How Technology Under Capitalism Will Leave All of Us Jobless

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Socialism

The march toward the obsolescence of human labor is an inevitability of capitalism.

In a capitalist society, a business is structured like a dictatorship: an owner or small group of owners, board members, and investors hold all the power and make all the decisions, including how company profits are used — to increase production, to open new plants or stores, invest in new technology, increase advertising, hire more workers, increase worker pay, increase owner pay, and so on. They also decide, when times are rough, when to close the stores or factories, when to lay off workers, when to sell the business, etc.

As a business owner, investing in technology can make your workplace(s) more automated, allowing you to reduce your workforce. While technology costs money to create, install, and maintain, it can save huge sums compared to human labor, and is much more efficient. Ford, for example, needs only one-third of the workers it needed in the 1970s for the same production levels (Imagine, Goldwin and Smith). Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance recently replaced dozens of employees with A.I., expecting a 30% increase in productivity. This leads to greater profits.

(There is little evidence, by the way, that higher minimum wages exacerbate this process; studies overwhelmingly show that raising the minimum wage does not cause unemployment, as more money in people’s pockets leads to more spending at businesses, creating equilibrium.)

The owners benefit immensely, massively increasing their wealth, but the workers are sent packing, forced to find work elsewhere (this has contributed to severe inequality in the U.S., where the bottom 80% of Americans now own just 7% of the national wealth and the top 1% owns 40%; recent income growth has gone almost exclusively to the rich; CEO pay has skyrocketed, worker wages have stagnated).

New technology and broader divisions of labor (think of the assembly line) constantly make specialized labor obsolete. The pursuit of profit tends to make a worker “an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him,” to quote The Communist Manifesto. When a task that originally required advanced training or higher education can be accomplished by low-skill labor, a capitalist has no need for someone with a college degree and needs not pay the higher salary. Then competition among workers for that job is broadened, driving the wage down further. If a task can be totally replaced by a machine, the job opportunity vanishes completely (“technological unemployment”).

Supporters of capitalism will protest, saying the advent of new technology often creates new high-skill, high-wage jobs, which is true. New technologies, from computers to jets, require trained personnel to build, maintain, upgrade, and operate them. However, the people who can take advantage of these new opportunities are not usually the ones who are displaced by the new technology. The losers (usually older folks) find their once-valuable skills irrelevant and their jobs eliminated. As Erik Olin Wright (Envisioning Real Utopias) points out, firms do not wish to spend the money to retrain older workers, and the new opportunities may be in far away cities, requiring obsolete workers to move even if they got new training. Perhaps they would have to stop working and go back to school, something most adults with families can’t do. And even the winners may not be safe for long, as the cycle continues: firms divide labor, automate tasks, and turn high-skill work into low-skill work. The winners’ jobs are eventually obsolete, and then they are fired and must find new work, sometimes a low-skilled, low-wage job.

Now, it is also true that new technology can create low-skill work. Uber lets more people be personal drivers, Postmates creates delivery jobs, the relative ease of launching, running, and monetizing a website and social media creates work for many. A cheerful analysis by economists in 2015 declared technology, because it builds a more advanced, prosperous society, created more jobs than it destroyed in the U.K. in the last 140 years; so while jobs for farmers, secretaries, washers, and launderers vanished, jobs for teachers, caretakers, social workers, and nurses increased. They also noted how increased personal wealth in a more advanced society leads to more spending on luxuries, hence a rise in the demand for bartending and hairdressing jobs. In other words, as a separate analysis put it, it is often the case that “growth of jobs at low risk of automation outpaces loss of jobs at high risk” (in the case of the U.K., from 2001 to 2015, 3.5 million low-risk jobs were added to the economy, 800,000 high-risk jobs lost).

Yet this does not mean there will always and for all time be enough jobs free of automation for every citizen that needs work (even today during economic boom times, there are not always enough jobs for everyone, low- or high-risk).

Most unskilled labor, if we think of 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 years from now, will surely be abolished by automation and robotics. Machines can already operate a warehouse, pick and inspect fruit, build cars, and lay bricks. Google and Uber are already working on driverless cars, Amazon on drone delivery systems. U.S. restaurants are installing tablets at tables or counters that take orders and payments, China perfecting a weaponized police robot (Anbot), Toshiba placing a temporary robot employee (ChihiraAico) in a Japanese department store, Nanyang Technical University unveiling a robotic secretary (Nadine), the PR2 robot at MIT can bake, and even sex robots are under construction, perhaps one day threatening prostitution! Amazon Go is a cashier-less grocery store.

High-skilled work is not free of risk either (who wouldn’t want a robotic lawyer with advanced knowledge of every legal case ever argued, able to easily out-think a human attorney?). Radiologists and journalists are threatened by technology able to do parts of their jobs faster, cheaper, with fewer errors.

A 2013 study by Oxford economists estimated 47% of jobs in the U.S. are currently at high risk of automation, perhaps fully automated “over the next decade or two” (including service, sales, office and administrative, production, and transportation jobs), 19% of jobs at medium risk of automation, and 33% at low risk (including other service jobs, plus education, media, legal, healthcare, business management, and engineering jobs).

via Oxford Martin

Other analysts declared in 2015, “Our research suggests that as many as 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages.”

Wren Handman writes, “Boston Consulting Group predicts that by 2025, up to a quarter of jobs will be replaced by either smart software or robots. Gartner, a technology research firm, ramps that estimate up and predicts that one third of all jobs will be eliminated by 2025…” The number of factory robots in manufacturing centers like Detroit, Toledo, Grand Rapids, Louisville, and Nashville tripled between 2010 and 2015 alone. Capitalist owners will increasingly be able to do away with human labor, increasing profits—and the wealth gap between them and everyone else. The workers will have to compete for fewer and fewer non-automated jobs.

Albert Einstein wrote that under capitalism, “Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all” (“Why Socialism?,” Einstein). Advances in technology and productivity (and thus profits) could allow for higher wages and shorter work weeks for workers at their workplaces — if workers owned their workplaces and called the shots. Yet over the past four decades—a time of skyrocketing productivity—wages barely budged, and while human beings are working fewer hours than centuries past, particularly in Europe, four in ten Americans are still working over 50 hours a week and full-time employees average 47 hours per week. Some of our neighbors work 60, 70 hours a week to make ends meet. Technological progress for each capitalist firm, instead of changing work for the better for each worker, exiles more people from the firm and from that type of work, creating a larger pool of laborers needing to compete for jobs elsewhere — usually low-skill and low-wage jobs.

What will happen to the vast majority of human beings when machines can outperform them at any job? When business owners can automate any task imaginable, increasing efficiency and profits?

There will surely always be demand for some human workers — perhaps citizens won’t want a robot teacher for their child or robot caretaker for their ailing parents. Perhaps business owners will always want to provide a human face to consumers, and will always preserve a partially human staff. Perhaps we’ll want human writers and human preachers. But can we all be teachers, childcare providers, business reps, and clergymen?

Surely for the vast majority of us, when all the freight trucks no longer need drivers, when machines can take an order, prepare your meal, and accept a credit card, when robotic clerks serve you at retail stores and police the streets — whether this happens in 100 years or 1,000 — we will need a new form of social organization to avoid extreme poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and hunger.

