by Zoltan Zigedy is available at:

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Notes from the Brink: March 2013

More Workers’ Woes

If it seems like I’m picking on the United Auto Workers union, it’s only because its descent from its once lofty, exemplary stature as one of the most democratic and militant CIO unions has been the steepest. Last month, I wrote of the leadership’s complicity in the gutting of union wage and benefit standards, a gutting that has left starting wages often lower than for their non-union counterparts. I reported that UAW contracts were pressuring management at non-union Toyota to buy out older workers in order to establish a new, lower starting wage to compete with their unionized competitors. UAW union contracts are now the corporate tool for slashing labor costs!

But it’s even worse than I thought. A retired autoworker pointed out that my claim of two-tier employment at UAW shops was incomplete. At Ford, the UAW has acceded to a three-tier system! Below the “entry” level tier, Ford, with UAW agreement, has established a classification of “long term supplemental” that offers the $14-16 entry-level starting wage, but with no job security or benefits! In some suburban, high- income areas, fast food restaurants offer better wages and benefits than this!

Labor Notes Ken Paff reports on a shameful act of treachery against workers employed at a car-hauling company under a Teamster contract. As revealed by a National Labor Relations Board decision, Ford colluded with a UAW local to underbid the Teamster contract and award the work to a lower-paying competitor. The NLRB administrative law judge ordered the voiding of the UAW contract and the re-employment of the laid-off workers with full back pay. According to the decision, Ford arranged the sub-standard contract with the UAW beforehand to secure a lower bid. As a result, the Teamster members who had made about $20 an hour were replaced with workers employed under a UAW contract at $11-14 per hour. According to a leaked document, the collusion would save Ford $9.8 million a year. This sorry deal was known to the top union leadership.

Treachery of this dimension transcends class collaboration and business unionism and sinks to the level of scabbing. Those who gave their lives to organize the UAW must be turning in their graves. Their legacy deserves much better than this insult to labor solidarity.

Currency War

Why is the escalation of the global currency war by the Abe government in Japan significant?

Until now, the leaders of all of the leading capitalist countries have proclaimed open and unrestrained trade—free markets—as a mark of a new level of international cooperation. They have advertised the dramatic growth of international trade as establishing bonds of mutual dependence that strengthen relations and lessen tensions.

But these “interdependencies” were tenuous at best. They temporarily concealed the ever compelled, inevitable drive for competitive advantage, to win at the expense of competitors. Cooperation is alien to a system—capitalism—based upon ever greater accumulation. A deepening crisis quickly surfaced these tendencies.

It was not the Abe government that opened the currency wars, but the US. The doses of “quantitative easing” adopted by the US Federal Reserve cheapened the dollar, making US exports more attractive and foreign imports less so. As a result, there was a marked revival of US manufacturing. In short, US policy makers broke with international cooperation and set out on the road to securing national advantage.

The first to feel the bite from this unilateral policy were many economies in Latin America. Despite the justifiable complaint of their leaders, US investment money flooded these markets, disrupting capital markets, and attacking their exports. Two years ago, Brazil lodged loud complaints against US quantitative easing and its negative impact on Brazilian exports.

Other countries, like the Republic of Korea, Switzerland, and Israel, have acted to protect their currencies, while Australian manufacturing has been seriously slowed because it has refrained from reacting.

The already seriously wounded EU economy has been further disrupted by the currency wars, with the European Central Bank reluctant to retaliate. Germany, with its manufacturing largely immune to price competition, has successfully blocked any strong reaction. The rest of the EU has consequently felt the loss of competitiveness.

It was the Abe government in Japan that brought this escalating contest into the open. Their explicit determination to weaken the yen served as the basis for Abe’s election campaign.

Despite a frantic attempt to get some agreement among the G7 powers, the battle only promises to become more aggressive and destructive. The Brazilian Finance Minister was recently quoted in The Wall Street Journal: “The currency war has become more explicit now because trade conflicts have become sharper. Countries are trying to devalue their currencies because of falling global trade. So many of them are in a difficult situation.”

The tensions emerging in the currency war are leading to sharp military confrontations and threats, especially among Asian Pacific countries. The capitalist sharks are turning on each other.

Here We Go Again!

Signs are eerily pointing toward developments reminiscent of the 2008 crash. Once again an enormous pool of capital is accumulating and overflowing into riskier and riskier areas to find a return. As reported in the WSJ, $149 billion has channeled into money market funds since November of 2012. The Journal notes that these funds are increasingly accepting risk (for example, French bank debt) to secure better returns.

