes liés au climat dans le cadre du système anarchique, basé sur l’Etat-nation, qu’est le capitalisme. Le climat est le résultat d’interactions entre l’atmosphère, les océans, les calottes glaciaires, les organismes vivants et les sols, les sédiments et les roches – interactions qui toutes affectent à des degrés divers les échanges de chaleur à la surface de la Terre. La meilleure façon d’influencer positivement quelque chose d’aussi dynamique, vaste et complexe que le système climatique, c’est une action coordonnée à l’échelle mondiale et fondée sur les avancées scientifiques et technologiques les plus récentes.
Dans une économie mondiale réorganisée sur une base socialiste, il sera possible d’élaborer et de mettre en œuvre, à une échelle inimaginable sous le capitalisme, un plan pour réduire les émissions de gaz à effet de serre et atténuer l’impact du réchauffement. Des efforts concertés seront mis en place si nécessaire pour réorganiser des industries entières et modifier la façon dont elles fonctionnent, qu’il s’agisse des secteurs de la production et de la distribution d’énergie, des transports, du bâtiment, de l’industrie ou de l’agriculture.
Il y a une autre considération essentielle : l’accroissement de l’abondance éliminera également les facteurs matériels (et les valeurs sociales arriérées comme celles promues par les religions) qui contribuent à la croissance démographique. Comme nous l’expliquons plus loin, la réorganisation socialiste de la société jettera les bases d’une légère contraction durable de la population, ce qui permettra d’assurer qu’il y aura suffisamment de ressources pour le bien-être de tous.
Climatologie et réchauffement de la planète
Le climat de la Terre connaît naturellement des variations incessantes, qui sont causées par des changements périodiques dans le mouvement orbital de la Terre et dans l’inclinaison de son axe, ainsi que par des variations de l’intensité de la lumière du soleil et de l’activité volcanique. Les analyses de carottes de glace et de sédiments océaniques ont révélé, au cours des derniers millions d’années, une succession de périodes glaciaires prolongées et de périodes interglaciaires pendant lesquelles il arrivait que la Terre soit plus chaude qu’aujourd’hui – des reptiles qui ne supportent pas le froid vivaient alors au nord du cercle polaire arctique. Les données géologiques indiquent que la transition entre les températures de la dernière période glaciaire, qui a atteint son pic il y a 20 000 ans, et celles d’aujourd’hui ne s’est pas produite graduellement et en douceur, mais plutôt de façon brusque et chaotique. Certaines de ces transitions climatiques se sont effectuées en à peine quelques dizaines d’années.
Les « climatosceptiques » mis à part (y compris ceux à la solde des grandes compagnies pétrolières), il est généralement admis que les activités humaines ont aussi une influence sur le climat. En 2007, les experts du GIEC (l’organisme qui fait sans doute le plus autorité en la matière au niveau mondial) concluaient ainsi leur rapport : « Le réchauffement du système climatique est sans équivoque. On note déjà, à l’échelle du globe, une hausse des températures moyennes de l’atmosphère et de l’océan, une fonte massive de la neige et de la glace et une élévation du niveau moyen de la mer. » Ils ajoutaient : « L’essentiel de l’élévation de la température moyenne du globe observée depuis le milieu du XXe siècle est très probablement attribuable à la hausse des concentrations de GES [gaz à effet de serre] anthropiques. » Ce rapport a été rédigé et révisé par plusieurs milliers de scientifiques venus du monde entier. Il s’appuie sur les données scientifiques et techniques les plus récentes et il reflète un large consensus au sein de la communauté scientifique.
Les « gaz à effet de serre anthropiques » affectent le climat en augmentant ce que l’on appelle, en faisant une analogie inexacte, « l’effet de serre » atmosphérique. Selon un mécanisme décrit pour la première fois par le physicien et mathématicien Jean-Baptiste Fourier dans les années 1820, la plus grande partie de l’énergie qui arrive du soleil sous forme de lumière traverse l’atmosphère, atteint la surface de la Terre et la réchauffe ; mais la chaleur ne peut pas s’échapper aussi facilement pour retourner dans l’espace. L’air absorbe une part non négligeable du rayonnement infrarouge total (ce que Fourier appelait la « chaleur obscure ») émis par la Terre et une partie de cette énergie thermique est réémise vers le sol, contribuant ainsi à le maintenir chaud. Sans atmosphère, la température à la surface d’une planète semblable à la Terre serait en moyenne plus froide d’environ 33 degrés Celsius que la température actuelle de la Terre, et la différence de température entre la nuit et le jour et entre l’été et l’hiver serait considérable, comme c’est le cas pour la Lune.
Cependant, tous les gaz de l’atmosphère n’ont pas le même pouvoir de réchauffement. Les constituants les plus abondants de l’atmosphère, l’azote diatomique et l’oxygène, sont quasiment transparents au rayonnement infrarouge. Celui-ci est en revanche fortement absorbé par les molécules de vapeur d’eau, de dioxyde de carbone (CO2), de méthane, d’oxyde d’azote et d’ozone. Parmi ces « gaz à effet de serre », c’est le gaz carbonique qui est le plus abondant (après la vapeur d’eau) ; il représente actuellement environ 390 parties par million (ppm) du volume de l’atmosphère, pour une masse totale d’à peu près 3 000 gigatonnes (trois mille milliards de tonnes). Cette concentration a considérablement augmenté en un laps de temps relativement court : l’analyse des carottes de glace a permis de déterminer que cette concentration était de 280 ppm avant la Révolution industrielle. Le dioxyde de carbone s’accumule aujourd’hui à raison de 2 ppm supplémentaires par an.
Une grande variété d’activités humaines contribuent à augmenter la concentration des gaz à effet de serre dans l’atmosphère : brûler des combustibles fossiles et du bois libère du dioxyde de carbone ; l’élevage du bétail, la production pétrolière et l’exploitation des mines de charbon y ajoutent du méthane ; l’agriculture et la production d’acide nitrique produisent de l’oxyde d’azote. D’autres pratiques, comme l’exploitation forestière, jouent aussi un rôle parce que les forêts absorbent le dioxyde de carbone et l’emmagasinent. Mais c’est l’utilisation des combustibles fossiles qui est sous le feu des projecteurs, car elle est responsable de la plus grande partie des émissions annuelles de dioxyde de carbone provoquées par l’activité humaine. Les océans, la couche arable et la végétation terrestres absorbent environ la moitié de ces émissions, mais le reste s’accumule dans l’atmosphère et accentue l’effet de serre.
Les conséquences du changement climatique évoquées par un certain nombre de scientifiques pourraient être extrêmement graves. Mais le fonctionnement du système climatique n’est encore compris que très partiellement ; on ne peut donc pas affirmer avec certitude que ces prédictions se réaliseront. Il est possible que l’impact du réchauffement anthropique ne soit pas aussi néfaste que ce que prédisent le GIEC et d’autres experts. Mais il est également possible que le résultat soit encore pire. L’éventail des possibles se reflète dans la communauté scientifique : une petite minorité trouve le rapport du GIEC de 2007 trop alarmiste, tandis que d’autres désapprouvent son « conservatisme ».
Le rapport du GIEC prévoit une élévation du niveau des mers, ainsi que des inondations côtières résultant de la fonte des calottes glaciaires aux pôles et de la dilatation thermique des océans. Il prévoit que les changements climatiques pourraient avoir pour conséquence que certaines régions habitées deviennent arides ou soient submergées, et ils pourraient provoquer l’extinction de nombreuses espèces marines et terrestres. Le nombre de « zones très sèches » que compte la planète a déjà plus que doublé depuis les années 1970 et ces zones représentent aujourd’hui plus de 30 % des terres émergées. Une diminution des calottes glaciaires de l’ouest de l’Antarctique et du Groenland analogue à celle qui s’est produite pendant la dernière période interglaciaire entraînerait une élévation du niveau des océans d’au moins dix mètres, assez pour submerger des dizaines de mégapoles mondiales, comme New York ou Shanghai.
Un réchauffement significatif sur une période de quelques décennies pourrait également déclencher des mécanismes qui altèreraient qualitativement le climat. La fonte complète du pergélisol (permafrost) arctique pourrait libérer les gigatonnes de carbone qui y sont emmagasinées, en grande partie sous forme de méthane, un gaz à effet de serre autrement plus puissant que le gaz carbonique. Une autre possibilité, plus lointaine mais aux conséquences plus graves, serait la libération des quantités colossales de méthane emprisonnées aujourd’hui dans des cristaux de glace (des structures appelées clathrates) que l’on trouve au fond de l’Arctique et d’autres océans.