There are essentially two solutions.

One is a guaranteed basic income: the State simply provides each citizen with a monthly stipend, citizens spend the money where they will, taxes are collected on the businesses and organizations where people spent their money, and the cycle continues. Switzerland is already moving closer to adopting a guaranteed income. In this way, those who own the technology that made work a thing of the past make survival possible for the masses.

The other solution is worker ownership: businesses will have to be owned by all their workers, so that no worker will be fired as technology improves. In an authoritarian capitalist firm, robotic labor means fewer human workers. In a worker-owned firm, it means participants in the firm can switch to more fulfilling and enjoyable tasks, and work fewer hours each week for the same income, if not more. In this way, the technology would be owned by the masses, and the profits would be shared, making survival possible.

Worker ownership is already a reality in the U.S. and around the world, as explored in “What is Socialism?” This solution is a bit more complex than a guaranteed income (if there are more people looking for work than worker cooperatives need, it may be necessary for the State — or local governments — to launch New Deal-style public work projects, using tax dollars to pay people to improve their communities, even if machines could do it better). But it may be a better option than paying citizens who don’t work, as there may be work that could improve society but is unaddressed because worker cooperatives can’t profit from it (i.e., cleaning up streets and rivers, or tutoring struggling students).

Either solution, of course, is socialism.

Oscar Wilde contrasts in The Soul of Man Under Socialism how machinery operates under capitalism and how it should operate under socialism:

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.

Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.

Jack London said something similar:

Let us not destroy those wonderful machines that produce efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run them for ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism… (A People’s History of the United States, Zinn)

As technology approaches a point where human labor will be all but obsolete, these ideas become increasingly relevant. When physicist Stephen Hawking was asked in 2015 whether technology would lead to mass unemployment, he replied:

If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

With so many jobs under threat of extinction in the next few decades alone, we know what option humanity must choose.

via Vice

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

A History of Violence: The American Slaughter in Vietnam

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under War

From a young age, Americans — like citizens of other nations — are indoctrinated with nationalism, the belief that the United States is the “good guy” in world affairs, even if sometimes making mistakes in the pursuit of its noble aims. We are taught the U.S. uses its military might to protect the freedom of Americans and foreigners, expand democracy and peace, or in simple self-defense.

While sometimes this is true, the actual history of American foreign policy is far darker and more complex. The view of our moral superiority, however, serves an important function for the State. With the glorification of one’s country inherent in nationalism and patriotism comes the belief that the lives of foreigners are less valuable than your own countrymen. So because the U.S. is in the right, it really doesn’t matter how many innocent people perish in the pursuit of its goals.

The History of Violence series takes a less nationalistic and more honest look at the reasons the U.S. uses violence and the kinds of violence it deems acceptable. The series raises a key question: Would Americans deem it permissible for other powers to do to us what we did to them, for identical purposes and using identical violence? That is, if Vietnam bombed millions of Americans to prevent us from electing a Communist government, if Mexico conquered half the U.S. for more land and resources, if Guatemala helped overthrow our democracy in the interest of its corporations, and so on.

Despite the more rosy picture of U.S. benevolence, throughout its history the American government used military force to protect its economic interests and global power at the expense of weaker (often defenseless) nations. Presidents of both political parties authorized hundreds of military interventions into foreign nations, particularly in Latin America.

The boldest tactics included invasion and occupation, aerial bombings, terror attacks and assassinations, forcing open markets, and enacting trade blockades using naval and air power. Other methods included secretly arming and training rebel and terrorist groups, organizing and supporting coups, rigging ballots, and arming and funding brutal dictators. Usual targets included popular socialistic and communistic groups or governments pushing for land reform to help peasants or seizing national resources from foreign corporations, usually American.

These actions killed millions, and led to civil war, totalitarianism, genocide, and dire poverty in many countries.

* * *

The conventional story of the American invasion of Vietnam usually goes something like this: Communist North Vietnam launched an invasion of democratic South Vietnam. The United States, always the defender of freedom and justice, came to South Vietnam’s defense. Through a series of unpredictable events, such as the liberal media “turning the American people against the war,” the ability of the enemy to blend in with the civilian population, and the enemy’s superior knowledge and use of their land, a peasant society defeated the most powerful military machine in human history.

Elements of this narrative are true, others have no basis in reality.

The real story begins in late 1945. Vietnam celebrated the surrender of Japan, which occupied Vietnam during World War II, having seized it from the French, who occupied it since 1887. There was immense hope that the decades of brutal foreign rule were over. To quote the U.S. Defense Department, “for a few weeks in September, 1945, Vietnam was — for the first and only time in its modern history — free of foreign domination, and united from north to south…” (A People’s History of the United States, by U.S. veteran Howard Zinn).

Much like the French and other peoples occupied by Axis forces, the Vietnamese formed a resistance movement against the Japanese and fought a guerrilla war to drive out their occupiers. This Vietnamese movement was led by a Communist named Ho Chi Minh. His nationalist organization, the Viet Minh, was a U.S. ally — because it was battling Japan.

Ho Chi Minh was thus enormously popular among the Vietnamese, as popular as George Washington among the American patriots who overthrew the British. With the Japanese gone, 1 million people celebrated in the streets of Hanoi, and the resistance fighters issued a Declaration of Independence, based on similar documents created by freedom fighters elsewhere. The first words read:

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

The Declaration of the French Revolution made in 1791 on the Rights of Man and the Citizen also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.” Those are undeniable truths.

Nevertheless, for more than eighty years, the French imperialists, abusing the standard of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, have violated our Fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens.

Just as the American colonial leaders listed grievances against the British, so did the Vietnamese against the French: “They have mercilessly slain our patriots, they have drowned uprisings in rivers of blood… They have robbed us of our rice fields, our mines, our forests, and our raw materials… They have invented numerous unjustifiable taxes and reduced our people, especially our peasantry, to a state of extreme poverty… The whole Vietnamese people…are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country.”

In their moment of self-rule, Ho Chi Minh founded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Of course, to the West this was unacceptable. Powers like France and Britain still held large worldwide colonial empires that benefited them materially. The raw materials of Vietnam would not be willingly given to the Vietnamese. Vietnam could not be allowed to give other Third World colonies ideas concerning freedom.

Britain’s armies quickly occupied the southern region of Vietnam and returned it to France. China took over the northern part of Vietnam, and the United States pressured the Chinese to give it back to France, which it did. Ho Chi Minh wrote letters to President Truman and the United Nations to ask for self-rule, which the U.S. and other Western powers had fought for and promised to the peoples of the world in their Atlantic Charter; he further pleaded for humanitarian aid for his country, which saw some 2 million people die of starvation due to a combination of French policies, natural disasters, and the world war. Truman ignored the letters.

As promised, the Viet Minh went to war with the French. But the French were quite weak from battling Germany during World War II, and when Communist movements suddenly came into power in China (1949) and Korea (1950), the U.S. decided it was time to aid the French. It began pouring weapons and money into Vietnam, by 1954 covering 80% of French war costs.

Did the U.S. want to stop Communism, as the narrative goes?

