Debs Attacks “the Monstrous System” of Capitalism ~~ E. Debs

In recognition of election day

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5725/

The world’s workers have always been and still are the world’s slaves. They have borne all the burdens of the race and built all the monuments along the track of civilization; they have produced all the world’s wealth and supported all the world’s governments. They have conquered all things but their own freedom. They are still the subject class in every nation on earth and the chief function of every government is to keep them at the mercy of their masters.

The workers in the mills and factories, in the mines and on the farms and railways never had a party of their own until the Socialist party was organized. They divided their votes between the parties of their masters. They did not realize that they were using their ballots to forge their own fetters.

But the awakening came. It was bound to come. Class rule became more and more oppressive and wage slavery more and more galling. The eyes of the workers began to open. They began to see the cause of the misery they had dumbly suffered so many years. It dawned upon them that society was divided into two classes - capitalists and workers, exploiters and producers; that the capitalists, while comparatively few, owned the nation and controlled the government; that the courts and the soldiers were at their command, and that the workers, while in a great majority, were in slavish subjection.

When they ventured to protest they were discharged and found themselves blacklisted; when they went out on strike they were suppressed by the soldiers and sent to jail.

They looked about them and saw a land of wonderful resources; they saw the productive machinery made by their own hands and the vast wealth produced by their own labor, in the shadow of which their wives and children were perishing in the skeleton clutch of famine.

Began to Think

The very suffering they were forced to endure quickened their senses. They began to think. A new light dawned upon their dark skies. They rubbed the age-long sleep from their eyes. They had long felt the brutalizing effect of class rule; now they saw the cause of it. Slowly but steadily they became class conscious. They said, “We are brothers, we are comrades,” and they saw themselves multiplied by millions. They caught the prophetic battle cry of Karl Marx, the world’s greatest labor leader, the inspired evangel of working-class emancipation, “Workers of all countries, unite!”

And now, behold! The international Socialist movement spreads out over all the nations of the earth. The world’s workers are aroused at last. They are no longer on their knees; their bowed bodies are now erect. Despair has given way to hope, weakness to strength, fear to courage. They no longer cringe and supplicate; they hold up their heads and command. They have ceased to fear their masters and have learned to trust themselves.

And this is how the Socialist party came to be born. It was quickened into life in the bitter struggle of the world’s enslaved workers. It expresses their collective determination to break their fetters and emancipate themselves and the race.

Is it strange that the workers are loyal to such a party, that they proudly stand beneath its blazing banners and fearlessly proclaim its conquering principles? It is the one party of their class, born of their agony and baptized in the blood of their countless brethren who perished in the struggle to give it birth.

Hail to this great party of the toiling millions whose battle cry is heard around the world!

Doesn’t Plead for Votes

We do not plead for votes; the workers give them freely the hour they understand.

But we need to destroy the prejudice that still exists and dispel the darkness that still prevails in the working-class world. We need the clear light of sound education and the conquering power of economic and political organization.

Before the unified hosts of labor all the despotic governments on earth are powerless and all resistance vain. Before their onward march all ruling classes disappear and all slavery vanishes forever.

The appeal of the Socialist party is to all the useful people of the nation, all who work with brain and muscle to produce the nation’s wealth and who promote its progress and conserve its civilization.

Only they who bear its burdens may rightfully enjoy the blessings of civilized society.

There are no boundary lines to separate race from race, sex from sex, or creed from creed in the Socialist party. The common rights of all are equally recognized.

Every human being is entitled to sunlight and air, to what his labor produces, and to an equal chance with every other human being to unfold and ripen and give to the world the riches of his mind and soul.

Economic slavery is the world’s greatest curse today. Poverty and misery, prostitution, insanity, and crime are its inevitable results.

The Socialist party is the one party which stands squarely and uncompromisingly for the abolition of industrial slavery; the one party pledged in every fiber of its being to the economic freedom of all the people.

So long as the nation’s resources and productive and distributive machinery are the private property of a privileged class the masses will be at their mercy, poverty will be their lot and life will be shorn of all that raises it above the brute level.

New Progressive Party

The infallible test of a political party is the private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of life. Apply that test to the Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties and upon that basic, fundamental issue you will find them essentially one and the same. They differ according to the conflicting interests of the privileged classes, but at bottom they are alike and stand for capitalist class rule and working-class slavery.

The new Progressive party is a party of progressive capitalism. It is lavishly financed and shrewdly advertised. But it stands for the rule of capitalism all the same.

When the owners of the trusts finance a party to put themselves out of business; when they turn over their wealth to the people from whom they stole it and go to work for a living, it will be time enough to consider the merits of the Roosevelt Progressive party.

One question is sufficient to determine the true status of all these parties. Do they want the workers to own the tools they work with, control their own jobs, and secure to themselves the wealth they produce? Certainly not. That is utterly ridiculous and impossible from their point of view.

The Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties all stand for the private ownership by the capitalists of the productive machinery used by the workers, so that the capitalists can continue to filch the wealth produced by the workers.

The Socialist party is the only party which declares that the tools of labor belong to labor and that the wealth produced by the working class belongs to the working class.

Intelligent workingmen are no longer deceived. They know that the struggle in which the world is engaged today is a class struggle and that in this struggle the workers can never win by giving their votes to capitalist parties. They have tried this for many years and it has always produced the same result to them.

The class of privilege and pelf has had the world by the throat and the working class beneath its iron-shod hoofs long enough. The magic word of freedom is ringing through the nation and the spirit of intelligent revolt is finding expression in every land beneath the sun.

The solidarity of the working class is the salient force in the social transformation of which we behold the signs upon every hand. Nearer and nearer they are being drawn together in the bonds of unionism; clearer and clearer becomes their collective vision; greater and greater the power that throbs within them.

Hosts of Freedom

They are the twentieth-century hosts of freedom who are to destroy all despotisms, topple over all thrones, seize all sceptres of authority and hold them in their own strong hands, tear up all privilege by the roots, and consecrate the earth and all its fullness to the joy and service of all humanity.

It is vain to hope for material relief upon the prevailing system of capitalism. All the reforms that are proposed by the three capitalist parties, even if carried out in good faith, would still leave the working class in industrial slavery.

The working class will never be emancipated by the grace of the capitalists class, but only by overthrowing that class.

The power to emancipate itself is inherent in the working class, and this power must be developed through sound education and applied through sound organization.

It is as foolish and self-destructive for workingmen to turn to Republican, Democratic, and Progressive parties on election day as it would be for them to turn to the Manufacturers‘ Association and the Citizens’ Alliance when they are striking against starvation wages.

The capitalist class is organized economically and politically to keep the working class in subjection and perpetuate its power as a ruling class. They do not support a working class union nor a working-class party. They are not so foolish. They wisely look out for themselves.

The capitalist class despise a working-class party. Why should the working class give their support to a capitalist-class party?

Capitalist misrule under which workingmen suffer slavery and the most galling injustice exists only because it has workingmen’s support. Withdraw that support and capitalism is dead.

The capitalists can enslave and rob the workers only by the consent of the workers when they cast their ballots on election day.

Every vote cast for a capitalist party, whatever its name, is a vote for wage-slavery, for poverty and degradation.

Every vote cast for the Socialist party, the workers' own party, is a vote for emancipation.

We appeal to the workers and to all who sympathize with them to make their power felt in this campaign. Never before has there been so great an opportunity to strike an effective blow for freedom.

Capitalism Doomed

Capitalism is rushing blindly to its impending doom. All the signs portend the inevitable breakdown of the existing order. Deep-seated discontent has seized upon the masses. They must indeed be deaf who do not hear the mutterings of the approaching storm.

Poverty, high prices, unemployment, child slavery, widespread misery and haggard want in a land bursting with abundance; prostitution and insanity, suicide and crime, these in solemn numbers tell the tragic story of capitalism’s saturnalia of blood and tears and shame as its end draws near.

It is to abolish this monstrous system and the misery and crime which flow from it in a direful and threatening stream that the Socialist party was organized and now makes its appeal to the intelligence and conscience of the people. Social reorganization is the imperative demand of this world-wide revolutionary movement.

The Socialist party’s mission is not only to destroy capitalist despotism but to establish industrial and social democracy. To this end the workers are steadily organizing and fitting themselves for the day when they shall take control of the people’s industries and when the right to work shall be as inviolate as the right to breathe the breath of life.

Standing as it does for the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery, for the equal rights and opportunities of all men and all women, for the abolition of child labor and the conservation of all childhood, for social self-rule and the equal freedom of all, the Socialist party is the party of progress, the party of the future, and its triumph will signalize the birth of a new civilization and the dawn of a happier day for all humanity.

Trump-Biden 2: Dueling Billionaire-Backed Liars ~~ Jeff Mackler

https://socialistaction.org/2020/11/01/trump-biden-2-dueling-billionaire-backed-liars/

If I were a high school debate referee I’d score Joe Biden the winner big time in the October 22 final debate with the nation’s moron accidental president Donald Trump. But it wasn’t a high school debate wherein each side is assigned in advance to take opposing sides of a question. In Trump-Biden 2 both debaters took the stage to defend the same side, that is, the corporate capitalist elite who really run the country regardless of which candidate gets to live in the White House.

