Showing posts with label revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revolution. Show all posts

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Food Crisis Behind Revolts

The rapidly rising cost of food is leading to revolts around the world and not just the Middle East.

The cost of food while making profits for Big Agri-Business cartels and those infamous Hedge Funds and Bankers, is impoverishing people.

The global food crisis which began at the end of 2010 mirrors the one in 2008 and the usual reaction to recourse to growing outputs in the hope that prices will go down is insufficient and short-sighted, said De Schutter at a press briefing yesterday.

The “real reason people are hungry” is poverty, he said, because “we have impoverished” small-scale farmers. Policies have favoured a small number of large producers, and now is the time to stray away from an unbalanced agricultural system that maintains poverty, leads to pollution and is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, he said.


And food revolts, which resulted in creating most of the historic revolutions since the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and even the Iranian Revolution, may be coming to developed advanced Capitalist countries including Canada.

While there are those who blame natural disasters for the problem the real issue is capitalism treats food as a commodity, and trades it on the futures market.

The Food and Agriculture Organization under the United Nations issued a rare alert last month that the drought in north China could put at risk wheat production and also put pressure on wheat prices.

Further, wheat futures in Chicago have soared more than 60 percent in the past year and last month jumped to the highest level since 2008. Corn and soybean prices have also witnessed steep increase.

Food prices are soaring to record levels, threatening many developing countries with mass hunger and political instability. Finance ministers of the Group of 20 leading economies discussed the problem at a meeting in Paris last week, but for all of their expressed concern, most are already breaking their promises to help.

After the last sharp price spike in 2008, the G-20 promised to invest $22 billion over three years to help vulnerable countries boost food production. To date, the World Bank fund that is supposed to administer this money has received less than $400 million.

Food prices are now higher than their 2008 peak, driven by rising demand in developing countries and volatile weather, including drought in Russia and Ukraine and a dry spell in North China that threatens the crop of the world’s largest wheat producer. The World Bank says the spike has pushed 44 million people into extreme poverty just since June.


A senior economist at HSBC has warned that Britain could experience riots if food prices continue to soar in line with the cost of crude oil.

Karen Ward told Sky News that amid "very low" wage growth in the developed world, failing to compensate workers for recent rises in food and energy prices could provoke social unrest in the U.K.

Energy markets -- where prices are near their highest levels since 2008 as battles rage in oil-rich Libya -- are "a significant contributor" to higher food prices, Ward told Sky Tuesday.

Food price inflation has helped spark the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East that toppled longstanding rulers in Tunisia and Egypt.

Last week, the United Nations said food costs are at their highest point since the agency began tracking them 20 years ago.

"The Great Food Crisis of 2011" is here. That's what the highly respected magazine Foreign Policy is calling the rampant food inflation that is causing problems worldwide.

The British government just completed a two-year study involving 400 experts from 35 countries to assess the global food situation. The results are scary. Here's what the report said:

By 2050 global food supplies will not be sufficient to feed an expanding population. The UN estimates that food production must rise by 70 percent to feed a world population of more than nine billion in 2050. [But] rising demand and surging global population coupled with increasing resource conflicts over land, water, and energy will hamper food production.

And the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that the "double whammy of high food prices and the global economic slump pushed an additional 115 million people into poverty and hunger." Over 1 billion people go hungry every day and it's rising.

2008 was also a bubble year for many commodities as U.S. food prices were up 5.5%. But 2011 isn't as simple as a bubble -- supply-and-demand economics suggest long-term imbalances. We have a real crisis when we combine the dismal long-term outlook with short-term supply shocks caused by the forces of Mother Nature and, arguably, climate change. It is time to be prepared.

The ongoing popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East poses the question if other developing countries, including Ghana, may experience similar or other forms of uprisings in the light of the imminent global food crisis of 2011.

In order to answer this question one needs to look at the underlying drivers for the uprisings in both 2008 and now.

In 2008 riots from Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt over the soaring costs of basic foods have brought the issue to a boiling point and catapulted it to the forefront of the world's attention.

Although food prices eased by the end of 2008, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) convened a World Summit on Food Security at its headquarters in Rome in November 2009, noting that food prices remain high in developing countries and that the global food security situation has worsened.

In January 2011 it became clear that the world was experiencing a second food crisis and that prices have risen to levels close to or above those prevalent in 2008.

The rice wall

In broad terms, food prices today are at the highest level ever recorded by the UN.

Wheat has risen by 58 per cent in the past 12 months, while corn has soared 87 per cent. Raw sugar prices are up 37 per cent.

Overall the UN food price index climbed by over one-third in the past year, with all food goods advancing.

So why aren't we as bad off as we were in 2008? For one reason only: the key staple of more than half the world's population has not taken off along with the others. Rice.

It has gained only a modest 6.5 per cent in the past 12 months.

"I've never loved rice more than now," gushed Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "Probably rice is the commodity separating us from a food crisis."

In the aftermath of 2008, some Asian countries began stockpiling rice more effectively. But we still need to be hyper-vigilant as today's rising oil prices, combined with some weak harvests, are starting to affect local prices.

Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, for example just announced rice increases of over 20 per cent.

If that seems like dull reading, just pause for a moment to contemplate what the current unrest in the world would be like if Asia were also to boil over should rice shortages become an issue.

At one point in 2008, Britain's MI6 foreign intelligence unit warned that as many as 70 countries might be unhinged by food costs.

Since then intelligence agencies have been keeping a close watch on rising food prices because of two events that tend to follow in their wake: widespread political unrest and mass financial devastation.

The milk rally that sent prices up 49 percent this year, more than any agricultural commodity, may be ending as farmers respond with record production and the costliest cheese in a quarter century curbs demand.

Output in the U.S., the world’s second-largest producer, may rise 1.7 percent to 196 billion pounds in 2011, enough to fill about 34,500 Olympic-sized pools, the Department of Agriculture estimates. Demand will weaken as restaurants cut promotions and grocers raise prices, said INTL FCStone Inc., a New York-based broker. Futures may drop 14 percent to $16.86 per 100 pounds by Dec. 31, a Bloomberg survey of 10 analysts showed.

Dairies are missing out on profits from milk’s biggest rally since at least 1996 as the surge in grain that drove world food prices to a record, contributing to protests in northern Africa and the Middle East, also boosted the cost of feeding cows. While income for grain and cotton growers will rise more than 20 percent this year, earnings at dairies may drop 13 percent, the government estimates.

“Grain farmers are having some of the best years they’ve had in a long time profit-wise, but you couldn’t say that for dairy,” said Bob Cropp, an economist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has been studying the industry since 1966. “Dairy facilities are running at the maximum. With a little softening in demand, prices are going to come down.”

Milk futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange closed on March 11 at $19.65, a 32-month high. Prices are up 54 percent from a year earlier as importers from Mexico to China increased buying and the rebounding U.S. economy bolstered domestic demand.

