On International Workers’ Day 2024, workers in the U.S. could swear that Senator Joe McCarthy and Minister Cotton Mather had returned from the dead.

More than 35,000 Palestinians, including 14,000 children, have died in just over 200 days of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza – funded, armed and given political cover by Washington. Yet any expression of opposition to the mass slaughter of Palestinians is labeled “antisemitism” by politicians of both capitalist parties and the corporate media. 

Congressional hearings reminiscent of the Red Scare anti-communist spectacles of the 1950s target university officials. Depending on how pliable they are, they are driven from office – like former Harvard President Claudine Gay, the first Black person to serve in that post – or they are given marching orders to crack down on student protesters, like Columbia University President Minouche Shafik.

After two weeks of violent police raids against campus Gaza Solidarity Encampments coast-to-coast, Columbia and other schools are now carrying out mass suspensions, threatening to prevent student activists from graduating. Right-wing politicians have called for students who participate in the encampments to be blacklisted from future employment.

Nor is it just Republicans. On April 29, 23 House Democrats called on Columbia President Shafik to “end” the encampment that sparked a nationwide student uprising, or resign. And of course, Genocide Joe Biden himself joined fascist House Speaker Mike Johnson in threatening the heroic students and faculty resisting at Columbia.

This comes after months of police attacks, targeted arrests of organizers, and slander campaigns against pro-Palestine protesters.

Yet the student encampments continue to grow and spread day by day.

Whipping up anti-trans hate

At the same time, another witch-hunt is unfolding across the U.S. targeting transgender people. 

In many ways, this hate campaign – now underway for three years and growing ever-more dangerous – set the stage for how opponents of genocide in Gaza are being treated.

So far this year, 550 anti-trans bills have been introduced in state legislatures in 42 states, along with 47 national bills. This includes some of the most drastic measures yet – cutting off all access to gender-affirming health care regardless of age, banning all restroom access, threatening the livelihoods of teachers, librarians and other workers if they are queer or respect the rights of trans students, and generally attempting to force trans lives out of existence.

State hearings on trans issues have the same tenor as the Congressional anti-Palestine hearings, driven by fascist politicians who repeat long-discredited theories or bigoted political and religious ideology as fact. When trans people and supporters show up and try to be heard, they are often silenced, driven out, or arrested.

Typical of this approach is the Cass Review commissioned by the British government, where anti-trans attacks are also at a fever pitch. This so-called review to advise the National Health Service policy on treatment of trans youth dismissed over 100 scientific studies to cherry-pick a handful that reached anti-trans conclusions. 

The supposedly impartial review was carried out by a team that excluded trans people, but included known transphobes who collaborated with Florida’s DeSantis administration.

And yet the Cass Review is already being used by the British government to cut off access to care, not only for trans youth, but also trans adults. It is being favorably cited by U.S. far-right politicians and “liberal” media like the New York Times and The Guardian to manufacture consent for anti-trans genocide.

Like the opponents of genocide in Gaza who are unjustly accused of antisemitism, no amount of evidence will suffice to refute the witch-hunters’ charges of “grooming” and “social contagion.” Like those accused of witchcraft in 17th century New England, the only way trans people can prove their innocence is to stop existing – death.

No more Odessa massacres!

The witch-hunt rhetoric directed at pro-Palestine students and faculty and at trans people escalates the danger of fascist violence, whether from “official” repressive bodies of the state (police and national guard) or “unofficial” neo-Nazi aligned movements. It’s an attack on the rights of the whole working class and all oppressed people, and must be fought with unity and urgency.

Ten years ago, on May 2, 2014, fascist gangs were given the green light by the U.S.-backed coup government in Ukraine to carry out a bloody massacre of nearly 50 activists and workers at the House of Trade Unions in Odessa. The working class movement in Ukraine was smashed and thousands of organizers driven into exile in its wake.

Anti-fascists from Ukraine to the U.S. warned then that Washington’s support for neo-Nazi terror abroad would boomerang here. Now this is visible for all to see.

The working class is making important gains in organizing, from Starbucks to Amazon to the United Auto Workers victory at Volkswagen in Tennessee. But this progress is threatened by the attacks on the political and civil rights of students, teachers, and LGBTQIA+ people. 

The bigoted politicians, the neo-Nazis and the big capitalists behind them will not stop with demonizing the Gaza solidarity movement and trans community. The purpose of the witch-hunts is to shatter the ability of the working class and oppressed to resist.

Don’t wait for an Odessa massacre to happen here! Mobilize to resist the bosses’ witch-hunts!

In this blogpost, Biko Agozino argues that Karl Marx was among the few European theorists of his time who did not try to conceal his ‘debt’ to Africa but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Agozino shows how people of African descent were central to the theory, practice and writings of Marx. Marxism is not a Eurocentric ideology.

Described by one editor as ‘nothing short of pathbreaking’, I am pleased to have been invited by roape.net to summarize in a blogpost the arguments in my paper ‘The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent’ (published in the journal in 2014 and free to access until the end of November). The original claim in the paper that Marx borrowed from the knowledge and experiences of people of African descent has also been described as ‘surprising’ by Micco Sarno who nevertheless concluded his detailed intertextual review by stating that the paper has deepened the understanding of Capital as a truly global critique of capitalism by a European author who was not Eurocentric. Adam Mayer wrote that the article ‘demolished the myth that Marxism was a Eurocentric ideology incompatible with African pride.’ In this summary of the paper, I highlight the key points and clarify some issues raised by some authors.

Contrary to claims by many that Marx was Eurocentric just like other European intellectuals of his time, my article argued that people of African descent were central to the discourse of Marx. I suggested that the earlier work of Marx, such as The Manifesto of the Communist Party, may have misled some readers into assuming that his writings about class struggles dealt with only the European working class. This may be so because the history of slavery outlined in the Manifesto referred mostly to ancient slavery in Europe, but my article also shows that some of the references in the manifesto concerned modern slavery in the New World. I delved into his mature work, Capital, to reveal that it was centered on people of African descent as the paradigm for explaining the struggle for liberation from oppression with emphasis on race-class-gender articulation contrary to crude economists, feminists, and Afrocentric scholars alike who assume that Marx was concerned only with male European working class struggles.

I concluded that article by suggesting that the epistemology and methodology of Marx as a scholar-activist who went beyond explaining the world and got involved in trying to change it for the better was a mirror image of the critical, creative, and centered paradigm that is privileged in Africana Studies and other critical disciplines today.[1] Therefore, the work of Marx should remain among the required readings for scholar-activists today instead of being subjected to rejectionist ideologies out of fear of marginalization by dominant powers or fear of the loss of originality if Marx is uncritically accepted as being relevant to all current struggles globally.

The rejectionist readings of Marx in relation to people of African descent can be illustrated in Cedric Robinson’s influential text, Black Marxism, which dismissed Marxism as ‘a Western construction’ with a philosophy, methodology, sociology and historical perspective that is ‘decidedly Western’. People of African descent were challenged by Robinson to develop their own original theory and methods instead of relying on Marx. The charge of Eurocentrism against Marx can also be found in the work of  Reiland Rabaka who lumped Marx together with Max Weber and Émile Durkheim in his work, Against Epistemic Apartheid, where he held up the work of W.E. B Du Bois but did not add that Du Bois himself rightly found Marx to be an ally of the Africana struggle for social justice. In the work of Molefi Kete Asante, rejectionism appears to be a strategy for originality lest Eurocentric scholars claim that Afrocentricity has nothing new to offer in An Afrocentric Manifesto. Some feminist writers have also rejected Marxism under the mistaken assumption that it neglected the oppression of women under the mode of reproduction.

While I support the call for more originality by scholars of African descent, I demonstrated that some of the most original thinkers in the Africana tradition are decidedly Marxist without apology precisely because Marxism allows room for internal criticism in the concrete analysis of concrete situations, Marx borrowed from Africana traditions of intellectual and moral leadership, and the Marxist perspective has a track record of sticking up for struggles against racism-sexism-imperialism.

Since Africana scholars are not completely against citing the work of some European scholars with approval, the tendency among some of them to insist on rejecting the work of Marx is a curious case of the choice of allies especially when those who reject Marx rarely cite specific texts by him. There is absolutely no reason for the online journal, Socialism and Democracy, to fantasize about a ‘science fiction gun fight’ between Marxists and Kawaida philosophers (a synthesis of nationalist, pan-Africanist, and socialist ideas) since Kawaida and Marxism are not mutually exclusive or at war with each other.

On the other hand, Eurocommunists may be responsible for the rejectionism from Africana scholars because they have tended to present Marxism as an exclusive heritage of European thought that should not be borrowed by people of African descent without obtaining permissions from the rightful owners. The Africa-born Eric Hobsbawn, in How to Change the World, mistakenly asserted that the historical knowledge of Marx and Engels was ‘nonexistent on Africa’. Far from it, there are hundreds of references to Africans and to people of African descent in Capital. I agree with the Africa-born Jacques  Derrida that we all owe it to ourselves to return to an activist reading of The Specters of Marx instead of shying away from the task to avoid being seen as trespassing on the exclusive private intellectual property rights of Marx and Sons of Europe.

Stuart Hall built partly on the teachings on C.L.R James to offer an Africana interpretation of Marx in Cultural Studies 1983. In his view, Eurocommunism made the error of reading Marx simply from the perspective of what the Africa-born Louis Althusser called crude economic determinism that is not attributable to Marx who saw other struggles articulated with the economic class struggle. On the contrary, the work of Marx is also simultaneously against racism-sexism-imperialism as systems of oppressive power to be fought against through party building, alliances and coalitions.

Similarly, Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, and Angela Davis, among others, saw the struggle against apartheid not only as class struggles but also primarily as a struggle against racism-sexism-imperialism in articulation or intersectionality. To suggest that the class struggle was the only important struggle in apartheid South Africa as Archie Mafaje implied was ‘mechanical’ and strategically misleading as Ruth First stated in her response to Mafaje in a debate in ROAPE in 1978. Nathaniel Norment was right in listing Marxism as a major current in African American Studies and the Black Lives Matter movement is justified in organizing against racism-imperialism-patriarchy globally.

My article filled a gap in knowledge by going beyond what Marx could contribute to Africana Studies and focusing on what Marx borrowed from Africana Studies. Relying on the ease with which modern technology enables us to conduct a discourse analysis of soft copies of texts, I used the PDF versions of Capital and other works by Marx to see the frequency with which he referred to the struggles of people of African descent against slavery, racism, and imperialism and the struggle of women against sexism as part of his core concerns in opposition to racism-sexism-imperialism. The difficulty of reading his hefty tomes in hard copies may be responsible for the fact that this gap in knowledge existed for so long before the research I conducted for the 2014 study. However, my discourse analysis should not be mistaken for a quantitative analysis just because I noted the frequency or number of times that Marx referred to Africa and Africans.

The notion that Europeans borrowed from Africa should not be surprising because Cheikh Anta Diop already warned that Africans should not be too quick to reject European ideas because when you scratch their surface, you will find that some of the most profound European ideas were borrowed or stolen from Africa. Karl Marx was among the few European scholars of his time who did not try to conceal his ‘borrowings’ from Africa but celebrated such knowledge as foundational. Although his references to Africa in volume one of Capital are few, numbering about six, a discourse analysis rather than quantitative number crunching will show that the references to Africa are substantively higher because Marx indicated over and over again that the references to Africa were paradigmatic for understanding the capitalist system of production as a system of ‘wage slavery’. The only error that Marx made was to use the term common in his time and since then by referring to the human trafficking of kidnapped Africans as a ‘slave trade’. Du Bois also called it a ‘trade’ in his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University even though he proved that it was suppressed by law. The Marxist theory of primitive accumulation rightly identified it as robbery, plunder, and violence and as a consequence Marxists should support the demand for reparative justice.