Certainly, there was fear that more nations would convert to Communism if Vietnam did, but actual democracy and freedom in Vietnam were not a priority of the United States, self-evident from the support of French rule and later the establishment of a brutal dictatorship in South Vietnam. As documented in Part I of the History of Violence Series: Facing U.S. Wars of Aggression, the U.S. was also very interested in keeping open access to Vietnam’s “immense wealth” of rubber, tin, oil, coal, and other raw materials. As Communist states had a pesky habit of nationalizing economic industries, kicking foreign corporations out, and in general maintaining tight control over the resources on their own land (see Part I), Communism was a severe threat to U.S. economic interests. This is not to say the U.S. did not also want to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining another ally — indeed, a closer relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.S.R. would expand the latter’s sphere of influence and access to Vietnam’s natural resources. Limiting the Soviet sphere of influence during this Cold War was highly important to American officials.

Yet the reasons may not even end there. For example, protecting the American image (we’re already involved, we can’t back out now and “lose”) and Washington politics (Republicans vilified Truman for “losing” China, thus Democrats that came after him aimed not to experience the same).

The question to ask ourselves is: Should we use violence to prevent another nation from creating a government we don’t approve of or won’t serve our interests? Even if it’s the will of that nation’s people? Would we think it acceptable for a foreign power, perhaps more democratic than our own, to wage war against us because we devised our own form of government or tried to the elect the “wrong” leader?

Ho Chi Minh was immensely popular and the U.S. government knew it. As an ally to the West during World War II and having based his Declaration of Independence on Western ones, he was also quite open to a relationship with the West. The U.S. Defense Department wrote that

…Ho had built the Viet Minh into the only Vietnam-wide political organization capable of effective resistance to either the Japanese or the French. He was the only Vietnamese wartime leader with a national following, and he assured himself wider fealty among the Vietnamese people when…he overthrew the Japanese…established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and staged receptions for in-coming allied occupation forces… (see Zinn)

In 1947, the State Department noted Ho Chi Minh was “the symbol of nationalism and the struggle for freedom to the overwhelming majority of the population.” It called it an “unpleasant fact” that “Communist Ho Chi Minh is the strongest and perhaps the ablest figure in Indochina” (Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman).

Despite U.S. support, the French lost their war to hold Vietnam in 1954. A peace conference at Geneva determined the French would withdraw to the southern half of the nation immediately, then after two years there would be reunification: North Vietnam would join with South Vietnam and an election would be held to form a new government.

The United States was determined to prevent that. After all, a Joint Chiefs of Staff memo from 1954 declared that “free elections would be attended by almost certain loss…to Communist control” (Zinn). And what was an international peace conference to Washington power?

That was the path the U.S. chose. To prevent an undesirable outcome of free elections, it would go to any means necessary. The U.S. would battle Vietnam’s George Washington and its patriots. The peasants may have defeated the French, but they would surely fall to the whims of the United States of America. And by waging war in a place with mass Communist support among the people, mass killing of civilians was almost the logical path to victory. As a U.S. army officer said of a town in the Ben Tre province, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” (James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me), a way of thinking easily applied to the entire country of Vietnam.

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 1.56.41 PM

The U.S. government’s first method was to strengthen South Vietnam, make it its own state (the Pentagon Papers explained, “South Viet Nam was essentially a creation of the United States”). But it couldn’t be a democracy. The people supported Ho Chi Minh and unification. What the U.S. needed was a dictator. To quote General Maxwell Taylor, a “satisfactory government” would need to be “established,” perhaps with “a military dictatorship” (Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman).

It selected Ngo Dinh Diem, a former Vietnam government official. It flew him from his home in New Jersey and installed him as South Vietnam’s leader. Diem set about replacing local governors with military officials and imprisoning critics of his regime, one of obscene violence. He was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, Communist and anti-Communist alike. The largest anti-Communist political group protesting Diem were the Buddhists; they were crushed. The U.S. issued his government weapons and cash, and he rejected the promised elections, requested by Ho Chi Minh, repeatedly. In protest of the dictatorship, a Buddhist monk named Quang Duc burned himself alive in Saigon — he would not be the last.

Nor would Diem be the last dictator the U.S. installed in South Vietnam; he was followed by the likes of Khanh, Thieu, and Ky, all equally dispicable. Replacing leaders the U.S. grew unhappy with usually required U.S.-organized coups.

The Vietnamese understood they had been betrayed, understood the worthlessness of Western promises. In 1958, resistance fighters began a guerrilla war against Diem, with the support of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam. In 1960, rebels formed the National Liberation Front (called the Viet Cong by the West), which had widespread support among the peasant population. South Vietnam was already falling apart.

In the early 1960s, the U.S. started sending military agents into North Vietnam to commit acts of sabotage. The U.S. had already sent thousands of military advisors into South Vietnam in the 1950s. Between U.S.-installed regimes and U.S. military actions, about 150,000 people had already died before the U.S. land invasion.

President Johnson and his administration, in 1964, invented a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. naval forces to justify a full-scale invasion. After all, as revealed in the Pentagon Papers, when U.S. leaders met in Honolulu two months before the alleged attack to discuss the possibility of war, they recognized that “public opinion on our Southeast Asia policy was badly divided in the United States at the moment and that, therefore, the President needed an affirmation of support.” So, as happened in the past, the government lied to rally the people to its cause.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident was, according to the State, an unprovoked attack on the U.S. destroyer Maddox, “while on routine patrol in international waters.” This was nonsense, of course. The Maddox was actually on a spying mission, in North Vietnamese waters, and no torpedoes were fired at it. Even before this, the CIA had secretly attacked North Vietnamese coastal installations. Johnson told an aide of the Gulf of Tonkin incident: “Those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish” (Loewen).

The lie served Johnson’s purposes. Congress granted him a war resolution, and American bombers attacked North Vietnam while U.S. troops flooded the South (the U.S. also hired hundreds of thousands of mercenaries from Korea and Thailand, also responsible for many atrocities).

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 1.59.22 PM

1964 to 1975 were years of unimaginable horror. The North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front in the South committed some atrocities, of course, but nothing compared to the better-armed United States.

The U.S. used two to three times as many bombs as used in World War II by all parties — some 7 million tons of bombs (some of these were dropped on Laos and Cambodia, wars the U.S. government tried to keep secret, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people). There were an estimated 20 million bomb craters in Vietnam by the end of the war. The U.S. established “free fire zones,” in which any person, young or old, male or female, was considered an enemy combatant and could be bombed with abandon. Villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong were obliterated.

U.S. troops launched surprise attacks on villages, shooting all males of military age. American and South Vietnamese military officials beat, tortured, and executed prisoners of war and critics of the conflict, Washington, or the South Vietnamese regime; the U.S. financed and set up hundreds of prisons. In places like Con Son prison island, people were kept in chains in “tiger cages” for years, growing paralyzed due to lack of limb use. In the cities, American soldiers enjoyed prostitutes, and in the countryside countless women and girls were raped, including “extremely violent gang rapes, or raping women with inanimate objects like bottles or even rifles.”

Most Americans have heard of the My Lai Massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. soldiers entered a small village in the Quang Ngai province, pushed nearly 500 infants, children, women, men, and elderly people into a ditch and mowed them all down. Yet most Americans do not realize that this was standard practice in Vietnam. Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering up the My Lai slaughter, said, “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace” (Zinn). A soldier named John Kerry said killings like My Lai were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command” (Loewen).