Commodities Rally

Milk’s 2011 rally has exceeded those of all agricultural futures traded in New York and Chicago including cotton, which surged 42 percent and reached a record last week. The Standard & Poor’s GSCI Index of 24 commodities advanced 11 percent, and the S&P 500 Index of stocks rose 3.7 percent. As of March 10, Treasuries gained 0.1 percent this year, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch index shows.



MARK COLVIN: We've heard plenty about how the uprisings in the Middle East and north Africa may affect the price of oil, much less about how the price of wheat may have caused them.

Fred Kaufman is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, who's published a number of long articles about what he calls the "food bubble".

He points out that when food prices peaked in 2008, there were riots in more than 60 countries. Prices have now gone past that peak again.

I asked him on the line from New York if that was a contributing factor to the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere.

FRED KAUFMAN: Well I would say so. I mean the food sector inflation rate in Egypt for the two months previous to the revolution was 17 per cent each month.

And of course we know that revolutions are traditionally led by middle class, angry people and in this case what you have is a situation where the price of wheat goes up, all of a sudden, the price of vegetables goes up and milk and if you no longer can feed your kids milk and fresh meat you're going to get very angry if you're a middle class person.

MARK COLVIN: The obvious parallel I suppose is the French Revolution where the price of bread just went up and up and up until people could take it no longer.

FRED KAUFMAN: Or even look at 1848 when the entire content of Europe goes into revolution and this is directly related to tremendous amounts of famine across the continent. Now I'm not saying there's famine, because now the situation with food has changed, which is that people aren't really going hungry because there isn't enough food. One thing we have to realise is that there is more than enough food; there's more than enough food to feed double the world's population.

The issue is not enough food; the issue is can you afford the food? And of course this leads directly into what I've been talking about for the past year and a half, which is speculation in global wheat and food markets.

MARK COLVIN: You call it the food bubble I think. What does that mean?

FRED KAUFMAN: Well, what it means is that there are exterior forces at work forcing up the price of wheat, forcing up the price of global wheat. Because remember that the last food bubble we had in 2008, when all was said and done, the wheat harvest of 2008 was the greatest the world had ever seen and in fact as the statistics are coming in from Russia and as the out, you know, we're seeing what's probably going to happen now that rain and snow has hit China it's looking as though we're going to see quite a good wheat harvest for this year too.

So that there's something else going on and what I discovered was actually there's a tremendous and a new kind of speculation going on by the largest banks in the world, who now perceive food as one of the last bastions of real value on Earth.

MARK COLVIN: Who's driving it then; which banks?

FRED KAUFMAN: They are the usual suspects. I mean of course Goldman Sachs was the first one who came up with this particular sort of food derivative in 1991, but of course as soon as Goldman had figured this thing out and it became very lucrative for them, they were followed by everybody; by JP Morgan, Chase, Deutsche and Barkleys and of course Lehman and AIG in America, which were part of the great financial debacle.

These financial products, what I call food derivatives, really hijacked the global wheat markets, because what they did is they put a tremendous demand pressure on wheat and on wheat futures that was exterior to any supply and demand natural pressure and these products were made, these are what are called long-only products, in other words they were made only to buy wheat futures. There's no mechanism in these products ever to sell and so of course when there's five times the year there's a tremendous demand of hundreds of billions of dollars to buy; this is of course going to have an effect on the global price.

MARK COLVIN: That's extraordinary; a product that you can buy but not sell?

FRED KAUFMAN: Yeah they're called the long only commodity index. And as I say Goldman masterminded this product in 1991 but of course the markets were not completely deregulated throughout the 1990s these are the American futures markets, and so what happened by the end of the 1990s is that the markets were deregulated and so large banking institutions were suddenly allowed to take huge stakes in food futures, which they had not been allowed to do since really before the Great Depression, since the financial regulations had been in place since then.

And after those position limits were given exemptions for these banks they went whole hog and then of course what happened was a perfect storm after 2005, with all the other derivatives and mortgage backed securities and stock markets and currencies tanking, where was a safe haven, where was a refuge? Well it was in commodities.

MARK COLVIN: Are these though like the derivatives that none of us understood before the global financial crisis but which led to it?

FRED KAUFMAN: Well you know what's so interesting is that actually a wheat future is the world's first financial derivative. So derivatives have been around for a long time and in fact these financial derivatives are not all bad in the sense that they help people who actually buy and sell wheat, the farmers and the processors, they help them manage their risks.

The problem with derivatives is when they subvert the market. In other words when they're no longer being used by what are called the bona fide hedgers, the people who actually have a stake in the markets, and this is what the banks have done. They realised, there's a way that we can eke money out of this mathematically and they eked out tremendous profits.

The current crop of deposed heads of state may have Wall Street to thank for their forced retirement. While the causes of helter-skelter commodity prices are complex -- natural disasters such as floods and droughts can play a big role, as can interest-rate shifts engineered by central bankers around the globe -- rapid-fire trading and speculation on the Street can magnify the problem.

In an era when vast pools of capital shift in and out of markets for basics like food and oil with the a few computer keystrokes, trading can cause prices to see-saw in ways that are sometimes harrowing and hard to control.

And this wouldn't be the first time. Less than three years ago, another food crisis was marked by rampant financial speculation that helped cause prices to skyrocket and prompted regulators to examine whether traders were also gaming oil prices. At the time, governments were also flush with enough cash to boost food subsidies and calm protesters. This time around, governments ravaged by the crisis lack the financial wherewithal to tamp down prices with subsidies.

Wall Street says that trading keeps food and energy markets liquid, allowing farmers to plan ahead when planting their crops or helping oil producers to know how much crude they can ship. Often, of course, that's true. But there also can be a more brutal calculus at work: big price spikes are good for traders holding onto wheat or oil contracts, allowing them to stuff more money into their wallets while families struggling to make ends meet thousands of miles away suddenly find that it's become too expensive to feed themselves.

The top lobby group for the derivatives industry, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, says it supports financial regulatory reform, but resists blame for pricing problems. "Although speculation is often blamed for causing problems in markets, the economic evidence shows that it is in fact a necessary activity that makes markets more liquid and efficient," ISDA Head of Research David Mengle wrote in a September memo.

Meanwhile, derivatives trading remains a largely under-regulated affair, even though such gambling was a major cause of the financial crisis in the United States and broadened the severity of the entire debacle.

It is now widely accepted that speculation helped fueled the price hikes of 2008: Economists at Princeton University, World Bank, the European Commission, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the International Monetary Fund, Rice University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Texas A&M University Agricultural and Food Policy Center have all published studies indicating that speculation played a role in 2008's commodity-price swings.

"Look, you have no market without speculators, so I like speculators," CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton told HuffPost. "But it's more like a casino right now than anything else."