Cash is also flooding equity markets. In only four weeks in the New Year, $38.1 billion was invested in stock mutual funds, more than the previous record in February, 2000 (remember that moment?).

A recent bank of charts published in the WSJ tellingly demonstrates the many signs of an overheated, dangerously speculative economy:

● Issuance of high-yield corporate bonds below investment grade is nearly double what it was in 2007.

● Business loans not required to meet traditional standards have risen sharply (though still well below

2007).

● Total assets in US high-yield, junk bond funds and exchange traded funds are more than double what

they were in 2007.

● Iowa farmland prices are more than double what they were in 2007.

As if there were not enough danger signs in the global economy, another over-accumulation event approaches. Hold on to your hats!

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

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Published: Prosveshcheniye No 3., March 1913. Signed: V. I.. Published according to the Prosveshcheniye text.
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 19, pages 21-28.
Translated: The Late George Hanna
Original Transcription:Lee Joon Koo and Marc Luzietti
Re-Marked up by: K. Goins (2008)
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (1996). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.

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This article was published in 1913 in Prosveshcheniye No. 3, dedicated to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marx’s death.

Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) was a Bolshevik social, political and literary monthly published legally in St. Petersburg from December 1911 onwards. Its inauguration was proposed by Lenin to replace the Bolshevik journal Mysl (Thought), a Moscow publication banned by the tsarist government. Lenin directed the work of the journal from abroad and wrote the following articles for it: “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign”, “Results of the Election”, “Critical Remarks on the National Question”, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, and others.

The journal was suppressed by the tsarist government in June 1914, on the eve of the First World War. Publication was resumed in the autumn of 1917 but only one double number appeared; this number contained two articles by Lenin: “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” and “A Review of the Party Programme”.

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.

It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief.

I

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.

Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.

But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.

Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.

Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.

II

Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.

By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.

Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

III

When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.

Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.

People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.

Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

Independent organisations of the proletariat are multi plying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.

Check out this website:

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/search?q=+Cuba

Via: http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2013/2013-02-26-elisaio-kkro

On Monday 25/2 the proceedings of the “round-table discussion” organized by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) were held in Moscow, on the topic “The Image of Socialism we are Fighting for”, with the participation of foreign delegations, which participated in the 15th Congress of the CPRF.

Elisseos Vagenas, member of the CC and Responsible for the International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE, made a contribution to the “round-table discussion” on behalf of the KKE. The speech was as follows:

The socialism which we are struggling for

Dear comrades,

We thank the CPRF for the opportunity that it is providing us today to exchange thoughts about this important issue.

The KKE, after the counterrevolutionary changes in the Soviet Union in 1991, despite the fact that it emerged organizationally weakened, due to the inner-party struggle with the opportunist forces which in the end left the party, maintained its communist identity: Its faith in the Marxist-Leninist worldview and the necessity of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It defended the hammer and sickle and its other historical symbols and at the same time began long-term research and inner-party work on the causes which led to the defeat of socialism in the USSR. Through this work, which was consolidated in the Decision of the 18th Congress of our party, our party enriched its conception of socialism. An enrichment which in turn is expressed in the new draft programme of our party, which will be the work of our 19th Congress in about a month.

Today we are certainly “one step” forwards compared to the revolutionaries before the Great October Socialist Revolution. This is because today there is the vast experience, positive and negative, of the socialist construction in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and other countries. The KKE, in contrast with the forces of the so-called “Party of the European Left” (PEL), defends the enormous contribution of the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries to the progress of humanity as a whole. Socialism which existed in the 20th century was able to satisfy important needs of the people, which capitalism not only cannot but does not want to satisfy: free education, health, social security, vacations, housing, pensions at 55 for women and 60 for men, certainty about the future and many other things.

It is no accident that that this experience, the construction of socialism in the 20th century, is subject to the rabid attack of the bourgeois political forces, the EU, the USA, as well as of the opportunist forces, with as a “common denominator” the attack against the person of Joseph Stalin, who was head of the CP and the soviet state, when the foundations of socialism were laid. Our party is of the assessment that this socialist soviet experience must be studied and utilised regarding the issue as to what the socialism we are struggling for should be like.

The overthrow of socialism did not occur due to “totalitarianism”, or because the workers had exaggerated gains and rights, as various forces, which are struggling against the communists, claim. The overthrow of socialism happened because in conditions of the aggressiveness of capital’s forces, basic laws of socialist construction were violated, such as the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the “state of the whole people” and the strengthening of commodity-money relations in the decades after 1950.