On the ‘Negro’, the number of references increase to 14 in volume one of Capital, five times in volume three and six times in Grundrisse, the methodological work in preparation for Capital. But these were not passing references or frequencies to be counted for quantitative analysis, they were foundational for Marxist theory. For example, Marx stated as follows:

A negro is a negro. In certain circumstances he becomes a slave. A mule is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain circumstances does it become capital. Outside these circumstances, it is no more capital than gold is intrinsically money, or sugar is the price of sugar …  Capital is a social relation of production. It is a historical relation of production. (Marx 1867, Vol. I, footnote 4, 541)

Here, Marx was giving a definitive role to people of African descent in the formation of the capitalist mode of production. The word slave was referenced 150 times in volume one and 72 times in volume three of Capital. In volume one, Marx critiqued Aristotle on the commodity fetishism of equal values because Aristotle failed to acknowledge that Greece was a slave society, what he was comparing were labors of equal value and not commodities. Africana Studies would not refer to people as slaves and Marxists would agree that they should be called enslaved people.

In his preface to the first English edition of volume one of Capital, Engels observed that after the abolition of slavery, the next struggle was to revolutionize the relationship between capital and land and he concluded (perhaps in acknowledgement of the Africana philosophy of nonviolence) that England held the promise of nonviolent revolution provided that the capitalists did not launch a pro-slavery rebellion. Although the references to slavery in volume three were to ancient slavery in Europe due to the influence of Engels who competed the volume posthumously, Engels still added an appendix on the fascinating defeat of the British army by the Zulu who were armed with only sticks and stones. Marx had set up the First International Workingmen’s Association precisely to oppose the British plans to join the American civil war on the side of the pro-slavery confederacy.

Numerous references to the concept of race can be found in Capital with a defiant usage that rejected white supremacy by consistently talking about the ‘human race’ and by questioning the concept of civilization when those who presumed themselves to be civilized were guilty of barbarous acts against indigenous people, women, and Africans. On the few instances when he used offensive words like the N-word or Kaffir, he was mocking the white supremacists who used such terms to signify white privilege. A collection of his work on colonialism also highlighted hundreds of refences against racism, slavery, and colonialism. This short blogpost does not have the space to highlight and analyze each reference of relevance to people of African descent and to women but hopefully, a book will emerge from this project to detail the evidence more comprehensively.

W.E.B. Du Bois used terms like the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to corroborate Marxist theory in Black Reconstruction in America. C.L.R. James concurred in The Black Jacobins where he stated that the enslaved Africans on the sugar plantations represented the most industrialized workers of their time and he went on to write a series of essays on The Negro Question as foundational in Marxist theory and revolutionary practice. However, George Padmore concluded that Pan-Africanism was a better strategy for Africans than communism due to the exclusionary practices of Eurocommunism. Eric Williams completed the Africana trilogy on Capitalism & Slavery a few years after The Black Jacobins by James in his DPhil thesis at Oxford University.

Claudia Jones and later, Angela Davis, also underscored the relevance of Marxism to the scholar-activism against racism-sexism-imperialism as articulated or intersectional systems of oppression to be opposed simultaneously. Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, Cabral in Unity and Struggles, and Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, reached similar conclusions. There are still Marxist political parties and activists in Africa and they should be encouraged to unite to demonstrate the relevance of Marxism to Africana struggles against imperialism-racism-sexism globally worldwide and towards the social democratic building of the Peoples Republic of Africa or the United Republic of African States.

You do not need to be a Marxist to agree that the methodology of historical materialism is relevant to struggles on the ground in Africa and globally, not only to the European working-class. Since Africans continue to read the work of bourgeois European thinkers with approval despite their silence on Africa, there is no reason why we should continue to reject Marxism as foreign without attempting to read the powerful body of work that was partly based on Africana knowledge and struggles. European Marxists have no excuse to continue ignoring original work by scholar-activists of African descent given that Marx would have paid close attention to such work.

—–

The arguments in this blogpost are developed further by Biko Agozino in his ROAPE paper ‘The Africana Paradigm in Capital: The Debts of Karl Marx to People of African Descent’. Published in 2014, this ground-breaking article is available on free access until the end of November.

Biko Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech and the author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason (London, Pluto, 2003) and of Black Women and the Criminal Justice System: Towards the Decolonisation of Victimisation (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1997; reissued by Routledge, 2018).

Notes

[1] A largely US based approach, Africana Studies is a multidisciplinary engagement to the research, experience and understanding of African people and African-descended people throughout the world.

Source: ROAPE.net

An April 5th article from the aptly-named pro-capitalist magazine website, Fortune.com, carried the title:  “‘We may be looking at the end of capitalism’: One of the world’s oldest and largest investment banks warns ‘Greedflation’ has gone too far.”

This piece by Will Daniel is a study of an essay by Albert Edwards, the chief global strategist at the French bank Société Générale. This investment bank is labeled as “systemically” important by the G20.

Corporations, particularly in developed economies like the U.S. and U.K., have used rising raw material costs amid the pandemic and the war in Ukraine as an “excuse” to raise prices and expand profit margins to new heights, he said.

Furthermore, Edwards wrote in the Tuesday edition of his Global Strategy Weekly that after four decades of working in finance, he’s never seen anything like the “unprecedented” and “astonishing” levels of corporate Greedflation in this economic cycle. To his point, a January study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that “markup growth”—the increase in the ratio between the price a firm charges and its cost of production—was a far more important factor driving inflation in 2021 than it has been throughout economic history.

Here is a chart that shows the widening profit margin that Edwards is talking about:

 

Edwards predicts that these “super normal profits” by corporations in the U.S. and abroad will “inflame social unrest.”:

“[T]he end of Greedflation must surely come. Otherwise, we may be looking at the end of capitalism,” he warned. “This is a big issue for policy makers that simply cannot be ignored any longer.”

Of course, this French banker needs merely to look out his office window to see the millions of workers who are pouring into the streets of Paris and other cities to protest the Macron government’s slashing of pensions by raising the retirement age, all to shore up corporate profits.

A rebuke of the Fed’s interest rate hikes and a call for price controls

The Fortune.com article’s writer, Will Daniel, describes the debate over the Federal Reserve’s policy to curb inflation by raising interest rates. The Fed lays the blame for rising prices on the workers and their increasing wages and “full” employment. The Fed is deliberately working to generate a devastating recession and impoverish the workers and oppressed.

But banker Edwards instead blames corporate price gouging for the sky-high rate of inflation and, reluctantly and out of sheer desperation, suggests an alternative strategy – price controls:

Edwards noted that many of his colleagues are “less sympathetic to the use of price controls”, but he argues their use may be warranted because “something seems to have broken with capitalism.”

The strategist referenced a paper by University of Massachusetts Amherst economists Isabella Weber and Evan Wasner, titled, “Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?” which found that corporations engaged in “price gouging” during the pandemic and argued temporary price controls may be the only way to prevent the “inflationary spirals” that could come as a result of this gouging.

It must be noted that Edwards never suggests wage controls, which were implemented by President Richard Nixon in 1971, because even this banker recognizes that workers’ wages play no role in this current sky-high inflation rate and wage controls would create even more “social unrest.”

China avoids financial crises and inflationary spirals.

On March 26, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Zhiwu Chen, director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, titled “How China keeps putting off its Lehman moment.”

The “Lehman moment” that Chen refers to is the collapse of the mega Lehman House Investment Bank in 2008, crushed by the unfolding financial crisis stemming from the subprime mortgage escapade. That fraudulent scheme, generated by the largest banks and insurance companies on Wall Street, caused millions of families to lose their homes and millions of workers to lose their jobs. Although the subprime crisis became global, China and its working class were virtually unscathed.

The article goes on to describe how, when the Chinese real estate developer Evergrande defaulted on its debt and when the tech giant Alibaba overreached on its IPO offering, bourgeois economists in the West predicted that the Chinese financial system would soon collapse. But that didn’t happen.

Although Chen never uses the word “socialism,” he does detail how the Chinese Communist Party was able to use that system’s socialist foundation to stave off crises and, crucially, safeguard the standard of living of an alert, conscious Chinese working class:

Most of China’s biggest and most powerful companies, including all of its major banks, are state-owned, and executives are usually members of the Communist Party, which controls top-level corporate appointments. Party committees within corporations further ensure that many important business decisions align with government policy. Even healthy and influential private companies can be ordered to undergo painful restructuring or curtail certain business operations, as a government crackdown on the e-commerce leader Alibaba and other Chinese tech giants that began in 2020 made clear.

Ultimately, all of this serves the party’s absolute priority of maintaining social stability; there is zero tolerance for financial distress or major corporate failures that could trigger street demonstrations. And government control of the business sector is only increasing.

Through its National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China does indeed have constantly monitored and updated price controls, keeping inflation far below that of the U.S. and the rest of the imperialist world.

In the Fortune article described above, Edwards tells how most bourgeois economists disdain price controls because corporations will simply cut back production and create shortages until enough pressure is put on the government to lift the controls.

But because China’s government and workers’ party have so much control over the banks and corporations, even private ones, such production cutbacks can be and are prevented.

Karl Marx lays out the way forward.

Today we are witnessing a tremendous upsurge in the class struggle. From the militant defense of tenants in Detroit to the union organizing struggles at Starbucks and Amazon, from the increasing wave of education worker strikes to the demonstrations and strikes in Germany, to the now epic weekly general strikes in France, our class here and in Europe, which has been near dormant for decades, is awakening. Edwards’ massive “social unrest” is on the horizon.

Although union membership in the U.S. is only a fraction of what it was before the powerful 1980s Reagan-led corporate anti-union campaign, unions are now more popular among our class here than they have been in decades. The stage is set for a massive struggle against the Federal Reserve-spawned austerity program.

As these struggles unfold and draw in more and more of the workers and oppressed, progressives of many “stripes” will be drawn in to not only support these struggles, which is essential but also to compose programs to guide them forward. Unions are fundamental and crucial, but they are limited essentially to the goals of protecting members from abuse and job losses and of increasing the share of the surplus value that we produce to enhance our standard of living.

“Reform” socialists like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), taking a class-wide outlook, may prepare political programs to affect capitalist distribution to benefit the working class. That is worthy and essential. But it leaves the class structure intact with the billionaires still in power, ready to dismantle whatever hard-won gains are won.

Revolutionary socialists must unite and prepare our class to carry the struggle even further.

In the heroic 1871 Paris Commune, workers and soldiers led by revolutionaries took control of the city of Paris. The workers organized and took control of all the major factories and other workplaces. So empowered, they enacted laws and regulations that bettered the lives of the working class rather than fill the pockets of the business owners. Though their struggle was defeated in a little over a month, organizers and theorists like Karl Marx drew many lessons from that experience.

In 1875, Marx wrote a letter to a group of activists meeting in the German town of Gotha. In order to create a “unified” German workers’ organization, the group adopted a reformist socialist program. Marx’s letter became known as the “Critique of the Gotha Program.”

Marx explains that capitalist distribution stems directly from capitalist production:

Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself.

Marx then states that the hardship that the workers face from capitalist distribution (i.e., the outrageous price of goods and services, the impoverishment of the unemployed, and so on) is because of the private ownership of capitalist production:

The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically.

Then he writes the solution to this that is as relevant today as the day the words were written:

If the material conditions of production are the cooperative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.

Marx is saying that the only solution to end all the suffering caused by deprivation and impoverishment the workers and oppressed face today and more so tomorrow, sky-high inflation, foreclosures and evictions, the absence of health care, the low wages and lack of benefits, all of this can only be finally resolved by placing productive property under the ownership and control of the workers and oppressed.

Marx contrasts this point with the program of the “reformers”:

Vulgar socialism (and from it, in turn, a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?

It should be pointed out that Marx and his comrade Frederick Engels didn’t make this letter public for 17 years in order to not create disunity in the broad workers’ movement, just as today revolutionary socialists support calls for reforms, particularly coming from organizations of the oppressed. That is why, for example, we favor permanent community-controlled price controls of essential goods and services needed by our class as well as reparations for the oppressed communities.

But we want banker Albert Edward’s dream, or rather for him, his nightmare of the “end of capitalism” fulfilled, to make these reforms unbreakable. And that’s what defines revolutionary socialism.

V.I. Lenin was born on this day, April 22, in 1870. Struggle-La Lucha presents this brief biography written by Vince Copeland, originally published in 1989, on the 65th anniversary of Lenin’s death.

George Plekhanov did not have Lenin in mind when he wrote his remarkable essay on “The Role of the Individual in History.” But the following paragraphs describe Lenin more than anybody else you can think of.

“A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time — needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes.

“In his well-known book on heroes and hero worship, Carlyle calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is a beginner precisely because he sees further than others and desires things more strongly than others.