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Charlie Gadhafi

Has anyone noticed that the news has been taken up recently by nonsensical rants from these two guys who sound a lot alike when it comes to self deluded self indulgent babbling.

"It's perfect. It's awesome. Every day is just filled with just wins. All we do is put wins in the record books," the 45-year-old actor said. "We win so radically in our underwear before our first cup of coffee, it's scary. People say it's lonely at the top, but I sure like the view." The embattled actor opened up his Beverly Hills home, which he now shares with his two girlfriends and his twin sons with soon-to-be ex-wife Brooke Mueller, to ABC News this weekend.


Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi appeared Monday either to not know that demonstrators in cities throughout Libya are calling for an end to his rule or not accept it, according to excerpts from the interview "No demonstration at all in the streets," he told ABC News and the BBC in a joint interview carried out at a restaurant in Tripoli, excerpts of which were posted on the BBC's website.Gadhafi, wearing sunglasses and clad in brown tribal clothing, refused to accept the reporter's assertion that they were not. "No. No one against us. Against me for what?"

Mind you at least the reporters talking to Gadhafi challenged him unlike the reporters who pandered to Charlie Sheen. Maybe Qaddafi should consider moving to Hollywood, where he would get the fawning respect of the entertainment industry that masquerades as news.

When Rossen said that Sheen was seen as crazy as he talked about being a warlock with tiger's blood, Sheen shrugged. "It's entertaining as hell. I'm laughing. ... Did they expect it to be a normal interview - conventional, boring? No, we're shaking a a tree. We're shaking all the trees."

Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi has told the BBC he is loved by all his people and has denied there have been any protests in Tripoli.

Col Gaddafi said that his people would die to protect him.

He laughed at the suggestion he would leave Libya and said that he felt betrayed by the world leaders who had urged him to quit.


Sunday, February 06, 2011

No Cops No Violence Egyptian Self Organization

When you line up rows and rows of riot cops, they have to have something to do. So when you have cops at demonstrations you inevitably have violence. Whether it was the recent G8 G20 meetings in Toronto or last Fridays rally in Liberation Square in Egypt, riot cops present attacked the protesters.

But once the Egyptian security forces were routed and forced off the streets of Cairo, and these are not merely riot cops, they are Gestapo like security forces, rather than violence and chaos, contrary to the media headlines, something new occurred. The demonstrations were peaceful, self organized.

A carnival atmosphere was reported until last Wednesday when these same cops, plus the criminals they let out of prison to intimidate the Egyptian masses, led pro government attacks on the demonstrators. By Friday the carnival atmosphere in Liberation square returned.

People are engaging in Potlach and Potluck, bringing food, drinks, blankets, medical supplies to share with their neighbours in Liberation square.In Liberation square the people have set up hospitals, latrines, and they clean up after themselves.

When the police left the neighbourhoods open to the criminals and thugs they released from prison, Egyptians organized neighbourhood self defense committees. The media call these vigilantes, but they are not, they are classic forms of anarchist self organization. Neighbours old, young, men, women, Christian, Muslim, have met each other and helped each other.

This is Anarchy in its truest form. The people organizing themselves, without the need of leaders. And there is no violence, the only violence comes from the State, trying desperately to hold on to power. The state needs chaos, it thrives on it, in order to justify the need for police.

But without the State or the police the people organize themselves for themselves.Just as the revolutionary proletariat in Spain did in the Thirties and the Russian people did in 1917.

If CNN and the internet had existed in 1917 the early days of the Russian Revolution or in Spain in 1936 the beginning of those revolutions would have looked like Cairo.

Saturday, November 01, 2008

FDR and the origins of State Capitalism

As I have written before state capitalism is a historic epoch. It saved capitalism from self destruction and from workers revolution. A revolution which was aborted and beccae a model for historic shift in the thirties to State Capitalism. It resulted from the shift from post WWI production to finance capital. The roaring twenties was a period of both Fordist expansion and expansion of finance capital. And that led to the crash of 1929.

It follows, therefore, that during a crisis the decline in commodity prices is always accompanied by a contraction in the volume of credit money. Since credit money consists of obligations assumed during a period of higher prices, this contraction is tantamount to a depreciation of credit money. As prices fall sales become increasingly difficult, and the obligations fall due at a time when the commodities remain unsold. Their payment becomes doubtful. The decline in prices and the stagnation of the market mean a reduction in the value of the credit money drawn against these commodities. This depreciation of credit instruments is always the essential element of the credit crisis which accompanies every business crisis.
Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital. A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development


In response to the crash of '29 Keyenes suggested that since the State creates capital in the form of money that it should intervene as the producer of credit and save the market. Just as it is now saving International Financial Capitalism from itself;

“The government intervention is not a government takeover,” Mr. Bush said. “Its purpose is not to weaken the free market. It is to preserve the free market.”

Which is exactly what FDR did after three years of Depression in the U.S. And which Republicans have spent the last sixty years denouncing, mistakenly, as Socialism. George W. Bush has ended his romance with Ronald Reagan to embrace the real politicks of FDR.

As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out;This new type of capitalism--properly called state-capitalism--persists to the present day in the ideological dress of 'socialism."


In fact it was a historic moment in Capitalism, when the financial exuberance of the market collapsed internationally, and the capitalist State came to the rescue, changing the nature of capitalism forever.

To sum up: the development of the productive forces of world capitalism has made gigantic strides in the last decades. The upper hand in the competitive struggle has everywhere been gained by large-scale production; it has consolidated the "magnates of capital" into an ironclad organisation, which has taken possession of the entire economic life. State power has become the domain of a financial oligarchy; the latter manages production which is tied up by the banks into one knot. This process of the organisation of production has proceeded from below; it has fortified itself within the framework of modern states, which have become an exact expression of the interests of finance capital. Every one of the capitalistically advanced "national economies" has turned into some kind of a "national" trust.N.I. Bukharin: Imperialism and World Economy Chapter VIII


State Capitalism in the thirties took on various forms, including Fascism, which itself is a form of nationalized corpratist state. Which once again right wing American politicos deliberatly confuse with Socialism. Whether it was FDR, or the populist movements of Prairie Socialism or Social Credit, state capitalism originated as a form of Distributionism, and is not socialism.At best it is about 'sharing the wealth', but not changing the fundametal nature of capitalism.

With the end of WWII the modern form of State Capitalism was born. It was internationalist and imperialist, reliant upon the Cold War to continue the prosperity of War Production. Both East and West were mutating into new forms of State Monopoly Capitalism; Stalinism in the East and the Military Industrial Complex in the West.

Contrary to pundits on the right, it is the historic mission of the capitalist state to save capitalism from itself, from its excesses. A lesson learned in the thirties. Socialism is not merely the state nationalizing or owning private assets, it is workers owning the means of production, not as taxpayers or consumers, but as producers. Anything less is merely another face of capitalism.