A second point that the KKE has come to is that the socialism which we are struggling for cannot arise from bourgeois parliamentarianism, through “left-patriotic governments”, which promote the “gradual” correction, “democratization”, “humanization” of capitalism, without a socialist revolution, without the destruction of the bourgeois state structures, without the construction of new popular organs of power.

Socialist construction is an uninterrupted process, which starts with the conquest of power by the working class. Our party has a different view from those parties, which in the name of “national specificities” or “21st century socialism” retreat from the fundamental characteristics of the socialist-communist society. In our evaluation socialism is the first phase of the communist socio-economic formation; it is not an independent socio-economic formation. It is an immature communism. The basic law of the communist mode of production is valid: “Planned production for the extended satisfaction of social needs.”

A basic feature of socialist society is the socialization of the means of production.

The socialisation of the means of production in industry, energy-water supply, telecommunications, construction, repair, public transport, wholesale and retail trade and import-export trade, the concentrated tourist –restaurant infrastructure, the capitalist agricultural cultivations.

The socialization of land and the mineral resources. State production units will be created for the production and processing of agricultural products whether as raw material or consumer products.

The abolition of private ownership and economic activity in education, health-welfare, culture and sports, in the mass media. They are completely and exclusively organized as social services.

The abolition of the use of alien labour, i.e. wage labour, by those who still possess isolated means of production in sectors that have not been compulsorily socialized, e.g. in crafts, agricultural production, tourism-restaurants, in certain auxiliary services.

Means of production, raw materials, industrial materials and resources, and labour power will enter a process of production and organization of social and administrative services via central planning.

Industry and the largest part of agricultural production will be carried out with relations of social ownership, central planning, workers’ control over the whole spectrum of management and administration.

The development potential of the country will placed at the service of the people and their needs through central planning, as well as whatever has been created by human activity in Science, Technology and Culture. This will safeguard a higher standard of living and of the development and cultivation of the intellect. Unemployment and labour insecurity will be eradicated, free time will be increased, so that the working people will have the ability to actively participate and exert workers’ control in order to safeguard the character of working class power.

Agricultural productive cooperatives will be promoted, which will have the right to utilize the socialized land as a means of production. The integration of small farmers will be carried out on a voluntarily basis. The incentives for cooperativization are: the reduction of the cost of production through collective cultivation work and collection of agricultural products. The protection of agricultural production from natural phenomena through the state infrastructure and scientific and technical support. Agricultural produce will be made available through its concentration via the state retail sector.

In addition, we are of the assessment that socialist construction is incompatible with the participation of the country in any imperialist union, such as the EU and NATO, IMF, OECD, and with the existence of US-NATO military bases in our country.

The new working class power, depending on the international developments and regional situation, will seek to develop mutually beneficial inter-state relations between Greece and other countries, especially with countries whose level of development, the nature of their problems and immediate interests can ensure such a mutually beneficial cooperation.

The socialist state will seek cooperation with countries and peoples who have objectively a direct interest in resisting the economic, political and military centres of imperialism, first and foremost with the peoples who are constructing socialism in their countries. It will seek to utilize every available “rupture” which might exist in the imperialist “front” due to inter-imperialist contradictions, in order to defend and strengthen the revolution and socialism. A socialist Greece, loyal to the principles of proletarian internationalism, will be, to the extent of its possibilities, a bulwark for the world anti-imperialist, revolutionary and communist movement.

Social needs are determined based on the level of development of the productive forces that have been achieved in the given historical period.

Basic social needs (education-healthcare- welfare) are covered for free in a universal way, according to the needs, while another part of them are covered by a relatively small part of the labour monetary income (housing, energy-water supply- heating, transport, nutrition).

A characteristic of the first stage of communist relations, i.e of the socialist relations, is the distribution of a part of the products “according to labour”. The distribution of a part of socialist production “according to labour”, which resembles commodity exchange only in terms of its form, is a result of the capitalist inheritance.

The new mode of production has not managed to discard it yet, because it has not developed all of the necessary human productive power and all the means of production to the necessary dimensions through the widest use of new technology. Labour productivity does not yet allow a decisively large reduction of labour time, the eradication of heavy and one-sided labour, so that the social need for compulsory labour can be abolished.

The planned distribution of labour power and of the means of production entails the planned distribution of the social product. This is a fundamental difference compared to the distribution of the social product through the market, based on the laws and categories of commodity exchange.

The socialist power is the revolutionary power of the working class, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The revolutionary workers’ power requires a high level of organisation with all the available means. It requires workers’ control in the exercise of the administration of the industrial units in the sectors of strategic importance so that it carries out its creative, economic-social and cultural work, in order to achieve the supremacy of the workers’ and people’s majority against the organised domestic and foreign resistance of capital, their counterrevolutionary activity after the loss of their power.