In 2016 the relatively unknown Trump stood out from the Republican primary pack of professional hustler politicians and from Washington, D.C. swamp dweller Hillary Clinton via a torrent of anti-establishment sounding invective aimed at convincing working people that he was prepared to take on the “insiders” and “crooks” who populate the “dark state.” Trump promised to bring on an era of truth, justice and openness – and jobs – for the common worker. Four years later the jobs never materialized because the corporate elite much preferred to relocate and run their plants with super low wage Chinese, Indian or Vietnamese labor and then ship their products back to the U.S. to undercut U.S. competitors. With 40 percent of China’s population earning less than $5.00 per day,   China and other cheap labor nations became U.S. manufacturing hubs. Trump‘s bluster aside, few, if any jobs came home. Those that remained here were closed and/or downsized via replacing workers with robots or other automated machines. Similarly, advised by his pollsters then that he might score a few more points if he sounded some “antiwar” themes in contrast to the Democrats, like promising to bring some troops home from Afghanistan or Syria, the warmonger Trump took that verbal option as well.

Today, his Democratic Party opponents, with the pampered military-industrial complex flush with eight years of unprecedented spending to pursue Obama’s seven simultaneous wars of intervention, conquest and plunder, pillory Trump for being soft on North Korea, China, Russia and Syria and much too hard on NATO. Biden insisted in the debate, with zero proof, other than alleged and undisclosed CIA reports, that Russia and Iran were intervening in the elections to support Trump. Biden neglected to note that U.S. “interference” in the affairs of other nations today includes maintaining 1100 military bases in some 170 nations and daily organizing monstrous drone wars, sanction wars, Special Operation team wars as well as the usual type of wars of mass infrastructure destruction, intervention and conquest.

Twin party agreements on fundamentals      

When Trump says, “Yes,” on any issue, the Democrats say “No” and visa versa, except when it came to the $3.2 trillion CARES Act largely corporate bailout legislation and the $1.5 trillion in corporate tax cuts. Bi-partisan unity there! When Trump asked Congress for some $775 billion for the military for 2020, the Democrats upped the figure by another $50 billion or so. When Trump attacked the FBI for spying on him at Obama’s order the Democrats defended and praised the FBI as the epitome of virtue except when the FBI head, days before the 2016 election, leaked the story of Hillary Clinton’s emails that revealed her moves to cheat Bernie Sanders out of a primary victory.

In any case, the Oct. 22 debate was an object lesson of ruling class politics in crisis, with a well-coached Biden prepared with a stream of sugar-coated lies aimed at the unwary and the moron Trump left near speechless, repeatedly, if not effectively, responding to Biden’s election time promises, “Hey Joe, why didn’t you do that in the eight years when you and Obama were in charge? In fact, Joe, during your 47 years in Congress?” This time out, however, the debate organizers agreed in advance to impose a mute button system to prevent a repeat of the first spectacle where an out of control Trump ceaselessly interrupted, bullied and badgered Biden, rendering any serious exchange near worthless.     

The result? An essentially silenced Trump barely bothered to present his own views and/or implied, as with the COVID-19 pandemic, that he “had already done everything” that Biden was proposing. Here, however, there was a difference in words not facts. Trump insisted that the world’s largest economy could not remain closed. People needed to work to live, he insisted, while Biden agreed but added that opening the economy had to be done “safely.” Biden added that the federal government had to provide the funds to do so since state funds, he insisted, were not available. Needless to say, neither had proposed the immediate allocation of such federal funds, not to mention that all states are free to raise any and all needed funds by reversing previous state budget decisions that had shifted billions in wealth from social programs to corporate relief, that is, socialism for the rich. Biden and Trump, debate rhetoric aside, both operate within these capitalist parameters.

States bring on 2nd & 3rd COVID-19 waves

All 50 states, red and blue, have repeatedly moved to re-open businesses and public institutions only to bring on a second and now a third wave of massive COVID-19 infections. Need we mention that NYC and New York State, run by Democrats with a near two-thirds legislative majority, repeatedly moved to re-open schools and other public and private facilities – always with disastrous consequences? And the ever-re-opening Democrats in California do so with abandon as national COVID-19 infections soar to national highs – 83,000 new cases reported on October 25 – a world record.

Minimum wage dispute

A “generous” Biden amazed even his own sycophants by proposing to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15.00. The last minimum wage raise to the present less than starvation rate of $7.25 was in 2008. Trump easily countered Biden’s sudden proclamation by asking why Obama-Biden had done nothing on this issue during their eight-year reign, while expressing his own hesitancy on the matter based on his concern that small business not be harmed. Neither bothered to mention the record of their parties in supporting  state minimum wage legislation that severely limits the applicability of the raised rates based on the premise of “protecting small businesses,” which are often designated as those with less than 100 workers!   

Trump’s racist, sexist, red-baiting of Harris

A particularly racist and sexist Trump outburst was registered when Trump ridiculed Biden’s Vice Presidential runningmate Kamala Harris. In a line or two of invective rarely matched in intensity Trump consciously mispronounced her name in order to lend it a foreign connotation and proceeded to demean Harris’s sex as if to promise his audience that a women would never be the Vice President. He added the red-baiting lie for good measure that Harris, a corporate candidate of the first order, was a socialist! In his own words, “We’re not going to have a socialist president, especially a female socialist president, we’re not gonna have it, we’re not gonna put up with it.”