And capitalism is not a 'free' market, but the historic movement towards global expansion and the increasing development of large monopolies, whether they are private corportations or state controled ones. Thus China's development as evolving from State Capitalism into a form of Monopoly Capitalism can be explained in light of both Schumpter and Hilferding .

Lenin and Bukharin influenced by Hilferding saw Capitalism of their day evolving as a new form of Imperialism, which today we call Globalization. They also saw the beginings of a new form of Capitalism; Fordist rproduction financed by Banks which we call Monopoly Capitalism. However their view that socialism was public ownership of Monopoly Capitialism was coloured by their view of the State.

As Social Democrats they viewed control of the State as the essence of Socialism. When in reality, as the Russian Revolution, and later Revolutionary periods of workers uprisings; Spaing 1936-39, post WWII revolts in Poland/East Germany and Hungary, France in 1968 and Italy in 1973 would show, workers recolution was about direct workers control of production, workers self management, not state ownership or state management.

Which is why stripped of the rhetoric, the so called Socialism of China is simply another face of Monopoly capitalism. And the current financial crisis is a crisis of competing capitals, which may result in rebalancing the Imperialist powers globally. America is in debt to the Asian Tigers and the current economic crisis harkens us back to the crisis and reshaping of the world after 1914.

And like that period the elephant in the room is actually not the fiscal crisis at all but the solution to this crisis which is either Inter-Imperialist War or workers revolution. Already the sabre rattling and small wars and war like crisises are part of the background noise we read and hear everyday, despite the rollercoaster that is Wall Street.

Around the world food production is down, costs are up and last year there were thirty major revolts world wide around food. In China and around the developing capitalist economies the proletariat are revolting, each new product failure, collapsing mine, or major capitalist disaster is met with increasing distrust of the 'system', the 'estalishment'. The falling rate of profit that so called Marxist myth, has once again reared its ugly head.

And if the pending crash and recession are serious and deep enough even American Idol besotted American Consumers may suddenly realize they are actually proletarians, facing the imminant collapse of not only their Empire, but of their very livlihoods, and revolution will be on the agenda once again.

It was exactly this threat of world revolution that spurned FDR and the American capitalist establisment to try and stablize capitalism last time around. And for sixty years it succeeded, until the predictable happened again; capitalism melted down.

--------------------The Origins of State Capitalism-------------------------

"H.G. Wells was one of the few socialists who claimed to see big business, and multinational corporations, in particular, as the forerunners of a World Socialist State"

John Maynard Keynes wanted a global system of fair trade and fair development free of debt bondage and unemployment. His greatest ideas came up against a USA determined to rule the world, to hold off trade competitors at any cost, and to wring from the Third and Fourth worlds every ounce of wealth it could squeeze at whatever cost in human suffering.

Keynes was an enlightened capitalist. His life’s work is adequate proof of that. He was also an anti-Communist, quite openly. Nonetheless, his total defeat on international trade and monetary policy by the US demonstrates the fate of the enlightened, even of enlightened capitalists – even ones of outstanding genius up against corporate capitalist imperialism.

He was a member of the justly famous Bloomsbury group: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and a host of other luminous, talented, gifted people. Keynes connected as well with W.H. Auden, Rupert Brooke, Serge Diagilev, Nijinsky, Ottoline Morrell, G.B. Shaw, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, as well as every major economist and many of the most powerful politicians of his time.


Franklin Roosevelt Studied in Post-Soviet Russia

Primakov, now functioning as a senior figure in Russian policy circles, and an informal advisor to Putin, made a high-profile television appearance on an NTV Sunday evening program, Jan. 28. He said that Russia is being criticized today more sharply than at any time since the end of the Cold War, because of "subjective factors on the other side": expectations that Russia would be a towel boy for Western institutions, beginning in the early 1990s.

Primakov recalled how, when he was Prime Minister, "a representative of the International Monetary Fund came over and tried to impose certain models of development on us. They were trying to impose on us a system whereby the state was not to be involved in anything, everything was to be left at the mercy of the market, and the market was supposed to take care of everything."

As against the fallacies of the IMF, Primakov cited Franklin Roosevelt, saying: "No country has ever managed to extricate itself from an economic crisis situation without decisive interference of the state. This is what Roosevelt said, and this is what [Ludwig] Erhard in West Germany after the Second World War said, and he acted accordingly.... We have seen a turning point; at long last we have rejected the views of the people I would describe as dogmatic liberals who thought that the market would provide all the answers.... At present the state is increasingly involved in the economy. It does not mean that the state will revert to [the Soviet central planning agency] Gosplan, to issuing directives. But indicative planning and even industrial policy as such were also denied. Now, thank God, we have abandoned this, and this is not liked."

The current Russian deliberations about Roosevelt go far beyond any opportunistic considerations that might be involved, having to do with Putin's team seeking a third term for him. They bring to the front of the agenda, where they should be, three things.

First, a reminder of what a difference for the world, the quality of leadership in the United States of America makes.

Second, an understanding of how the collaboration of the United States and Russia, as two of the world's great nations, has shifted the course of history for the better, in the past, and could do so again. MGIMO, the venue for the Feb. 8 "New Deal" conference, recently issued an in-depth study of what a multipolar world could look like, and it by no means excluded the U.S.A. (See "Moscow Discussion: Can U.S.-Russian Relations Improve?" in EIR, Dec. 8, 2006.) And when his NTV interviewer asked if Russia should form a bloc with countries that have been ostracized, e.g., for seeking nuclear weapons, Yevgeni Primakov strongly condemned any notion of turning anti-American: "To form a bloc against America? I am against it.... There should be no anti-Americanism in our policy. We should look for ways to uphold our national interests without confrontation. This is Putin's course and I support him on that to the hilt."

Lastly, the American System economics of the Roosevelt period in the U.S.A., with all it implies for basing relations among nations on their mutual interest in the improvement of life for their populations, is exactly what needs to be brought into action in Russia, in the United States itself, and throughout the world.




'A new deal'

In his Presidential acceptance speech in 1932, Roosevelt promised "a new deal for the American people." The term was taken from a 1932 book by the same name, "A New Deal," written by Stuart Chase. That book rapidly disappeared from the shelves after Roosevelt's election. Its contents were the currency of White House economic policy discussion by Tugwell and other central planners around the new President.

Chase, along with Tugwell and Robert Williams Dunn, had jointly written a report, "Soviet Russia in the Second Decade," following their 1927 travel to Stalin's Russia.