Paradoxalement, le réchauffement de l’atmosphère pourrait aussi plonger une grande partie de l’hémisphère Nord dans un froid polaire. Si un flot suffisant d’eau douce provenant de la fonte des glaces se déversait dans le Nord de l’océan Atlantique, le vaste courant océanique connu sous le nom de Gulf Stream s’arrêterait. Ce courant puissant, qui prend sa source dans le golfe du Mexique, entraîne des eaux chaudes vers le nord, réchauffant ainsi l’Europe de l’Ouest, le Canada et le Nord-Est des Etats-Unis.
Une série d’études menées depuis 2007 ont précisé ou modifié les prévisions du GIEC et elles ont montré les incertitudes entourant la modélisation climatique. Par exemple, le lien entre le réchauffement climatique et l’augmentation du nombre et de la violence des ouragans a été remis en cause par les dernières recherches de Kerry Emanuel, un spécialiste des ouragans au MIT qui était auparavant l’un des principaux défenseurs de cette théorie. Début 2010, le GIEC a reconnu toute une série de bourdes scientifiques et il a retiré l’annonce qu’en 2035 la plupart des glaciers de l’Himalaya auraient fondu – une des conclusions-chocs de son rapport de 2007. L’attitude de certains climatologues qui refusent de publier le code informatique de leurs modèles représente une brèche supplémentaire dans la rigueur scientifique. Cette pratique avait été révélée par le « Climategate » (le scandale des courriers électroniques de l’université d’East Anglia orchestré par des réactionnaires).
Même les modèles les plus sophistiqués ne proposent qu’une simplification grossière des processus physiques comme la dynamique complexe de la vapeur d’eau. Plus fondamentalement, les prévisions qui en découlent présupposent une réalité sociale statique. Les prédictions du rapport du GIEC de 2007 se basent sur différents « scénarios » de croissance et de développement. Mais bien des événements pourraient modifier radicalement le cours des choses. Ainsi, le Scientific American a publié en janvier 2010 un article intitulé « Une guerre nucléaire limitée, des souffrances dans le monde entier », où l’on fait remarquer en conclusion que dans un conflit opposant par exemple l’Inde et le Pakistan, la fumée provoquée par 100 bombes nucléaires larguées sur des villes et des zones industrielles serait suffisante pour occulter le soleil et affecter l’agriculture dans le monde entier. Ce scénario n’est qu’une aimable plaisanterie comparé à la menace que représente le gigantesque arsenal nucléaire qui est aux mains des impérialistes américains. Un seul sous-marin américain de classe Ohio peut lancer jusqu’à 192 ogives thermonucléaires guidées indépendamment.
Quels que soient véritablement les conséquences et le calendrier du réchauffement climatique, une chose est sûre : dans un monde dominé par le capitalisme impérialiste, ce sont essentiellement la classe ouvrière et les pauvres qui subiront les conséquences humaines les plus désastreuses – qu’il s’agisse de famines, de la désorganisation de la société ou de maladies. Les pays les moins développés, qui ont des infrastructures insuffisantes et de trop maigres ressources pour s’adapter aux nouvelles conditions climatiques, paieront un très lourd tribut. Le vrai coupable n’est pas tant le changement climatique que le système capitaliste mondial, qui impose aux pays semi-coloniaux des conditions inhumaines et prive leurs populations des moyens de défense les plus élémentaires, et pas seulement en temps de catastrophes.
L’impérialisme moderne, caractérisé par l’exportation de capitaux, s’est développé à la fin du XIXe siècle ; les frontières des Etats-nations s’avéraient trop étroites et confinées pour satisfaire les besoins des capitalistes en nouveaux marchés et en main-d’œuvre bon marché. Par le fer et par le sang, les pays avancés ont au fond partagé le monde en sphères d’exploitation en concurrence les unes avec les autres. Lénine a décrit ce processus dans l’Impérialisme, stade suprême du capitalisme (1916), un classique du marxisme. Chaque classe capitaliste cherchant à défendre ses intérêts aux dépens de ses rivales, les impérialistes se sont embarqués dans une série de conquêtes et de guerres coloniales, dont la Première Guerre mondiale et la Deuxième ont été les points culminants.
Les classes capitalistes d’Amérique du Nord, d’Europe et du Japon exploitent non seulement leur propre classe ouvrière mais aussi les masses opprimées d’Asie, d’Afrique et d’Amérique latine, bloquant ainsi tout développement économique et social pour l’immense majorité de l’humanité. Les écologistes citent l’exemple du Sahel en Afrique sub-saharienne comme preuve de l’ampleur des conséquences du réchauffement climatique. Cette région, qui s’étend de l’océan Atlantique au Soudan, connaît depuis plus de quarante ans des sécheresses et des précipitations irrégulières. Il est vrai que la désertification rapide du Sahel, majoritairement peuplé d’éleveurs nomades et de paysans, a exacerbé la concurrence pour la terre entre les nombreux groupes ethniques de la région. Mais le fait que le Sahel s’enfonce dans la pauvreté, la famine et la misère est au fond un phénomène créé par l’homme : c’est une conséquence de la domination impérialiste.
En Afrique, une petite partie seulement des terres sont actuellement arables. Pour développer l’agriculture africaine, il faut construire des systèmes d’irrigation, assécher les marais et assainir les régions insalubres. Mais de telles mesures resteront impensables tant que le continent sera pris dans l’étau du Fonds monétaire international et de la Banque mondiale. Le colonialisme a conduit l’Afrique dans une impasse en la forçant à spécialiser son agriculture dans les produits tropicaux destinés à l’exportation afin de pouvoir rembourser une dette usuraire (dette d’ailleurs accumulée dans une large mesure pour importer massivement des produits alimentaires). La destruction de l’Etat ouvrier bureaucratiquement déformé soviétique en 1991-1992 a considérablement aggravé la dévastation du continent africain. L’Union soviétique constituait en effet le principal contrepoids à l’impérialisme américain et elle fournissait une aide importante à divers régimes du tiers-monde.
Tant que durera le capitalisme, il continuera à provoquer des famines à grande échelle et autres fléaux, comme les épidémies de maladies évitables causées par le manque d’infrastructures sociales de base (égouts, alimentation en eau potable, etc.). Même si le réchauffement climatique produit par l’homme était stoppé d’une façon ou d’une autre sous le capitalisme, les déprédations impérialistes continueraient sans relâche. Ceci a notamment comme conséquence que des milliards de personnes resteraient vulnérables aux changements climatiques « naturels », aux fluctuations régionales des cycles saisonniers, aux « événements météorologiques extrêmes » comme les ouragans et autres catastrophes naturelles. Le tremblement de terre qui a touché Haïti en janvier 2010 en est l’illustration : le nombre de victimes – environ 250 000 personnes – est le résultat de l’oppression impérialiste à laquelle est soumis depuis plus d’un siècle ce pays extrêmement pauvre, une oppression qui l’a laissé complètement à la merci des effets du séisme. A Port-au-Prince, les bâtiments mal construits se sont tout simplement écroulés ; aujourd’hui environ 1 500 000 Haïtiens vivent toujours sous des tentes de fortune.
La lutte pour le renversement révolutionnaire de l’ordre capitaliste décadent est une question de survie pour l’humanité. Une petite preuve de la supériorité d’une économie collectivisée sur le système capitaliste de production pour le profit est la façon dont Cuba, un Etat ouvrier déformé, a su protéger sa population d’ouragans dévastateurs. Quatre ouragans ont frappé Haïti en 2008, faisant 800 morts. Deux de ces tempêtes ont également traversé Cuba, entraînant la mort de quatre personnes. Malgré la mauvaise gestion bureaucratique de l’économie et la relative pauvreté du pays – aggravée par plus de quarante ans d’embargo économique américain –, Cuba est connue pour l’efficacité avec laquelle sont évacués ses habitants lors de catastrophes naturelles de ce genre : le gouvernement diffuse rapidement des prévisions météorologiques, il éduque et mobilise la population et organise l’hébergement d’urgence, les moyens de transport, l’approvisionnement en produits alimentaires ainsi que l’assistance médicale.