The extent and the forms that the revolutionary working class power uses for the repression of the counterrevolutionary activity depend on the stance of the political and social organisations towards the two conflicting powers, the working class and the capitalist class.

The socialist state as an organ of the class struggle, which continues with other forms and under new conditions, does not have merely a defensive, repressive and organisational function. It also has a creative, economic, cultural, educational operation under the leadership of its ideological –political vanguard, of its party. It expresses a higher form of democracy whose chief characteristic is the active participation of the working class and generally of the people who are educated on the basis of (non monetary) incentives that arise from the superior mode of production and democracy during the formation of the socialist society during the resolution of the old contradictions and social inequalities through the control of the administration of the productive units, of the social and administration services of all the organs of power from the bottom up.

The exercise of workers’ and social control will be institutionalised and safeguarded in practice, as will the unhindered criticism of decisions and practices which obstruct socialist construction, the unhindered denunciation of subjective arbitrariness and bureaucratic behaviour of officials, and other negative phenomena and deviations from socialist-communist principles.

The foundation of working class power is the production unit, social services, the units of administration, the production cooperatives where the working people exercise their right to elect and recall the representatives.

The communist party, as an ideological-political organised vanguard of the working class, constitutes the leading force of the revolutionary working class power, the dictatorship of the proletariat. It vindicates its revolutionary leading role as long as it expresses the general interests of the working class and the scientific laws of socialist-communist construction in practice.

Dear comrades,

At the end of this brief contribution, allow me to say that the communists in Greece keep alive in our hearts the mass heroism of the proletarians who stormed the Winter Palace, of the communists and Komsomols who crushed the counterrevolution in unprecedented historical conditions and laid the foundations of the socialist construction, of the Red Army soldiers who crushed the Nazi hordes! Their sacrifices and their struggles were not in vain. They sustain and encourage the communists all over the world, the forces that struggle for the revolutionary regroupment of the international communist movement.

ByZoltan Zigedy

Via: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

From the Russian Revolution until the demise of Soviet and Eastern European socialism, one dominant, uncompromising and persistent theme has obsessed ruling elites in the capitalist world and their allies: Anything but Communism (ABC). The ABC doctrine has led to the seemingly contradictory consequence of “champions” of democracy and human rights embracing anti-Communist despots and torturers. It has led the same celebrated values to be compromised in capitalist countries by the violent repression of Communists, leftists, and workers. The doctrine has placed arbitrary limits on the rights of self-determination for any emerging nation daring to flirt with a non-capitalist path. And when Communism threatens to breach the barriers constructed by the capitalist class, that class resorts to the most extreme form of Anything but Communism: fascism.

For the left, ABC has often appeared to be an insurmountable hurdle to the goal of peoples’ power and socialism. Too often the task of overcoming ABC overwhelms the advocates of socialism, leading to compromise, concession and ideological dilution. Certainly, many of the formerly powerful Communist Parties of Western Europe succumbed to this lure. The self-described Euro-Communists, especially, hoped to convince their opponents that they were reliable and docile contestants unworthy of the class hatred embodied in ABC. They thought that by demonstrating their fealty to bourgeois standards of political conduct and by donning the trappings of civil parliamentarians, they would win the respect of their class foes. But the illusion of acceptance through “historical compromise” and electoral coalition proved to be just that—an illusion. Today, these parties have thoroughly demonstrated their “trustworthiness” by totally abandoning Communism for tepid class-neutral reformism.

ABC and Syriza

In the wake of the twenty-first-century crisis of capitalism, the need for a revolutionary movement of peoples’ power and socialism becomes both more apparent and more urgent with every passing day. The material conditions of most poor and working people have sunk to a level demanding far more radical solutions than those offered by the traditional bourgeois parties. Their failure to correct, or even address, the harsh deterioration of mass living standards over the last five years confirms their political irrelevance.

Nor are the romantic and spontaneous movements of the recent past of any use in the face of the ravages of a capitalist economic, social, and political crisis. Subcommandante Marcos or the leader-eschewing leaders of the Occupy movement are incapable of combating the ravages of a wounded capitalism despite the enthusiasm and encouragement of much of the US and European left.

Indeed, the objective conditions call for an organized movement determined to overthrow capitalism and replace it with peoples’ rule and the construction of socialism.

Yet the US left and much of the European left are still captured by the mentality of Anything but Communism. They subjectively hope to manage capitalism and yearn to return to the pre-crisis world of life-style advocacy, promotion of social harmony and tolerance, and incremental social welfare; they imagine class struggle without class conflict; and they share the make-believe hope of class justice without class domination.