In his 1932 book, "A New Deal," Chase argued that the earlier transition out of feudalism into what he called laissez-faire capitalism, was essentially over. The era of Trusts, monopolies, capital concentration by large banks, must now give way to central or collective planning. Chase wrote, "modern industrialism, because of its delicate specialization and interdependence, increasingly demands the collectivism of social control to keep its several parts from jamming. We find a government meeting that demand by continually widening the collective sector through direct ownership, operation and regulation of economic functions." He adds, "Competition is perhaps a good thing—in its proper place. Where is its proper place? Collectivism is beyond peradventure on the march."

Much of Chase's book was filled with fulsome praise for Stalin’s Russian model of central planning and its achievements, reflecting the fascination of numerous younger American intellectuals in the early 1930's.

In his "A New Deal," intended as a kind of blueprint for the Roosevelt campaign, Chase advocated what he called, "The Third Road, a road which runs neither to red dictatorship nor to black (business)." Chase proclaimed that under the Third Road, "private profit will not furnish the happy hunting ground it used to. State trusts, investment control, the curbing of speculation, will choke the muzzle of the more devastating forms." He also proposed drastic economic controls, an eerie harbinger of what would come to pass under the Federal Reserve of Alan Greenspan: "The Federal Reserve will take over the control of currency, the stock exchanges, banks and domestic investment... A new Foreign Trade Corporation will supervise exports, imports and foreign loans. Public works will undoubtedly be centralized in one department..."

Leaving no doubt that his sentiments were not market-oriented in any way, Chase concluded his tract by stating, "We can go on, however...without violent revolution...if we are willing to halt expansion, and organize industry on the basis of using to the full the equipment we now possess. This is the program of the third road. It is not an attempt to bolster up capitalism, it is frankly aimed at the destruction of capitalism, specifically in its most evil sense of ruthless expansion. The redistribution of national income, the sequestration of excess profits, and the control of new investment are all designed to that end." Little wonder that Chase was given a very discreet background policy role in FDR's inner circle. This was explosive stuff for the American public, even in an economic depression.

After leaving Harvard in 1910, Chase had joined the Boston Fabian Club and went to Chicago to work in Jane Addams' Hull House. As a young bureaucrat with the Federal Trade Commission in 1917, Chase investigated charges against Armour & Co. meatpackers. This all shaped his social outlook, and the Soviet model gave it justification in terms of national planning. Chase first met Roosevelt in 1932, but his role was more as a writer than as a policy administrator in the New Deal. He held several official consulting posts in the New Deal, but was mainly influential through his good friend, Rexford Tugwell, and through his writings.

Rexford Guy Tugwell, the Columbia University economics professor who traveled with Chase in 1927 to the Soviet Union, was the central person of this collectivist group around FDR. Indeed, when it emerged that Tugwell was one of the inner circle of the new President, business leaders and newspapers began to research Tugwell's economic writings, and came away shocked, leading some to nickname him, "Rexford the Red."

As newspaper journalists began digging into Tugwell's published writings for clues as to what policies the new President Roosevelt was being given by his top advisers, they became alarmed.

In a paper in the American Economic Review March 1932, Tugwell wrote, that the quest for profit no longer motivated business, but that instead it produced "insecurity" because profits were, "used for creating over-capacity in every profitable line; they are injected into money market operations in such ways as to contribute to inflation; they are used, most absurdly of all, as investments in the securities of other industries." Tugwell proceeded further in his frontal assault on the core of the market private enterprise system which had created such extraordinary wealth and improvement of general living standards over the previous decade: "Industry is thought of as rather a field for adventure...The truth is profits persuade us to speculate." When such comments were widely reported in the Nation's media, they did little to bolster businessmen's confidence in the new Administration.

In discussing a proposal to introduce national economic planning, Tugwell wrote in 1932, "it seems altogether likely that we shall set up, and soon, such a consultative body...The day on which it comes into existence will be a dangerous one for business...There may be a long and lingering death (of the private profit enterprise—w.e.), but it must be regarded as inevitable." Private business, Tugwell added, "would logically be required to disappear. This is not an overstatement for the sake of emphasis; it is literally meant."

In October 1932, that is, one month before FDR's election, Rexford Guy Tugwell went on to formulate a six-point program for dealing with the depression crisis. Tugwell opposed wage cuts, then a common method of corporate cost cutting. He insisted, however, on reducing retail prices, and called for "drastic income and inheritance taxes," as well as "avoidance of budgetary deficits and monetary inflation." Obviously businesses could not possibly simultaneously maintain wage levels, reduce prices, and pay increased taxes, without risking bankruptcy in such crisis times. To this, Tugwell advocated, "the taking over by the government of any necessary enterprises which refuse to function when their profits are absorbed by taxation."

In brief, Tugwell's program, and this was planed, would first make it impossible for business to function, then bring those failed businesses under nationalization or state ownership. Tugwell concluded his 1932 program, "So long as prices, profits and individual production programs are at the disposal of independent business executives, our system will continue to show much the same faults as it displays at present." Tugwell endorsed Norman Thomas' League for Industrial Democracy program which called for a, "new social order based on production for use, not for profit."

Tugwell was strategically placed in 1933 as Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, just under his recommended choice of Secretary of Agriculture, Iowa farm editor, Henry A. Wallace. Tugwell continued in the early months to have regular access to his old friend, FDR as well.

Rudolf Hilferding and the total state.

Before World War I, Hilferding followed the traditional Marxist view that identified the executive branch of the modern state as a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." He regarded the state as the "conscious organ of [a] commodity producing society" which reached the height of its power in the era of finance capital. For Hilferding the most important features of "modern capitalism" were "those processes of concentration which, on the one hand eliminate free competition' through the formation of cartels and trust, and on the other bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship." Through this relationship, he argued, capital assumed the form of finance capital which, "in its maturity, is the highest stage of concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the capitalist oligarchy."(3) Hilferding also thought that the development of finance capital created the economic preconditions for socialism, which could be achieved only through the seizure of political power. Workers, organized in trade unions and in the SPD, could use the state to wrest large-scale industry from the control of finance capital and transform it into public property. He thought that it was possible for the working class to win state power through electoral means, but that capitalist suppression of workers' rights or a major war between rival capitalist powers could lead to violent revolution. Nevertheless, he did not argue that the SPD itself should "make" the workers' revolution.(4) World War I and its aftermath forced Hilferding to revise his views on the relationship between Social Democracy and the state. In 1918 he joined the anti-war Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), in which he supported the socialization of key industrial sectors, the dismantling of the army and bureaucracy, and the democratization of German politics. By 1921, however, he was convinced that the socialist revolution had failed. The splintering of the workers' parties, the SPDs counterrevolutionary actions, and the political "immaturity" of the working class combined to halt Germany's social and economic tranformation. For Hilferding defending whatever democratic gains the revolution had made against the growing strength of Germany's reactionary right wing became the socialist movement's main task and he strongly supported the USPD's reunification with the SPD in 1922.(5) Hilferding steadfastly advocated the parliamentary road to socialism after 1922, and he justified this strategy with an analysis of contemporary changes in the economic and political situation both at home and abroad. He asserted that the war had accelerated the economic processes he had identified prior to 1914. The expansion and further concentration of capital, the formation of cartels and trusts, the increasing influence of finance capital, and the state's intervention in the economy were bringing the era of capital competition to a close. A new system, characterized by economic regulation and planned production, was developing. If left undisturbed, this process would result in a hierarchical social order in which the economy was organized, but the ownership of the means of production remained in private hands. Hilferding called this system "organized capitalism." He saw in its stability and its enhanced use of planning the potential for a socialist planned economy.(6) Social Democracy's task, Hilferding believed, was to educate workers and to fight for the democratization of production. In his view, the republic gave the working class real access to political power because its institutions were subject to the will of the voters.