Kerry described how U.S. soldiers had

raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Kahn, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam…in addition to the normal ravage of war.

GIs even collected and displayed Vietnamese ears as trophies. As Nick Turse put it:

…the way to prove the body count was to bring in an ear. This was a practice in some units. There were incentives tied to body count, winning R&R at a beach resort in country or extra beer, medals, badges…

There was also an active trade in body parts in Vietnam. Ears were worn on necklaces, one ear or maybe even a whole chain of ears. Some guys wore these to show their combat prowess. Others would collect these ears and sell them to people who wanted to project this image. In one unit they were cutting off the heads of enemies, and anyone who presented it to the commander got an extra beer ration. In one case, a sergeant had cut off a head and he boiled the flesh of it, and then traded the skull for a radio.

A soldier wrote back home of an incident (Zinn):

Dear Mom and Dad:

Today we went on a mission and I am not very proud of myself, my friends, or my country. We burned every hut in sight! It was a small rural network of villages and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions… We fired into all the huts we could… Everyone is crying, begging, and praying that we don’t separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons and grandfathers. The women wail and moan.

Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions and food. Yes, we burn all the rice and shoot all the livestock.

Turse again:

I would talk to Vietnamese who would tell me about what it was like just to try and eke out an existence in the war zone. About having their home burned down five, six seven times. And then finally giving up rebuilding and starting to live a semi-subterranean life in their bomb shelter. About how they figured out ways to get out of that shelter, to get water or food or relieve themselves. And how their entire lives were just predicated on figuring out a way not to get killed.

Kerry and many other veterans joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which “exposed the ugly truth about US involvement in Southeast Asia and our first-hand experiences helped many other Americans to see the unjust nature of that war.” The VVAW still exists today, as “our government is still financing and arming undemocratic and repressive regimes around the world. Recently, American troops have been sent into combat in the Middle East and Central America, for many of the same misguided reasons that were used to send us to Southeast Asia.” Several other groups, like the Concerned Officers Movement, also formed and protested the war.

After My Lai, the Army formed the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, whose archives Turse used for his book Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The group, while doing nothing to prevent or punish war crimes, kept records of “massacres, murders, rape, torture, assault, mutilation.”

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 2.02.45 PM

Turse says:

There was a shorthand in Vietnam: the MGR, or Mere Gook Rule. The idea is that the Vietnamese weren’t real people. They were subhumans. Mere gooks who could be abused or even killed at will. And this is something that was inculcated in troops from the earliest days of training. I talked to a lot of veterans who told me that as soon as they arrived at boot camp, they were told you never call them Vietnamese. You call them gooks, dinks, slants, slopes. Anything to take away their humanity. Anything to make it easier to kill them. They were told by their superiors that all Vietnamese were likely the enemy. That children might carry grenades, women were probably the wives or girlfriends of guerillas, and they were probably making booby traps. And even if there were rules of engagement on paper, or little cards handed out saying to treat the Vietnamese properly, the message that they were really given was that it was a lot safer to shoot first because no one was going to ask questions later.

He explained the American strategy:

You would kill your way to victory by piling up Vietnamese bodies, and the Americans were always chasing this crossover point when they would be killing more Vietnamese guerrillas than the enemy could put into the field. And the idea was that at that moment, the enemy would give up the fight…

The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. Their commanders were leaning on them heavily. You were told to produce Vietnamese bodies, and if you didn’t you were going to stay out in the field longer. They learned pretty quickly that the command wasn’t discerning about what bodies were turned in, that just about any Vietnamese bodies would do. This pushed American troops toward at least calling in all Vietnamese who were filled as enemies, and also to the killing of detainees and prisoners and civilians, and calling them in as enemy dead.

This coupled with the much higher level of strategic thinking like the use of “free fire zones,” which was basically a legal fiction that the US came up with to open wide swaths of the countryside to unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling. This caused tremendous amounts of death and destruction in the country side. And it opened it up to all this heavy firepower and made it inevitable that large numbers of civilians would be killed or wounded.

In 1966, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton suggested the U.S. turn its attention from bombing villages in North Vietnam to causing mass starvation through attacks on infrastructure:

Destruction of locks and dams, however — if handled right — might…offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction doesn’t kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided — which we could offer to do “at the conference table”… (Zinn)

Rice fields had long been a target. In 1961 and 1962, Kennedy authorized the use of chemical weapons on South Vietnamese rice fields. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman write in Manufacturing Consent:

Between 1961 and 1971…the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of concentrated arsenic-based and dioxin-laden herbicides (mainly Agent Orange) on 6 million acres of crops and trees, besides using large quantities of the “super tear gas” CS and vast amounts of napalm and phosphorus bombs. An estimated 13 percent of South Vietnam’s land was subjected to chemical attacks. This included 30 percent of its rubber plantations and 36 percent of its mangrove forests, along with other large forest areas, destroyed by toxic chemicals in programs that included multiple “large-scale intentional effort[s] combining defoliation with incendiaries to produce a forest fire in South Vietnam.”

A 1967 study prepared by the head of the Agronomy Section of the Japanese Science Council concluded that U.S. anticrop warfare had already ruined more than 3.8 million acres of arable land in South Vietnam, killing almost 1,000 peasants and over 13,000 livestock. This policy of attempting to force enemy capitulation by destroying its food supply was not only contrary to the rules of war, it was notable in that it “first and overwhelmingly affected small children.”

Among the millions wounded, about 2 million Vietnamese were wounded from exposure to chemical weapons. But most were in the South. Why?

One reason for this was that North Vietnam had a government with links to other countries, so that the use of these barbarous and illegal weapons against it would have been widely publicized. South Vietnam was occupied by the United States and its client regime, so that the victimized people of the South were voiceless and could be treated with unlimited savagery.

With Agent Orange and CS soaked into Vietnam’s soil, trees, and plants, hundreds of thousands of children would be born with often lethal birth defects — this is still occurring today, with photos available for all to see.

Screen Shot 2017-07-04 at 1.55.27 PM

Likewise, 16 million acres of Vietnam today contain unexploded bombs and landmines left behind by the United States. Over 40,000 people died from them from 1975 to 2009, including many children.

What was left behind in the United States?

Of course, among some ultraconservatives, a belief that American intentions were pure and noble and — even more disturbing — that the means the U.S. used to meet its goals were “necessary,” even if a “necessary evil.” Clearly, a superpower working to keep poor people who longed for independence under foreign rule and killing millions to ensure they didn’t elect the “wrong” leader or political party (or restrict said superpower’s access to natural resources) would be seen as simply “evil” had the culprit been Vietnam and the victim the United States. Most Americans would suggest that America, even if on the verge of electing leaders that could one day oppress them, should be allowed to take that (possibly benign) risk, as “democracy” would suggest, without other nations deciding to “bomb them into the stone age” (U.S. General Curtis LeMay). But that courtesy was not extended to foreigners. So the United States was the “good guy” that somehow tripped over its own feet on its way to help others.