This hope is found in the most recent celebrity of the Greek party, Syriza, and its attractive and agreeable leader, Alexis Tsipras. Syriza embodies the delusions of the US and European soft-left in the post-Soviet era: it advocates a noisy but vacuous anti-capitalist posture attached to a program of “enlightened” management of capitalism. Like its forebears in Social Democracy and Euro-Communism, it offers to appease the bourgeoisie while promising a distant goal with no more clarity than that of William Blake’s poetic Jerusalem.

Tsipras reveals the timidity and conservatism of the Syriza program in two recent documents: an interview with Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal published as a glowing opinion piece (The Conscience of a Radical) on January 28, 2013 and an article authored by Tsipras in Le Monde Diplomatique (The Greek Revival Plan, February 16, 2013).

The WSJ interview occurred when Tsipras visited New York to “meet with think-tank scholars, journalists and International Monetary Fund officials, and to be dined at the State Department,” to quote Stephens. It is hard to envision anyone frightening capitalism while maintaining this itinerary. As the friendly Stephens noted: “It definitely amused me to meet him in the breakfast room at his hotel, the Helmsley Park Lane on Central Park South. Not exactly the cafeteria of the proletariat.”

The trusted spokesperson for monopoly capital, Stephens, found much to like in the spokesperson for Syriza. He concludes that: “If the radical in Syriza means a party capable of thinking for itself and posing the right questions, maybe the right answers won’t be far behind.”

Apart from this ringing endorsement, what answers does Tsipras offer to the growing devastation of Greece and the capitalist crisis?

Tsipras assures Stephens that he advocates neither a default on Greek debt nor an exit from the euro zone.

Instead, Syriza is committed to a “conference” with the European Union to discuss negotiating a restructuring of Greece’s debt (Tsipras writes of the “public debt” though he also calls for the recapitalization of Greek banks, presumably mainly private banks). The model for this maneuver is the 1953 conference called to renegotiate the debt of the Federal Republic of Germany (Tsipras fails to acknowledge that there were two Germanys in 1953!) where 21 countries agreed to reduce the FRG debt and invoke less onerous terms. Unsaid in his proposal is the Cold War context of the 1953 conference. Conferees remembered well the consequences for the world of the heavy reparations and debt imposed on Germany after World War I. They were equally anxious to draw the FRG into the Cold War (the FRG joined NATO IN 1955) and in need of the FRG’s growing industrial might. Nothing remotely like these considerations weighs on the other EU members in deciding Greece’s fate today.

But how would Syriza secure such a conference today? By moral suasion? By calling on historical parallels? Neither would move EU leaders or their Central Bankers to participate in a plan that they would perceive as disordering financial markets. To believe so is to vastly misunderstand the logic of contemporary capitalism. There is something remarkably naïve in believing that the Greek crisis can be solved by merely calling a conference of EU leaders.

Tsipras, in both his interview and article, blames Greece’s sorry state on corruption. He does not place the capitalist system, the capitalist crisis, inequality, or any other systemic element or process in Syriza’s sights; rather, he sees Greece declining because of corruption and cronyism. Surely the leader of a “radical left” party must recognize that capitalism breeds corruption just as surely as it generates crisis. Corruption is an inevitable byproduct of capitalism and will reappear and expand as long as capitalism exists. To attack it, one must attack capitalism.

But there is no attack on capitalism in Tsipras’ or Syriza’s plans. Instead, there is “…breaking with the past… working for social justice, equal rights, political and fiscal transparency—in other words, democracy.”

Fine. But these broad slogans are not socialist. They are not even anti-capitalist. In fact, they could be embraced easily by Social Democrats in Europe or even Democrats in the US.

For those who were quick to condemn the Greek Communists (KKE) for not joining with Syriza in an electoral coalition, Tsipras’ and Syriza’s program should cause pause to reconsider. Like previous appeasers of Anything but Communism, Syriza trades on its differences with Communists. It offers a pledge of fidelity to the bourgeois rules of the game. Like other appeasers, it sacrifices principled advocacy of socialism to political expediency, a sacrifice that gets us no closer to peoples’ power or to socialism. Once Syriza is compelled to come forth with a program, it is impossible to locate a common ground with revolutionary Communists.

