Letter from the US: The racist Charleston massacre has clear political roots

Barry Sheppard writes a Letter from the US: The racist Charleston massacre has clear political roots.

Racism, as an idea, is not the cause of the oppression and exploitation of Blacks, with the result that it is not possible to simply solve problem by changing people's minds. Rather than the cause, racists ideas are the result of Black oppression — and its ideological justification.

Racism is a useful tool for the capitalist ruling class to divide and weaken the working class.

The government maintains the system of national oppression evident in the police, courts and jails enforcement of it, but at the same time it pretends the US is no longer a racist society. The result is apparently contradictory government stances.

It is this system that spawns the racism that grips the minds of the Dylann Roofs of this world.

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Since 2002, Right-wing White Terrorists have Killed More Americans Than Muslim Extremists

Cenk Uygur writes that Since 2002, Right-wing White Terrorists have Killed More Americans Than Muslim Extremists.

But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police.

In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism

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Once again, a white gunman is a deranged individual while a non-white one is a terrorist. Thus, the media continues to construct racism.

And, yet, the threat is always from the non-white people. The objective reality of white terrorism stands in contrast to the subjective reality of non-white terrorism.

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The Education-Deficit Does Not Explain Rising Inequality

Mark Thoma posts an extract from Discussion of Matthew Rognlie: "Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share": The Honest Broker for the Week of June 14, 2015, b J. Bradford DeLong.

So what, then, is going on and driving the sharp rise in inequality, if not some interaction between our education policy on the one hand and the continued progress of technology on the other? Thomas Piketty (2014) has a guess. Piketty guesses that the real explanation is that 1914-1980 is the anomaly. Without great political disturbances, wealth accumulates, concentrates, and dominates. The inequality trends we have seen over the past generation are simply a return to the normal pattern of income distribution in an industrialized market economy in which productivity growth is not unusually fast and political, depression, and military shocks not unusually large and prevalent. …

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So, economists are rediscovering the key insights of Karl Marx about Capital.

What is also missing from Piketty's insight is that the period of 1917-89 was when an alternative political and economic system severely challenged the legitimacy and hegemony of Capitalism. This system crushed Nazi Fascism by destroying its armies at Stalingrad, Kursk, Belorussia, and Berlin.

While this system of Russian Socialism was fatally flawed through the dominance of the bureaucracy of the central planning, it was viable for over seventy (70) years. A feudal country of peasants was rapidly modernised to a point that it could crush the second largest industrialised country in the world: Nazi Germany.

The USSR also challenged the USA in the realm of scientific advance and research. Remember the space race!

The October Revolution was indeed one of the great political disturbances.

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The left, & social change

Chris Dillow writes about The left, & social change.

Perhaps another technology-induced social change is occuring. For example, the collapse in the cost of storing and transmitting information makes dencentralization — worker control — feasible where previously there was hierarchy. And lower capital requirements might be undermining the monopoly power of big capitalism in favour of smaller companies. We can encourage this for example by spending our money at indepedent coffee shops, craft breweries, worker coops or through P2P lending rather than at capitalist firms.  

What I'm saying here is that the transition to a better society might occur not (just) by protesting or waiting for a big bang revolution, but as a result of countless small individual actions, which might have echoes throughout society.  Obviously, I don't know what all these actions should be — but if the left can apply millions of brains to the question, it might find some answers.

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The technology-induced social change that is occurring in the complete automation of Department II. Workers who perform rote tasks are going to lose their livelihoods.

The workers who survive this purge are going to have skills and abilities are difficult to automate, or are of such a nature that automation devalues the product to the consumer. For example, an artist who paints by numbers can be replaced a machine, while an artist exceeds their customer's expectations is more likely to be employed. Another example is a programmer who codes through using Google, can be replaced by a program that does the same thing. Whereas a programmer who solves the problem that a customer has, is more likely to be employed.

I think that the sifting machine of Capitalism will favour the development of workers who think and see beyond their job. Besides being harder to replace by machines, they will develop the ability to stay ahead of the changing game.

The natural selection of the Capitalist workplace will workers develop their consciousness about the world around them as theories are rapidly destroyed in the furnace of Capitalism.