Permanent Revolution 08 Revolutionary theory and imperialism

In his 1910 book, Finance Capital,4 Hilferding examined the latest developments in the capitalist mode of production. He explained how the process of concentration and centralisation of capital, which Marx outlined, had grown apace in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This had given rise to the domination of the economy by huge cartels or trusts rather than small scale enterprises so typical of the era of “free competition capitalism”. This he called monopoly capitalism, a new stage in the development of capitalism.The reason that the banks had come to dominate in this way was due in the first instance to changes within capitalist production itself. The rise in the organic composition of capital had lengthened turnover time (i.e. the length of time it takes for machinery and plant to wear out and transfer its value completely through several cycles of production) and so reduced the adaptability of firms to short-run cyclical ups and downs. To get over the effects of short term fluctuations in demand the firms turned more and more to the banks and the provision of credit; they also needed credit to finance the ever larger sums necessary for new investment in machinery. As a result of this development the banks themselves began to commit huge sums to industry for ever longer periods of time. As a consequence they could not move capital about freely to take advantage of every short term fluctuation in the rate of profit between sectors. This meant, in turn, that the banks had an interest in the formation of cartels and trusts so as to prevent as far as possible fluctuations in output and demand putting their huge credits at risk. Hilferding summarised the process thus:“The most characteristic features of ‘modern’ capitalism are those processes of concentration which, on the one hand, ‘eliminate free competition’ through the formation of cartels and trusts, and on the other, bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship. Through this relationship . . . capital assumes the form of finance capital, its supreme and most abstract expression.” 5Thus a central feature of this new stage was the growth of banking monopolies which in the course of their development had come to dominate, and even fuse with, the key sectors of industrial capitalism to form “finance capitalism”.A natural consequence of the concentration of capital in this way was that huge amounts of machinery and plant (constant capital) more and more outweighed the growth of variable capital (i.e. the amount advanced to buy wages). This growth in the “organic composition of capital” led inexorably to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF), as Marx had explained in Capital.On the basis of this law he explained how finance capital uses its power to offset this law. The huge monopolies can cut output within certain limits in order to maintain prices and profits; they can influence the national governments to erect tariffs preventing foreign monopoly capital entering their markets to compete with and undercut them; they can even keep prices in the internal market high and practise “dumping” at lower prices in colonial or semi-colonial markets.But for Hilferding the key factor which explained the relatively crisis-free expansion of monopoly capital which marked the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth was the export of capital to foreign countries. This, for Hilferding, was the root of the explanation of the long boom of 1895-1913. Following Marx in Capital he illustrated the way in which the export of capital to countries with a lower organic composition of capital and higher rate of profit overcomes the effect of crises due to the operation of the law of the TRPF:“The precondition for the export of capital is the variation in the rate of profit, and the export of capital is the means of equalising regional rates of profit. The level of profit depends upon the organic composition of capital, that is to say upon the degree of capitalist development.” 6Hilferding explained that the policy of finance capital which it pursues to secure external markets for sales, capital investment, access to raw materials and so on is the policy of imperialism. Moreover, on the basis of the recent developments in the growth of monopoly capital and faced with the internal contradictions of this growth, “capital can pursue no other policy than that of imperialism”

.7Rudolf Hilferding and 'the stability of capitalism' --

The real danger comes from WITHIN scientific socialism--Rudolf Hilferding the orthodox [Marxist], not Eduard Bernstein(4), the revisionist. Hilferding sees the new stage of capitalism in its financial razzle-dazzle appearance and becomes enamored of its capacity to “unify” commercial, industrial, and financial interests [instead of being] concretely aware of the greater contradictions and antagonisms of the new monopoly stage of capitalism.
I wish to stress the seeming orthodoxy of Hilferding. No one, absolutely no one--not the firebrand Rosa Luxemburg, nor the strict realist V.I. Lenin, and I dare say not Hilferding himself--knew that what he was doing with his theory of finance capitalism was bringing in the first theory of retrogressionism [into Marxism]....Even with over four decades of hindsight, and much, hard thinking on the subject, I have first now realized that what Hilferding was SEEING and analyzing (and it took Nikolai Bukharin’s theory of the transition period to bring it home to me)(5) was the STABILITY OF CAPITALISM.
Watch the orthodoxy though: Hilferding is proposing no revisionism. The automatic fall of capitalism is still expected and the inevitability of socialism in a mechanistic sort of way is also held to tightly. BUT rather than seeing monopoly as a transition into opposite of a previous stage, monopoly is treated more like simple large-scale production. THAT IS THE KEY. For if it is not a transition into opposite of a fundamental attribute of capitalism, then CAPITALISM’S ORGANIZATION and centralization, monopolization’s appearance as the “emergence of SOCIAL control”...is in fact superseded socialism. Or more precisely, [Hilferding] retrogresses back to home base: the equilibrium of capitalist production.
By viewing the whole development of trusts and cartels not from within the factory, but from “society,” that is, the market, Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation--the DEGRADATION of the proletariat along with capitalist accumulation--has no meaning for Hilferding. Neither does Marx’s postulate “private production without the control of private property” make any imprint on Hilferding.(6) And of course labor remains a unity; there is not any inkling of an aristocracy of labor arising out of the monopolization and degradation and imperialism.
You must remember that even with the outbreak of World War I, but before Lenin did his own analysis [of imperialism in 1915], he introduced Bukharin’s WORLD ECONOMY AND IMPERIALISM which said pretty much the same thing as Hilferding. All this I want to repeat again and again in order to emphasize the orthodoxy, in order to show that [even when] all the formulae are adhered to the loss of revolutionary perspective not yet in a positive way but in the negative of awe before the EXISTENT, continued capitalism can be very, very deceiving. If it was [deceiving] to Lenin we better watch it all the time.
What in truth emerges from a close study of Hilferding...is that the new generation of Marxists following Engels’ death [in 1895], placed within growing, centralized production, SAW MONOPOLY NOT AS A FETER BUT RATHER AS AN ORGANIZING FORCE OF PRODUCTION. So that the Second International, which had openly rejected Bernsteinism and gradualness, accepted Hilferdingism. That meant tacit acceptance of the capacity of capital to gain a certain “stability,” to modify its anarchism as a “constant” feature. They saw in [this] new stage not a TRANSITION to a higher form, but something in itself already higher, although “bad.”
Now the person who made this all clear to me was Bukharin, that logical extension of Hilferding, blown into the THEORY of counter-revolution right within the first workers’ state. It is to him that we must turn. Here too for our generation it is correct to view him with hindsight, precisely because his is “only” theory that will become full-blown actual counter-revolution with Stalin supplying it an objective base.
Keep in mind therefore the three actual stages of capitalist production for the three decades since the publication of Bukharin’s ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD:
l) 1920-30: Taylorism plus Fordism, that is, the discovery of the [assembly] belt line and with it the necessity for a fascistic order in the factory. It may be “vulgar” to call gangsters part of the intelligentsia, but that is the genuine face of “social control” when the masses themselves do not control [production]. Marx’s view of the planned despotism plus the industrial ARMY of managers, foreman, etc. has moved from theory to such EVERYDAY practice that every worker knows it in his bones; he needs no ghost come from the grave to tell him THAT....
2) 1930-40: General crisis; New Dealism where “everybody” allegedly administers, and fascism where openly only the elite do, both in mortal combat with the CIO and the general sit-down strikes (which made a true joke of private property) for “social control.” Plan, plan, plans: National Five-Year Plans in Russia, Germany, Japan; John Maynard Keynes, the New Deal, technocracy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, public works.
3) 1940-50: Monopolization has been transformed into its opposite, statification. (What greater scope for a modern Moliere, to take those weighty volumes of the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC)(7) proving monopolization and how strangling it is, and then on the eve of World War II they are finally published in full, prefaced by a call for full mobilization which shows that monopolization plus Hitlerism is child’s play as compared to American statification.)
End of World War II, “end” of fascism and state-private-monopoly rule. Complete state-capitalism reaching its tentacles from Russia into Eastern Europe, engulfing Britain, seeping into Western Europe and peering out of the U.S. TOTAL, GLOBAL PLANS: Marshall, Molotov, Monnet, Schumann, Truman’s Point 4.(8) Keynes is dead; long live the state plan. The intelligentsia in Russia, the Social Democratic labor bureaucracy elsewhere, all in mortal combat with the Resistance, with the Warsaw [uprising](9), with general strikes and colonial revolutions. One strangles the revolution “for” the masses’ own good, and the other for “democracy’s” shadow.