Tackling global capitalism—essential to reversing the continuing devastation of this deep and profound crisis—requires more than a conference and a series of slogans. Real solutions are not to be found with those promising to guide capitalism out of an inhuman crisis of its own making.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Coal Execs deserve “a cell next to Bernie Madoff”

By Kay Tillow

http://tinyurl.com/aw7z5g3

St. Louis, MO. February 13, 2013. Shirley Inman was arrested for
peaceful, civil disobedience as she protested at the Peabody Energy
headquarters against the corporate threat to rob miners and their families
of the health benefits they have earned. Inman, a member of United Mine
Workers of America Local 2286 in Madison, West Virginia, spent 18 years
driving a coal truck. Head held high, Inman faced arrest with a
determination much greater than her petite stature. She is serious about
this fight.

“If I can’t get my medication for my heart disease, I won’t be around much
longer,” said Inman. “I’m a breast cancer survivor and I have coronary
artery disease. Health care isn’t an option for me; it’s what I need to
survive. I’ll do whatever it takes to make these corporate executives keep
the promises they made – and if that means going to jail, so be it.”

Inman was arrested with nine of her union brothers, including UMWA
Secretary Treasurer Dan Kane. This was the second set of arrests at
Peabody Energy, and it looks like there will be more to come. On January
29 UMWA President Cecil Roberts was arrested with the first group, but he
was not present for this rally because of negotiations.

In 2007, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal spun off a large chunk of their
health care and retirement obligations to a new entity called Patriot
Coal. In a financial and bankruptcy transaction that UMWA Vice President
from Alabama, Daryl Dewberry, described as “nickel slick”, Peabody Energy
and Arch Coal are trying to wash their hands of responsibility for the
health benefits for which they had signed contracts.

There was an air of militancy as more than 1,000 miners and supporters
marched to the park and rallied between the St. Louis arch and the Peabody
headquarters prior to the arrests. There was emotion also. Health care
hits close to the heart. The union has challenged the theft of benefits
in court, and the case has been moved to St. Louis. Concerned that
bankruptcy law may not be adequate to protect these benefits, the miners
say they will win this battle by appealing to a higher moral law.

Dan Kane, UMWA Secretary Treasurer explained. “They intentionally put
Patriot in the position for bankruptcy. They want this in the bankruptcy
court—they don’t want it in the court of public opinion. This is about
every man and woman who works for a living. Health care and pension are
not gifts. You paid for it. But these companies are using bankruptcy
more and more. Lawyers will get paid. Million dollar bonuses will go to
executives. The heads of Patriot won’t suffer. Those who did the work
walk out with nothing. That has to stop. We don’t want their sympathy.
What we want is justice.”

“We want what we’ve earned,” said Kane. “They want to go to their
palatial homes—but they deserve a cell next to Bernie Madoff. I’m tired
of an economy that walks all over the workers. I look for a day when we
win the fight so every person who wants to can be in a union without
interference. And next, I look for a day when each and every one drops
their tools and sits down for a day and tells the executives here’s what
it’s like without us.” The protesters roared approval.

Dewberry said the UMWA was founded in 1890 “when it was not popular to
have all creeds and colors together, but we did it and we’ve been doing it
for over 100 years.” He said that miners are “used to adversity and we
are all our brothers’ keepers. Peabody left scars in Alabama. Arch left
scars in Alabama. They left black lung. Miners took less benefits to
assure health care.”

“Know this, Peabody, we’re seasoned and we ain’t backing down from
nothing,” continued Dewberry. “Our members have been shot at and burned
out and turned out since 1890 and nobody is going to turn us around.” He
then compared the times with an earlier era when Abraham Lincoln said,
“…(C)orporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high
places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to
prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all
wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed.”
Dewberry declared of Peabody “They don’t know what a fight is, but we’ll
take ‘em on.”

James Gibbs, UMWA Vice President from West Virginia and a third generation
coal miner spoke. “I think about Peabody and Arch and how they lied to
our retirees who today walk with canes and walkers and carry bottles of
oxygen after working all these years. They were promised health care for
all their lives. We’re not going to let Peabody get by with this. It’s
not right.”

Reflecting the common heritage of the union with the civil rights
movement, Gibbs related the story of Rosa Parks. Then he told of his
father who worked the last 30 years in the mine with an artificial leg,
“yet Pittston didn’t mind a bit to try to take their benefits. But
Pittston didn’t win that fight. We win when we are right.” He was
referring to the 14 month struggle in 1989 when Pittston sought to
discontinue medical benefits to miners, retirees and the disabled.
Pittston was met with massive resistance when miners and their families by
the thousands engaged in non-violent civil disobedience to bring the
company to its knees and to a contract.