Wall Street funds Biden over Trump

Poor Joe Biden got hoisted on his own petard when he revealed that Trump had concealed the administration’s prior knowledge that COVID-19 was “dangerous” while simultaneously arranging to contract Wall Street investors to help them prepare. Said Trump, disingenuously for sure, “I don’t know if somebody went to Wall Street. You’re the one that takes all the money from Wall Street. I don’t take it. You have raised a lot of money, tremendous amounts of money. And every time you raise money, deals are made. I could raise so much more money. As president and as somebody that knows most of those people, I could call the heads of Wall Street, the heads of every company in America. I would blow away every record. But I don’t want to do that because it puts me in a bad position. And then you bring up Wall Street? You shouldn’t be bringing up Wall Street Joe. Because you’re the one that takes the money from Wall Street, not me. I could blow away your records like you wouldn’t believe. We don’t need money. We have plenty of money. In fact, we beat Hillary Clinton with a tiny fraction of the money that she was able to get. Don’t tell me about Wall Street.”

Here we quote President Trump at length because he blurts out a truth that is rarely publicly revealed –  the simple notion that ruling class figures like Trump, a moronic accident of history, in his case, have full and unimpeded access to the nation’s “one percent,” with the reciprocal understanding that each of these top corporate leaders exercises their “influence” as a matter of course – as day follows night. Indeed, capitalism’s top gun political officials have properly and historically been defined as “the Executive Committee of the ruling class.” In Trump’s case, and a rare exception for sure, a relatively unstable nut case, again, an “accident of history,” won an election and has declined to play by the established rules of the game. These begin with the proposition that whomever wins the presidency will agree in advance to be surrounded and dominated by the direct representatives of the ruling class, who will inform the president as to his proper conduct. That Trump’s term in office has been marked as never before by the constant and repeated dismissal/firing and replacement of one top official after another informs us that despite best efforts to “civilize” this narcissistic nut case, and teach him to utter the slick diplomatic language prepared by trained speech writers, he has proven to be beyond redemption. More than a few of Trump-dismissed top executives, like former Exxon Mobile CEO, Rex Tillerson, who briefly served as the administration’s Secretary of State, have quit (or were fired), with the latter privately, but reported by the New York Times, as stating that Trump was a “f*****g moron.”

But even a “f*****g moron” can retain the capacity for revealing insider truths as with Biden’s Wall Street money-raising. Forbes Magazine reported that in the presidential billionaire count Biden leads Trump 131-93.

Trump blasts Black Lives Matter

Trump’s “big lie” repertoire sometimes gets the best of him as when he claimed to have done more for Blacks than Abraham Lincoln. Few takers on that assertion and even fewer when he responded to debate moderator Kristen Welker’s question as to why he described the Black Lives Matter Movement as a symbol of hate. Here’s Trump’s response:

“Well you have to understand the first time I ever heard of Black Lives Matter they were chanting ‘Pigs in a blanket’, talking about police, ‘Pigs, Pigs’, talking about our police, ‘Pigs in a blanket, fry’ em like bacon’. I said, ‘That’s a horrible thing’. And they were marching down the street. And that was my first glimpse of Black Lives Matter. I thought it was a terrible thing. As far as my relationships with all people, I think I have great relationships with all people. I am the least racist person in this room.”

Here we have the president of the U.S., standing before an audience of 50 million people on Oct. 22, stating that his first glimpse of a movement that has to date mobilized some 26 million people in the streets in peaceful protests against the nation’s systemic racism, declaring that movement to be violent and illegitimate! CNN’s national survey found that 84 percent of the country agreed with Black Lives Matter’s fundamental critiques of ingrained institutional racism. And Trump? Need we say more?

And Biden, no narcissist for sure, but a lifelong water carrier for the nation’s covert congressional racists – not only because of his role in supporting or crafting the heinous 1984 and 1994 racist mass incarceration bills that jailed millions of Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans to ever-privatized slave labor prisons, but a lifetime – 47 years – but also for his service to the heirs of the former Southern slavocracy Democrats who partnered for decades with their Northern Democratic Party “liberal “ counterparts to maintain Jim Crow racist segregation.

It was a revealing debate indeed, an object lesson of capitalist brutality in its crudest and most despicable form. No serious choice for serious social justice activists today. Vote Socialist Action! Join us!

A Right-Wing Think Tank Is Behind the Controversial Great Barrington Declaration Calling for COVID-19 Herd Immunity. ~~ Dana Drugmand,

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-10-29/a-right-wing-think-tank-is-behind-the-controversial-great-barrington-declaration-calling-for-covid-19-herd-immunity/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

An open letter that emerged earlier this month opposing COVID-19 shutdowns and calling for a “herd immunity” approach to addressing the coronavirus — which already has claimed over 220,000 American lives — is one of the latest examples of how right-wing ideology and think tanks that have long cultivated climate science denial are now engaging in COVID disinformation and promoting messaging dangerous to public health.