Did Hilferding Influence Schumpeter?

The thesis regarding the limited ability of free competition to promote
technological progress is supposed, for both theoreticians, to be a conclusion drawn
from past historical experience. More precisely, Schumpeter argued that the
capitalist era could be divided into two distinct periods (Screpanti and Zamagni
1993, pp. 243ff.): (a) The era of ‘competitive capitalism’ when small enterprises
dominated, an era which declines in the 1880s and (b), the era of monopolistic or
‘big-business capitalism’, during which large enterprises, trusts and cartels
dominated, starting roughly from the 1880s and having consolidated its fully
fledged form by the time Schumpeter’s book was written.
For Hilferding, too, the elimination of free competition and monopolies
came, historically, in a similar way: ‘Finance capital signifies the unification of
capital. The previously separate spheres of industrial, commercial and bank capital
are brought under the common direction of high finance, in which the masters of
industry and of the banks are united in a close personal association’, and
consequently: ‘The basis of this association is the elimination of free competition
among individual capitalists by the large monopolistic combines’ (Hilferding 1910,
p. 301, emphasis added). Thus, ‘it is also clear that monopolistic combines will
control the market’ (ibid., p. 193).
We have seen, so far, that for both theoreticians the real incentive for
innovation was the ability of monopolistic formations – deriving from their noncompetitive
nature – to create extra profits. Also, the elimination of free
competition was regarded, by both economists, as the main characteristic of an era
during which large enterprises, trusts and cartels dominated, and which attained its
typical characteristics around 1900.

As far as the other aspect of the Schumpeterian hypothesis is concerned,
namely that perfect competition is an unstable market structure where only large
enterprises can push technological progress forward, the views of both theoreticians
are strikingly similar. For Schumpeter, once big corporations are formed, the
imperfectly competitive market structure becomes stable, as large firms become
increasingly conducive to technological progress and change:9 ‘There are superior
methods available to the monopolist which either are not available at all to a crowd
of competitors or are not available to them so readily’ (Schumpeter 1942, p. 101).
‘The perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit .… ousts the small or mediumsized
firm’ (ibid., p. 134). On the same line of argument, the large firm is
considered to possess the ability to attract superior ‘brains’, to secure a high
financial standing (ibid., p. 110), and to deploy an array of practices to protect its
risk-bearing investments.
In his Finance Capital, Hilferding had developed a similar approach:
The expansion of the capitalist enterprise which has been converted into
a corporation .… can now conform simply with the demands of
technology. The introduction of new machinery, the assimilation of
related branches of production, the exploitation of patents, now takes
place …. from the standpoint of their technical and economic suitability
.… Business opportunities can be exploited more effectively, more
thoroughly, and more quickly .… A corporation .… is able, therefore,
to organize its plant according to purely technical considerations,
whereas the individual entrepreneur is always restricted .… The
corporation can thus be equipped in a technically superior fashion, and
what is just as important, can maintain this technical superiority. This
also means that the corporation can install new technology and labour
saving processes before they come into general use, and hence produce
on a large scale, and with improved, modern techniques, thus gaining
an extra profit, as compared with the individually owned enterprise.
(ibid., pp.123-4)
Consequently, ‘The introduction of improved techniques .… [benefits] the
tightly organized cartels and trusts. [T]he largest concerns introduce the
improvements and expand their production’ (ibid., p. 233).
Hilferding repeatedly affirmed the position that the big corporation is able
to create the conditions which may assure its market supremacy as well as its extra
profits for a long period: ‘An industrial enterprise which enjoys technical and
economic superiority can count upon dominating the market after a successful
competitive struggle, can increase its sales, and after eliminating its competitors,
rake in extra profits over a long period’ (ibid., p. 191).
Thus Hilferding expressed what we could codify as ‘Hilferding’s
hypothesis’, namely the thesis that ‘the size and technical equipment of the
monopolistic combination ensure its superiority’ (ibid., p. 201), which is, in general
terms, very similar to ‘Schumpeter’s hypothesis’, written thirty-two years after
Hilferding: ‘large firms with considerable market power, rather than perfectly
competitive firms were the “most powerful engine of technological progress”’
(Schumpeter 1942, p. 106). The obvious similarity of ideas of both theoreticians on
this specific issue needs no further comment.
Further to the above, Hilferding introduced, in his Finance Capital, the
notion of a ‘latest phase’ of capitalism, which is characterised by the following
main features: the formation of monopolistic enterprises, which put aside capitalist