“He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social relationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying those needs.

“He is a hero, but he is a hero not in the sense that he can stop the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course (of history). Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is colossal. And the power is terrible.”

The ‘beginnings’

Aside from the exclusive emphasis on the male sex and the rather literary use of the world “terrible,” this is an almost perfect description of the relation of the individual to the historical process — and not only the “great” individual.

But it may be a little incomplete just to say that great people are “beginners,” because the historical forces they represent and the leaders and thinkers who preceded them also produce those people, too. In that sense, they are “continuers.”

Lenin would have been the first to admit — and even proclaim — that he, too, was a continuer, especially of Karl Marx and even of Plekhanov himself in that thinker’s earlier period.

However, in Lenin we have an example of a person who, although also a “continuer,” actually did clearly begin not one, but several, very important aspects of the struggle for the inevitable socialist future of humanity.

Let us review the main “beginnings” that he was personally responsible for.

But first a few words on his character and personality, which are not always clear from his writing or even from some biographical descriptions.

Love and struggle

The age of complete world socialism that Lenin visualized and fought for will bring about the end of all hunger — hunger of material goods as well as for food for everybody on earth. This can undoubtedly be achieved with the constantly improving machinery and technology already evident in the present age. This technology needs only to be released from the death-grip of an outlived profit-hungry, war-mad social system.

With a new economy and a new system, the socialist age will eventually bring the spirit and practice of universal cooperation, love and consideration for one’s neighbor, and the fullest development of every individual without the necessity of trampling upon any other individual.

To bring about this age, however, requires not so much a program to convince people in the present age to love their neighbors, etc. (which would be utopian if not false and hypocritical), as it requires a relentless struggle against the ruling class enemy which resists the coming into being of the socialist age with all its might.

This struggle, in turn, requires a different kind of person to engage in it. It also requires a plan, a strategy, a theory and a leadership.

Lenin provided all those, but in order to do that effectively he had to conduct himself and even shape himself in a certain way.

Necessary explosions

He was passionate in his will to bring about the revolution to usher in the socialist age, but so absolutely devoted to the task that he was ruthless toward its enemies and, whenever necessary, critical toward its friends. This alone required a certain austerity and at times aloofness.

His devotion to the goal, together with the constant deep study to prepare himself for battle, did not always prepare people for the occasional explosions of his great store of political ammunition. He was irresistible on the platform, but infinitely more from the logic and the political power of his position than from any so-called “charisma.”

This, of course, required a “terrible” intensity on his part.

Humor, personal love, relaxation and other human attributes he had, of course. But these were not part of the highly political personality that his contemporaries were usually acquainted with.

A well-known Menshevik named F.I. Dan said of him (probably after Lenin gave him some well-deserved political blow):

“What are you going to do with a guy who talks, writes, thinks and breathes nothing but revolution 24 hours a day?”

This was probably not meant entirely as a compliment.

But it gives us an inkling of why Lenin became the leader of the revolution, if not why Dan became one of its leading opponents.

1895: First Marxist workers’ organization in Russia

At the age of 25, Lenin founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which was the first Marxist workers’ organization in Russia.

(Some time before that, Plekhanov had formed the Emancipation of Labor Group, but it was composed of professionals and exiles.)

As a result, Lenin was arrested on Dec. 8, 1895, and sent first to prison for 14 months and then to Siberia for three years. In both places he constantly kept in touch with his revolutionary followers and also wrote a powerful book, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.”

1900: ‘The Spark’ is lit

In 1900, Lenin founded the first nationally circulated illegal Russian Marxist newspaper. It was called Iskra (The Spark) and was edited and printed abroad.

Its editorial board included Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich and other prominent Marxists.

It reached thousands of workers in Russia who, in turn, read it aloud to thousands of others.

1903: A new kind of party

Lenin founded the Bolshevik Party. He didn’t do this merely by setting up a banner and coining a few good slogans and calling upon people to rally ‘round. He did it after long struggles with the old anarchist-populist elements in the 1890s and then against a new opportunist trend among the Marxists called “economism.”

While he already had great prestige in the movement, he did not necessarily have the full confidence of all the other leading Marxists at the time — nor did he have confidence in all of them. He was dissatisfied with some of the attitudes among them — attitudes about party membership and responsibilities.

So he proposed at a convention of about 60 leaders held in exile that every party member become, in effect, a professional revolutionary. That is, the party must be a party of cadres whose main interest in life was the socialist revolution and who would subordinate their other activities to the needs of the party.

A political bombshell

When he made this proposal it was like dropping the proverbial bombshell. It led to an irreconcilable split. The Mensheviks (meaning minority) walked out. It later became clear that underneath the simple words describing what a party member should be was a determination to make the socialist revolution. And underneath the opposition to those words was not only a softness in general, but a different view of the coming revolution.

The concept of a party is generally known at the present time (although not generally practiced), but the difficulties in forming the party and keeping it together under Czarist rule are somewhat less known and even less understood.

From the very beginning, the road was hard.

But Lenin knew he was right. And he was more right than he knew. Even Lenin could not have foreseen in 1903 the sequence of events in 1917. He could not have known that the Mensheviks would actually oppose the October Revolution tooth and nail.

As a matter of fact, even the Mensheviks themselves could not have dreamed in 1903 that their own leader in 1917, I.G. Tsereteli, the president of the Soviets (until September, when the Bolsheviks won the Soviet elections), would shortly after the revolution go down to Georgia and actually organize an armed counterrevolution against the new Soviet state.

1905: Revolution and insurrection

There were many tests and crises for the new party, which were reflections of and responses to the crisis-torn Czarist regime and the workers’ struggle against it.

In the 1905 revolution, for instance, when the Petersburg Soviet members were all arrested, the Bolsheviks under Lenin (who had secretly returned to Russia from exile) led the Moscow uprising.

The insurrection was beaten down, though it lasted several days before it ended. This put an even deeper chasm between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks — the latter saying: “They shouldn’t have taken up arms.”

1907: Reaction and bourgeois parliament 

During the events of 1905, the Czar had been forced to “grant” a representative parliament called the Duma. All the real revolutionaries, mostly Bolsheviks, boycotted this Duma, which they regarded as an attempt to co-opt the revolution.

But during the reaction after the revolution was over, Lenin was the first of the revolutionaries to recognize that the times had changed. Even though he had been the first to advocate insurrection, he now proposed taking part in this more or less fraudulent Duma. He was at first opposed by the majority of his own central committee, although he later convinced them to do it.

(Lenin was called inflexible and stiff-necked by his enemies, but he was really a superb tactician who tried to take advantage of every possible means of struggle, including the parliamentary.)

1908: The socialist heaven must stay on earth

During the reaction, there was a struggle over Marxist philosophy led by supporters of a form of mysticism which tried to establish itself in the party and actually form a new “religion.”

Lenin led this fight and wrote a powerful and thoroughgoing rebuttal to the philosophical revisionists known as “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.”

This did not come easy, either. Besides the tremendous theoretical work required, he had to rebuke his personal friend, the great novelist Maxim Gorky, who helped the party with funds and in other ways, too. And he had to attack leading comrades while being temporarily in a bloc with George Plekhanov, who had now become a Menshevik but still fought for the materialist view of history.

That was how Lenin saw the issue of Marxist theory and the materialist method.

How easy it would have been to gloss over the mystical maunderings of a few leaders and just make a few remarks about them! But that wouldn’t have been Lenin, and it wouldn’t have maintained the party’s sharpness in doctrine and method that was necessary to make a revolution.

1913: Right of self-determination 

There was also an important, and in the light of later events, historical dispute with Rosa Luxemburg, an otherwise very revolutionary comrade, over the question of self-determination.

Luxemburg thought the socialist revolution would solve national oppression, and anyway, the leaders of some of these oppressed nations were oppressors too, so how could a workers’ party support them?

Lenin not only led a debate against this view, but was the first to set down in theoretical form the whole question of the defense of the rights of colonies and semi-colonies (called neo-colonies today) to secede from imperialist oppressors.

Later, during the First World War, when he refused to support the imperialist countries, he took care to make exception for small countries fighting for their liberation.

This was extremely difficult to do at that time, because the small European countries fighting in the First World War (e.g., the Balkans) had completely sold themselves to the big imperialist countries and it appeared to revolutionaries like Luxemburg that there never would be any progressive war by any small country.

1914: ‘Turn the imperialist war into civil war’

The greatest test for Lenin personally, parallel to that of the 1917 revolution itself, was in taking his uniquely revolutionary position on the First World War.

Earlier, the European socialist parties had all pledged themselves to oppose the coming war. But, when the war actually came, the parties capitulated and each — except for individual holdouts — supported its respective imperialist government.

In Germany, for instance, 110 socialist members of the national congress voted for the war. Only one, Karl Liebknecht, voted against. (There were other great German leaders who agreed with Liebknecht, like Rosa Luxemburg.)

It was about the same in the smaller socialist parties.

In Russia, however, all five Bolshevik representatives in the Duma, along with some “internationalist” Mensheviks, voted against the war. And they were all sent to hard labor in Siberia. (So much for parliamentary immunity!)

But Lenin not only opposed the war: he went further and proposed that socialists use the war situation to work for the overthrow of their respective governments.

“Turn the imperialist war into civil war,” he said.

And he developed the doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” — that is, the proposition that the defeat of your own imperialist country, your own ruling class, is preferable to their chauvinist victory, especially if the defeat is brought on by the people’s struggles for their rights and for progress and socialism.

Needless to say, the imperialist rulers of all countries persecuted the opponents of their war. And they accused the strikers and fighters for justice of being enemy agents. Even a literary opposition to the war was tantamount to treason.

‘Second International is dead: Long live the Third!’

Furthermore, Lenin condemned all the socialists who supported the war or half-supported it. He condemned the whole Second International and called for the establishment of a Third (Communist) International.

He was the first person to do this. And he found no answering echo for some time, not even among the most resolute anti-war fighters in all countries.

All this was in the first few months of the war. And it must be remembered that the chauvinism and hysteria on both sides had reached heights not previously known in the modern world — and never known on such a worldwide basis.

The pressure to conform was very intense. Even within the anti-war part of the Social Democratic parties, there was a strong tendency to go along with Karl Kautsky, leader of the Second International, who had a centrist position. But Lenin vigorously condemned this grouping and Kautsky in particular for not declaring war on their own ruling class.

He took an equally hard line in his own country, of course. Plekhanov, the “Father of Russian Marxism,” supported the war, objectively supporting the same Czar against whom he had fought for most of his life.

Lenin, who had blocked with Plekhanov on the question of Marxist philosophy, now mercilessly condemned him for his terrible capitulation.

But Lenin’s hard line helped to further harden the Bolshevik Party and prepare it for the revolution that came in 1917.

1917: It began on Women’s Day

The revolution itself began on International Women’s Day, March 8, 1917, with a demonstration of women textile workers. It came like a thunderclap in the middle of the war under the very nose of the Czarist court.

After five days of constantly increasing strikes and street demonstrations, first unarmed and finally armed, the Czar abdicated and the capitalist democrats took over with a so-called “provisional government.”

From the start, the workers and soldiers (the latter mostly peasants in uniform) established huge councils (“soviets”) that really rivaled the provisional government, but appeared to be only auxiliaries.

‘All power to the Soviets!’

Within a month after the spring revolution, Lenin came back from exile and immediately raised the slogan, “All power to the Soviets.”

This slogan may seem simple enough and clear enough to revolutionaries looking at it from the vantage point of history.

But it caused a great furor in the whole movement when he raised the idea.

In fact, of all the difficult, creative revolutionary positions that Lenin ever took, this one was the boldest, the most courageous, the most heroic, one might say. For he mobilized his whole party, the party he had worked with and sacrificed so many years to build, in an effort to do something that had never been done before and appeared to many wise heads to be absolutely suicidal.

What? Make another revolution just weeks or months after the first? Not only that, but to make a socialist revolution, a proletarian revolution, without allowing a period for capitalist rule (after the fall of feudalism) of the type that had developed in all the advanced countries?

Obviously, an attempt to take power followed by a failure would destroy the Bolshevik Party completely and every chance to be an opposition party in the new democratic capitalist regime would be lost.

On the other hand, think of all the wise people today who will tell you how Marx was wrong about the socialist revolution coming first in Western Europe and that its success in the underdeveloped East proves that Marx’s whole thesis was wrong.