Workers who come together in revolutionary parties will be available to do develop faster through access to tested Marxist theory and practice. As these parties growth, the more ideas are generated and tested against reality until viable roads to Socialism are constructed.

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Liberal feminism's limits exposed

Meave Noonan writes that Liberal feminism's limits exposed.

A key weakness of the book is its relative silence around class, and failure to properly situate women’s oppression within the context of capitalism. A more sustained, overarching emphasis on the intersection of class with sexism, racism and other axes of oppression would help to illustrate the complex ways in which the system of capitalist accumulation benefits from the continued subjugation of women and other oppressed groups.

The changing nature of employment under neoliberalism is an issue which bears heavily on women, and it is therefore somewhat surprising that the book does not offer a more focused discussion of this issue.

Women are among those worst affected by the predominance of insecure work. The at-times outright contempt shown by both sides of Australian parliamentary politics for the disadvantage faced by single, working-class mothers casts the limits of liberal feminism into sharp relief.

The radical potential of feminist thought and action, if it is to achieve meaningful social change for all women, must be connected to the wider aim of creating a more just, egalitarian society.

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This requires the non-capitalists to see past the great national security swindle and be prepared to see why alliances for socialism must be built.

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Antonio Gramsci: Why alliances for socialism must be built

Bill Bonnar reflects on Antonio Gramsci: Why alliances for socialism must be built.

When Britain had an industrial economy this was a fairly straight forward question. Britain had a large working class centred on industry and organised through the trade union movement. This created the labour movement including a mass party of the working class; the Labour Party or in Italy; the Italian Communist Party.

For socialists the labour movement was the vehicle for socialism and their role was to work within that movement moving it to the left and resulting in the election of a left government. The only tactical discussion was whether socialists should work within the mass party of the working class or build a distinctive socialist party within the movement.

That was then. Today Britain is an archetypal post-industrial society. In Scotland the overwhelming majority of workers either work in the public sector or the retail and financial sectors. Manufacturing industry represents only a small proportion of the economy. The result is that the organised working class is much smaller and less influential than before and has largely lost its industrial base.

It alone can no longer be the same vehicle for socialist change it was in the past. It has to forge alliances with wider social forces seeking to build a broad based alliance against capitalism.

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The question is: how to build a revolutionary party without a proletariat? These days, the proletariat really exists in the developing world. Even there automation is dissolving the proletariat.

Automation is throwing up a new, but predicted, crisis in Capitalism: the extinguishment of profit. Without surplus value from exploited workers, there can be no profits. Without profits, Capitalism grinds to a halt.

Have we missed the revolutionary opportunity to create a Socialist society based on a viable working class? The means of production are becoming robots, and they are property that are owned by Capitalists.

Society has no future need for workers. Without workers, there can be no revolution. Without workers, there are no consumers.

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The great national security swindle

Tony Iltis debunks The great national security swindle.

The number of fatalities from terrorist attacks in Australia is tiny. Even taking into account Australians killed overseas, such as those killed in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing, there are far greater threats to Australian lives.

Safe Work Australia reported: “As at 26 May 2015, 65 Australian workers have been killed while at work” this year, and 38 women have been killed in domestic violence attacks since the start of the year.

The same state and federal governments that find unlimited resources to fund draconian “anti-terror” policing and prosecutions are unable to fund accommodation for women fleeing partner and ex-partner violence. “In March, there were 33,933 people on the Victorian public housing waiting list, with 9556 eligible for 'early' urgent housing, which includes many who have suffered family violence,” the May 22 Age said.

The Abbott government has responded to this threat to Australians' lives by further cutting funding to women's services and housing.

The government's response to the threat to Australians' lives from workplace accidents has been to foreshadow a further round of criminalisation of trade unions, particularly construction workers' unions, for attempting to protect occupational health and safety.

The Abbott government's attempts to convince Australians that they are threatened by terrorists was helped by the opening of the inquest into the deaths of Man Haron Monis and two hostages when he hijacked a Sydney cafe in December.

However, so far the evidence presented to the inquest suggests that Monis was an attention-seeking psychopath with a shotgun rather than an ideologically motivated terrorist.