Spéculation et protectionnisme
Même si beaucoup de militants radicaux écologistes se considèrent anticapitalistes, toutes les variantes de l’écologisme sont des expressions de l’idéologie bourgeoise – elles proposent des correctifs sans remettre en question la pénurie et la société de classe. Les « solutions » au réchauffement climatique préconisées par de nombreux écologistes se basent sur le marché et elles ont la faveur des gouvernements capitalistes un peu partout dans le monde. Leur pièce maîtresse est le système dit « de plafonnement et d’échange » (plafonnement des émissions et échange des droits d’émission), qui est appliqué aujourd’hui dans toutes les économies européennes. Ce programme fixe une limite généreuse à la quantité de gaz à effet de serre que les entreprises sont autorisées à émettre (« plafonnement »). Celles d’entre elles dont les émissions dépassent cette limite doivent acheter des crédits à celles qui émettent moins que leur niveau autorisé (« échange »). En fin de compte, c’est la classe ouvrière qui fait les frais de ce système, en premier lieu du fait des coûts plus élevés de l’énergie et des carburants. De même, si l’on instaurait une taxe carbone destinée à refléter le « coût social » des émissions sous forme de « prix », ce serait la classe ouvrière qui en supporterait le coût.
Les entreprises peuvent également éviter de réduire leurs émissions si elles investissent dans des mécanismes de « compensation » : des projets mis en place ailleurs, souvent dans des pays pauvres, et qui sont censés réduire la quantité de gaz à effet de serre présente dans l’atmosphère. Dans le cadre de l’un de ces projets, des familles rurales pauvres en Inde ont reçu des pompes à pédale pour irriguer leurs terres. Un autre projet encourage les Kenyans à utiliser des générateurs qui marchent au fumier. Des programmes de plantation d’arbres au Guatemala, en Equateur et en Ouganda ont perturbé les systèmes locaux d’approvisionnement en eau, obligeant ainsi des milliers de paysans à quitter leur terre sans avoir jamais reçu la compensation promise pour s’occuper des arbres. Les écologistes occidentaux peuvent peut-être « compenser » leur sentiment de culpabilité libérale de vivre une vie confortable en soutenant de tels programmes, mais dans le tiers-monde, le résultat final n’est autre qu’une paupérisation accrue des masses.
Le système « de plafonnement et d’échange » est devenu un nouveau terrain de spéculation. Certains fabricants de produits chimiques, comme la société DuPont, ont accru leur production d’un certain réfrigérant, le HFC-23 (un gaz à fort effet de serre), dans le but d’en incinérer un sous-produit de fabrication et de toucher ainsi une grosse somme en « compensation ». Le « marché carbone » promet aussi de devenir un nouveau terrain de jeu gigantesque pour les spéculateurs, les virtuoses du capital-risque et les banques d’affaires – un peu comme celui des créances hypothécaires qui a précipité l’implosion de l’économie mondiale. Plus de 130 milliards de dollars se sont échangés sur le marché mondial du carbone en 2009.
L’écologisme va aussi de pair avec le chauvinisme, ce qu’illustre le soutien des écologistes aux mesures de protectionnisme commercial. Si les principaux acteurs de la conférence de Copenhague étaient arrivés à un accord, cela aurait certainement eu comme conséquence un regain de protectionnisme. Comme l’a fait remarquer Michael Levi dans Foreign Affairs (septembre-octobre 2009) : « En dehors des sanctions commerciales et autres pénalités désagréables, le monde a peu d’options efficaces pour faire appliquer les engagements pris pour réduire les émissions. » En effet, la législation environnementale a longtemps servi de couverture pour imposer des droits de douane, une pratique bien établie dans les règles de l’Organisation mondiale du commerce (OMC). Historiquement, le protectionnisme a provoqué en représaille des guerres commerciales, qui ont une fâcheuse tendance à se transformer en guerres tout court.
Le président de la Commission européenne a menacé en 2009 d’imposer une taxe sur les produits en provenance des Etats-Unis et d’autres pays non signataires du protocole de Kyoto, ceci afin de protéger les entreprises européennes. Aux Etats-Unis, la version du projet de loi présenté par le Parti démocrate à la Chambre des représentants pour instaurer un système « de compensation et d’échange » inclut une disposition qui prévoit une taxe sur les importations en provenance des pays qui n’auraient pas réduit leurs émissions d’ici 2020. L’industrie sidérurgique américaine appelle déjà à des sanctions contre les producteurs d’acier chinois si la Chine ne s’engage pas à réduire ses émissions de carbone. Emboîtant le pas aux aciéristes américains, les bureaucrates chauvins et anticommunistes du syndicat des ouvriers de la sidérurgie United Steelworkers ont porté plainte contre la Chine pour violation des règles de l’OMC parce qu’elle subventionne les exportations de panneaux solaires, d’éoliennes et autres équipements d’« énergie propre ». Le protectionnisme donne de la crédibilité à l’idée mensongère que dans chaque pays les travailleurs sont liés à leurs exploiteurs par des « intérêts nationaux » communs ; c’est du poison pour la solidarité internationale de la classe ouvrière.
Le protectionnisme visant les importations d’éthanol de canne à sucre en provenance du Brésil et d’autres pays fait aussi partie intégrante du plan du gouvernement Obama pour l’« indépendance énergétique » des Etats-Unis. En qualifiant la dépendance des Etats-Unis envers le pétrole du Proche-Orient de talon d’Achille de l’Amérique, Obama n’a laissé planer aucun doute sur le fait que l’« indépendance énergétique » est un cri de ralliement pour accroître la capacité de l’impérialisme américain à réaliser ses ambitions militaires et économiques dans le monde entier, grâce à la diversification de ses ressources énergétiques et une meilleure maîtrise de celles-ci.
Ce n’est pas par hasard que des groupes comme Greenpeace reprennent à leur compte le slogan de l’« indépendance énergétique ». Les principales organisations politiques écologistes, les partis « verts », sont des partis capitalistes de deuxième ordre hostiles au prolétariat. Aux Etats-Unis, les Verts jouent un rôle de groupe de pression libéral sur le Parti démocrate. Ce parti compte dans ses rangs des apôtres de l’écologisme comme Al Gore qui, à l’époque où il était vice-président sous Bill Clinton, a contribué à la mise en œuvre des sanctions pour affamer les Irakiens, ainsi qu’au bombardement de la Serbie. En Allemagne, les Verts ont participé à une coalition gouvernementale capitaliste avec le Parti social-démocrate de 1998 à 2005. Durant cette période, les écologistes allemands ont fait écho sur le thème de la « lutte contre la surpopulation » aux discours de l’extrême droite et à son racisme anti-immigrés. Joschka Fischer, ministre vert des Affaires étrangères, a déployé l’armée allemande en dehors des frontières (pour la première fois depuis le Troisième Reich de Hitler) pour participer aux guerres menées par les Etats-Unis contre la Serbie et l’Afghanistan.
La montée du capitalisme vert
L’écologisme n’est en aucune manière hostile à la production pour le profit. Comme le fait remarquer l’auteur d’un article du New York Times (21 avril 2010) intitulé « 40 ans après, la Journée de la Terre est une affaire de gros sous » : « L’hostilité aux entreprises était telle, au moment de la première édition de la Journée de la Terre en 1970, que les organisateurs n’avaient accepté aucune subvention de la part des grandes entreprises et qu’ils proposaient des séminaires pour “tenir tête aux chefs d’entreprise et de gouvernement dans les débats”. Quarante ans plus tard, la Journée de la Terre est devenue un événement marketing branché pour vendre tout un éventail de biens et de services, comme des fournitures de bureau, des yaourts grecs et des produits éco-dentaires. »
La rhétorique « écolo » n’a jamais été aussi présente qu’aujourd’hui dans les conseils d’administration des entreprises. En 2009, une légion de grandes entreprises avaient quitté la chambre de commerce américaine pour protester contre son déni total du réchauffement climatique. Cette attitude reflétait des intérêts divergents au sein de la bourgeoisie américaine. Plusieurs grandes entreprises ont décidé d’adopter une politique de « neutralité carbone », comme le géant de l’Internet Google, qui se flatte de construire des centres de données « éco-énergétiques » et d’investir dans des installations solaires et des parcs éoliens.
Lord Browne, ex-directeur général de British Petroleum (BP), avait contribué au milieu des années 1990 à lancer cette mode en faisant passer l’amélioration des rendements pour des réductions d’émissions et en faisant tout un battage là-dessus à coups de communiqués de presse. Aux Etats-Unis, les homologues de Browne injectaient des millions de dollars dans les caisses de la « Global Climate Coalition », l’un des groupes industriels les plus ouvertement opposés à la réduction des émissions. Browne au contraire flairait les subventions et les avantages fiscaux qui allaient découler du consensus occidental naissant selon lequel les émissions de carbone étaient un problème. Il rebaptisa son entreprise « Beyond Petroleum », créa un nouveau logo « écolo » et entreprit de faire du producteur régional qu’était BP une compagnie pétrolière mondiale engagée aussi dans les énergies « alternatives ». Pendant ce temps, BP réduisait les coûts en utilisant des matériaux de construction bon marché et rognait sur les dispositifs de sécurité des plates-formes pétrolières, préparant ainsi le terrain pour de nombreux « accidents », comme l’explosion d’avril 2010 qui causa la mort de onze travailleurs et le déversement de millions de barils de pétrole dans le golfe du Mexique (voir « Désastre dans le golfe : la course au profit capitaliste tue », Workers Vanguard n° 961, 2 juillet 2010).