In the Russia of 1917, every socialist of whatever faction was more keenly aware of this proposition of Marx than the smartest kibitzers of today. And it was precisely this thought (in addition to sheer worry and fear) that paralyzed the movement. It was this mental paralysis that Lenin had to overcome and the Bolsheviks had to cure in action.

Furthermore, Lenin called for the Soviets to take power at a time when the Bolsheviks were in a small minority in the Soviets.

This alone required a deep historical understanding and a clear historical perspective.

If Lenin and the Bolsheviks had failed to see the special situation in Russia — both theoretically and practically — if they had failed to apply living Marxism to the given, historical Russian conditions, there might have been no successful socialist revolution in Russia. And if so there would not have been any in Eastern Europe after the Second World War and probably not so soon in China, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America in the subsequent period.

The “beginner,” who was part of the inevitable and unconscious force of history, had begun a whole chain of revolutions and a new phase in the world socialist revolution first conceived by Karl Marx.

Sam Marcy, a leading Marxist thinker and fighter of the second half of the 20th century, died 25 years ago on Feb. 1, 1998. To mark the occasion, Struggle-La Lucha is publishing a selection of Marcy’s articles that demonstrate the breadth and depth of his analysis and strategic thought on behalf of the workers and oppressed, while also providing insight into today’s struggles.

May 5, 1992 — The brutal suppression of the Los Angeles insurrection offers a classic example of the relationship of bourgeois democracy to the capitalist state. The statistics most eloquently demonstrate the relationship.

The number of arrests in Los Angeles County alone as of May 5 is 12,111 and still rising. The number of injuries has reached a staggering 2,383. Several hundred are critically wounded. Thus the number of dead at present will undoubtedly continue to rise.

All this has to be seen in light of the repressive forces amassed by the city, state and federal government: 8,000 police, 9,800 National Guard troops, 1,400 Marines, 1,800 Army soldiers and 1,000 federal marshals. (Associated Press, May 5)

At the bottom of it all Marxism differs from all forms of bourgeois sociology in this most fundamental way: all bourgeois social sciences are directed at covering up and concealing — sometimes in the most shameful way — the predatory class character of present-day capitalist society. Marxism, on the other hand, reveals in the clearest and sharpest manner not only the antagonisms that continually rend asunder present-day bourgeois society but also their basis — the ownership of the means of production by a handful of millionaires and billionaires.

Bourgeois sociology must leave out of consideration the fact that society is divided into exploiter and exploited, oppressors of nationalities and oppressed. The basis for both the exploitation and oppression is the ownership of the means of production by an ever-diminishing group of the population that controls the vital arteries of contemporary society. They are the bourgeoisie, the ruling class. At the other end of the axis is the proletariat of all nationalities, the producer of all the fabulous wealth. Material wealth has been vastly increasing along with the masses’ productivity of labor. But only 1% of the population amasses the lion’s share of what the workers produce while a greater and greater mass is impoverished.

Flattering ‘the people’

Especially during periods of parliamentary elections as in the U.S. today, bourgeois sociologists are full of effusive praise for “the people.” Each and every capitalist politician embraces “the people” with what often becomes disgusting flattery. The people are everything during periods when the bourgeoisie needs them most of all, as during its many predatory wars. Indeed, at no time is the bourgeoisie so attached to the people as when it is in deepest crisis.

But the people — the unarmed masses — become nothing, not even human beings, when they are in the full throes of rebellion against the bourgeoisie’s monstrous police and military machine. Does not the Los Angeles insurrection prove all this?

No amount of praise, no amount of flattery, can substitute for a clear-cut delineation of the class divisions that perpetually rend society apart.

To the bourgeois social scientists the masses are the object of history. Marxist theory, on the other hand, demonstrates that the masses are the subject of history. Where they are the objects of history they are manipulated as raw material to suit the aims of ruling class exploitation. They become the subject of history only when they rise to the surface in mass revolutionary action.

Their rising as in Los Angeles is what Karl Marx called the locomotive of history. Their revolutionary struggle accelerates history bringing to the fore the real character of the mass movement.

To speak of the people in general terms, without cutting through the propaganda to reveal the relations of exploiter to exploited, of oppressor to oppressed, is to participate in covering up the reality. 

Oppression of a whole people

Most indispensable for an understanding of contemporary society is the relation between oppressor and oppressed nationalities. One cannot apply Marxism to any meaningful extent without first recognizing the existence of national oppression — the oppression of a whole people by capitalist imperialism. This is one of the most characteristic features of the present world reality.

This concept above all others must be kept foremost if we hope to understand what has happened in Los Angeles and in other major cities of this country.

The insurrection and the way it is being suppressed closely follow the exposition by Frederick Engels in his book “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” and later brought up to date by Lenin in “State and Revolution.”

What is the state? What is democracy?

Bourgeois sociologists and scholars and above all capitalist politicians always confound the relationship between the two. They often treat them as a single phenomenon. In reality, the relation between democracy and the state is based on an inner struggle — between form and essence.

The state can take on many different forms. A state can have the form of a bourgeois democracy; it can be a monarchy; it may be ruled by a military junta. And in modern society, on the very edge of the 21st century, it may have a totalitarian or fascist form.

Whatever its form, its essence is determined by which class is dominant economically and consequently also dominant politically. In contemporary society, this means the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie over the proletariat and the oppressed nationalities.

Bourgeoisie needs different forms of rule

The bourgeoisie cannot maintain its class rule by relying solely on one particular form of the state. It can’t rely only on the governing officialdom — even those at the very summit of the state, even when they are solely millionaires and billionaires. Under such circumstances, should there be an imperialist war or a deep capitalist crisis that leads to ferment among the masses, the bourgeois state would be vulnerable to revolutionary overthrow.

But the state is not just the officialdom — who presume to govern in the interest of all the people. The state in its essential characteristics is the organization, to quote Engels, of a “special public force” that consists not merely of armed men and women but of material appendages, prisons and repressive institutions of all kinds.

The decisive basic ingredient of the state is the armed forces with all their material appendages and all who service them. Most noteworthy are the prisons — more and more of them — calculated to break the spirit of millions of the most oppressed while pretending to some mock forms of rehabilitation. All the most modern means — mental and physical — are used to demoralize and deprave the character of those incarcerated. These repressive institutions, this public force, appear so omnipotent against the unarmed mass of the oppressed and exploited. 

But it stands out as the very epitome of gentility and humaneness when it comes to incarcerating favored individuals, especially the very rich, who have transgressed the norms of capitalist law.

In general then, the Los Angeles insurrection shows that democracy is a veil that hides the repressive character of the capitalist state. The state at all times is the state of the dominant class. And the objective of the special bodies of armed men and women is to secure, safeguard and uphold the domination of the bourgeoisie.

Growth of the state

Engels explained that in the course of development of capitalist society, as the class antagonisms grow sharper, the state — that is, the public force — grows stronger.

Said Engels, “We have only to look at our present-day Europe where class struggle, rivalry and conquest has screwed up the public power to such a pitch that it threatens to devour the whole of society and even the state itself.”

Written more than 100 years ago, this refers to the growth of militarism. The sharpening of class and national antagonisms had even then resulted in larger and larger appropriations for civilian and military personnel employed for the sole purpose of suppressing the civil population at home and waging adventurist imperialist wars abroad. The state grows in proportion as class and national antagonisms develop. Democracy is merely a form that hides the predatory class character of the bourgeois state. Nothing so much proves this as the steady and consistent growth of militarism and the police forces in times of peace as well as war.

The ruling class continually cultivates racism to keep the working class divided, in order to maintain its domination. This is as true at home as it is abroad. The forces of racism and national oppression have been deliberately stimulated by Pentagon and State Department policies all across the globe.

Marxism on violence

After every stage in the struggle of the workers and oppressed people, there follows an ideological struggle over what methods the masses should embrace to achieve their liberation from imperialist monopoly capital. There are always those who abjure violence while minimizing the initial use of violence by the ruling class. They denounce it in words, while in deeds they really cover it up. That’s precisely what’s happening now.

Yes indeed, they readily admit the verdict in the Rodney King beating was erroneous and unfair. But — and here their voices grow louder — “The masses should not have taken to the streets and taken matters into their own hands.” Their denunciation of the violence of the ruling class is subdued and muffled — above all it is hypocritical, a sheer formality. It’s an indecent way of seeming to take both sides of the argument when what follows is, in reality, a condemnation of the masses.

In times when the bourgeoisie is up against the wall, when the masses have risen suddenly and unexpectedly, the bourgeoisie gets most lyrical in abjuring violence. It conjures up all sorts of lies and deceits about the unruliness of a few among the masses as against the orderly law-abiding many.

Marxism here again cuts through it all. The Marxist view of violence flows from an altogether different concept. It first of all distinguishes between the violence of the oppressors as against the responsive violence of the masses. Just to be able to formulate it that way is a giant step forward, away from disgusting bourgeois praise for nonviolence. It never occurs to any of them to show that the masses have never made any real leap forward with the theory of nonviolence. Timidity never made it in history.

Indeed, Marxists do prefer nonviolent methods if the objectives the masses seek — freedom from oppression and exploitation — can be obtained that way. But Marxism explains the historical evolution of the class struggle as well as the struggle of oppressed nations as against oppressors.

Revolutions, force and violence

As Marx put it, “force is the midwife to every great revolution.” This is what Marx derived from his study of the class struggle in general and of capitalist society in particular.

None of the great revolutions has ever occurred without being accompanied by force and violence. And it is always the oppressor — the ruling class and the oppressing nationality — that is most congenitally prone to use force as soon as the masses raise their heads. 

In all the bourgeois revolutions in Europe, this new would-be ruling class used the masses to fight its battles against the feudal lords. Then, when the masses raised their heads to fight for their own liberation against the bourgeoisie, they were met with the most fearful and unmitigated violence. All European history is filled with such examples, from the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 to the Paris Commune of 1871. 

Does not the bourgeoisie, once it has tamed the proletariat at home, use force and violence through its vast military armada to more efficiently exploit and suppress the many underdeveloped nations throughout the world?

It is so illuminating that Iraq, the nation subjected to the most violent, truly genocidal military attack in recent times, has taken upon itself to press a formal complaint in the UN Security Council on behalf of the embattled masses in Los Angeles and other cities. Iraq called on that body to condemn and investigate the nature of the developments here and the irony is that the head of the Security Council felt obligated to accept the complaint. Not even the U.S. delegate, obviously taken by surprise, objected.

How much real difference is there between the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 and that of the revolutionary rising of the masses in Los Angeles in 1992? The brutal suppression differs only in magnitude and not in essence. While it might seem that in Los Angeles national oppression alone is involved, in reality it derives from the class exploitation of the African American masses dating back to the days of slavery.

Watts and social legislation

Following the Watts insurrection the bourgeoisie made lofty promises to improve the situation. The Watts, Detroit, Newark and other rebellions did win significant concessions that eventually were enacted into law. They became the basis for a temporary improvement in the economic and social situation of the oppressed people.

None of the progressive legislation, up to and including affirmative action, would have been enacted had it not been for the rebellions during the 1960s and the 1970s. Yet now, almost three decades after the Watts rebellion, the masses are in greater poverty and the repression is heavier than before. The fruits of what was won have withered on the vine as racism and the deterioration of economic conditions took hold once again. 

Once more the bourgeois politicians attempted to mollify the masses with endless promises of improvements never destined to see the light of day. This evoked a profound revulsion among the masses. It took only an incident like the incredible verdict of the rigged jury that freed the four police officers in the Rodney King beating to ignite a storm of revolutionary protest.

If revolutionary measures are ever to have any validity, doesn’t a case like this justify the people taking destiny into their own hands?

Less workers, more cops

How interesting that technology everywhere displaces labor, reducing the number of personnel.

There was a time when it was hoped that the mere development of technical and industrial progress, the increase in mechanization and automation, would contribute to the well-being of the masses. This has once again shown itself to be a hollow mockery. The truth is that the development of higher and more sophisticated technology under capitalism doesn’t contribute to the welfare of the masses but, on the contrary, throws them into greater misery.

What has been the general trend? The growth of technology, particularly sophisticated high technology, has reduced the number of workers employed in industry as well as in the services. The introduction of labor-saving devices and methods has dramatically reduced the number of workers in all fields.