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The issues of violence against women and the sacrifice of safety for profits do rank on the Capitalist agenda. The perpetrators are among the supporters of Capitalism: violent men and ruthless business owners. One does not attack one's own supporters.

Yet, the ruling class wants an enemy that we are all frightened of so that we need them to protect us.

We need to discover who the real enemy is.

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Introducing the Zero Labor Factory (90% Free Actually); Robots at Chili's, Applebees, Panera

Mike Shedlock writes about Introducing the Zero Labor Factory (90% Free Actually); Robots at Chili's, Applebees, Panera.

There is no shortage of labor. There is no shortage of skills either. Rather, there is a shortage of people willing to work for what factory owners are willing to pay.

And with cheap money everywhere you look, there is plenty of money at low rates to buy robots.

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Now, we are entering another crisis in Capitalism: the elimination of profits through the elimination of labour in Department II. Robots cannot be exploited to provide surplus value which is the origin of profit in a Capitalist system.

Robots work as fast as they are able. You cannot force robots to work faster or longer. Robots are unexploitable.

And the reduction in the labour forces means that there are less consumers able to buy the cheaper goods. Thus, Capitalists will find it harder to convert commodities into cash.

In a Communist society, all of these automated factories would be owned by the whole of society and the goods produced would be available to all as needed. Profit is no longer needed to keep the economy going.

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The vision thing

Chris Dillow writes about The vision thing.

One thing makes me hopeful — that this election was not a victory for austerity. The two main austerity parties — Tories and LibDems — saw their share of the vote fall by 14.4 percentage points whilst the two clearest anti-austerity parties (SNP and Greens) gained a combined 5.9 percentage points.  

On the other hand, though, I'm pessimistic. Ukip's success* shows that there is also public support for anti-market policies: Ukippers (and indeed many other voters) favour (pdf) controls on prices and rents as well as on immigration. And whilst a slogan "we'll put you in control" should in theory be a popular and coherent way of promoting worker democracy, I see very little public demand for it.

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I think the difference between austerity in Greece and the UK is that austerity in Greece was an existental crisis. Austerity there was threatening the idea of Greece. Whereas in the UK, austerity was a way of keeping the super-rich happy enough to stay there in order to spend enough to keep some of the people happy.

It is probably very early in the development of the workers' consciousness in places like the UK to talk about worker democracy. However, the workers in places like Venezuela can see the benefit of this through the nearness of Cuba and the effects in their daily lives. Thus, they are developing their consciousness at a faster pace.

This is probably due to that the effects of colonialism was never disguised in Venezuela as it was in the UK. Only a heavy hand of the military there kept things under control. Now that the military has aligned with the workers, there is an awakening of how society can be better organized.

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Guantanamo horrors shift military men's views

Phil Shannon writes that Guantanamo horrors shift military men's views.

The price Hicks was to pay for an end to his existence of fear, pain and despair, however, was the tag of “convicted terrorist”. This was despite Hicks’ guilty plea being coerced under extreme duress and, this year, ruled void in the US courts.

Mori, who retired from the military in 2012 and joined the social justice section of an Australian law firm, played a vital role in justice for Hicks. But he reminds the readers of his valuable book that “it was they, the Australian public, who got David Hicks out. I hope that the people of Australia never forget that.”

Like Mori, Sergeant Joe Hickman was “a patriotic American” and he was proud to finally get to “meet the enemy” as a guard in Guantanamo in 2006.

“Keeping terrorists locked up was an important job,” Hickman writes. But, like Mori, he also had standards, namely a belief in “basic American principles of decency”, even towards those he had been told were “evil men bent on destroying our country”.

Decency, however, was decidedly lacking in the “excessively punishing” detention conditions, cultural insults and “Rodney King-style beatings” of cuffed and shackled detainees.

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Here are two (2) US military men who defied the system because of their commitment to their principles. Their core values took them on a journey to the progressive side of politics. They had realized that the proclaimed conservative principles espoused by their superiors and government was a sham. They remembered that true conservatism is about the defence of rights. And they both paid a personal price for adherence to their principles.