competition; the fusion of bank and industrial capital, leading to the formation of
finance capital, which is considered to be the ultimate form of capital; the
subordination of the state to monopolies and to finance capital; and, finally, the
formation of an expansionist policy of colonial annexations and war.10
Hilferding regarded capital exports as an inherent characteristic of
capitalism in its ‘latest’, monopolistic, stage, rooted in the ‘cartelisation and
trustification’ of the economy and the need ‘to annex neutral foreign markets ....
above all overseas colonial territories’ (Hilferding 1910, pp. 326, 328).
Finance capital, as Hilferding defined it, is advanced to industrial
capitalists who use it. This ‘new’ concept is also seen as the linking between
capitalism’s ‘latest’ stage and imperialism (Winslow 1931, p. 727). The colonies
were regarded as the outlets for the export of finance capital. In this sense, finance
capital was considered to be helpless without political and military support: ‘capital
export works for an imperialistic policy’ (Hilferding 1910, p. 406) since it ‘does not
want freedom, but domination’ (ibid., p. 426). Imperialism is, thus, a tendency to
expansion of a developed capitalist power, a tendency created, in the last instance,
by economic processes, but also supported by political processes. It is argued,
therefore, that imperialism, which is capitalist rivalry at its highest level, leads to
war and mutual destruction of the capitalist powers.



SEE:

No Austrians In Foxholes

State Capitalism in the USSR

China: The Truimph of State Capitalism

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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

May 1968

Forty years ago this month the world changed with students and workers taking to the streets of Paris to call for revolution. Capitalism was at the height of its post war boom yet these folks were calling for its overthrow. A conference was held this month in England to celebrate 1968 And All That.




SEE:

MLK Day

Forty Years Ago

40 Years Later; The Society of the Spectacle



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Saturday, March 08, 2008

100 Years Of Bread and Roses


Today marks the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day one of two Internationalist Workers Holidays begun in the United States. And it is one that recognized women as workers, that as workers women's needs and rights are key to all our struggles hence the term Bread and Roses.

Women have led all revolutions through out modern history beginning as far back as the 14th Century with bread riots. Bread riots would become a revolutionary phenomena through out the next several hundred years in England and Europe.

It would be bread riots of women who would lead the French Revolution and again the Paris Commune, led by the anarchist Louise Michel.

Bread riots occurred in America during the Civil War.

It would be the mass womens protest and bread riots in Russia in 1917 that led to the Revolution there. The World Socialist Revolution had begun and two of its outstanding leaders were Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, both who opposed Lenin's concept of a party of professional revolutionaries leading the revolution and called for mass organizations of the working class. Their feminist Marxism was embraced by another great woman leader of the Russian Revolution; Alexandra Kollontai.

Women began the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 by shutting down the phone exchange.
Women began the Winnipeg general sympathetic strike. At 7:00 a.m. on the morning of Thursday, May 15, 1919, five hundred telephone operators punched out at the end of their shifts. No other workers came in to replace them. Ninety percent of these operators were women, so women represented the vast majority of the first group of workers to begin the city-wide sympathetic strike in support of the already striking metal and building trades workers. At 11:00 a.m., the official starting point of the strike, workers began to pour out from shops, factories and offices to meet at Portage and Main. Streetcars dropped off their passengers and by noon all cars were in their barns. Workers left rail yards, restaurants and theatres. Firemen left their stations. Ninety-four of ninety-six unions answered the strike call. Only the police and typographers stayed on their jobs. Within the first twenty-four hours of the strike call, more than 25,000 workers had walked away from their positions. One-half of them were not members of any trade union. By the end of May 15, Winnipeg was virtually shut down.


Again it would be mass demonstrations of women against the Shah of Iran that would lead to the ill fated Iranian revolution.

Today with a food crisis due to globalization bread riots are returning.

When women mobilize enmass history is made.

March is Women's History Month, March 8 is International Women's Day (IWD), and March 5 is the birthday of the revolutionary Polish theorist and leader of the 1919 German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg. It was Rosa Luxemburg's close friend and comrade, Clara Zetkin, who proposed an International Women's Day (IWD) to the Second International, first celebrated in 1911.

Clara Zetkin, secretary of the International Socialist Women's Organization (ISWO), proposed this date during a conference in Copenhagen because it was the anniversary of a 1908 women workers' demonstration at Rutgers Square on Manhattan's Lower East Side that demanded the right to vote and the creation of a needle trades union.

The demonstration was so successful that the ISWO decided to emulate it and March 8 became the day that millions of women and men around the world celebrated the struggle for women's equality.

Actually, International Women's Day is one of two working class holidays "born in the USA." The other is May Day, which commemorates Chicago's Haymarket martyrs in the struggle for an eight-hour day.




Clara Zetkin

From My Memorandum Book


“Agitation and propaganda work among women, their awakening and revolutionisation, is regarded as an incidental matter, as an affair which only concerns women comrades. They alone are reproached because work in that direction does not proceed more quickly and more vigorously. That is wrong, quite wrong! Real separatism and as the French say, feminism à la rebours, feminism upside down! What is at the basis of the incorrect attitude of our national sections? In the final analysis it is nothing but an under-estimation of woman and her work. Yes, indeed! Unfortunately it is still true to say of many of our comrades, ‘scratch a communist and find a philistine’. 0f course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards women. Could there be a more damning proof of this than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow worn out In petty, monotonous household work, their strength and time dissipated and wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly, their will weakened! Of course, I am not speaking of the ladies of the bourgeoisie who shove on to servants the responsibility for all household work, including the care of children. What I am saying applies to the overwhelming majority of women, to the wives of workers and to those who stand all day in a factory.

“So few men – even among the proletariat – realise how much effort and trouble they could save women, even quite do away with, if they were to lend a hand in ‘women’s work’. But no, that is contrary to the ‘rights and dignity of a man’. They want their peace and comfort. The home life of the woman is a daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. The old master right of the man still lives in secret. His slave takes her revenge, also secretly. The backwardness of women, their lack of understanding for the revolutionary ideals of the man decrease his joy and determination in fighting. They are like little worms which, unseen, slowly but surely, rot and corrode. I know the life of the worker, and not only from books. Our communist work among the women, our political work, embraces a great deal of educational work among men. We must root out the old ‘master’ idea to its last and smallest root, in the Party and among the masses. That is one of our political tasks, just as is the urgently necessary task of forming a staff of men and women comrades, well trained in theory and practice, to carry on Party activity among working women.”

International Women


Bread and Roses

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!

As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.

As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.

As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.

Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses

SEE:

IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Feminizing the Proletariat




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