But the opposite trend prevails in the police forces. This is an absolutely incontestable fact.

At one time the police patrolled the streets on foot. Maybe they used a public telephone for communications with headquarters. Today they are equipped with sophisticated gear. They ride either on motorcycles or in police cars or helicopters. They communicate by radio.

All this should reduce the number of police. But the trend is quite the contrary: to increase the forces of repression. This is not geared to productivity as in industry. Their growth is geared to the growth of national antagonisms, the growth of racism, and the bourgeoisie’s general anti-labor offensive.

In Los Angeles, the bourgeoisie is forced to bring in federal troops to assist city and state authorities. The social composition of the Army is not just a cross-section of capitalist society. The Army and Marines, especially the infantry, have a preponderance of Black and Latino soldiers. What does this signify?

The U.S. imperialists had to wage a technological war against Iraq out of fear that the preponderance of Black and Latino soldiers could end up in a disastrous rebellion; they might refuse to engage in a war against their sisters and brothers in the interests of the class enemy. That’s why the armed forces never really got into the ground war that seemed at first to be in the offing.

In Los Angeles the local police and state forces were inadequate. Only because the masses were unarmed was the bourgeoisie able to suppress what was in truth an insurrection — a revolutionary uprising. Spontaneity and consciousness as Marx would put it, such a rising is a festival of the masses. The incidental harm is far outweighed by the fact that it raises the level of the struggle to a higher plateau. The wounds inflicted by the gendarmerie will be healed. The lessons will be learned: that a spontaneous uprising has to be supported with whatever means are available; that a great divide exists between the leaders and the masses.

No viable class or nation in modern capitalist society can hope to take destiny in its own hands by spontaneous struggles alone. Spontaneity as an element of social struggle must beget its own opposite: leadership and organization. Consciousness of this will inevitably grow.

Source: Marxists Internet Archive

The large cryptocurrency exchange FTX went out of business on November 11. Many have likened this phenomenon to the collapse of the investment banking firm Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis of 2008, believing the FTX collapse to be as important an event in the cryptocurrency world as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the official financial system.

In fact, even before the collapse of FTX, cryptocurrency values had slumped greatly. The total value of all cryptocurrencies, which had been estimated at $2 trillion by the end of 2021, had slumped to half that figure by the end of September 2022. The FTX collapse will certainly deal a further blow to this entire system.

FTX was set up by Sam Bankman-Fried, a student of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 2019 as a cryptocurrency exchange that exchanged one cryptocurrency for another or a cryptocurrency for fiat money and vice-versa.

In addition, it also issued its own cryptocurrency called FTT, exchanged spot fiat money or cryptocurrency for futures, and sold derivatives and options. It, thus, functioned in many ways as a bank, accepting dollars or euros or cryptocurrency today against the promise to pay larger amounts tomorrow or the day after. It had such a phenomenal rate of growth that within a mere three years, it had grown to become the fifth-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trade volume and the second-largest by holdings.

This meteoric rise was facilitated by the extraordinarily high profile that FTX acquired through a number of measures it adopted: its political donations to the Democratic Party were the highest among all donors if we leave aside George Soros. It sponsored sporting events and generally close association with several prominent sportspersons like Shaquille O’Neal, the former basketball star, and Naomi Osaka, the current tennis star. And It prominently supported the Ukraine government through the launch of an “Aid for Ukraine” program that accepted cryptocurrency donations with the promise that they would be converted into fiat money deposits with the National Bank of Kiev.

FTX’s collapse, however, has been as sudden and dramatic as its emergence. A substantial amount of its own digital currency, the FTT, was held by a firm called Alameda, which also was owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, the head of FTX. When Alameda’s balance sheet leaked out, a panic developed that a chance fall in the price of FTT would cause a major collapse in it. A rival cryptocurrency platform, Binance, started selling off its FTT holdings because of this panic, and that started a real collapse exactly in the same manner as a bank run does.

In fact, the scenario exactly resembled a bank collapse, and the reason, too, was exactly the same, namely, the absence of adequate reserves or readily saleable assets with which a sudden run could be countered. In effect, Sam Bankman-Fried was running a Ponzi scheme, siphoning off funds in a clandestine manner.

Binance, for a while, thought of buying up FTX but finally decided against it. There was, of course, no question of appealing to the government to bail out FTX, despite its closeness to the Democratic Party and President Joe Biden, since the whole idea of a cryptocurrency is to shun government scrutiny. As a result, there was no alternative to a declaration of bankruptcy, which Sam Bankman-Fried did on November 11.

This is where FTX’s parallel with Lehman Brothers, notwithstanding the importance of the collapse of each in its own respective sphere, ends.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers was the outcome of the collapse of the “housing bubble” that had got built up because of euphoric expectations about its longevity on the one hand and the development of institutional arrangements that systematically camouflaged risks on the other. The fact that many investment banks held toxic assets was not just because of greed or carelessness on their part, but above all, because under the institutional arrangements that had developed, it had become difficult to know what was a toxic asset, to distinguish between a toxic and a non-toxic asset.

To call the asset price bubble a flaw of the system, as many liberal economists were to do subsequently, is not just to be wise after the event but to miss the central point that this so-called flaw is exactly the mechanism through which neo-liberal capitalism had managed to generate a boom. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, in other words, was a part of the very modus operandi of neo-liberal capitalism.

The development of cryptocurrency, however, is not part of the modus operandi of the system. It is an external appendage to the system itself, whose elimination would still leave the system intact. The collapse of FTX, in short, would not jolt capitalism the way the collapse of Lehman Brothers had done. Cryptocurrency is like a commodity, or more appropriately, a security, that is generated and held outside of any government supervision. In fact, therein lies its attractiveness to those who hold it, for in the shadowy world where it functions, no questions are asked about its operation.

It is not surprising that the balance sheet of Alameda, the firm also owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, and even its ownership, was unknown for a long time to the holders of FTX’s cryptocurrency, the FTT. And it is also not surprising that the accounts of FTX had scarcely been properly audited, for otherwise, the shenanigans of Sam Bankman-Fried would not have gone unnoticed.

Cryptocurrency belongs to a shadowy system that has developed alongside the capitalist system from which the operators of the latter system derive great personal benefits, such as, for instance, deploying funds that are officially not accounted for; but this shadowy system is not organic to the latter’s functioning. The functioning of capitalism is punctuated with fraudulent practices, but it will be a serious mistake, as Marx was at pains to point out, to treat the system merely as a fraudulent system.

It is not surprising that there has been no attempt on the part of the U.S. government to bail out FTX, as there had been to bail out the rest of the American financial system after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, for which the Obama administration had pledged $13 trillion at that time.

A system that deliberately shuns government supervision can scarcely ask for government assistance when faced with a crisis, and no government will be brazen enough to assist it when it is faced with a crisis just because its leading personnel gets substantial donations from it.

If Lehman Brothers’ collapse was linked to the modus operandi of capitalism, FTX’s collapse arises because of the fraudulent practices that can, and typically do, characterize this entire world of cryptocurrencies, practices whose prevalence is precisely what constitutes the attraction of this world for those who inhabit it.

Again, it is not surprising that questions are being raised about how much of the “Aid for Ukraine” fund was actually sent to Ukraine and to whom, and how much of it was actually used for its proclaimed purposes. When this entire program has been characterized by zero accountability and zero transparency, and when information about it has to be pieced together from disjointed comments appearing from time to time on the web page, such questions are bound to be raised. And it speaks volumes about the Ukrainian government and its Western backers that they allowed such shady outfits like FTX to raise millions of dollars in the name of helping Ukraine.

The collapse of FTX raises important questions about the future of the cryptocurrency system itself. Though many would have incurred losses because of the collapse of FTX, it is unlikely that the system would spontaneously wither away. The question really is: what kind of government policy would this collapse generate?

The Chinese government has banned cryptocurrency for quite some time now. The Indian government had also announced in 2021 that it would bring a Bill before Parliament to ban cryptocurrency, but it has not yet done so. Given this government’s softness towards fraudsters, of which the forgiving attitude toward private filching of bank funds is an obvious example, it is doubtful if such a Bill will ever be tabled; but that would be extremely unfortunate.

Source: News Click

The National Business Review reported a comment by New Zealand’s then National Party government Minister of Finance, Bill English, on Aug. 15, 2014, that he had occasionally pointed out in speeches to business audiences that New Zealand has had post-World War II recessions roughly every ten years: in 1957-58; 1967-68; the mid-1970s; the mid-1980s; 1997-98 and 2007-8. He would observe laconically: “You’d think we would see them coming.”

But, of course, bourgeois economists, commentators, and journalists don’t generally see them coming. One problem, however, is that sometimes the Marxist critics of capitalism see them coming a little too often.    

But it is a simple fact of life that capitalism has had economic crises on a periodic basis, at least since 1825. Every 10 years or so, capitalism goes through a cycle of boom and bust. The following charts for the U.S. economy illustrate this reality. They were taken from an important paper by U.S. Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh entitled: “Profitability, Long Waves and the Recurrence of General Crises.”

 

 

Capitalism also goes through historical periods where the industrial cycles of boom and bust are more pronounced one way or another. That is, capitalism goes through periods of several decades, such as the post-World War II “long boom” involving multiple cycles where the upturns are relatively stronger than the downturns.

Similarly, there are other periods, such as the decades following the crisis of 1873, where the upward phases of the cycle are relatively weak and the downward phases more pronounced.

Understanding these cyclical fluctuations is also closely connected to another element of Marxist theory that is important to explain what is happening — historical materialism — which is simply a way of viewing and understanding history.

Ever since we humans began generating a consistent surplus, societies have been divided into classes where each class is defined by its relationship to the means and mode of production. The legal, political, social and cultural elements of society arise from this economic foundation.

The relations and modes of production, which determine how the economic system is produced and reproduced, have gone through various stages as technology and the forces of production have advanced. The main stages have been slavery, feudalism, capitalism and the beginning efforts to construct socialism.

Economic systems do not pass away until they have exhausted their progressive functions in terms of increasing society’s productive capacity, which in turn enables population growth and cultural development. When the growth of the productive forces reaches a certain limit within the framework of the existing society, the question is posed: Can the fetters of the existing social relations be thrown off and a new society established?

Marx’s answers

Karl Marx devoted his life to answering this question in relation to capitalism. This was the question from his point of view. Decades of research, decades of writing, decades of reflection — in between throwing himself into labor struggles and the odd revolution when they were happening. But he always returned to this basic task.

The key questions were understanding why capitalism operates the way it does and whether capitalism is a historically limited system — whether it will reach a limit and need to be superseded. Marx’s answers are to be found in his writings, especially his great work known as Capital.

Our inability, so far, to supersede capitalism on a world scale means that periodic crises return, again and again, each one causing great hardship while giving a powerful impetus to the centralization of capital and the growth of monopoly domination.

The system’s dependence on relentless expansion over time and its inherent drive to maximize profit rather than meet human needs mean that we now face the incompatibility of this system with our coexistence with Mother Earth.

That has become an element of crisis theory in the broader sense — demonstrating the increasing incompatibility between a livable environment and the way the system is organized through private property and ownership.

The crises, therefore, tend to get bigger, more prolonged, and more socially destabilizing. We have entered a new period like that with the 2007-8 world recession, the weak recovery following, and now the post-COVID boom and bust in rapid succession.

But there is no final crisis in this system — other than a descent into nuclear war or barbarism arising from the sort of ecological winter or runaway ecological collapse that capitalism appears to be preparing for us. Short of such a disastrous outcome, the system will continue to carry on with its booms and busts until it is overthrown and replaced.

That can only be carried out by a conscious social and political force, by a class that is not bound to the system by material interest. That is why the working class is the only class that can overthrow this system. It is the only class not bound by property and profit to its perpetuation. It is the only class with the numbers and social power, if organized, if conscious enough, to effect this outcome and bring about real majority rule.

Marx’s challenge

The problem faced by Marx was that the challenge he took on in his writing of Capital was so daunting that all we got during his lifetime was the first part of a planned six-part work.

Marx published volume 1, part of his planned first volume in several editions. Friedrich Engels, using Marx’s notebooks, produced what we know of as volumes 2 and 3 after Marx’s death. Then there was the Theories of Surplus Value — a part of a rough draft of a history of economic thought. All of that was originally going to be the first volume of the planned six-part project.