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Rallies demand end to Aboriginal community closures

Rallies demand end to Aboriginal community closures.

Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance said: “These forced closures are indisputably an act of genocide that will have grave consequences for the people forced, under duress, to leave country. It is an act of cultural genocide that will damage vital cultural connections to country.

“It also signals an impending ecocide, resulting from the mining exploration and aggressive destruction of Aboriginal land that will inevitably ensue.”

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The mills of Capitalism grinds people down into autonomons shedding all identity: cultural; historical; personal. People should just be workers and consumers—nothing more.

Joining in this Aboriginal resistance helps us reclaim our own identity and humanity.

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"Serious" politics

Chris Dillow writes that "Serious" politics is flummery.

Politics has many ways of creating and sustaining what Paul Krugman calls "Very Serious People" and Nassim Nicholas Taleb "empty suits" — men (generally men) whose judgments (always judgments) are sensible, sober, and wrong. One reason why I'll be voting Green is to reject this flummery.

Another thing: one might ask why there is no political party with entirely sound economics — one that: is concerned about productivity; anti-austerian; pro-market (in the right institutional framework); and egalitarian. But that's another question. 

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Dillow writes that the mass media is complicit in framing the economic debate in terms that are acceptable to the Capitalist elite. The system cannot be questioned. Instead, the debate is about how to save the Capitalists from their own stupidity.

The idea of being pro-market is interesting. I suppose I am pro-market in that people should decide how the economy operates. It is ruled through the market of ideas and discussion.

Society, as a whole, should take responsibility for how the productive forces are used.

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Baltimore Riots Were Caused by Capitalism and Cops, Not Poverty

Ted Rall writes that the Baltimore Riots Were Caused by Capitalism and Cops, Not Poverty.

Liberals believe capitalism is a good system prone to excesses, which they propose to mitigate via reform and regulation: poverty, income inequality and racism associated with class are flaws in an otherwise laudable economic model.

But that’s not true. Poverty, and the racism that goes with it, are features, not bugs. The ruling classes require a permanent underclass to exploit directly, and serve as a warning to workers not to ask for big raises, shorter hours or other improvements in workplace conditions — be quiet, lest you wind up like them.

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Racism is also used to divide the working class against itself. Other sources of division are sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.

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Venezuela: Priorities of a Socialist Government

Venezuela shows what Socialism is like.

Venezuela slashes military budget by 34%

Social housing project delivers 700,000th home

This shows the priorities of a Socialist government.

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The Cops Have Met Their Enemies: They Are Us

Ted Rall writes that The Cops Have Met Their Enemies: They Are Us.

In many American cities, particularly those with majority white police forces in minority neighborhoods, the police are an occupying army. They view the locals not as citizens whose taxes pay their salaries, who are in fact their bosses, but as dangerous, troublesome rabble to be contained, controlled and suppressed. The militarization of domestic policing, which dates back to the 1950s and the establishment of the first SWAT team in Los Angeles, further separates gendarmes from civilians via training derived from warfare, heavy body armor and wildly excessive firearms.

Trust in the cops is at a record low, thanks in part to ubiquitous cell phone and security camera videos that document police abuse so meticulously that it’s no longer possible even for white law-and-order types to deny accusations by blacks that the cops are treating them like dirt. Look for the cop-citizen gap to widen further as the police increasingly treat whites — for example, during the crackdown against the Occupy movement — badly as well.

The cops have met their enemy, and he is us.

And now there’s no denying it.

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This is also known as 4GW. And also as Class Warfare.

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Heartless, clueless?

Chris Dillow asks if Capitalists are really Heartless, clueless?.

One is a form of naive cynicism which regards inequality and injustice as natural and inevitable, and so attempts to fight it must be futile and foolish whilst defenders of the system are hard-headed realists.

The other is a tendency to underweight the incompetence of those who are on the side of the rich.

Hostile portrayals of capitalists have for decades been of Gradgrindian figures grinding the faces of the poor rather than of bumbling oafs. And today bankers are routinely described as greedy when in fact what distinguishes them from the rest of us is their stupidity: most of us like a pound, but we didn't destroy an entire industry.

What this misses is the likelihood that a lot of success in business might be due to dumb luck.