Known as the Great Barrington Declaration, this statement advocating for herd immunity was introduced in early October at an event hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research, a conservative free-market think tank located in the western Massachusetts town of Great Barrington. This think tank, funded in part through a corporate investment firm with holdings in major oil and petrochemical companies, operates a network for the international business community that partners with other institutions backed by Koch and fossil fuel cash.

The herd immunity strategy, which the open letter describes as a “focused protection” approach, basically calls for allowing this highly infectious virus to spread throughout the population, in theory infecting enough individuals while somehow protecting the most vulnerable such as the elderly from getting sick in order to allow a resumption of daily life. Such a strategy would inevitably result in more deaths — by some estimates the American death toll would likely rise to between 1 million and 2.5 million — and is far from guaranteed from even reaching the intended goal of broad immunity.

Yet this is the strategy that has apparently garnered favor under the Trump administration. One of the administration’s leading medical advisors on the coronavirus, Dr. Scott Atlas, is openly promoting herd immunity. President Trump himself continues to downplay the virus threat, holding large rallies defying public health measures, and even making unfounded claims that he is now personally immune after contracting the virus.

“From a public health and ethical viewpoint, the fact that the Great Barrington Declaration is now the Trump administration’s official policy is deeply troubling,” Dr. Gavin Yamey, a physician and professor of global health and public policy at Duke University, wrote October 14 in TIME. Yamey says this “letting the virus rip” approach is “dangerous and inhumane.”

The vast majority of experts in public health and epidemiology agree. The Infectious Diseases Society of America issued a statement denouncing the Great Barrington Declaration, calling the herd immunity strategy to COVID-19 “inappropriate, irresponsible, and ill-informed.” A similar statement came from 20 public health organizations that say the declaration is “not grounded in science and is dangerous.” The Director-General of the World Health Organization said during an October 12 media briefing: “Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic. It is scientifically and ethically problematic.”

The Great Barrington Declaration has over 30 original co-signers from around the globe, some with listed expertise in epidemiology and others with medical or science specializations unrelated to an infectious virus like the novel coronavirus. According to the declaration’s website, there are more than 11,000 signatures from those who self-identified as medical and public health scientists, over 31,000 signatures from self-identified medical practitioners, and over 580,000 signatures from “concerned citizens.”

However, some of the signatures are fake (Dr. Johnny Bananas?), as The Guardian points out, though the Declaration claims that they make up less than 1 percent of the total and that most have been removed from the count tracker.

But as investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed explained in an article published in the London-based news site Byline Times, there appears to be no vetting process to verify the medical and scientific credentials of signatories. Ahmed demonstrated this by signing his name under the Medical and Public Health Scientists category, and was automatically added without verification.

“For a document that is supposed to represent an emerging body of scientific opinion, the lack of vetting is surprising — and indicates that the Great Barrington Declaration is less a genuinely independent scientific enterprise, than a propaganda project,” Ahmed writes.

Remember the Oregon Petition?

This lack of vetting signatories on a controversial petition that endorses contrarian scientific viewpoints is reminiscent of the notorious piece of climate science denial propaganda known as the Oregon Petition.

Published in 1998 by a conspiracy theorist and an Exxon-backed think tank, the Oregon Petition falsely claimed there is no scientific consensus on global warming. Like the Great Barrington Declaration, it also contained fake signatures, including fictional characters and celebrity names, including a member of the British pop band the Spice Girls. And most of the 30,000 or so signatories the petition claims as scientific experts have no expertise in climate science.

The National Academy of Sciences even issued a statement calling out this deliberately misleading petition.

What Is the American Institute for Economic Research?

The institution behind the Great Barrington Declaration, the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), is a free-market think tank tied to funding from the Koch petrochemical and industrial empire and an investment firm with significant holdings in fossil fuels.

The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, describes itself as “one of the oldest and most respected nonpartisan economic research and advocacy organizations in the country” and “dedicated to developing and promoting the ideas of pure freedom and private governance.” However, it is more broadly aligned with libertarian ideology hostile to government intervention and regulatory policies.

AIER operates a program called the Bastiat Society that promotes its free-market, anti-government ideology and partners with other Koch-funded think tanks, networks, and organizations that are some of the most prominent disseminators of disinformation on climate science and climate policies. These include the Atlas Network, State Policy Network, Manhattan Institute, Cato Institute, Charles Koch Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and others.