There were to be additional volumes on wage labor, the state, and competition. The entire work was to culminate in the volume on the world market. It was there logically that crises were to be dealt with in a systematic way. Marx does not deal with crises except in scattered references, mostly in volume 3 of Capital and in his correspondence.

Marx’s method was to begin at the most abstract level before moving progressively to the more concrete. In Capital, he begins with the abstract categories of the commodity and value and moves through to the formation of prices and the role of money and the market.

He goes on to explain the origin of profit in surplus value and ties this all in with the origin of capitalism in what he called “primitive accumulation.” Systematic treatment of things like exchange rates, world trade, and so on was to come later.

There was an added problem with what we know as volume 2, published after Marx’s death. Volume 2 is actually more a volume about how capitalism works rather than how it doesn’t. Marx explains how capitalism must be a system of expanded reproduction, and he presents formulas to prove that is how it must exist and, in a sense, how it can exist.

There was a certain consternation and debate inside the socialist movement when volume 2 was published. The revolutionary ideas of Marx and Engels were already under attack within German Social Democracy, the German workers’ party at the time, which followers of Marx and Engels led. Volume 2 was used by critics of these revolutionary ideas to “prove” that capitalism worked and could last indefinitely — in support of the views of the reformist wing of German Social Democracy led by Eduard Bernstein.

Because the cause of crises wasn’t fully spelled out in Marx and Engels’ work, revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg started to look for explanations for why crises happen that didn’t quite fit in with the logic of what Marx and Engels had written. She looked at the exhaustion of the world market. Others looked at things like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which Marx viewed as a long-term historical tendency.

This logic can be deduced from their major economic works and their journalism and correspondence in which they wrote about and analyzed actual crises until Marx’s death in 1883 and Engels’ in 1895.

Capitalism has also changed significantly since Marx and Engels wrote. These changes need to be incorporated into our understanding of crises. The system has evolved from industrial capitalism based on free competition to monopoly capitalism.

We have been through the Great Depression of the 1930s. We have had the experience of the “Keynesian revolution.” We have had the Monetarist counter-revolution inspired by U.S. economist Milton Freidman and the debates in economic theory around that.

We have also had an end of the international gold standard, a very important event. We had the stagflation of the 1970s and the neoliberal turn in the 1980s.

Most recently, we have had the global “Great Recession” of 2007-9, followed by an unprecedentedly weak recovery, anemic at best for most of the world. Monetarism appeared to be abandoned briefly in favor of Keynesianism again to confront the COVID-19 crisis, only to be reimposed to crush the inflation unleashed in its wake.

Today we are facing a renewed global recession that threatens a return of a great depression. This is because the weak recovery after 2008 still required an enormous explosion of debt. The inflationary money printing followed this to cope with the COVID-19 crisis that will require interest rates we haven’t seen in decades to bring under control. That, in turn, will provoke a cascade of debt and broader financial crises across the globe.

Conflicting crisis theories

Marx had identified the essence of the periodic crises of capitalism as crises of overproduction very early on, even in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. This crisis can only happen because production periodically exceeds monetarily effective demand, which is ultimately determined by the existing size and growth rate of the global hoard of the money commodity — gold.

I am emphasizing this because there has been a retreat from this analysis, including among followers of Marx. In fact, the two main schools of Marxist crisis theory today are not schools based on periodic overproduction crises.

One school is based around the primacy of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TROPF). Marx introduced this idea in volume 3 of Capital as an important long-term historical tendency in capitalism. Marx also pointed out many counter tendencies, but the tendency is true over long periods. Many Marxist economists use that important theory as the primary explanation for why capitalism has crises.

This school of thought is associated with the U.S. academic Andrew Kliman and British theorists from the Trotskyist tradition, including the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader Alex Callinicos and the prolific blogger Michael Roberts. All three writers deserve to be read, and there is much to learn from their writings.

But the almost monomaniacal attachment to the TROPF to explain crises leads them astray.

Michael Roberts even tries to explain the 10-year cycle under capitalism as a result of the fall in the rate of profit. It is, of course, true that every crisis is associated with a fall in the rate of profit, but that temporary decline is a result of the crisis, not the cause.

Callinicos seems unable to explain the real growth of capitalism since the 1980s. Because the early 1980s crisis must have been the result of the TROPF, and since there has been no counter tendency big enough to overcome the falling rate of profit sufficiently, the crisis must be permanent. However, the world economy has more than doubled in size in that period, and we have seen an explosive growth in capitalist production in China, which he fails to properly account for in his theories.

The other significant school of thought is associated with the U.S. Monthly Review magazine and its editor John Bellamy Foster. Foster is an important writer on economic matters for the magazine and a leading theorist on Marxism’s relevance to understanding today’s ecological challenges. The Monthly Review school is very influenced by Keynesian ideas. John Maynard Keynes was a pro-capitalist economist who became very influential in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Traditional bourgeois economic theory denied that capitalism could have crises. Keynes had been schooled in this theory but, when faced with the crisis of the 1930s, was forced to acknowledge the reality staring him in the face. This was that capitalism could have crises; in fact, it seemed to him to have a tendency towards stagnation. But he believed the state could intervene to alleviate crises, if not eliminate them altogether.

So from a Keynesian point of view, you cannot have a crisis of overproduction. Rather, with Keynes, you have a crisis of under-consumption that can be resolved by the state stepping in to purchase goods directly or printing money to give people to spend themselves and/or using government deficit spending to put more money into the economy. Part of the reason Keynes favored ending the gold standard was to allow this to happen more easily.

Overproduction as the underlying cause of crisis, which is based on Marx’s concept of money as the universal equivalent, has been — especially since the end of what remained of the international gold standard in 1971 — all but forgotten, including by most of those claiming to be Marxist.

Capitalism requires a measure of value that is itself a commodity

Classical political economy, represented by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was the science of capitalism. Marx developed and perfected their labor theory of value. Smith’s “invisible hand” — the unobservable market force that helps the demand and supply of goods in a free market to reach equilibrium automatically — was the law of labor value in operation. 

But Marx also explained that what Smith and Ricardo called “labor” was actually “labor power” or the ability to work. But a capitalist won’t employ labor unless the worker can produce more value in a workday than what they are paid. This “surplus value” is the origin of all forms of profit and drives the invisible hand. This made Marx’s ideas a revolutionary advance on classical political economy and forced the capitalists to abandon the science of political economy.

A central part of Marx’s perfected labor theory of value was that it requires — as does commodity production as a system — a measure of value that is itself a commodity.

Ultimately, gold emerged as the main money commodity because it is durable, contains significant value (amount of abstract human labor measured in units of time) in a small quantity, and is easily divisible. However, it can only be a measure of value because it has value as a product of labor itself, measured by its monetary use value in units of weight.

The pro-capitalist alternative to that theory and Keynesian under-consumptionism is dubbed Say’s Law — an economic principle of early “vulgar” economics named after the French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767—1832). Marx dubbed them “vulgar” economists because they had ceased to seek a scientific explanation for what was happening and instead provided simple apologies for capitalism and its laws.

Say stated that production creates its own demand. Commodities are bought with commodities. Money plays no particular role except as an intermediary.

This idea, combined with marginalism — the theory that commodities have exchange value because of their scarcity relative to human needs — tries to banish the labor theory of value by claiming things have value due to their marginal utility and that generalized overproduction of commodities is impossible.

Essentially, this is a subjective rather than objective theory of value. Marginalism, which assumes Say’s Law either explicitly or implicitly, was the end of bourgeois economics as any form of science. All bourgeois economics today is built on these two theories and can’t escape them.

The abolition of the gold standard has created very real problems with the modern U.S. dollar-based international monetary system, with permanent inflation, regular exchange rate crises, and so on. Following the Bretton Woods monetary conference in 1944 up to 1971, when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, money in everyday use nearly always had a legally fixed relationship to gold via the U.S. dollar.

You could go to a central bank and demand a certain amount of dollars for your currency, which in turn would represent a specific amount of gold-backed by the bullion hoard in Fort Knox.

Prior to 1933, individuals, as well as countries, could demand gold for their paper U.S. dollars. After 1933, up to 1971, foreign governments and their central banks — but not individuals — could do the same.

But after the gold standard was completely abandoned, there was an assumption on the part of many Marxist economists that maybe Keynes was right on one point. Maybe now you could just create money at will. The state had the power not just to create tokens representing gold but create currency at will with no relationship to gold — now supposedly “just another commodity” like all others with no special role.

That is a big mistake. Ultimately, all non-commodity money — token money and credit money — must have a relationship to a real money commodity like gold. This is true whether a formal gold standard exists or not. This lawful economic relationship still exists and therefore continues to be the underlying cause of crises of overproduction.

When they started to print money at will, in the 1970s, when Nixon said, “We are all Keynesians now,” you ended up with a severe bout of inflation as printed money lost value and its fixed relationship to the money commodity, which remained gold.

The “price” of gold surged — it took more and more tokens to represent the same amount of gold. Monetary tokens were being devalued, and inflation was the inevitable result.

Engels (and Marx) on overproduction crises

The nature of a crisis as an overproduction crisis was spelled out by Engels in 1873.

Engels was a remarkable man. He worked managing his family business in Manchester for some decades, operating as a capitalist in the textile trade. He did that so he could keep his friend and intellectual partner free to work on Capital. He hated what he did.

Engels was a brilliant man, but he knew there was one person — Karl Marx — who alone at that time was both willing and able to carry through the critique of bourgeois political economy. Engels was willing to do whatever was necessary to enable Marx to work. The correspondence of Marx and Engels is extraordinarily rich in political and economic analysis.

Engels begged Marx to get on with the task of writing the book. Marx promised again and again that it was just around the corner. There came a certain point in his life when Engels could give the business up, and there is a wonderful letter where he expressed his joy at being liberated from his role as an industrial capitalist.

Engels did a lot of writing in defense of the joint views of Marx and Engels. One of his major works was a polemical work in 1877 called Anti-Duhring against a then fashionable but now obscure German professor. It became an exposition of the mature views of Marx and Engels on a broad range of political, historical, philosophical  and economic ideas.

By this time, all of Marx’s major economic concepts had been developed. He even wrote a chapter of Anti-Duhring himself. For those attached to the TROPF, it is not mentioned once as a cause of crisis. However, they did write an important paragraph summarizing their joint views on the origin of crises under capitalism. It reads:

We have seen that the ever-increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force.

The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similarly compulsory law.

The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child’s play, appears to us now as a necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantitative, that laughs at all resistance.

Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry.

But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets, is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. [Emphasis added]

The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production.

The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic.

Capitalist production has begotten another “vicious circle.”

The problem is Engels didn’t spell out what these laws are that govern the capacity for growth of the markets and why they work much less energetically.

But he spells out that he sees the cycles of capitalism and the crises they produce as a periodic collision of two counterposed forces—the physical ability of capitalism to use modern science and technology to expand production without limit, and the different, less energetic laws governing the growth of the markets.

Laws governing the growth of markets

The laws that govern the growth of markets are connected to the role of the money commodity as a measure of value and periodic changes in the relative profitability of gold production versus the production of other commodities.

Gold is both the universal equivalent, the measure of value, and a commodity in its own right. Therefore its production remains key to understanding the laws of capitalism that determine value, price and profit.

But if you look at the history of capitalism, there is a peculiarity about gold. Because it is the ultimate measure of value, the production of gold tends to move countercyclically to overall commodity production. So when there is an overall boom in production in society, gold production tends to decline, and during overall depressions in society, gold production tends to increase. This is an important mechanism for regulating capitalism.

As prices in gold terms (in weights of gold) rise during the rising phase of the industrial cycle, gold’s purchasing power falls, gold production becomes relatively less profitable, and capital flows out of that sector, gold production slows, interest rates rise as money becomes tight, and the boom ends in a crash.

When prices in gold terms fall sharply in a crisis, gold’s purchasing power rises, gold production becomes relatively more profitable, and capital flows into the sector, causing gold production to rise, adding to the growing idle money hoard resulting from the crisis itself, pushing down interest rates, and the economy recovers.