Some feel our military assault was “not sufficiently severe” (CIA director John McCone, 1965; see Zinn) to subdue the Vietnamese. In other words, if only the U.S. had dropped more bombs, sent more young American men into the bloodbath, killed more of the “enemy.”

Others hold to the idea that the U.S. would have won the war, had the “liberal media” not been so “pessimistic” and “critical,” turning the American people against the government, leading to the mass protests (nevermind the veterans participating in or leading the marches). Manufacturing Consent examines the reporting on the war at the time by the major media and shows that, with extraordinarily rare exceptions, the media supported U.S. government policy, preserving important narratives like that the South Vietnam people supported their U.S.-appointed dictators, even at times ignoring or covering up America’s most horrific crimes (for example, big publications like Life refused to report on My Lai when the story first broke).

And, as one might expect from a nation with so many patriots, detailed reporting on the war often caused popular support for the war to increase, not decrease. For example, conservatives often point to the Tet offensive (a massive Vietnamese counterattack that showed the U.S. had not in any way succeeded in crushing the enemy’s morale) as the best example of media reporting turning the people against the war. However, in early February 1968, the first few weeks of the Tet offensive, public opinion polls showed a shift toward increased American violence, toward the “hawks.” By the summer, when the Tet offensive was over, support for the war weakened.

Finally, comparing internal military documents, opinion polls, and media broadcasts and articles, Manufacturing Consent shows that the military and the common people were convinced long before the media that Vietnam could not be won (as documented above, public opinion was “badly divided” from the beginning). Not that this matters when considering the morality of the U.S. attack on Vietnam — whether the media turned the public against the war is irrelevant.

Despite last-ditch efforts (massive bombings called a “pacification campaign” by the State and the media), the U.S., with no victory in sight and its population near rebellion against the war, was forced to withdraw its military in 1975. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces overwhelmed the last South Vietnam regime and captured Saigon.

They renamed it Ho Chi Minh City.

The United States lost about 60,000 soldiers in the war; hundreds of thousands more were maimed or cursed with PTSD. It is estimated that 3 million people perished in Vietnam, mostly civilians. We do not know for sure, because we do not count the bodies of our victims.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

Is it White Privilege for a White Person to Write a Book on Race?

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Race Relations

A number of weeks ago, an African American woman sent me a message concerning my book, Racism in Kansas City: A Short History, which chronicles 200 years of white hatred and anti-black oppression in Kansas City, Missouri.

The woman seemed disappointed that a white person wrote the book. She told me it was “time for reparations” and asked when I would donate some of the profits of the book to the black community in Kansas City. She disliked the idea of me “making money off” and “taking advantage” of the black community.

I assured her that indeed a portion of the money garnered from the book is donated and that profiting off the black struggle and our ugly racial history was not my intent. She pointed out, rightly, that intent and impact are not the same thing. In a public social media post (not a message directed to me), she said I was exercising white privilege.

White privilege clearly exists. If whites bothered to study the evidence of modern prejudice or had any understanding of how past discrimination created disproportionate, intergenerational minority poverty (I recommend Racism in Kansas City: A Short History), the idea that whites generally have an easier time landing a job, getting a good home loan, or driving without being stopped and searched wouldn’t be controversial in the slightest (see How Whites Misunderstand White Privilege). Being divorced from the very possibility of experiencing racism is white privilege. I cannot actually understand how racism feels, having never experienced it. It’s certainly white privilege to write a book on something you will never experience.

The conversation echoed one I had with my brothers (also white) two years ago, in the early stages of writing the book. While documenting a truly horrific local history of segregation, discrimination, and violence, I told my brothers that once the book was in print I would be profiting off that horrific history — profiting off the retelling of the suffering black families and individuals went through and their valiant fight for equality and justice. Was that ethical?

Thus I feel this woman had a point (the foreknowledge that a white person telling this story might raise some eyebrows led me to decide I couldn’t publish it unless it had a foreword from a respected black Kansas Citian — namely, Alvin Brooks). Not that I’m making a great deal of money off Racism in Kansas City — some of the profits go to justice causes, most go to buying more copies of the book or social media advertising — but I am making something.

So indeed, I am benefiting financially from racism past and present — that’s white privilege at its finest. A sentence disturbing to write, but not untrue. Clearly, had so many white Kansas Citians throughout history not been barbaric toward our black neighbors, had slavery and Jim Crow and ideas of racial inferiority or deviancy never existed, Racism in Kansas City: A Short History never would have existed. Who could deny such a statement? In this way, I am benefiting from white privilege in a way most whites are not.

Yet at the same time, my justifications are perhaps reasonable. It wasn’t financial gain that motivated me to create the book, but rather an interest in American racial history and its effects, sparked by writers black and white — from Howard Zinn and Tim Wise to Malcolm X and Cornel West covering our national racial history, with Charles Coulter (Take Up the Black Man’s Burden) and Kevin F. Gotham (Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development) and others examining race relations in Kansas City. (The book I envisioned, unlike these other local works, would cover all 200 years of Kansas City history, be readable for a high school audience, and sharply focus on the darkest moments.)

Further, the alternatives to writing the work seemed unsatisfactory. Simply not writing the book, to someone kept awake at night obsessing over it, couldn’t be the answer. It was a story I thought Kansas City — particularly white Kansas Citians — needed to read. (One won’t be reading long before figuring out who the book is for.) What other alternatives existed? Finding a black writer and encouraging him or her to take up the project in my stead?

Lastly, it occurs to me that while this is white privilege, surely it must also be “the historian’s privilege,” if you will. Some historians focus on “feel-good” history, where everything is loving Pilgrims feasting with Native Americans. But most histories must contain brutality, oppression, and death, as this is what makes up much of history (and, I will add, makes history important and relevant to today). Can it not be said that any historian who writes and sells a book is in some way profiting from human misery — someone’s misery — of the past?

And when I think of all the people, of all colors, who have told me, often with great emotion, how the book impacted their lives, what it meant to them… Hopefully, despite the brutal history that afforded a young white person the opportunity to write a successful book, history will judge me as having done something good for Kansas City.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

What is Socialism?

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Socialism

“If we are to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

What is socialism? Socialism aims to eradicate forever authoritarianism, bureaucracy, poverty, and war; not by increasing government power, but by increasing democracy, the power of ordinary people, in politics and the workplace.

This is not authoritarian socialism, State Socialism, or Communism. This is democratic socialism, libertarian socialism. It is a vision of a better world.

Citizen Control of the State

Socialists seek the “socialization” of political power through direct democracy, a form of government that already exists in Switzerland. As Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg said, “There is no democracy without socialism and no socialism without democracy.”

How would you like to have a say — a direct say — in public policy? How would you like decision-making power? Under direct democracy, all public policy would be decided by national vote, from abortion rights to whether the nation should wage war. Instead of only voting once every four or eight years, concerned citizens will vote many times a year, on national policy. They will vote on education standards, whether to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants, the federal budget, everything.

Socialism is the simple belief that the people should govern the politicians, not the other way around.

Citizens would have initiative rights for municipal, state, and national policy; that is, the ability to have a law or law change put before the people for a vote.