AIER is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. According to publicly available 990 filings reviewed by DeSmog, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation contributed $68,100 to the organization in 2018. The Atlas Economic Research Foundation (also known as the Atlas Network), which supports free market thinks tanks around the world that are known messengers of climate denial, gave $54,133 to the American Institute for Economic Research in 2018. The Shell Oil Company Foundation has donated a small amount, about $500 total, between 2013 and 2017.

This free-market think tank has further links to the fossil fuel industry through American Investment Services (AIS), which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization. AIS says it is a “separate legal entity” that “conducts its investment advisory business independent of AIER’s day-to-day operations.”

But earnings from this investment firm, valued at nearly $285 million as of this year, help fund AIER, which appoints the firm’s board of directors.

American Investment Services has holdings in various polluting energy and petrochemical corporations such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, General Electric, and Eversource Energy, as well as tobacco giant Phillip Morris.

Given these financial ties to fossil fuel interests and the fervent “free market” ideology it promotes, it is unsurprising that AIER contributes to misleading messaging around climate change that continues to pollute the public discourse. As Ahmed, the investigative journalist, wrote in the Byline Times, “All its climate change related reports and commentaries are studiously dedicated to downplaying the severity of climate risks and obfuscating the science around human exploitation of oil, gas, and coal in driving current global warming levels.”

Commentary published last year by AIER Senior Fellow Richard M. Ebeling on the think tank’s website, for example, criticized Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg for “supercharging” what Ebeling calls “hyped-up hysteria” on the dangers of global warming.

AIER’s current president is economist Edward P. Stringham, who also is a research fellow with another Koch-backed think tank called the Independent Institute. This organization also tracks in climate denial, is supported with Koch funding, and has received at least $80,000 from ExxonMobil.

‘Ecological Leninism’: On waging war against the common cause of Corona and the climate crisis. ~~Eds

https://mronline.org/2020/10/30/ecological-leninism-on-waging-war-against-the-common-cause-of-corona-and-the-climate-crisis/

What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis?Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.

COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’

The book is shot through with biblical imagery of plague and pestilence, but Malm finds his lodestar in the urgent rhetoric of a 20th century prophet. The Bolshevik leader Lenin, surveying the desperate situation of Russia in September 1917, riven by war, famine and economic breakdown, urged that the powers of the state must be seized and directed against what he saw as the root causes of the crisis of his day–the chronic conflict generated by warring capitalist empires. Malm sketches an ‘ecological Leninism’ for today, a programme for marshalling the hard power of the state to rewire an economic system that is destroying us.

Use of the imagery of ‘war communism’ is bold even for the Marxist writer of Fossil Capital and The Progress of this Storm. But if Malm offends, that is his intention: ‘When there is a threat to the health or even physical existence of a population one doesn’t leave it to the least conscientious individuals to play with the fire as they want. One snatches the matches out of their hands.’

Disturbing the hornets’ nest

Our crisis, he argues, is systemic. Individual, companies, industries and nations do not intend to destabilise the conditions that support our civilisation by ripping up the planet’s ecosystems. The economic machine in which they are entangled is hardwired to do so. And as it careers onwards it disturbs more and more of the pathogens that have lived for millions of years in the depths of tropical forests, the recesses of cave systems, and the mephitic atmospheres of marshes, lagoons and swamps.

Most of those viruses have been contained within the luxuriant ecosystems that proliferate around the equator, able to move between thousands of hosts before exhausting themselves. There has always been the possibility of ‘Zoonotic spillover’, the process by which a microbe leaps from its habitual animal carrier to a human intruder. These transmissions are only as frequent as we allow them to be: so long as we don’t poke our hand into the hornets’ nest, we don’t get stung.

But as widening circuits of global trade have compelled the clearing of ancient forests, the mining of caverns and the bleeding dry of wetlands, the natural barriers between humans and the carriers of pathogens are breaking down.

Soaring demand for beef, soybean, palm oil and wood accounts for much of the depletion, as loggers and farmers cut into the heart of great forests such as the Amazon, the Ecuadorian Yasuni and the Indonesian Harapan. Some 70 per cent of the total agricultural land of Malaysia and Indonesia is now devoted exclusively to the production of palm oil. The hydrocarbons and mining industries have also established their presence, opening up timeless fastnesses such as the peatlands of the Congo basin, an ancient rainforest harbouring colonies of viruses that have slept undisturbed–until now.

And as the loggers and drillers move in, the pathogens and their carriers flood out: rats, mosquitos, insects, and, above all, bats, the most effective of viral agents, sheltering thousands of coronaviruses in dense roosts where as many as 3,000 individuals can congregate in a square metre.

The hollowing out of the world’s great biospheres has–and continues to be–primarily driven by demand from wealthy northern countries for ever more rarefied commodities:

[T]he American appetite for hamburgers is satisfied from pastures carved out of the Amazon. The import of coffee to the North presupposes deforestation in the tropical belt. Chocolate consumed in the most tremendous quantities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and supplied by a mirroring top trio of Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia comes from cocoa trees grown where wild forests once stood.