Même si les écologistes libéraux et les réformistes de l’ISO montrent BP du doigt parce que ce dernier cherche à « écoblanchir » son exploitation des combustibles fossiles, le fait est que Browne a été l’un des instigateurs du mouvement pour le « passage au vert ». L’attention médiatique qui a entouré le calculateur de consommation énergétique que BP avait posté en 2005 sur son site internet a contribué à populariser l’idée que chaque individu devait réduire son « empreinte carbone ». L’année suivante, Al Gore prescrivait dans son documentaire Une vérité qui dérange l’abandon de certaines habitudes de vie prétendument gaspilleuses : les gens devaient consommer moins, utiliser moins d’eau chaude, remplacer leurs ampoules à incandescence par des lampes fluo-compactes et gonfler correctement leurs pneus de voiture. L’Economist de Londres (31 mai 2007), porte-parole du capital financier, faisait remarquer sarcastiquement que « les choix économiques individuels ne feront pas l’ombre d’une différence pour l’avenir de la planète. On ne sauvera pas les ours polaires en éteignant les lumières. » Les sermons d’Al Gore sur la réduction de la consommation ne l’empêchent pas de profiter de sa somptueuse villa de Nashville ou de son jet privé.
« Faire plus avec moins » n’est pas franchement une option pour les ouvriers au chômage dans les friches industrielles de Detroit, ou pour les populations qui vivent entassées dans les bidonvilles de Calcutta. Les entreprises qui deviennent « neutres en carbone » n’amélioreront pas les conditions de travail sur les chaînes de montage, où les ouvriers risquent de perdre un membre ou même la vie parce que les patrons décident d’augmenter les cadences pour extraire un maximum de profit. Le recours à des sources d’énergie « alternatives » ne réduira pas les niveaux de pollution dans les quartiers pauvres et ouvriers. Les entreprises qui produisent de l’énergie, en revanche, s’en mettront plein les poches.
Toute tentative d’utiliser de façon rationnelle les ressources de la planète et d’éviter la dégradation à grande échelle de l’environnement se heurte nécessairement à l’anarchie de la production sous le capitalisme, un système qui repose sur la propriété privée des moyens de production (les usines, la technologie, la terre, etc.). Même si les usines individuellement peuvent être bien organisées, il n’y a pas de planification économique à l’échelle mondiale. Les décisions d’investissement, y compris pour la recherche et le développement, sont avant tout motivées par le profit.
Friedrich Engels, qui a fondé avec Karl Marx le socialisme moderne et scientifique, écrivait dans son essai inachevé de 1876 « Le rôle du travail dans la transformation du singe en homme » :
« Pourvu que individuellement le fabricant ou le négociant vende la marchandise produite ou achetée avec le petit profit d’usage, il est satisfait et ne se préoccupe pas de ce qu’il advient ensuite de la marchandise et de son acheteur. Il en va de même des effets naturels de ces actions. Les planteurs espagnols à Cuba qui incendièrent les forêts sur les pentes et trouvèrent dans la cendre assez d’engrais pour une génération d’arbres à café extrêmement rentables, que leur importait que, par la suite, les averses tropicales emportent la couche de terre superficielle désormais sans protection, ne laissant derrière elle que les rochers nus ? Vis-à-vis de la nature comme de la société, on ne considère principalement, dans le mode de production actuel, que le résultat le plus proche, le plus tangible. »
Pourquoi la question de l’environnement suscite-t-elle alors des inquiétudes de la part de nombreux porte-parole de la bourgeoisie ? D’abord parce qu’un capitaliste individuel va s’inquiéter s’il est démontré que la pollution industrielle affecte sa propre santé et pas seulement celle de ses esclaves salariés. Plus généralement, un nombre croissant de représentants politiques des capitalistes s’alarment face à la menace de perturbations économiques et sociales que fait peser le réchauffement climatique. Un article du New York Times (9 août 2009) intitulé « Le changement climatique considéré comme une menace pour la sécurité américaine » citait plusieurs experts militaires et spécialistes du renseignement qui évoquaient la possibilité, dans les prochaines décennies, « d’intervenir militairement pour faire face aux effets de tempêtes violentes, de sécheresses, de migrations de masse et d’épidémies ». Le Pentagone élabore déjà des plans pour sécuriser ses installations situées au niveau de la mer et fortifier les frontières pour empêcher l’entrée de réfugiés. Les discours du gouvernement sur la sauvegarde des intérêts américains sont une recette pour de nouvelles interventions impérialistes comme l’occupation d’Haïti, sous couvert de « porter secours aux victimes de la catastrophe » après le séisme de janvier 2010.
Ceux qui à gauche ne croient plus à une révolution socialiste prolétarienne n’ont plus rien d’autre à proposer que leurs propres scénarios catastrophe avec des stratégies réformistes impuissantes. Dans la New Left Review (janvier-février 2010), Mike Davis écarte la possibilité d’une « révolution mondiale », qualifiée de « scénario complètement irréaliste ». Il se résigne ainsi à accepter l’inévitabilité d’une catastrophe écologique imminente : « Au lieu de galvaniser l’innovation héroïque et la coopération internationale, les turbulences environnementales et socio-économiques croissantes risquent simplement de pousser encore plus les classes supérieures à se claquemurer frénétiquement pour s’isoler du reste de l’humanité […]. L’objectif serait de créer de vertes oasis de richesse permanente, entourées de murs, au milieu d’une planète dévastée. »
John Bellamy Foster, une vedette de l’« éco-socialisme », déploie tous ses efforts pour transformer Karl Marx en un proto-écologiste et pour vider le marxisme de son contenu révolutionnaire. Dans un article publié dans la Monthly Review (janvier 2010), il parle d’un « nouveau prolétariat environnemental » composé de petits paysans, d’habitants des bidonvilles sans travail et d’autres couches de la population du tiers-monde « directement exposées et qui seront les premières touchées par les catastrophes imminentes ». Ce « prolétariat » est présenté comme « le principal agent historique et l’initiateur d’une nouvelle ère de révolutions écologiques ». Cette notion prend clairement ses racines dans la « nouvelle gauche » des années 1960. Celle-ci rejetait l’idée que la classe ouvrière, dans les pays avancés comme dans le monde néocolonial, est la seule à pouvoir renverser l’ordre capitaliste et collectiviser les moyens de production. Après la disparition de la nouvelle gauche, de nombreux militants radicaux se sont réconciliés avec l’impérialisme et ont adhéré à l’une ou l’autre variante de la politique écologiste.
Il existe bel et bien un prolétariat dans les régions dont parle Bellamy : les mineurs de platine en Afrique du Sud, les ouvriers des chaînes de montage de l’industrie automobile en Inde et dans les usines aéronautiques au Brésil. Comme dans les pays capitalistes avancés, ce qui manque ce sont des partis ouvriers révolutionnaires, capables de mobiliser cette puissance sociale en se mettant à la tête des masses dépossédées des villes et des campagnes pour les mener vers une révolution socialiste.
De son côté, l’ISO critique certaines des panacées écologistes, comme la réduction de l’« empreinte carbone » des individus, tout en se joignant aux libéraux et aux verts pour appeler les gouvernements capitalistes à imposer des pratiques respectueuses de l’environnement. Dans un article intitulé « Quand la Terre devient une serre » (International Socialist Review, mars-avril 2009), l’ISO propose « un plan d’action gouvernemental sur l’environnement » qui consiste principalement à conseiller au gouvernement Obama d’investir dans des énergies non fossiles. L’ISO est contre le nucléaire et elle tient le « capitalisme de libre échange non réglementé » (souligné par nous) pour responsable de la destruction de l’environnement ; elle fait ainsi écho aux préjugés petit-bourgeois qui caractérisent le mouvement écologiste. Ces positions n’ont rien de surprenant : depuis quelques années, l’ISO présente des candidats sur les listes des verts.