This is common at the local and state levels in the U.S. How did Colorado legalize marijuana in 2012? People gathered enough citizens on a petition, it was put on the ballot, the people voted, and it was done. No corrupt politicians in the way, swayed this way and that by lobbyists and their bribes. No bureaucracy, no unelected officials making decisions for the common people. Just socialized power.

Proposed laws would be available for reading online, under guidelines ensuring their readability and brevity (no more 1,000-page laws). There would be a required time for public debate before the vote, allowing people who choose to be active in politics to study the legislation, listen to media pundits scream at each other, sway others to their side, and finally make an informed, educated vote. Change will come through the battle of ideas, not the whims of corporations or power-hungry politicians.

Under socialism, the Supreme Court and the president would preserve a system of checks and balances. The people would essentially take the place of Congress, being able to overrule the president’s veto with a supermajority but not the Court’s.

Short term limits, the threat of veto, and the threat of immediate recall vote (perhaps even of the president) would keep officials in line with the desires of voters. If, say, two-thirds of Americans felt the president wrongly vetoed a measure passed by the people, he or she could be overruled by national vote, just as Congress can do today. If the president (or any politician) refused to enforce laws, a two-thirds majority vote could remove him or her from office immediately. Politicians must be terrified of the people.

To quote The Communist Manifesto, “The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat [common people] to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” Power to the people, as the radical leftist saying goes.

A Simpler Government

Clearly, when the people become the lawmakers government will be simpler and smaller, in that bureaucracy will be all but eradicated and corruption (such as corporations pouring vast sums of money into politicians’ campaign coffers to influence legislation) will be extraordinarily difficult (how does one bribe the entire citizenry?).

But to enact the laws the people demand, there will still need to be various federal departments, like that of education, labor, energy, and so on (the members of which would be elected and at risk of immediate recall by popular vote, much different than unaccountable cabinet members appointed by the president). Fortunately, having been stripped of much of their power through direct democracy, their main task would be simple: writing checks.

The smaller government of socialism doesn’t mean no more taxes, but nor does it mean outrageous taxes. It means refusing to spend trillions on bank bailouts, wars, and a global military machine. It means using tax wealth (garnered progressively, having the rich pay higher rates than the poor and richer companies pay higher rates than smaller ones, as most people support) to meet human needs, primarily in three areas: healthcare, education, and jobs. There is a need for other departments to handle other things, of course (national defense and Social Security payments spring to mind), but these are the big three:

Guaranteed Work and a Strong Minimum Wage. Socialists envision using tax dollars to fund local public work projects. Even in the economic boom times of capitalism, there are not always enough jobs for those who seek them, and tens of millions remain very poor through no fault of their own. (Today, 48% of Americans are poor or make low income, as 50% of U.S. jobs pay less than $34,000 a year, about $24,000 after taxes.) But with public work projects, taxes could cover a basic salary to otherwise unemployed workers to rebuild our inner cities and slums, clean streets or rivers, tutor struggling students, plant new trees, paint murals on buildings — any productive task that betters society in some way. This has been accomplished successfully in the past, such as during the Great Depression. Some American and Canadian cities are already paying homeless men and women to do similar work, helping them crawl out of extreme poverty.

Such work need not be permanent (though governments could theoretically help workers organize into new, self-sustaining worker co-ops if there existed a consumer base for their mission), nor organized by the federal government. Federal tax dollars can be distributed to city councils based on annual unemployment levels, and cities can decide what projects they need to focus on to improve their communities.

Local projects run by locals, coupled with a strong minimum wage for all Americans (which many studies show does not increase unemployment and only causes slight increases in prices), would mean food stamps, child tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other forms of welfare (except those for the elderly, sick, and disabled) could be eliminated. Unemployment compensation will disappear — paying someone for 99 weeks without work in return is extremely wasteful. Under socialism, men and women will be paid to work (see What Conservatives Will Love About Socialism).

In this way, unemployment and poverty can be eradicated.

Guaranteed Healthcare. Likewise, the State will not own the hospitals (as it does in Britain today) — the doctors, nurses, and janitors would (see below). But the Department of Health would receive medical bills from hospitals and would cover the costs — at the very least covering the costs of expensive surgeries and prescriptions that today leave many bankrupt (in 2013, an estimated 645,000 bankruptcies were linked to massive medical bills; at the beginning of 2016, 20% of insured Americans were having difficulty paying their medical bills) or dead from preventable problems (45,000 a year in the late 2000s died as a direct result of not having health insurance).

Universal healthcare already exists in virtually every industrialized nation besides the United States, and much can be learned from their experience.

The French system is more efficient, more popular, and far less expensive per citizen and as a proportion of GDP than the American system. Sweden insures all citizens, but uses private doctors and competition to keep down costs. True, these systems are not perfect, for example often relying on heavier taxes. Yet they are popular, even taken for granted, and no one is dying from preventable illnesses. Healthcare is seen as a human right, not something you must have a good job or enough money to have. The U.S. is wealthier than any nation that has universal healthcare today — if they can manage, so can we (and notice these democracies have yet to mutate into horrific Communist dictatorships).

Guaranteed Education. Under socialism, the State will not own the schools. Teachers, paras, librarians, and janitors will own their schools; professors, students, and groundkeepers will own the colleges (see below). But schools and colleges can be funded similarly to today (though school funding will no longer be based on property taxes, which ensures poor inner-city neighborhoods have dismal schools and rich suburban neighborhoods have very fine schools — schools will be funded equally).

In the same way taxation today provides free K-12 education for all, this could be expanded to cover the cost of college, something many other democracies have already accomplished. College only being available to those who can afford it or those willing to take on massive debts is an enormous waste of human talent. Anyone ambitious and willing to work hard should be able to earn a degree, regardless of whether they come from a rich or poor family. (One might ask if everyone has a strong wage and a job, why should college or healthcare be paid for? The answer is obvious: Tens of thousands a year for tuition or tens of thousands in medical bills would still not be doable for many families making a guaranteed salary of even $40,000 or higher — particularly those with multiple children, more than one sick parent, etc.)

The teachers and workers who run the schools must of course have as much independence from the State as possible, more than they have today. In reality, a society where each school had total control over its curriculum (and all else) wouldn’t necessarily be incompatible with a socialist society. Likewise, neither would families being able to choose between any school they wished. However, it seems likely this “privatization” would cause serious problems. Should public schools have the freedom to simply not teach a subject? To gut the study of black slavery, the Civil War, or all of social studies for instance? And wouldn’t families flock to schools that align with their preferences, quickly making public schools divided by religion, political persuasion, race, and class…even worse than today? This is why schools should not be businesses that compete for students and tuition fees. It’s why schools and teacher salaries should remain funded through the State. (People will of course still have the freedom to create private schools; we’re talking about public schools here.)

It seems reasonable to maintain a system where your public school is based on where you live. Though this is not a perfect system (most blacks and whites, for example, do not live in integrated neighborhoods, meaning they don’t share schools), it seems to offer the best chance for students to befriend and learn from other students and teachers who are culturally and ideologically different. Further, it makes sense to have a national curriculum, to keep learning consistent enough between schools, to aid both students and teachers who move around the nation.

The curriculum, of course, would be designed by an elected Department of Education and approved by the majority of the people. Should evolution and climate change be taught in public schools? Let the majority decide.