The ten volunteers for civil disobedience led the crowd to the street
beside the gleaming Peabody Energy headquarters where they were arrested.
The police secured their wrists with white plastic handcuffs and took them
away. UMWA Vice President Steve Earle announced “We’ll be back in a
couple of weeks.”

The UMWA is taking on a big fight that will impact all workers and our
ability to stop crooked bankruptcies from destroying health coverage.
Please sign the petition to support the miners here:
http://www.fairnessatpatriot.org/take-action/sign-the-petition/

Then ask your local union to endorse HR 676, national single payer health
care, so that we can free our health care from corporate control and
assure all medically necessary care for everyone.

Sample resolution is here:
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org/tools/sample_resolution

You can watch the video of the February 13, 2013 rally and sit in here.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/mineworkers

(The video begins with Kentucky AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan
introducing Paul Whiteley to sing about Peabody–lyrics by Paul and
Bill.)

Background on single payer: Cecil Roberts speaks on single payer health
care here. http://tinyurl.com/aspchla

Distributed by:

All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care–HR 676
c/o Nurses Professional Organization (NPO)
1169 Eastern Parkway, Suite 2218
Louisville, KY 40217
(502) 636 1551

Email: nursenpo@aol.com
http://unionsforsinglepayer.org

By Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

Workers’ Woes

Workers at a non-union Toyota plant in Kentucky have been offered incentives to retire early in order for management to replace them with new hires at a lower starting wage. The labor cost advantages formerly enjoyed by Toyota—the non-union premium—is no longer available to non-union plants in the auto industry. It seems the wages and benefits long ago won by a more aggressive UAW have retreated to the extent that non-union plants must now secure lower compensation in order to compete!

Since the UAW has conceded starting pay in the unionized industry down to about $14-16 per hour, Toyota seeks to replace older workers making around $26 per hour in their Kentucky plant with new hires at $16 per hour. Thus, the union shops are paradoxically pressuring the wages and benefits of non-union employees downward.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, industry experts claim that the non-union manufacturers enjoyed a $29 an hour competitive advantage in wages and benefits as recently as 2008. By the end of 2011, they report that non-union labor costs were about equal with General Motors and actually higher than Chrysler!

It is hard to imagine a more demoralizing consequence for the union movement in the US: if only the market, and not a fighting union, is to competitively determine wages and benefits, how does one entice workers to join the union? For the bankrupt UAW leadership, union growth comes only from striking a deal with the employers– a deal that would promise collaboration and stability at the expense of workers’ pay and benefits.

The decimation of the living standards of US unionized auto workers came with the bailout and subsequent temporary stewardship of the auto industry by a Democratic Party administration. That same administration demanded plant closings and layoffs as a condition of the bailout.

With friends like these, workers are sadly in dire straights.

Clearly, radical changes are in order, changes that cry out for class struggle unionism and independent political action. Without a new direction, US workers will continue the descent towards Depression-era living standards.

Currency Wars

The 1917 text of Lenin’s Imperialism projected intense struggles between rival capitalist powers. Written during an unprecedented total war between the most economically advanced countries, a war that when settled cost the lives of millions of people, Lenin’s tract explained the First World War as a contest between empires seeking global advantage for the spoils of capitalist exploitation.

Less than twenty years later, the same empire-building forces were again unleashed to carve the world in a desperate attempt to secure markets and sources of strategic resources. World War Two further confirmed Lenin’s thesis that competing capitalist powers were unable to collaborate and cooperate for some greater, universal good. Instead, competition always begets aggression, national chauvinism, and war.

Many were dismissive of Lenin’s prophecies when witnessing the Cold War expediencies of inter-imperial cooperation against the emerging post-war socialist community. With well over a third of the world’s population in the socialist camp, the imperial rivals found a temporary basis of unity around fears and resistance to the success of socialist revolution. The survival of capitalism tamed the inherent rivalries for that moment.

The demise of that threat with the collapse of Eastern European socialism and the accommodation with capitalism by Asian Communists has unleashed the beast of imperial competition. The global economic crisis only serves to fuel the tensions and expose the rivalries.

I wrote in November of 2008 of the “global crackup”, noting that the US was no longer in a position to impose its will on the rest of the world, unable to slough its problems easily upon others. I drew attention to the logic of capitalist competition that, in the long run, denies any hope of cooperation and common solutions.

Today, that tendency— aggressive imperialist rivalry—has found its expression in a new war, a war waged around the relative value of national currencies.

Rulers understand that in a climate of stagnant or declining world trade, nation-states will draw an advantage from devaluing national currencies; by cheapening money—the medium of exchange— domestic enterprises will be able to offer their products at a more favorable price in international markets.