Lorsque l’ISO affirme, dans « Quand la Terre devient une serre », que « seul un avenir socialiste permettra d’espérer un avenir durable pour la planète », ce n’est que de la poudre aux yeux pour faire passer la conclusion opérationnelle de l’article : « Beaucoup de gens espèrent encore en Obama et en la possibilité que les attentes en termes de changements puissent être canalisées dans un mouvement qui ferait pression sur lui pour qu’il aille significativement au-delà de ses promesses de campagne. » De façon similaire, le PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) déclarait dans un article du 25 mai 2008 consacré à un projet de loi sur l’environnement du Congrès américain : « Sans mouvement radical de masse pour stopper le réchauffement climatique, les politiciens n’offriront que des demi-mesures qui garantiront que les profits continueront à s’amonceler dans les poches des pollueurs. »
Les réformistes ont eu le « mouvement » qu’ils voulaient devant les bâtiments où se tenaient les négociations de l’ONU sur le climat à Copenhague en décembre 2009. Des dizaines de milliers de manifestants se sont rassemblés derrière le mot d’ordre « Changeons le système, pas le climat ! » et autres revendications similaires. Ce slogan, claironné par l’Action pour la justice climatique (AJC), l’ISO et d’autres groupes, peut vouloir dire beaucoup de choses différentes. Pour l’AJC (un réseau international de groupes écologistes), le « changement » recherché consiste à limiter la croissance économique et à « garder les combustibles fossiles dans le sol ». Les écologistes de tout poil soutiennent depuis longtemps que l’humanité dépasse ou devrait bientôt dépasser les « capacités » de la Terre. Selon ce point de vue, il y a trop d’habitants sur la planète et ceux-ci possèdent trop de choses. Invariablement, les propositions des écologistes pour limiter la consommation et réduire la production concordent avec les mesures d’austérité capitaliste qui visent la classe ouvrière et les pauvres, que ce soit dans les centres industriels ou dans les pays retardataires.
Pour l’essentiel, le bilan de la mobilisation à Copenhague a été d’implorer les impérialistes « démocratiques » d’accélérer les négociations sur la réduction des émissions, comme l’illustraient des pancartes comme « Bla, bla, bla. Il faut agir maintenant », « Il n’y a pas de planète B », ou encore « Le monde veut un vrai accord ». Surtout, beaucoup plaçaient leurs espoirs dans Barack Obama, commandant en chef de l’impérialisme américain, dont les sermons sur les problèmes que pose le réchauffement climatique pour les êtres humains coïncident avec une intensification de l’occupation américaine meurtrière de l’Afghanistan, une projection de puissance militaire aux quatre coins du monde et la multiplication des attaques contre les droits démocratiques aux Etats-Unis même, au nom de la « guerre contre le terrorisme ».
A l’approche de la conférence de Copenhague, l’ISO (qui avait applaudi l’accession d’Obama à la Maison Blanche) a publié un article débile dans le Socialist Worker (2 juillet 2009) sur le projet de loi du gouvernement sur le « cap and trade » : « Si tout ce qu’il entend c’est le bruit des dollars des entreprises qui se déversent dans les caisses du Parti démocrate, il est clair que la Terre, les êtres humains, les animaux et les plantes viendront en deuxième, très loin derrière les considérations de profit des entreprises ». Ce que raconte l’ISO, tout comme le PSL et le reste de la gauche réformiste, est une fable : il serait possible de modifier les priorités fondamentales de la classe capitaliste dans le sens des intérêts des exploités et des opprimés en faisant suffisamment pression sur l’aile libérale de la bourgeoisie, représentée aux Etats-Unis par le Parti démocrate. Que les réformistes se réclament sans arrêt du socialisme ou pas, leur action politique a pour effet d’« éduquer les masses dans l’idée de l’inébranlabilité de l’Etat bourgeois », selon la caractérisation tranchante de Trotsky dans les Leçons d’Octobre (1924).
Malthus et la croissance démographique
Pratiquement tous les écologistes, à un degré ou à un autre, voient dans la croissance démographique la principale cause de la dégradation de l’environnement. C’est l’opinion qu’exprime Robert Engelman, du Worldwatch Institute, dans un numéro spécial de Scientific American publié en juin 2009 : « A l’ère du changement climatique et des crises économiques, les limites malthusiennes sont de retour, et elles nous prennent douloureusement en étau. Alors que jadis une population plus nombreuse signifiait plus d’ingéniosité, plus de talent et plus d’innovation, aujourd’hui cela semble signifier moins pour chacun » (souligné dans l’original).
C’est poser le problème à l’envers. Il est vrai que la population mondiale est passée de 3 milliards d’individus en 1960 à 6,5 milliards en 2005, et qu’elle devrait atteindre les 7 milliards en 2011. La croissance démographique accélérée amplifie les problèmes inhérents au mode de production capitaliste que sont la pauvreté, la famine et la dégradation de l’environnement, mais cette croissance n’est pas la cause de ces maux. Par exemple, selon le Programme alimentaire mondial des Nations Unies, la production alimentaire est aujourd’hui plus d’une fois et demie supérieure à la quantité nécessaire pour fournir à chaque habitant de la planète une alimentation saine et équilibrée. Mais les capitalistes manipulent le marché alimentaire mondial pour accumuler autant de profits que possible, pas pour nourrir ceux qui ont faim.
L’argument que les masses paupérisées seraient responsables de la pénurie est resté associé au nom de Thomas Malthus. Dans son Essai sur le principe de population, un pamphlet publié en 1798, ce pasteur de l’Eglise anglicane affirmait que l’accroissement incontrôlé de la population suit une progression géométrique, tandis que les moyens de subsistance augmentent selon une progression arithmétique. En combinant ces deux affirmations, on obtient le « principe de population » de Malthus, qui en tirait la conclusion que la croissance de l’humanité dépasserait celle des ressources de la planète, provoquant ainsi misère et vices en tous genres.
Avec cet argument, les malthusiens exonèrent l’ordre social existant, celui d’une société divisée en classes, de sa responsabilité dans la misère des masses. La théorie de Malthus faisait partie intégrante de la contre-offensive idéologique contre la Révolution française. Non seulement l’aristocratie féodale dans toute l’Europe mais aussi la bourgeoisie anglaise craignaient que leurs propres « classes inférieures » n’adhèrent aux principes de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité. Le malthusianisme était une tentative de démontrer l’inévitabilité des privations pour les masses laborieuses, de manière à les dissuader de s’engager dans des luttes sociales pour améliorer leur sort.
Marx et Engels ont impitoyablement démoli la théorie de Malthus, considérée par Engels comme « la plus brutale déclaration de guerre de la bourgeoisie au prolétariat » (la Situation de la classe laborieuse en Angleterre, 1845). Malthus présentait comme des vérités éternelles les rapports d’exploitation spécifiques qui existaient à l’époque entre travailleurs salariés et capitalistes, ainsi que les antagonismes entre l’aristocratie foncière et la bourgeoisie urbaine. Marx a montré que la pauvreté de la classe ouvrière provient de l’appropriation par les capitalistes – qui possèdent les moyens de production – de la plus-value extorquée aux travailleurs salariés (le prolétariat). Afin d’en finir avec la misère et les privations pour les masses laborieuses, il faudra l’expropriation des moyens de production par le prolétariat et un développement qualitatif des forces productives, qui sera rendu possible dans le cadre d’une économie collectivisée. La révolution technologique du XIXe siècle en Europe a été en elle-même une réfutation spectaculaire du malthusianisme parce qu’elle a démontré qu’une augmentation qualitative des moyens de subsistance était possible.
Les marxistes ne sont en aucun cas indifférents aux problèmes que pose une forte croissance démographique. Mais nous savons que seule une société capable d’élever le niveau de vie des habitants du monde entier pourra créer les conditions nécessaires pour une diminution naturelle des taux de reproduction. Dans les pays capitalistes avancés qui ont connu une augmentation du niveau de vie de leur population, le taux de fécondité (le nombre moyen d’enfants qu’aura chaque femme pendant toute la période où elle aura été en âge de procréer) a en général diminué, parfois de façon spectaculaire. Avec l’avènement de l’industrialisation, le taux de fécondité a chuté d’abord en France puis en Grande-Bretagne, et ensuite dans la plupart des pays d’Europe et aux Etats-Unis. Déjà dans les années 1970, 24 pays avaient un taux de fécondité inférieur ou égal à 2,1 – le niveau où la population reste stable.