‘A drizzle of viruses’

Increasingly intense extraction has seeded a bloom of viruses. Since the turn of the millennium outbreaks have followed in quick succession: Nipah, West Nile, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika. The coronavirus is merely the first to move beyond their habitual seedbeds in Asia, Africa and South America.

The replication of northern consumption patterns in Southeast Asia provided the ideal conditions for the genesis of COVID-19. The wet markets of Wuhan have become ever more decadent and reckless in response to demand from prosperous consumers. Just as the western world increasingly demands novelties such as zebra steaks, crocodile sausages, whale, camel and python meat, so Wuhan’s wealthy patrons have come to expected ever more carnivalesque displays of pangolins, flying-foxes, racoons, dogs and rats.

Nearly 20 per cent of all the world’s species have now been commodified. And, as at Wuhan, viruses lurk among them. Unrestrained consumption ‘violently shakes the tree where bats and other animals live. Out falls a drizzle of viruses.’

Extraction means global heating, which means more viruses. Depletion of forests and wetlands diminishes their capacity to soak up and sequester carbon dioxide. And rising global temperatures open opportunities for the carriers of pathogens to move northwards beyond their ancient tropical habitats. An alarming story somewhat lost amid the noise when the pandemic took hold was the appearance of swarms of locusts more than 20 times larger than normal–embodying an area three times that of New York–across east African and west Asia. As temperatures rise they may even be able to glide over the mountain ranges that until now have confined them to southern regions.

The pandemic has inspired comparison with the great plagues of the past. But Malm suggests our predicament is different and, modern medicine not withstanding, in some ways worse. He acknowledges the parallels with the decline and fall of Rome drawn in Kyle Harper’s intriguing 2017 study The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, detailing how imperial expansion pulled in diseases causing outbreaks that shook the classical world’s foundations with catastrophes such as the Antoninian and Justinian Plagues.

But empires have risen and fallen and risen again. Today’s pandemics are entangled with climate change, a chronic ecological rupture. COVID-19 threatens to be one of ‘an avalanche of missiles’ that will continue to rain down over centuries. The process can only be stopped by inoculating ourselves against the unchecked extraction that Malm, in one of the book’s boldest images, suggests is itself a virus:

Capital doesn’t mean to destroy the intricate cellular structures of wild nature; it doesn’t have an intention formed in the mind and then engage in efforts to realise it–there is just no other way for it to replicate. … Unlike other parasites, this one cannot stay content with vegetating in the furs or veins of other species for millions of years of co-evolutionary equilibrium. It can subsist solely by expanding and, in this sense, it exhibits a sort of permanent pandemicity; it doesn’t return to lurk in the shadows until the next visitation, like Ebola or Nipah. Once it had leapt out its reservoir host on the British Isles, it commenced the long historical work of subsuming wild nature on this planet, be it in the form of a palm oil plantation, a bauxite mine, a wet market or a rat farm. All of these and uncountable other entities represent wild nature dragged into the chain of value, and given the biological fact that pathogenic microbes are constituent elements of such nature, capital must call them up too.

Impending catastrophe, then and now

Looking for a way forward, Malm, whose previous works have elaborated Marx’s concept of metabolic rift–the imbalance in our relationship with nature wrought by unsustainable production–turns to Lenin’s essay The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution.

There, Lenin, drawing on Marx’s stark assessment in the The Communist Manifesto that the fight for socialism will end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’, argued that the devastation wrought by the war was the inevitable endpoint of competition between empires for resources: humanity had to ‘choose between perishing’ or transitioning to ‘a superior mode of production’.

For Lenin the way out was both impossible and obvious: to dare to use ‘the rich store of control measures’ the Russian government, like the other warring nations, had already designed and exercised during the conflict to plan production and prevent food systems collapsing. But with a critical difference: rather than being employed to defend the status quo they should be used to overturn it. The powers of the capitalist state should be used against capitalism itself.

Like Lenin, Malm rejects the left alternatives of social democracy and anarchism as inadequate to the scale of the crisis. Social democracy is fatally entangled with a capitalist system of overproduction that is the root cause of our predicament. And by forsaking the power of the state anarchism denies itself the agency necessary to act at sufficient scale. Lenin urged something new: a state prepared to use its powers to wrench Russia onto a new path: to withdraw from the war, to commandeer the grain supply, to take control of the banking system, to redirect production for communal need.

Malm imagines what a systematic climate change programme charged with similar urgency might look like. It would audit supply chains and import flows to determine the extent of resource extraction from the south to the north. It would pare those supply chains down to a minimum of essential goods. It would redirect resources to the rewinding and reforesting of regions worn down by northern consumption. It would ban the import of meat, especially beef, investing plant proteins. And so on: in brief, it would do whatever is necessary to establish trade circuits that do not continually extract and exploit. Above all, it would require planning: ‘Comprehensive, airtight planning. Everybody knows this. Few say it.’