In this sense, the claim that the the rich are heartless, by understating their stupidity, actually helps to legitimate inequality.

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What motivates the Capitalists is the defence of their class interests. And what defines their class is the control of the means of production. Thus, their class interest is to preserve that control.

How that control has evolved over time has been from direct control of personal property to the control of providing finance necessary for the operation of a business.

In the early days of Capitalism, the Capitalist was the man who owned and ran the business. This is the small businessman. This is the image that the petite bourgeoisie has of the Capitalist despite the radical changes over the past five (5) centuries. The confrontation between Capitalist and their enemies was at personal level and direct.

The capitalist then evolved to the stockholder who sat on the board of directors. Control and ownership was shared, but the Capitalist was still visible at the head of the firm. This started with the East India Company and its ilk in the seventeenth century and continued until the late nineteenth century with Andrew Carnegie, J.P.Morgan, etc.. The confrontation now evolved to be between masses of people: unions versus troops and police. The proxy war was waged throught the political system.

Nowadays, the Capitalist controls the finance provided to businesses. The control of businesses is indirect. Capital is owned—not the business. The political process has been subverted by international organisations such as the World Bank, IMF, ECB, WTO, and through treaties such as 'free-trade' deals. The Capitalist has vanished from the real world, yet their power is greater than before.

Now, the Capitalists dare to discipline entire nations: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Spain, Italy, Iran, China, North Korea, etc.. Anyone who defies the existing world order can expect to be attacked and destroyed.

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Productivity, Robots, China, Growth

Mike Shedlock writes about Productivity, Robots, China, Growth.

Congratulations. You are more productive than ever. Just don't expect to be paid more for it. In reality, some machine is doing all that for you.

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With China rapidly automating, the idea of cheap, replacable labour is in the dustbin of history.

This poses two (2) problems for Capitalism: reduction in the available surplus value; and reduction in the purchasing power of the working class. Without an income, workers cannot purchase goods and services, and profits cannot be materialised. Without workers, Capitalists cannot convert the surplus value of labour into profit.

Total automation is the death of Capitalism.

Workers can only survive in such a system by finding niches that are difficult to automate. This requires training and development. Workers will have to become self-directed because businesses are losing the profitability to do this for their workers.

In other words, workers will have to think like Communists in such a world. They will have to develop an appreciation of the Marxist critique of Capitalism so that they can understand how Capitalism works. They will have to develop their own abilities—they can no longer be passive receptables of corporate wisdom.

Economic survival means that workers cannot wait for governments to come to their aid. Workers have to develop their own abilities and solidarity.

But this only takes us part of the way towards a Communist revolution. Whether workers, in general, have the stomach for this remains to be seen.

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Syria, Yemen Conflicts only seem to be about Sunni-Shiite from 30,000 Feet

Juan Cole writes that Syria, Yemen Conflicts only seem to be about Sunni-Shiite from 30,000 Feet.

JUAN COLE: I see evidence of al-Qaeda thinkers, like Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was the number-two man for a long time, before bin Laden was killed, being influenced by Marxist thought, and radical Marxism. This is very clear in the technical terms that the Muslim far-right uses. They talk about a vanguard. This was a Leninist term. In some radical forms of Marxism, activists were impatient with the working class, which seemed not to want to fulfill its historical duty by rising up against the business classes, and so it engaged in sabotage—not everywhere all the time, but there were some groups that did that kind of thing in hopes of provoking a class war, because they knew the business classes would call upon their agents, the police, to crack down hard on sabotage and workers’ activism and so forth.

I think that al-Qaeda picked up this kind of thinking from the Marxist fringe in places like Egypt and so forth. I think that it is a deliberate strategy on their part, the sharpening of contradictions, or the heightening of contradictions, as it’s called. I think it explains everything that happened in Iraq.

I remember reading a New York Times piece in 2005 or so that al-Qaeda in Iraq had blown up a pet shop. There were pieces of rabbits and snakes wiggling on the ground. This author in The New York Times expressed himself with amazement. He said, “We should get out of Iraq now, because we can’t understand why you would do that. And if you don’t understand what your enemy is doing, then you should not be there.”