The capitalist system seeks to escape the limits of monetarily effective demand by, as Marx explained some 150 years ago, expanding credit. But credit cannot expand forever, even with all the modern-day miracles performed by modern computers. In the end, the debt must be serviced—interest and principal paid—and eventually the game is up. Interest rates rise during the industrial cycle’s boom (overproduction) phase, credit collapses, and another crisis is born.

Critique of Crisis Theory blog

In the last decade, I have been working with a small group of Marxists in North America doing a blog focused on economics that I highly recommend. It is called A Critique of Crisis Theory. What I have been explaining here are essentially their ideas.

The blog’s first 40 or so posts are being turned into the draft of a book we hope to serialize soon. The author of the blog, Sam Williams, and his collaborators have been working on their economic ideas for some decades. The creation of the Internet has allowed these ideas to be shared with a much wider audience than was possible before.

More recently, Williams has been responding to new developments and discussing with others who have engaged or critiqued his ideas. I tried to critique his views on an aspect of economic theory I thought I had some familiarity with — productive and unproductive labor.

Classical economists and Marx recognized that not all labor performed was productive of value and surplus value. We can see this easily when we look at the “labor” of a police officer, priest or soldier versus the labor of a miner or factory worker. I think we can identify who is a productive worker in that picture.

It gets more complicated when we look at the labor of bank workers and retail workers whose labor may or may not be necessary for production to occur. It gets even more complicated when we look at workers in health and education who may be employed in a private business producing a profit for the capitalist. Anyway, that is the area I wanted to discuss.

Sam was patient in his responses and took the time to respond to my first questions in a very pedagogical way.

Then when I wrote back, still disagreeing, he wrote an even longer and more thorough response that included a reference to Albert Einstein, who, he said, proved that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing, just as physical goods and “non-material” services can both be commodities embodying labor value. That sealed the issue for me, and I conceded they had a far better understanding of this issue.

What I found by following the blog was that it appeared to answer many of the questions and doubts I had from my own reading of Marxist economic theory, which has been an interest of mine though I am no “expert,” which I will come back to. From a young age, I had been very interested in Marxist economic theory. Initially, I had been strongly influenced by a prominent Belgian Marxist economist named Ernest Mandel. Much of what he wrote remains useful.

In some things he wrote in the 1970s, Mandel hints at the continuing importance of the role of gold as the money commodity. He played an important role in analyzing the “long waves” of 40 or 50 years duration that appear to be a feature of capitalism, which I believe is correct.

The Critique blog author also believes long waves play an important role and provides an explanation for a long cycle based on long-term swings in gold production, which makes the argument for its importance even more powerful.

Another fine economist, Anwar Shaikh, who knows his Marx and supports an understanding of the history of capitalism involving long waves, has produced a graph that seems to support the Critique of Crisis theory on this point. He follows the long-term movement of wholesale prices in the U.S. and the UK.

He shows in his graph that there is a movement in wholesale prices upwards during a period of the long wave that is dominated by strong upturns in the business cycles and trends downward in prices during a period of the long wave where business cycles are dominated by the downward phase of the cycle. The decline in wholesale prices is associated with a period of stagnation or long depression under capitalism. So we have the 1873-1893 decline, the Great Depression of 1929-1939, the Great Stagflation of 1967-1982, and a similar decline, which he argues indicates a new Great Depression, beginning in 2008, which he describes in a lecture as a “very scary” conclusion for his students at that time.

To produce an accurate version of the graph, he needed to measure the prices in terms of gold because, in the period following the abolition of the gold standard, there has been a permanent inflation in paper money prices that hides the real movement of prices in gold terms. This fits very closely with the Critique of Crisis Theory blog’s view, even though Shaikh is broadly in the school that looks for the cause of crises in the TROPF.   

The crisis theory blog brings the very useful empirical work by Shaikh into long waves and crisis theory together in a blog as follows:

As a rule, after several industrial cycles dominated by the boom phases, the general price level rises above the value of commodities. This causes the rate of profit in the gold (money material) producing industries — mining and refining — to become less profitable than most other branches of industrial production. Capital, therefore, begins to flow out of gold production and refining.

As the production of money material declines, the quantity of money grows at an increasingly slow rate relative to real capital — productive and commodity capital. As a result, credit increasingly replaces money, eventually stretching the credit system to its limits.

Money becomes tight, and interest rates rise. This situation, assuming capitalist production is retained, can only be resolved by a crash or a series of crises and associated depressions of greater than average intensity, duration, or both.

One result of a crisis or series of crises of greater than usual violence or duration is a lowering of the general price level — measured in terms of the use value of gold bullion — once again to below the value of commodities. This makes gold production and refining industries more profitable than most other industries.

Capital once again flows into gold mining and refining, causing the production of gold bullion to rise once again. The quantity of money then expands with low interest rates and “easy money.”

As the process of liquidating the previous overproduction goes on, especially of those commodities that serve as means of production, the accumulation of (real) capital stagnates. As a result, for a period of time, money capital is accumulated at a faster rate than real capital.

But once the accumulated overproduction — especially in the form of surplus productive capacity — is liquidated, a new “sudden expansion of the market” occurs, leading to a series of industrial cycles dominated by the boom phases rather than the crisis or depression phases.

This “long cycle” is built into the commodity foundation of capitalist production and is the inevitable result of the commodity form itself once it is fully developed.

But this cycle is also affected by accidental events such as discoveries of rich new gold mines and technological improvements in gold mining or refining that can either weaken or reinforce it depending on circumstances, as well as by such “accidents” as wars and revolutions.

So history is not an automatic repetition of cycles but a complex process involving both chance and necessity.

Williams and his collaborators are quite orthodox in demanding a return to Marx on the nature of capitalist crises as crises of the general overproduction of commodities. At the same time, they incorporate major developments of the capitalist system in the 150 years since Marx and Engels wrote in order to explain what is happening today.

An important contribution

The Critique of Crisis Theory blog is making an important contribution to Marxist economic theory today. The blog is getting thousands of page views monthly and becoming influential in Marxist economic debates. It is getting the recognition and respect it deserves.

The world reality we face today is conforming to the central theses of the blog. The current unfolding crisis and the 2007-9 crisis are both clearly global crises of overproduction. There were simply too many houses, too many cars, and so on. Of course, “too many” from the point of view of being “too many” to be sold for a profit, not in terms of human need.

I think we all should pay respect to the founders of scientific socialism and give this issue of crisis theory the attention and importance it deserves. We cannot leave it to others, to “professionals” or self-selected “experts.”

I am not an “expert” on this stuff. It has been a continuing interest of mine because it is important that we understand it and because it is important we understand what is happening and who we are, what our role is, what we expect will happen to this system, who the agent of social change is going to be, and what the prospects are for making change in the world today. Those are all issues that anyone who wants to find a way out of the permanent crises capitalism seems to have in store for us can begin to address.

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Mike Treen is an Advocate for Unite Union in New Zealand. Two decades ago, Unite began a successful campaign to organize workers who had lost union protection in the 1990s in an extreme “neoliberal” attack on workers’ rights. The employment law at that time did not mention unions. Unite now has union-negotiated collective agreements in fast food, cinemas, hotels and call centers. This includes at McDonalds, which hasn’t signed a collective agreement in any other country which has “voluntary” unionism and no legal compulsion to do so. In 2015, Unite Union led a campaign against zero-hour contracts in the fast food industry that led to their legal abolition under a National Party-led government. This party had implemented the 1990s reactionary anti-worker “reforms.” Unite Union is also active in broader social movements around migrant rights, housing and international solidarity movements like the struggle for Palestine. Mike Treen himself went on a boat trip to try and break the siege of Gaza in 2018. (See a 2009 report) or watch this video.)

One-hundred-and-five years ago, on Nov. 7, 1917, workers and peasants overthrew the capitalist government in Russia. The world hasn’t been the same since.

Two million soldiers in the Russian army had died in World War I. Russia was ruled by the cruel Czar Nicholas II.

Like the United States, the Russian Empire was a big prison of oppressed nationalities. Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Poles, Ukrainians, Georgians, Finns, Armenians, and other peoples were denied independence.

Wars of conquest slaughtered Muslims. As with Native nations in the Americas, Siberia’s Indigenous peoples were hunted down and killed.

Russian people were also oppressed. Many had been serfs, a sort of land slavery. But serf families couldn’t be broken up and sold like cattle, as African slaves were in the U.S.

Thirty thousand serfs died building St. Petersburg, the former Russian capital.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861, two years after the raid at Harpers Ferry led by John Brown. The outbreak of the U.S. Civil War may have influenced the czar to get rid of serfdom before the serfs got rid of him.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks

By 1914, serfdom was gone, but 30,000 big landlords still ruled the countryside, where five out of six people lived. The vast majority of peasants couldn’t read or write. Women had no rights.

Foreign capital poured into Russia, grabbing huge profits from long workdays in the factories. Striking workers were shot down.

Oppression breeds revolution. V.I. Lenin was the greatest leader of Russia’s revolution. He organized a communist party known as the Bolsheviks.

Lenin was 17 when his older brother Alexander was hanged for trying to assassinate the czar. When the Black revolutionary Jonathan Jackson was 17, he was killed trying to free his older brother George Jackson and other political prisoners.

Lenin studied the teachings of Karl Marx. Lenin taught that workers had to be saturated with Marx’s revolutionary knowledge and determination to win.

Soviets vs. pogroms

The first Russian Revolution broke out in 1905. Workers went on strike, shutting down factories and railroads. Peasants burned the gentry’s mansions. Czarism was on the ropes.

Workers formed councils called soviets. Today, we need peoples power assemblies to fight cutbacks, racism, and war.

European banks poured in loans to save czarist tyranny. In 1960, David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan bank — now the JPMorgan Chase & Co. bank — saved South Africa’s tottering apartheid regime with loans following the Sharpeville massacre.

The 1905 Revolution was also defeated because the czar was able to pit peasant soldiers against workers and even other peasants. Billionaires divide poor and working people in the U.S. today with racism and anti-immigrant bigotry.

Mass lynchings called pogroms led by czarist flunkies killed Jewish people. Hundreds of African Americans were massacred in pogroms in East St. Louis, Ill., in 1917 and in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921.

The Bolsheviks fought pogroms with guns in hand. Lenin waged war on racism. He enriched Marxism by teaching that workers in the big capitalist countries had to support revolts in the colonies.

“What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me!” was how Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh described Lenin’s “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions.” 

The Black poet Claude McKay, who wrote “If We Must Die,” spoke in Red Moscow.

Peace, land and bread

Sick of war and hunger, women textile workers in Petersburg went on strike on March 8, 1917 — International Women’s Day. The holiday commemorates a strike of women garment workers in New York City.

Five days later, czarism was overthrown. Workers, peasants and soldiers made the revolution, but capitalists seized the reins.

For the next eight months, Lenin’s Bolsheviks won millions of poor people to socialist revolution by demanding bread, peace and land. Despite Lenin being forced underground, Bolsheviks won majorities in the soviets that sprung up everywhere.

These soviets overthrew capitalist leader Alexander Kerensky on Nov. 7. It’s called the Great October Socialist Revolution because under the old Russian calendar it occurred in October. It’s also called the October Revolution because many peoples, not just Russians, rose up to break their chains.

Peasants threw out the landlords. Bolsheviks exposed secret treaties that divided up colonies among the imperialist countries. This revolutionary energy helped overthrow Germany’s kaiser and end World War I.

Capitalist governments, including the U.S., waged war against the soviets on a dozen fronts. But the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, was victorious.

The 73-year-long war

The Soviet Union remained the target of world capitalism. Hitler came to power over the bones of the German working class.

Following Lenin’s death, this political isolation led to backward steps, including abolishing abortion rights. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin framed Bolshevik opponents while increasing inequality.

At the same time, the Soviet Union launched the first and biggest affirmative action program in history. Every person had the right to an education in their own language. The Soviet five-year plans created the world’s second-biggest economy. Everyone had a job.

Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union defeated Hitler. An estimated 27 million Soviet people died in World War II. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, which the U.S. refused to bomb.

The Bolsheviks inspired the Chinese Revolution. The Soviet Union armed Korea and Vietnam against the U.S. war machine. Cuba was aided.

In 1988, it was Soviet weapons that allowed Angolan, Namibian, African National Congress and Cuban soldiers to defeat South Africa’s apartheid army at Cuito Cuanavale. Two years later, Nelson Mandela walked out of jail.