Malm points to recent instances of where a strong state has pushed through the noise and forced through effective climate change mitigation measures. During his tenure as Brazilian President, Lula oversaw a significant reduction in the deforestation of the Amazon, expanding protected areas and enforcing forest codes against illegal logging, measures that slashed Brazil’s CO2 emissions by some 40 per cent. And although the Chinese state’s prolific use of coal has been an environmental catastrophe, it has pushed through a massive reforestation programme.

Malm echoes Lenin’s call that ‘war must be declared on the oil barons and shareholders’. For Lenin that meant socialising the industry to ramp up production for the construction of a new Soviet state. Today we need public control to manage the sunsetting of the industry. But radically reducing fossil fuel production and phasing out carbon emissions will not be enough. We need to drawdown the excess carbon already in the atmosphere. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic reduced emissions by some 5 per cent. But a 7.6 per cent reduction is needed every year over the next decade to keep within the Paris Agreement targets.

Only the state has the power to roll out the direct air capture technologies we need at sufficient scale. And only the state can redirect the oil and gas industry away from carbon production towards carbon capture and burial: ‘The demand for nationalising fossil fuel companies and turning them into direct air capture utilities should be the central transitional demand for the coming years.’

An ‘acid taste’

Malm acknowledges that the harsh language of ‘rationing, reallocating, requisitioning, sanctioning, ordering’ leaves an ‘acid taste’. But this is what needs to be done:

Here we truly are in the situation of Lenin’s September text: everybody knows what measures need to be taken; everybody knows, on some level of their consciousness, that flights inside continents should stay grounded, private jets banned, cruise ships safely dismantled, turbines and panels mass produced–there’s a whole auto industry waiting for the order–subways and bus lines expanded, high-speed rail lines built, old houses refurbished and all the magnificent rest.

The ‘classical Marxist dream of a humanity liberated in a land of abundance’–which finds contemporary expression in manifestos for a technologically advanced ‘luxury communism’–must be sidelined for the foreseeable future: ‘those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of these needs to happen, that there will be no sacrifices or discomforts for ordinary people, are not being honest.’

Lenin of course was that rarest of polemicists: one who got the opportunity to follow through on his words. And follow them through he did, not without brutality. Malm acknowledges the cruelties of ‘actually existing’ war communism: the authoritarianism, the food requisitions at gunpoint, the militarisation of labour, the summary executions to enforce discipline in the ranks. The experience ‘of civil war ‘deposited a poison of brutalised power in the heart of the workers’ state, to which it eventually fell victim’. Freedom of expression and assembly must be sacrosanct, however dire the emergency.

But planning allowed resourcefulness. At the start of the conflict the White and allied forces held 99 per cent of the coal and 97 per cent of the oil resources that had powered the pre-war Russian state. Surrounded on all sides, and forced to live completely by their own means by an import blockade, the Soviets marshalled the resources they did have effectively, constructing a functioning ‘biofueled workers’ state’ using the boreal forests that blanketed the Russia that remained to them for construction, heat and energy. And despite having to fell so much timber, they were conscious of the need to preserve, setting half of the forests aside as inviolable ‘monuments of nature’. That legacy persists: Russia still has more pure wildernesses than other nation.

Like Lenin’s essays, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is in the best tradition of the polemic: the anger controlled, the urgency palpable, the imagery vivid, the case emphatically made, agree with it or not. And like Lenin, Malm is writing at a time of emergency. The critical difference, of course, is that Lenin wrote in the knowledge that a revolutionary vanguard was close to power.

Today’s left, at least that section offering a transformative agenda, is nowhere near. For all the talk of Green New Deals, by and large progressives retain faith in the sufficiency of a gradualist path to climate mitigation, placing hope in renewables technology and market mechanisms: solar, wind and batteries, carbon pricing and capture. In his anger Malm does not acknowledge that there is a certain tough-mindedness in pragmatism too: we need to do what we can within the context of the current political and economic environment, with the imperfect tools it affords. That means pressing for more investment in clean energy, for carbon taxes, for market regulation, and perhaps even for nuclear power and some forms of geoengineering.

But as the crisis bites harder, governments will have to take some or all of the tougher measures Malm anticipates. And the right, not the left, might be positioned to use it. Nationalist authoritarianism of various degrees has already taken hold in several nations: China, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom.

The pandemic has illustrated the public will accept harsh measures if the threat is close by. Malm: ‘No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement … ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.’

The challenge for the left would seem to be to ensure that it, not the authoritarian right, has the keys to the state when the eye of the storm arrives. That day seems some way off. Whomever holds power, and whatever one thinks of his analysis, Malm, echoing Lenin, is surely right about this: it is necessary to act now–‘this very evening, this very night’.