I understood exactly what they were doing. They were hitting soft targets. They were hitting businesses. It was a Shiite-owned pet shop. What they were trying to do was to get the Shiites’ goat in Iraq. They were trying to provoke a civil war, because they hoped that the Shiite clans who were being hit would go and attack Sunnis, and if they went and attacked the Sunnis, then al-Qaeda could go to the Sunnis and say, “Gee, you seem to be being attacked. We could protect you.”

So by provoking attacks on their own community, they actually could parlay that into power.

At the time, I was skeptical that they could succeed in this, but you come to last June, and they took over Mosul, the second-largest city in the country, in exactly this way—by continually provoking the Shia, getting reprisals going, and then going to the Sunnis against whom the reprisals were waged and saying, “You need protection.” By that time, the Mosulites said, “Yes, we do. Would you please come in,” even though Mosulites are cosmopolitan, secular-minded people. But they were willing to bring in this radical fundamentalist group just because they were tired of being targeted by the Shiite government.

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Marxists should always be sharpening the contradictions—but only through political means. We are offering an alternative political explanation for events. We want to show that there are Communist and Capitalist narratives at play in the world around us.

Marxists have rejected the terrorist mentality. Terrorism, as shown by events over the past twenty (20) years, has strengthen the Capitlist state through greater legal power, greater reliance on force, and the ready support of such measures by the population. Support for the government is almost reflexive once the terrorism aspect is highlighted.

The Capitalist is always willing to suppress the working class whenever it feels its interests are threatened. But it can, and has, retreat before determined resistance by a significant portion of the working class.

Marxists, at this stage of the struggle, are engaged in educating and radicalising the working class through mass actions, propaganda, and agitation. We join in the daily struggle to sharpen our political awareness of how the world works.

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Protests against racist police killings sweep US

Protests against racist police killings sweep US.

Protesters demanding widespread reform of the police took the streets on April 14, as killings of unarmed black men have become all-too frequent in US headlines.

Activists from various right groups rallied in different cities throughout the country. Signs carried by the protesters in New York read: “Stop Police brutality and mass murder.” Protesters spread the message on social media websites using hashtags, including the popular #BlackLivesMatter.

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The thinking behind these protests is mistaken: the police are not there to defend society against the criminals; but to defend the rich criminals against the poor members of society. This attitude determines the direction of police violence which is against the poor.

There are the misguided police officers who believe that they serve the community. It takes some time for the real situation to penetrate their thick skulls. Then they either leave or succumb to the pervasive corruption that the police are forced to immerse themselves.

In theoretical terms, the state serves the interests of the ruling class. And the police are merely the agents of violence in the service of the state. Everything flows from that.

In order to stop the police brutality, it is necessary to change the social order into a classless society.

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Huge rallies against WA community closures

Rachel Evans and Jemma Nott write that there were Huge rallies against WA community closures in Sydney and Melbourne.

Rebel Hanlon, assistant secretary of the NSW construction division of the CFMEU denounced capitalism’s role in the oppression of Indigenous people, including mining companies' land grabs and Deicorp, the developers threatening to move Indigenous people off the Block in Redfern.

He pledged the unions support for the campaign to maintain Aboriginal housing in Redfern. A contingent of Maori construction workers gave an energetic solidarity Haka.

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Here we have an advanced worker understanding and articulating the linkage between oppression of Aborigines and the engine of Capitalism. The building unions have a long history of workers educating themselves in the workings of Capitalism. This is why the governments have been keen to quash the militancy of the building unions.

The latest attempt to quash the CFEMU was commented on in Royal Commission 'prejudiced and biased':

Any defiance against the ruling class is a crime. A crime is defying the natural order of things.

And since Capitalism is currently the true natural order of things, workers who ask for and fight for decent working conditions and wages are against the natural order of things in which the Capitalists alone determine what is right and fair.

As I wrote in State governments share blame for (Not) Closing the Gap:

To really solve this problem requires all non-indigineous Australians to confront their racist attitudes towards Aborigines, and begin to redress the wrongs inflicted on them.

This requires that we acknowledge the racist basis for Capitalism and the invasion of Australia.

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