Worker Control of Businesses

Socialism would not only end authoritarianism and bureaucracy in the State, it would mean the same for the place American adults spend most of their lives: their jobs.

Workers would own their workplaces. In a capitalist society, a business is structured like a dictatorship: an owner or small group of owners, board members, and investors hold all the power and make all the decisions, including how company profits are used — to increase production, to open new plants or stores, invest in new technology, increase advertising, hire more workers, increase worker pay, increase owner pay, and so on.

Predictably, owners often award themselves huge sums of money and pay workers little, creating massive inequality. Predictably, in the U.S. today the 1% of wealthiest citizens own as much wealth as the bottom 95% of citizens. The bottom 80% of Americans own just 7% of the national wealth, while the top 1% owns 40%. Capitalism is the few growing rich off the labor of the many. After all, could Steve Jobs have built all these devices himself? He needed workers.

Adam Smith, an economist that inspired Karl Marx, wrote in The Wealth of Nations of a central conflict under capitalism: “The workmen desire to get as much as possible, the masters to give as little as possible.” (Conservatives worship Smith, but would squirm if they actually read some of his insights.)

Marx believed, as do modern socialists, that wealth is created by workers. It’s a very simple idea. Originally, it is the company founder creating the good or providing the service, but eventually the owner hires workers and takes a managerial role. Without workers, an owner cannot produce on a scale larger than him- or herself. Wealth is created by workers because workers directly provide the good or service that is sold by the owner.

That sale covers the cost of production, the cost of labor, and a little extra: profit the owner uses as he or she chooses. This means workers are not paid the full value of what they produce for the company. Socialists call it exploitation. It is a theft by someone who would not have that profit without the workers. So socialists say profit should be kept and controlled by the people directly responsible for generating it. Under a system where all workers are owners, there would be no owner-worker conflict; unions would thus be obsolete.

True, owners make decisions that can lead to more sales and more profits. Like investing in a new technology, for example. But to put it bluntly, owners are not needed. The top-down, authoritarian structure is not vital. The workers can wield that decision-making power and keep the profits of those decisions. Worker cooperatives — businesses that are owned and run by the workers — are more democratic than capitalist-structured firms. They are “socialist” because power and wealth are “socialized,” or shared equally, within a firm. They still compete with other businesses to provide the best products for the lowest prices (market socialism).

Hundreds of successful worker cooperatives exist in the U.S., with many more around the world, some with a few employees, others with tens of thousands. Decisions are made democratically, by the vote of each employee, or by elected managers. Decisions on hours, pay, schedule, new hires, investments in new technology, opening new stores, and everything else is made by discussion and vote. Profits are distributed more equitably, enriching everyone, not just the few. More workers means profits are further divided, but just like in capitalist firms, more workers also mean higher profits. These cooperatives were organized by ordinary people, not the government.

When workers own their workplaces, there is little chance they will decide to fire themselves and outsource their own jobs to poorer nations. Capitalists do this so they can pay workers pennies and follow fewer worker safety and environmental regulations. Worker-owners are less likely to poison the soil, water, and air of their own communities, or ignore workplace safety guidelines. New technologies no longer lead to mass firings — they allow everyone to work fewer hours while making more money! Both worker ownership and people’s control of government will work in tandem to prevent oil companies and weapons manufacturers (the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned of) from influencing the decision to wage war, as has occurred countless times in American history.

Unsurprisingly, workers-owners are happier, wealthier, more productive, and their businesses less likely to fold than capitalist firms. There are challenges, such as the ability to get credit from banks suspicious of co-ops, but they are in no way insurmountable. There is nothing to say in 200 years America will not be a nation of worker cooperatives, if that’s what people choose.

Marx saw worker cooperatives by 1864 as a

…victory of the political economy of labor over the political economy of property. We speak of the co-operative movement, especially the co-operative factories raised by the unassisted efforts of a few bold “hands”. The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.

To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be developed to national dimensions…

There are even some 60 American schools that have done away with authoritarianism, in their buildings at least, if not their districts.

Most private and public schools have top-down control, with the principal being the dictator at the top who makes all decisions on school policy and receives the biggest paycheck. So these experimental schools have simply done away with principals; teachers make all decisions, like hiring, curriculum, and school scheduling, democratically.

The Denver Green School in Colorado has a 4 day week for students, and on Fridays teachers, office personnel, social workers, and all other employees meet to discuss, debate, and vote on school policy. The Hughes STEM High School in Cincinnati has a principal, but he or she has equal power with teachers and cannot veto a democratic decision. Employees feel empowered, and in a profession with colossal turnover, the Avalon School in St. Paul has a teacher retention rate of 95-100%. Most teacher-led schools have on average fewer than 200 students, but larger schools are joining the trend, some with over 600.

The Path to Communism?

Let it never be said that trying to accomplish these things will only lead to Communism. As you move toward democracy in politics and the workplace, you move away from Communism and State Socialism.

The goal of both democratic socialism and authoritarian socialism is the eradication of capitalism, but each has a different manner of going about it. Democratic (and guild, libertarian, etc.) socialism does so from the bottom-up, simply by workers (and even consumers or local communities) owning their workplaces. The government has no role except perhaps granting the lawful right of ownership. Communism destroys capitalism from the top-down, wherein the government owns all workplaces and organizes the economy and the workers according to a central plan. The people are supposed to own the government and thus the plan (this type of democratic nationalization is what Marx favored), but of course it doesn’t always work out that way.

Soviet Russia, for instance, was a command economy: top-down administration, an economy structured, ironically, like a single capitalist business. The iron fists of capitalists were replaced by the iron fists of dictators and unelected economic planners. This system is therefore called both state socialism and state capitalism in historical literature!

Opponents of socialism insist that these reforms — the government paying medical or tuition bills, expanded public sector work for the unemployed, worker ownership, and pure democracy — are a slippery slope to tyranny. Of course, Americans also insisted racial integration, Medicare, and social security would lead to authoritarianism! They were wrong. These types of arguments are often simply unfounded. Switzerland has direct democracy; a multitude of peaceful democracies in Europe and elsewhere have free college and healthcare; Germany requires large companies to have half their boards of directors elected by the workers (“codetermination”). Are these nations going to end up Communist dictatorships? When do we expect the gulags? Did New Deal programs destroy our right to start a business, work in a particular field, or vote for representatives? Did taxpayer-funded public schooling, small checks for the elderly, and covered healthcare bills for the disabled, very poor, and seniors?

It cannot be emphasized enough that direct democracy takes power away from the State and gives it to the people. True, the government has a role to play in footing bills, guaranteeing rights, and organizing and funding local work projects. (The right to workplace ownership would be in the same vein as minimum wage, workplace safety, anti-child labor, and anti-discrimination rights. You may see this as an evil government eradication of the right to be a capitalist owner, but rights are typically crushed by more ethical ones. The right of a worker to a minimum wage abolishes the right of the employer to pay him or her $2 per hour; the right of a person of color to be served at a restaurant ends the right of a white supremacist to deny him or her service; the right to workplace ownership makes history the right of capitalist exploitation and authoritarianism.) But direct democracy is the key to creating a government of, by, and for the people.