Mais ce genre de progrès est limité dans un monde dominé par l’impérialisme, où des milliards de personnes vivent dans des conditions épouvantables. L’oppression impérialiste renforce aussi l’obscurantisme religieux réactionnaire et une oppression brutale des femmes dans le monde entier. Pendant la guerre froide antisoviétique, par exemple, les Etats-Unis ont consciemment soutenu les forces fondamentalistes islamiques comme rempart contre à la fois le « communisme impie » et le nationalisme laïque. John Foster Dulles avait ainsi déclaré en 1950, trois ans avant de devenir ministre des Affaires étrangères : « Les religions de l’Orient sont profondément enracinées et elles ont de nombreuses valeurs précieuses. On ne peut pas réconcilier leurs croyances spirituelles avec l’athéisme et le matérialisme communistes. Cela crée un lien commun entre nous. »
De la même façon, les bourgeoisies des pays du tiers-monde utilisent la religion et la superstition pour consolider leur pouvoir. Le gouvernement indien, par exemple, attise le chauvinisme hindou. Avec son opposition moyenâgeuse à l’avortement et la contraception, l’Eglise catholique (qui a de l’emprise sur plus d’un milliard de personnes), elle aussi, contribue considérablement à la croissance démographique. Les Etats-Unis, quant à eux, occupent la première place parmi les pays capitalistes avancés pour ce qui est de la prévalence des croyances religieuses.
Comme nous l’avions fait remarquer dans « En défense de la science et de la technologie : un échange sur les éco-radicaux et les négationnistes du VIH » (Workers Vanguard n° 843, 4 mars 2005) :
« La société communiste reposera sur un ensemble de valeurs sociales complètement différentes de celles qui existent aujourd’hui. La libération des femmes de la domination patriarcale signifiera l’accès complet et sans entrave au contrôle des naissances et à la contraception. Le communisme élèvera au plus haut le niveau de vie de tous. En mettant fin à la pénurie, à la pauvreté et au besoin, le communisme éliminera aussi la cause principale de la prévalence de la religion et de la superstition, avec l’arriération qui en découle assignant aux femmes le rôle de produire la prochaine génération de travailleurs à exploiter. »
Sous le communisme, les êtres humains auront une meilleure maîtrise de leur environnement naturel et social. La division entre ville et campagne, ainsi que la dépendance économique envers la famille, auront été surmontées. L’époque où les gens étaient obligés de faire plus d’enfants afin d’avoir suffisamment de main-d’œuvre pour travailler leur terre ou pour s’occuper d’eux quand ils seraient vieux sera révolue depuis longtemps. Engels écrivait en 1881 dans une lettre à Karl Kautsky :
« Il existe certes cette possibilité abstraite, que le nombre des hommes s’accroisse tant qu’on doive mettre une limite à son accroissement. Mais si, un jour, la société communiste se voyait contrainte à planifier la production des hommes de la même façon qu’elle aura déjà réglé la production des objets, c’est elle, et elle seule, qui le réalisera sans difficultés. »
Capitalisme, technologie et production d’énergie
Horrifiés par la dégradation de l’environnement provoquée par les grandes entreprises, les éco-radicaux « anticapitalistes » tirent souvent un trait d’égalité entre capitalisme et technologie. D’après cette conception, capitalisme devient synonyme de consommation, y compris celle des biens de première nécessité. Les partisans de « l’écologie profonde » et autres primitivistes du même acabit poussent l’écologisme à sa conclusion logique : ils sont contre l’industrie et la civilisation, au motif que ce qui reste de la nature doit être protégé de l’homme. Dans la pratique, une telle perspective ne peut se réaliser qu’avec la mort de plusieurs milliards de personnes. Dans la Question agraire et les « critiques de Marx » (1901), Lénine polémiquait ainsi contre Sergueï Boulgakov, un « marxiste légal » néo-malthusien russe :
« Il n’y a pas eu derrière nous d’âge d’or, et l’homme primitif était tout à fait accablé par les difficultés de l’existence, par les difficultés de la lutte contre la nature. L’emploi des machines et des procédés perfectionnés du travail a énormément facilité à l’homme cette lutte en général et la production des vivres en particulier. Ce qui a augmenté, ce n’est pas la difficulté de produire des vivres, mais la difficulté pour l’ouvrier de se procurer des vivres ; cette difficulté a augmenté parce que le développement capitaliste a haussé la rente foncière et le prix de la terre, a concentré l’agriculture entre les mains des gros et petits capitalistes, a concentré plus encore les machines, les outils, l’argent, sans lesquels une bonne production est impossible. »
Au début de son développement, le capitalisme a donné naissance à la science moderne et à la révolution industrielle, qui a été déclenchée par la découverte que l’on pouvait utiliser le charbon dans des machines à vapeur. La puissance motrice de la vapeur, combinée à la technologie des machines, allait bientôt révolutionner la production, et les ouvriers salariés travaillant collectivement dans de grandes usines allaient remplacer les artisans. En même temps, la propriété des moyens de production devenait de plus en plus une entrave au développement des forces productives.
L’accroissement de la production nécessitait l’augmentation des ressources énergétiques – d’abord le charbon puis, de plus en plus, le pétrole. Aujourd’hui, quatre des six entreprises les plus rentables au monde sont des compagnies pétrolières, le pétrole fournissant à lui seul plus d’un tiers de l’énergie mondiale. A l’échelle de la planète, ce sont des milliers de milliards de dollars qui sont investis dans des infrastructures utilisées pour la production ou le raffinage du pétrole et du gaz. D’autres dérivés du pétrole comme l’asphalte, le caoutchouc ou le plastique occupent aussi une place vitale dans les économies industrielles.
Les magnats capitalistes et leurs gouvernements ne sont pas prêts à simplement passer par pertes et profits leurs investissements historiques dans les combustibles fossiles. Un gouvernement ouvrier ne le serait pas non plus. Une économie planifiée et collectivisée mènerait des recherches scientifiques pour développer des sources d’énergie plus sûres et plus efficaces, mais il est bien possible qu’elle ait à tourner au charbon et aux hydrocarbures (pétrole et gaz naturel) pour un certain temps encore. Comme nous le faisions remarquer dans « La mode de l’écologie et l’énergie nucléaire » (Young Spartacus n° 55, juin 1977) : « Les marxistes ne sont pas insensibles aux aspects environnementaux des progrès techniques. Mais cette inquiétude est tempérée par le fait que nous sommes déterminés à éradiquer scientifiquement la pénurie et la misère de l’humanité. La révolution prolétarienne victorieuse utilisera la science et la technique pour créer les bases matérielles nécessaires au dépassement de la “condition humaine” synonyme de guerre, de pauvreté et de pénurie qui est la marque des sociétés de classes. »
Léon Trotsky, qui a dirigé avec Lénine la révolution d’Octobre 1917, décrivait ainsi la contradiction inhérente au progrès technologique sous le capitalisme :
« La technique et la science ont leur propre logique, la logique de la connaissance de la nature et de son asservissement aux intérêts de l’homme. Mais la technique et la science ne se développent pas dans le vide, elles le font dans une société humaine divisée en classes. La classe dirigeante, la classe possédante domine la technique et, à travers elle, elle domine la nature. La technique en elle-même ne peut être appelée militariste ou pacifiste. Dans une société où la classe dirigeante est militariste, la technique est au service du militarisme. »
– « Radio, science, technique et société », mars 1926
Nous défendons les avancées de la science et de la technologie réalisées sous le capitalisme, et nous savons qu’une société socialiste s’appuiera sur ces progrès. Aujourd’hui, l’application de cette technologie est étroitement liée à la recherche du profit par la bourgeoisie. Même les technologies les mieux comprises sont mises en œuvre de façon dangereuse et avec un coût social élevé, intentionnellement ou non. La catastrophe survenue en avril 2010 dans le golfe du Mexique, où onze ouvriers ont perdu la vie, prouve bien que le secteur de l’énergie est l’un des plus dangereux pour les travailleurs, parce que les procédures de sécurité passent à la trappe. Bien qu’aucune activité d’extraction ne soit requise pour la production d’énergie solaire et éolienne, ces industries à petite échelle coûtent pourtant elles aussi des vies. Partout dans l’industrie, nous luttons pour le contrôle syndical sur les conditions de travail et, en cas de danger spécifique, pour des actions ouvrières pour arrêter la production. Tout cela requiert des efforts concertés pour syndiquer les travailleurs des entreprises et des sous-traitants qui de plus en plus recourent à une main-d’œuvre non syndiquée.