The US tepid “recovery” from the depths of the crisis has largely been won by hyper-exploitation of a docile work force and the dramatic expansion of exports through the Federal Reserve’s massive devaluation of the dollar via the printing press. The Qualitative Easing programs aim to suppress interest rates and remove the corporate garbage generated by the financial promiscuity of 2008-2009. But they also have the not-so-unintended consequence of bolstering the competitiveness of US export manufacturing.

At the same time, US policy makers pointed an accusatory finger at the Peoples’ Republic of China, charging its leaders with currency manipulation. While the charge got little traction from those who closely studied these relationships, it served as a useful diversion from US policies and bolstered rounds of anti-China bashing by do-nothing politicians and labor mis-leaders.

European Union leaders, occupied with the desperate effort to save the Euro, offered little resistance to US currency manipulation.

But with the election of Shinzo Abe in Japan, the currency war was joined. Abe, a right-wing nationalist, exploited the Japanese public’s frustration with years of ineffective governance and economic stagnation to scorn cooperation and offer an aggressive economic program geared towards restoring Japanese competitiveness. Assuming the office of Prime Minister, he launched an aggressive campaign to devalue the Yen. His pressure on the Bank of Japan has already (in less than two months!) produced a drop of 10% in the Yen’s value against the dollar and 15% against the Euro. This means that Japanese products are enjoying a growing competitive advantage in international markets.

International bankers see these moves clearly as the opening salvos in a major escalation of the currency/trade wars. Politicians in countries throughout the world have quietly made similar moves to spur competitiveness, but never with the open audacity shown by Abe.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the unabashed belligerence and arrogant nationalism accompanying these economic moves. The Japanese government has provoked disputes with nearly every Asian Pacific government over barren islands claimed as part of Greater Japan. Imperial aggression is as great a danger today as it was nearly a hundred years ago when Lenin established it as a structural feature of mature capitalism.

A Hushed Mea Culpa

Capital’s policeman, the International Monetary Fund, has offered a quiet confession of an arcane theoretical mistake of enormous consequence. As the leading cheerleader for decades of the “fiscal responsibility” approach to public programs, the IMF can take dubious credit for the policy of austerity as a general panacea for economic duress. A cursory look at the IMF legacy shows a constant, unrelenting enforcement of balanced budgets and meager public spending. Developing countries seeking IMF loans have felt the lash of austerity as a condition of relief.

A cornerstone of IMF thinking was a little discussed macro-economic assumption of the compounding effects of debt reduction. Where “unschooled” common sense might suggest that removing a dollar of public spending from economic activity would remove at least a dollar from a nation’s gross domestic product, the IMF postulated that it would reduce economic activity by only half of a dollar. That is, the “multiplier” for a reduction of public spending was only .5. The assumption, of course, is the neo-liberal axiom that the dollar spent elsewhere in the private sector MUST always be far more productive, must always be greater than unity and, therefore, must always outweigh the loss of “inefficient” public sector spending.

Unfortunately, the axiom is wrong. IMF empirical studies show that, in fact, the multiplier of public spending reductions ranges between .9 and 1.7. In other words, the negative impact of public spending cuts was underestimated by two to three times! The IMF confessed as much in its October report. Unstated, however, is the negative impact of this “error” on hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have lost public benefits to the discipline of IMF imposed “fiscal responsibility”. Even more have suffered from the constraint on economic growth produced by the regimen of austerity.

And yet debt reduction through choking government spending remains a priority of political parties from the far right to the social democratic left.

The Sky is Falling, but not on Everyone yet!

You would never know it from the Wall Street pundits loudly proclaiming the best January stock market in two years, but the US GDP shrank in the final quarter of 2012 (as it did in the UK, the EU, and even the seemingly bullet-proof German economy).

Generally, negative GDP panics investors and disrupts markets, but we live in special times. To the extent that labor remains quiescent and social movements fail to translate into anti-capitalist uprisings, investors and the capitalist class have made their peace with historically unacceptable unemployment and stagnating, but stable economic growth. It’s the earnings that catch the eye of the investors and the wealthy. And they have been holding up rather well so far.

In fact, they are creating the conditions for another round of risk-taking. Money market funds are flush with cash and seeking greater returns, securitization of debt is on the rise again (securities built on auto loans are greater than at any time since 2005), and banks are again growing their real-estate loan portfolios. Capitalism and the lust for ever greater accumulation never sleep!

Of course it is the very mechanism of accumulation, the search for yield on swelling capital (and the accompanying pressures on profitability), that announces the next round in the crisis.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com