If you read the history of Marxism, the libertarian, democratic, and anarchistic socialists stood opposed to State Socialists like the Bolsheviks. There was a deep division between Marxists on bottom-up versus top-down control, which roughly determined who would go on to call themselves communists and who would call themselves socialists. In the Soviet Union, Communism crushed socialism through violence (read Anarchism, by Guerin, for a detailed and captivating study). The workers who took over their workplaces and their towns lost that power to the State at the end of a gun.

Perhaps nothing could better explain this dichotomy than an 1887 poem by Ernest Lesigne, a Frenchman. This was several decades after Marx and several before the Russian Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. It is called “Two Socialisms”:

There are two Socialisms.

One is communistic, the other solidaritarian.

One is dictatorial, the other libertarian.

One is metaphysical, the other positive.

One is dogmatic, the other scientific.

One is emotional, the other reflective.

One is destructive, the other constructive.

Both are in pursuit of the greatest possible welfare for all.

One aims to establish happiness for all, the other to enable each to be happy in his own way.

The first regards the State as a society sui generis, of an especial essence, the product of a sort of divine right outside of and above all society, with special rights and able to exact special obediences; the second considers the State as an association like any other, generally managed worse than others.

The first proclaims the sovereignty of the State, the second recognizes no sort of sovereign.

One wishes all monopolies to be held by the State; the other wishes the abolition of all monopolies.

One wishes the governed class to become the governing class; the other wishes the disappearance of classes.

Both declare that the existing state of things cannot last.

The first considers revolutions as the indispensable agent of evolutions; the second teaches that repression alone turns evolutions into revolution.

The first has faith in a cataclysm.

The second knows that social progress will result from the free play of individual efforts.

Both understand that we are entering upon a new historic phase.

One wishes that there should be none but proletaires.

The other wishes that there should be no more proletaires.

The first wishes to take everything away from everybody.

The second wishes to leave each in possession of its own.

The one wishes to expropriate everybody.

The other wishes everybody to be a proprietor.

The first says: ‘Do as the government wishes.’

The second says: ‘Do as you wish yourself.’

The former threatens with despotism.

The latter promises liberty.

The former makes the citizen the subject of the State.

The latter makes the State the employee of the citizen.

One proclaims that labor pains will be necessary to the birth of a new world.

The other declares that real progress will not cause suffering to any one.

The first has confidence in social war.

The other believes only in the works of peace.

One aspires to command, to regulate, to legislate.

The other wishes to attain the minimum of command, of regulation, of legislation.

One would be followed by the most atrocious of reactions.

The other opens unlimited horizons to progress.

The first will fail; the other will succeed.

Both desire equality.

One by lowering heads that are too high.

The other by raising heads that are too low.

One sees equality under a common yoke.

The other will secure equality in complete liberty.

One is intolerant, the other tolerant.

One frightens, the other reassures.

The first wishes to instruct everybody.

The second wishes to enable everybody to instruct himself.

The first wishes to support everybody.

The second wishes to enable everybody to support himself.

One says:

The land to the State.

The mine to the State.

The tool to the State.

The product to the State.

The other says:

The land to the cultivator.

The mine to the miner.

The tool to the laborer.

The product to the producer.

There are only these two Socialisms.

One is the infancy of Socialism; the other is its manhood.

One is already the past; the other is the future.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

By Conservatives’ Logic, Nearly All Americans (Including Them) Are Lazy

Posted on December 8, 2016 by G.S. Griffin under Politics

How do we explain the inability of poor Americans to earn a degree, find themselves a high-paying job, buy a fine house, and send their children to the best schools?

Were we to bother to study sociology and the economic realities of social class mobility (see Beyond Bootstraps: Why Poverty is So Hard to Escape), we’d see the problems are slightly more complex than a defect in poor people that better-off people simply don’t have. That is, we’d understand it’s not merely a lack of willpower, effort, ambition, common sense, or wisdom. This is not to say poverty doesn’t cause some people to lose hope, fall into depression, and give up, but this is an effect of social conditions, quite different from an alleged flaw in certain people that is somehow innate.

Yet, to many right-leaning Americans, those special defects are the sole cause of our poor neighbors’ plights. While this is a position largely rooted in a lack of knowledge and an ideology full of individualistic dogma, it is interesting to consider where such logic ends up if followed to its conclusion.

Note for a moment the obvious: Under conservative logic, even if 50% of jobs in the U.S. pay under $34,000 (some $24,000 after taxes) and if the cost of living is skyrocketing, and therefore 48% of Americans live in poverty or earn low-income, it still must be said that about half of Americans are lazy. Those are the current economic conditions in the U.S. (see The 56% of Americans With Under $1,000 in Savings: Poor Savers or Just Poor?), and if we are so eager to select an unwillingness to work hard as the root cause of unfavorable living conditions, there is no reason we couldn’t say half of Americans have some special defect. This would, of course, include many conservatives, likely many who engage in “blaming the victim.”

But there is no need to stop there. If one insists that a lower class person hasn’t made it to the middle class yet due to lack of effort, why would one not say the same of a middle class person who has yet to make it to the upper class? America has some economic mobility, but not enough to escape the conclusion that the vast majority of us are entirely lazy. Consider an excerpt from “Beyond Bootstraps” that discusses income levels (there are five, the “quintiles”):

A 2007 study found that a minority, 34% of Americans, manage to reach a higher quintile (for example, moving from the lowest to the second quintile). Yet “children of middle-income parents have a near-equal likelihood of ending up in any other quintile, presenting equal promise and peril for those born to middle-class parents.” 42% of people born into the lowest quintile die there, and the vast majority of those who escape the lowest quintile die in the second lowest. The very poorest and the very richest are those least likely to leave the social class in which they were born.

This is not a temporary problem. In 2014, economists found children have about the same chances of economic advancement that children had 50 years ago.

The majority of Americans will die in the social class in which they are born, because in many interesting ways social class perpetuates itself. If the mark of laziness is the inability to better one’s social condition to a substantial degree, it appears only 34% of Americans are without this innate defect. 66% of us, according to conservative logic, are not working hard enough — we are not rising to new income levels. (True, those in the top quintile can’t “escape” or rise into a higher quintile, so perhaps we can say the percentage of lazy Americans is a bit lower, but you understand what I’m getting at.)

If the majority of Americans do not advance to a higher social class, and the root cause of an inability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps is lack of effort, the only sensible conclusion is that the majority of Americans lack willpower and ambition. It couldn’t be that our neighbors in the lower class, the middle class, and the upper class work equally hard to better their lives in whatever ways are available to them, whether it’s taking a second job at a fast food joint or figuring out the best marketing strategy for your global corporation’s products.

This demonization of the poor as lazy and flawed is not only a poor substitute for explanations that consider economic realities, it logically must include both better-off people and countless conservatives who perpetuate this sort of nonsense.

For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.

Griffin

The political writings of G.S. Griffin

Author Archives: G.S. Griffin

How Technology Under Capitalism Will Leave All of Us Jobless

A History of Violence: The American Slaughter in Vietnam

Is it White Privilege for a White Person to Write a Book on Race?

What is Socialism?

Citizen Control of the State

A Simpler Government

Worker Control of Businesses

The Path to Communism?

By Conservatives’ Logic, Nearly All Americans (Including Them) Are Lazy