Nous sommes des marxistes révolutionnaires. Conseiller la bourgeoisie sur la meilleure façon de satisfaire ses besoins énergétiques ne nous intéresse pas. Nous nous préoccuperons de trouver le meilleur moyen de fournir de l’énergie sur la planète quand le prolétariat international sera au pouvoir. Ce n’est qu’à ce moment-là qu’on pourra décider en toute connaissance de cause d’utiliser telle source d’énergie plutôt que telle autre. Nous sommes conscients que tous les types de production d’énergie présentent des inconvénients. Le charbon par exemple, selon sa qualité, peut contenir plus de 90 % de carbone pur. Et son pouvoir calorifique est également moins élevé que celui du gaz naturel (méthane). A quantité d’énergie égale, brûler du charbon plutôt que du gaz produit de ce fait davantage de dioxyde de carbone. Mais argumenter aujourd’hui, dans une société où le profit règne en maître, que telle ou telle source d’énergie est plus sûre ou plus raisonnable qu’une autre, c’est courir au désastre. Quelques exemples :
En 2008, la production aux Etats-Unis de biocarburant à base d’éthanol de maïs a provoqué un déficit de la production céréalière et a déclenché une crise alimentaire qui a frappé de plein fouet les populations les plus pauvres de la planète, à un moment où la production agricole mondiale était pourtant au plus haut. De plus en plus d’usines américaines fonctionnant au charbon ont commencé à réduire leur pollution atmosphérique, mais beaucoup d’entre elles rejettent leurs déchets toxiques dans les rivières qui alimentent les réseaux de distribution d’eau.
Une usine située à 65 km de Pittsburg (Pennsylvanie) a installé en juin 2010 un système de « lavage » des fumées de ses cheminées ; depuis lors, elle déverse chaque jour des dizaines de milliers de litres d’eaux usées dans une rivière avoisinante qui approvisionne 350 000 personnes en eau potable. Alors que plusieurs projets de construction de nouvelles centrales nucléaires ont été lancés aux Etats-Unis, les propriétaires des anciennes centrales ont déposé des demandes de permis pour pouvoir les maintenir en service pendant 40 ans au-delà de la durée de vie prévue de leurs réacteurs. Les écologistes ont en général toujours été hostiles à l’énergie nucléaire, même si aujourd’hui certains considèrent qu’elle pourrait devenir une alternative à l’utilisation des combustibles fossiles, notamment avec l’arrivée des réacteurs rapides intégraux (IFR, une variante de réacteur à neutrons rapides), qui créent moins de déchets et pour lesquels le risque de fusion du cœur est moindre. Nous nous opposons aux campagnes écologistes contre le nucléaire, sans pour autant soutenir les politiques et les activités des propriétaires de réacteurs ou des agences gouvernementales qui les contrôlent.
Il est vrai que la planète contient une quantité limitée d’uranium, mais si de nouveaux réacteurs surgénérateurs, comme les IFR, étaient employés, ils n’utiliseraient qu’1 % de l’uranium consommé actuellement par les réacteurs à eau pressurisée. Il existe aussi la possibilité de développer un jour des technologies qui permettront d’exploiter la fusion nucléaire à des fins de production d’énergie. Il ne s’agit pas de nier les risques que les réacteurs nucléaires représentent en termes de sécurité : ces risques sont bien réels et demeurent sans solution, en particulier la question de l’élimination des déchets. Mais une grande quantité de déchets nucléaires provient en réalité de l’usage militaire du nucléaire. Le gigantesque arsenal nucléaire aux mains des Etats-Unis et des autres puissances impérialistes représente un danger bien plus grand pour l’humanité qu’une fuite accidentelle dans une centrale nucléaire ou lors du transport ou du stockage des déchets. Les Etats-Unis sont le seul pays à avoir fait usage de l’arme atomique, quand en août 1945 ils ont incinéré plusieurs centaines de milliers de personnes dans les villes d’Hiroshima et de Nagasaki, au Japon. Il faut défendre l’Etat ouvrier chinois !
L’expérience de l’Union soviétique a démontré la supériorité d’une économie planifiée. La Révolution russe de 1917, dirigée par les bolchéviks, a brisé la domination capitaliste et a instauré des formes de propriété prolétariennes, ouvrant ainsi la voie à une amélioration qualitative du niveau de vie des masses laborieuses, à un degré inatteignable dans les pays qui restaient enchaînés par la domination impérialiste. En URSS, tout le monde avait accès à un logement, aux soins médicaux, à l’éducation et à un emploi. Même isolée, et malgré sa dégénérescence sous le règne de la bureaucratie stalinienne à partir de 1923-1924, l’Union soviétique connut une transformation fondamentale ; de société arriérée, avec une écrasante majorité de paysans, elle devint une puissance industrielle moderne. Alors qu’en 1925 l’Union soviétique était le onzième producteur mondial d’énergie électrique, elle occupait en 1935 la troisième place, derrière l’Allemagne et les Etats-Unis. Pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, les Soviétiques furent en mesure de déplacer et de reconstruire les industries détruites par l’invasion nazie. Mais la bureaucratie stalinienne a sapé les fondements mêmes de l’Etat ouvrier soviétique avec son dogme profondément antimarxiste du « socialisme dans un seul pays ». Le socialisme, autrement dit le premier stade d’une société communiste sans classes, doit reposer sur l’abondance matérielle. Pour cela, des révolutions socialistes doivent avoir lieu dans le monde entier, y compris dans les pays industrialisés avancés. Les staliniens étaient opposés à la perspective d’une révolution prolétarienne mondiale et recherchaient au contraire un accommodement avec l’impérialisme. Après des décennies de trahisons staliniennes et de pressions impérialistes incessantes, l’Union soviétique a succombé face aux forces de la restauration capitaliste en 1991-1992, une défaite historique pour les travailleurs et les opprimés du monde entier.
Par la suite, la Chine est devenue la principale cible des efforts des impérialistes pour fomenter une contre-révolution capitaliste. Pour détruire l’Etat ouvrier né de la Révolution chinoise de 1949, les impérialistes ont fait monter d’un cran leurs pressions contre Pékin, tout en menant une politique de subversion économique et politique à l’intérieur du pays, par exemple en soutenant des forces contre-révolutionnaires comme le mouvement pour l’« indépendance du Tibet » derrière le dalaï-lama. Contrairement à l’Etat ouvrier soviétique des premières années, l’Etat ouvrier chinois était dès son origine déformé sous le régime de la bureaucratie stalinienne nationaliste du Parti communiste. Aujourd’hui, il est urgent de lutter pour défendre la Chine et les autres Etats ouvriers déformés qui restent (Corée du Nord, Vietnam, Cuba [et Laos]) contre l’impérialisme et la contre-révolution capitaliste. Notre défense de la Chine, comme celle de la Corée du Nord, implique que nous soutenons les efforts de ces pays pour développer des bombes nucléaires et les systèmes d’armes (avions, missiles, sous-marins) associés. En tant que trotskystes, nous luttons simultanément pour une révolution politique prolétarienne qui chassera les bureaucraties staliniennes et remettra le pouvoir aux mains de conseils ouvriers et paysans (soviets) déterminés à lutter pour la révolution prolétarienne mondiale. C’est dans ce cadre que nous abordons la question de la dégradation de l’environnement et des autres problèmes sociaux aujourd’hui en Chine. Beaucoup d’écologistes se joignent aux impérialistes pour pointer sur la Chine un doigt accusateur, parce qu’elle est devenue le premier pays émetteur de gaz à effet de serre, devant les Etats-Unis.
Pékin a pour le moment réussi à résister aux efforts des impérialistes qui voudraient lui imposer un calendrier de réduction des émissions, en faisant remarquer par la même occasion que l’Occident reproche à la Chine une augmentation d’émissions qui est due à la fabrication, financée par des capitaux occidentaux, de biens destinés à être exportés en Occident. 70 % de l’énergie consommée aujourd’hui en Chine provient de la combustion du charbon. Le charbon est notamment utilisé pour le chauffage domestique dans les régions rurales, pas seulement dans les centrales électriques. La Chine utilise le charbon parce que c’est ce qu’elle possède. Et c’est la raison pour laquelle les impérialistes américains insistent autant sur la nécessité pour la Chine de limiter ses émissions (en même temps qu’ils s’autorisent à ne pas contrôler les leurs). Une diminution de la production et de l’utilisation du charbon nuirait gravement à l’économie chinoise.
En même temps, la forte demande de charbon a contribué à la prolifération de mines privées extrêmement dangereuses, dont les patrons paient les inspecteurs du gouvernement pour qu’ils ferment les yeux. C’est là une des principales causes des catastrophes qui se produisent régulièrement dans les mines chinoises. Malgré les incursions capitalistes découlant des « réformes de marché », le cœur de l’économie de la Chine repose toujours sur la propriété collectivisée, et ceci illustre ce qu’il est possible de faire quand le principe directeur n’est pas de générer des profits. Tandis que le monde capitaliste est enlisé dans la récession, la Chine connaît une croissance économique phénoménale, due dans une large mesure à un programme de relance massive grâce aux banques et aux industries d’Etat (voir « Chine : Luttes ouvrières dans l’“économie socialiste de marché” », Workers Vanguard n° 964 et 965, 10 et 24 septembre 2010). Pendant la même période, la Chine a annoncé son intention de réduire considérablement le taux de croissance de ses émissions de dioxyde de carbone d’ici 2020. Le gouvernement prévoit de dépenser pour cela 5 000 milliards de yuans (environ 700 milliards d’euros) ces dix prochaines années pour développer des sources d’énergie plus propres, comme l’éolien et le solaire, ainsi que des voitures électriques et hybrides.