The Pentagon spent $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union. This unrelenting pressure finally led to the Soviet Union being overthrown in 1991.

Despite this tremendous defeat, the October Revolution will live forever.

Life expectancy is one of the best measures of human development.  In hunter-gather societies, on average, about 57-67% of children made it to 15 years. Then 79% of those 15-year-olds made it to 45 years.  Finally, those remaining at 45 years could expect to reach around 65-70 years. So we can see that life expectancy at birth in these societies was very low, given high child mortality. But some 40% did make it to about 65 years on average.  It seems to have been worse in the class-based feudal and slave societies.  The average medieval life expectancy for a peasant was only a mere 35 years of age at birth, but it was closer to 50 years on average for those who made it beyond 15 years.

You can see that measuring life expectancy at birth is not a perfect guide to how long humans did live in pre-capitalist societies.  Nevertheless, there is no doubt that life expectancy on average rose sharply once science came to bear on hygiene, sewage, knowledge of the human body, better nutrition, etc.  Of course, there were sharp inequalities in life expectancy in class societies between rich and poor.

If we accept that life expectancy is a good measure of human development, the latest data are revealing about capitalist societies in the 21^st century.  Life expectancy fell in the U.S. in 2021 to its lowest since 1996, the second year of a historic retreat, mainly due to COVID-19 deaths.  The decline from 2019 marked the largest two-year drop in life expectancy at birth in close to a century, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found.  Also, disparity in life expectancy between men and women widened last year to the highest in more than two decades, with American men now expected to live just 73.2 years, nearly six fewer years than women.

Deaths from COVID-19 contributed to over half of the overall decline in U.S. life expectancy last year.  COVID-19 was associated with more than 460,000 U.S. deaths in 2021, according to the CDC. But COVID was not the only factor in the decline.  Drug overdoses and heart disease are also major contributors, the data showed.  Interestingly, deaths from suicide decreased in 2020 during COVID, but they were still the fifth-biggest contributor to the drop in overall life expectancy last year. Suicide-related deaths are the third-leading contributor to the decline in life expectancy for American men.

While U.S. life expectancy decreased from 78.6 years in 2019 to 76.9 years in 2020 and 76.1 years in 2021, a net loss of 2.4 years, in contrast, peer countries averaged a smaller decrease in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 (0.55 years) and a 0.26-year increase between 2020 and 2021, widening the gap in life expectancy between the U.S. and other advanced capitalist economies to more than five years. The decrease in U.S. life expectancy was highly racialized: as the largest decreases in 2020 occurred among American Indian/Alaska natives, Hispanics, black and Asian populations.  For native Americans and Alaska natives, life expectancy fell to 65, close to the national average during World War II.

This decline in life expectancy in rich U.S. contrasts with the continued rise in China throughout the COVID pandemic – where the death rate from the virus was minimal compared to the U.S. and Europe.  As a result, in 2021, China’s life expectancy at birth is now higher than that of the U.S.!

This outcome is a stark and depressing condemnation of American capitalism in the 21^st century. “The stagnation in life expectancy reflects deep societal challenges — not just in our health system but also in our economic and political systems,” said Dave Chokshi, a physician and former NYC health commissioner.

It was not just the pandemic. Americans of every age, at every income level, are unusually likely to die from guns, drugs, cars, and disease.  American babies are more likely to die before they turn five; American teens are more likely to die before they turn 20; American adults are more likely to die before they turn 65. Europe has better life outcomes than the U.S. across the board, for white and black people, in high-poverty areas and low-poverty areas.

The U.S. has more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country—both overall and on a per capita basis. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy in the U.S. declined for consecutive years in 2015 and 2016, largely because of the opioid epidemic and drug overdoses. The U.S. has a higher death rate from road accidents than Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union. Even on a per-miles-driven basis, the U.S. still has a higher death rate than much of Europe.

At 40 percent among adults, the U.S. obesity rate is double the average of most European countries and eight times higher than Korea’s or Japan’s. Although the precise relationship between weight and health is contentious, the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund has stated bluntly that America’s obesity levels are responsible for roughly one-fifth of deaths among American adults aged 40 to 85.

The U.S. has fewer general practitioners per capita than most rich countries, in part because of the long and expensive medical education encourages doctors to become highly paid specialists. And along with this lack of affordable and accessible primary care, the U.S. has the highest rate of avoidable deaths of any rich nation. (Examples of the OECD’s definition of “avoidable” mortality include deaths related to alcohol, shootings, accidents, and influenza.)

Life expectancy is an important measure of human development, but it is not the only measure.  The UN has created a human development index (HDI) which measures not just life expectancy but also educational advancement and economic prosperity.  The HDI was launched in 1990.  In its latest Human Development Report (HDR), the data confirm that capitalism in the 21st century, if it ever was, is no longer progressive in the development of human well-being.  The report says that “decades of progress in terms of life expectancy, education and economic prosperity have begun unraveling since the pandemic.”  Over the past two years, nine out of ten countries have slid backward on their HDI.

Switzerland sits at the top of the index with a life expectancy of 84 years, an average of 16.5 years spent in education, and median salary of $66,000.  At the other end of the scale is South Sudan, where life expectancy is 55; people spend just 5.5 years in school on average and earn $768 a year. But recent setbacks in a majority of the 191 countries included in the index, especially in life expectancy, have taken development levels back to those seen in 2016, reversing a 30-year trend.

Over the years since the index was introduced, many countries have faced crises and slid backward, but the global trend consistently moved upwards. Last year was the first time the index declined overall since calculations began, and this year’s results solidified that downward trend. And “the outlook for 2022 is grim,” says Achim Steiner, one of the HDR authors, who points out that more than 80 countries are facing problems paying off their national debt.  “Eighty countries being one step away from facing that kind of crisis is a very serious prospect,” he says. “We are seeing deep disruptions, the tail end of which will play out over a number of years.”

When we look at the league table of countries in the HDI, the usual richer advanced capitalist economies are at the top.  But the U.S. is not in the top 20; it’s 21^st, although it has by far the largest in population of these richer countries.  And if we compare the progress in human development in the top G7 economies using the HDI since 1990, we find, whereas the U.S. was the highest of the G7 in 1990, it has slipped to fifth out of seven.  While Germany’s HDI rose 13.6% from 1990-2021, the U.S. HDI rose only 5.6%.  And the U.S. rose the least of the G7 in the 21^st century.  Strangely, the UK rose the most from 1990, if from a lower start, and was the fastest riser in the 21^st century to date.  This may be due to the higher than average spending on education in the 1990s and early 2000s.

	1990	2000	2021	1990-2021	2000-21
Ger	0.829	0.889	0.942	13.6	6.0
Can	0.860	0.890	0.936	8.8	5.2
UK	0.804	0.862	0.929	15.5	7.8
Jap	0.845	0.877	0.925	9.5	5.5
U.S.	0.872	0.891	0.921	5.6	3.4
Fra	0.791	0.844	0.903	14.2	7.0
Ita	0.778	0.841	0.895	15.0	6.4

Every G7 country did better than the U.S. – another indicator of the relative decline of U.S. imperialism.

The UN has also developed an inequality-adjusted HDI, where the degree of inequality of income is fed into the HDI to change the outcome.  Every country has a degree of inequality.  But some are much worse than others.  Among the G7 economies, the level of inequality in the U.S. and Italy is so high that it reduces the HDI in those two countries by over 11% and knocks them even further down the HDI league.

This is not surprising given the huge rise in inequality and poverty in the U.S. since the HDI was started.  In January 2022, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019 – that’s an official poverty rate of 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019.  The “poverty threshold” for a four-person family in 2020 was $26,496.  And the U.S. Federal Reserve reports that in 1989 the top 1 percent controlled 23.5 percent of the nation’s wealth, and, in 2022, its share had increased to 31.8 percent or $44.9 trillion.  The bottom 50% of wealth holders had 3.7% of household wealth in 1989; now, they have 2.8%.

Inequality is even higher in many Global South countries; in particular, Brazil, South Africa, and India have shocking inequality rates that knocks their HDIs by over 25%.

If we look at the largest so-called emerging economies by population, including the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), as you might expect, China achieved the greatest improvement in its HDI of all countries.  From a lowly 0.48 in 1990, China’s HDI reached 0.77 in 2021, a rise of 59%.  Compare that to India, which started pretty much at the same HDI as China but reached only 0.63 in 2021, a rise of 46% but still way less than China.

	1990	2000	2021	1990-2021	2000-21
Arg	0.72	0.78	0.84	16.5	8.1
Turk	0.60	0.67	0.84	39.7	25.1
Russ	0.74	0.73	0.82	10.6	12.3
Slan	0.64	0.69	0.78	23.0	13.7
Ukr	0.73	0.70	0.77	6.0	10.4
China	0.48	0.58	0.77	58.7	31.5
Mex	0.66	0.71	0.76	14.5	6.9
Bra	0.61	0.68	0.75	23.6	11.0
S Afr	0.63	0.63	0.71	12.8	12.6
Indo	0.53	0.60	0.71	34.0	18.5
India	0.43	0.49	0.63	45.9	28.9

Whereas China was just 5pts higher in its HDI than India in 1990, now it is 14 pts higher.  In those three decades, China has come from behind to overtake Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia – and close the gap with the U.S. from 40pts behind to just 15 pts.

For topical purposes, I also looked at Ukraine, Sri Lanka, and Russia.  In 1990, when the Soviet bloc fell, Ukraine had a HDI of 0.73, virtually the same as Russia and ahead of tiny debt-ridden Sri Lanka.  By 2000, the ‘shock therapy’ of the return to capitalism lowered the HDI in Ukraine and Russia while all others in the list rose.  And 30 years later, Ukraine’s HDI has crawled up just 6% to 0.77, falling behind Sri Lanka and Russia, both of which did not do very well either.

Are the major economies of the global South catching up with the G7 countries of the global North?  If we exclude China and India, then the global South average (as defined above) was 18pts behind the G7 average in 1990.  In 2021, the gap was 14pts.  So hardly any progress in closing the gap in 30 years.  And the countries of Global South chosen here are mostly the best performers, not the poorest and weakest.

Returning to the measure of life expectancy, we find that as people have healthier and longer lives, they become more skilled and educated and so enable economies to grow and to raise incomes and livelihoods.  So public health measures are the most important lever for fostering economic development. 

The news that after 140 years, scientists at the University of Oxford have finally developed a vaccine that has 80% effectiveness against the deadly disease of malaria, which has killed millions and still kills nearly one child a minute.  The big pharma companies had avoided putting funds into malaria vaccines for decades, preferring to develop anti-depressants and cancer drugs that could sell well in the richer countries.  So it has taken 140 years to develop the malaria vaccine compared to just one year to find a vaccine for COVID.  The latter, of course, affected the Global North too.  Now the possible eradication of malaria, that affects primarily the Global South, would probably be the most significant boost to life expectancy and human development this century.

Source: Michael Roberts blog

The typical winner of the Nobel Prize in economics is a 67-year-old man, born in the United States, who is working at the University of Chicago when he wins. That’s what science writer Maggie Koerth found.

Technically, there is no Nobel Prize in economics, Koerth explains. Instead, there is the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It was first awarded in 1969 and is named after the central bank of Sweden — the Sveriges Riksbank — which funds it. 

The Nobel Foundation doesn’t pay out the award or choose the winner. Members of the Nobel family have spoken out against the award.

Nonetheless, the award was given out this year and the media calls it the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. David Card, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, got half of the Sveriges Riksbank award this year.

Card is credited for showing that raising the minimum wage doesn’t increase unemployment. That’s good and it’s certainly true.

Funny though: A prize was never given to the first economist to point this out. 

Back in 1865, Karl Marx’s lecture series to the First International workers’ association was a response to John Weston, who had said that raising wages would be harmful and therefore labor unions are harmful.

The first five chapters of “Value, Price and Profit” are Marx’s responses to Weston. The rest of the lecture series is a condensed preview of Marx’s “Capital,” which was published two years later in 1867.

Of course, it’s good that David Card was able to use the most modern research tools available to confirm that there is no downside to raising wages. Indeed, raising wages is an excellent thing to do, as Marx pointed out more than 150 years ago.