La Chine est déjà « le premier constructeur mondial de centrales au charbon plus efficaces et moins polluantes, grâce à sa maîtrise de cette technologie et à la réduction des coûts » (New York Times, 11 mai 2009). La Chine a achevé il y a quelques années la construction d’une ligne de chemin de fer reliant le Qinghai au Tibet, la plus longue voie ferrée du monde à de telles altitudes et la première à rejoindre le Tibet. Selon un article du magazine Science (27 avril 2007), ce projet pourrait passer à la postérité comme un « miracle écologique », grâce notamment à un réseau de tunnels construits pour éviter de perturber les migrations saisonnières des animaux et grâce au contournement des marais et à l’isolation des voies de façon à éviter de déstabiliser le pergélisol. Il y a cependant de véritables problèmes environnementaux en Chine. Les grandes villes étouffent dans un brouillard toxique. Du fait des rejets massifs de déchets industriels, un tiers des rivières du pays et une grande partie de ses lacs sont impropres à tout usage industriel ou agricole. Et plusieurs millions de Chinois n’ont pas accès à l’eau potable. Même s’il existe une législation visant à limiter la pollution, les bureaucrates corrompus et vénaux n’appliquent pas scrupuleusement les lois.
En plus des luttes des paysans et des ouvriers contre les difficultés économiques, il y a de nombreuses manifestations en lien avec des problèmes de pollution ; il y en a eu environ 50 000 rien qu’en 2005. En août 2009, des centaines d’habitants de la province du Shaanxi, dans le Nord-Ouest de la Chine, ont attaqué une fonderie tenue pour responsable de l’intoxication de plus de 600 enfants. En juillet 2009, plus d’un millier de personnes ont jeté des pierres contre la police et ont bloqué des routes dans le Sud de la Chine pour protester contre la pollution causée par une usine appartenant à l’un des plus grands producteurs privés d’aluminium. Malgré ses avancées historiques, la Chine reste marquée par un héritage d’arriération rurale. Sous le régime stalinien, la mauvaise gestion de l’économie collectivisée, combinée aux effets des « réformes de marché » en place depuis trente ans, a créé des inégalités croissantes et toute une série de problèmes sociaux non résolus.
Une révolution politique prolétarienne mettrait en place un régime de démocratie ouvrière basé sur des conseils d’ouvriers et de paysans (soviets) qui décideraient de la stratégie économique et autres questions clés non par oukase bureaucratique mais par un débat ouvert. Les usines seraient dirigées non par des agents d’une bureaucratie intéressée mais par des conseils d’usine où les syndicats, affranchis du contrôle bureaucratique, auraient leur place. Mais la démocratie ouvrière même la plus aboutie ne peut pas se substituer au niveau technologique (et au temps) nécessaire pour surmonter l’opposition entre la ville et la campagne et d’autres traits retardataires persistants de la société chinoise. Un Etat ouvrier chinois dirigé par un parti léniniste-trotskyste se donnerait pour mission de lutter pour la révolution prolétarienne dans toute l’Asie, et particulièrement dans les pays capitalistes avancés. Une révolution politique prolétarienne en Chine aurait un énorme impact sur la conscience des travailleurs dans le monde entier, et elle constituerait un formidable encouragement pour la lutte de classe – en particulier pour la conception que l’objectif fondamental des travailleurs doit être la révolution socialiste.
Pour une économie collectivisée et planifiée à l’échelle mondiale, dans le cadre du pouvoir ouvrier ! Contrairement aux idéologues écologistes qui déifient une nature « vierge », nous savons que depuis les premiers jours de son apparition sur Terre, l’homme a laissé son empreinte sur le monde naturel, ce qui a ensuite influencé le développement de la civilisation. L’homme a défriché de vastes étendues de terres pour l’agriculture, il a exploité des usines rejetant de la fumée et il a fait exploser des bombes atomiques ; au fil des ans, l’intervention humaine a accéléré des processus naturels et créé aussi des complications supplémentaires. Dans « Le rôle du travail dans la transformation du singe en homme », Engels énumère plusieurs conséquences fortuites des tentatives de manipulation de la nature faites par différentes populations à diverses époques, avant d’ajouter : « Et ainsi les faits nous rappellent à chaque pas que nous ne régnons nullement sur la nature comme un conquérant règne sur un peuple étranger, comme quelqu’un qui serait en dehors de la nature, mais que nous lui appartenons avec notre chair, notre sang, notre cerveau, que nous sommes dans son sein et que toute notre domination sur elle réside dans l’avantage que nous avons sur l’ensemble des autres créatures de connaître ses lois et de pouvoir nous en servir judicieusement. »
Pour avoir la moindre chance de développer les forces de production et d’utiliser les ressources de la planète, le tout rationnellement (ceci inclut relever les défis du changement climatique), il faut se débarrasser du capitalisme décadent actuel. Il faut une planification consciente et à grande échelle, ce qui est absolument incompatible avec la recherche du profit, la concurrence, l’anarchie du marché, les crises de surproduction, la division du monde en Etats-nations et les rivalités interimpérialistes. Il faudra une série de révolutions prolétariennes pour instaurer une économie socialiste planifiée internationalement, qui libérera les capacités productives de l’humanité et éliminera la pénurie – une condition préalable à la disparition des classes et au dépérissement de l’Etat dans une société communiste. Une fédération internationale d’Etats ouvriers s’attacherait à combler le vaste fossé qui sépare le « premier monde » du « tiers-monde », en mobilisant les ressources productives du monde entier dans le but d’augmenter fortement le niveau de vie des masses paupérisées d’Afrique, d’Asie et d’Amérique latine, dont les besoins fondamentaux (comme un logement décent, un système de santé de qualité, l’éducation ou l’eau potable) ne sont pas assurés aujourd’hui sous la domination impérialiste. Il serait possible de planifier rationnellement l’aménagement des villes, de mettre en place des systèmes de transport de masse étendus et gratuits et de réduire les déchets.
Des ressources considérables seraient investies dans le développement de sources d’énergie à faible émission et des mesures seraient mises en place pour limiter les effets du changement climatique en apportant une aide massive à ses victimes (sous forme de nourriture, d’eau potable et de médicaments) ou en déplaçant des villes ou des populations entières qui habitent le long des côtes. Personne ne peut empêcher les tsunamis de se former ni les plaques tectoniques de dériver. Les marxistes ne prétendent pas non plus résoudre tous les problèmes de l’humanité. Comme le faisait remarquer l’historien marxiste Isaac Deutscher dans « De l’homme socialiste », une conférence donnée en 1966, « nous luttons tout d’abord contre les problèmes qui sont créés par l’homme et que l’homme peut résoudre ». Il ajoutait : « Trotsky parlait ainsi des trois tragédies dont souffrait l’humanité : la faim, le sexe et la mort. La faim est l’adversaire dont le marxisme et le mouvement ouvrier moderne relèvent le défi […]. Oui, le sexe et la mort poursuivront encore l’Homme Socialiste ; mais nous sommes convaincus qu’il sera mieux équipé que nous pour leur faire face. » Engels écrivait dans Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique (1880) en parlant du jour où le prolétariat prendra le pouvoir et accomplira sa mission historique, l’émancipation universelle : « Le cercle des conditions de vie entourant l’homme, qui jusqu’ici dominait l’homme, passe maintenant sous la domination et le contrôle des hommes, qui pour la première fois, deviennent des maîtres réels et conscients de la nature, parce que et en tant que maîtres de leur propre socialisation. […] Ce n’est qu’à partir de ce moment que les hommes feront eux-mêmes leur histoire en pleine conscience ; ce n’est qu’à partir de ce moment que les causes sociales mises par eux en mouvement auront aussi d’une façon prépondérante, et dans une mesure toujours croissante, les effets voulus par eux. » L’objectif de la Ligue communiste internationale (quatrième-internationaliste) est de forger les partis ouvriers d’avant-garde qui sont nécessaires pour mener le prolétariat, à la tête de tous les déshérités et les opprimés, dans une lutte victorieuse pour un avenir socialiste.
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