Cult Capitalism ~~ Lyra Walsh Fuchs

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cult-capitalism?utm_source=Dissent+Newsletter&utm_campaign=d74d310e61-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_22_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a1e9be80de-d74d310e61-102327940

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

To understand how NXIVM’s members went from the pursuit of professional success to facilitating and enduring horrific wrongs requires examining the world of contemporary business from which the cult emerged.

Ex-NXIVM member Sarah Edmondson holds one of the colored sashes that she earned while ascending the ranks of the cult. (Warner Media/courtesy of HBO)

In October 2017, the New York Times broke the news that NXIVM, an Albany-based company that peddled self-help and professional success courses, contained a secret women’s group that branded its members in a painful ceremony. “For hours muffled screams and the smell of burning tissue filled the room,” the Times reported, as a leader’s initials were carved into the women’s skin. The branding, it turns out, was the tip of the iceberg. Several of NXIVM’s inner circle now face prosecution for an array of garish crimes. As the court cases unfold, interest in the company and its downfall has proliferated, resulting in several front-page investigations, two documentary television shows, a hit podcast series, multiple made-for-TV movies, and several tell-all memoirs. The Vow, an HBO series that first aired last summer, garnered the most attention; it attempted to relate what it was about the group that appealed to so many. Seduced, which broadcast a few months later, focused on one young survivor’s story and provided revelations about abuses that were glaringly absent from The Vow.

Commentators seeking to understand how things got so bad inside NXIVM often gesture toward QAnon and our larger conspiratorial moment. “As dangerous conspiracy theories rise to shocking prominence in American life,” a review in the Times reads, “‘The Vow’ examines why people are so primed to fall for the kind of tempting but perilous psychological traps that skilled manipulators use to lure and catch their idealistic prey.” But there’s less to this parallel than first appears. QAnon projects a shadowy otherworld upon the one we live in, translating decades of moral panic into anti-government rabidity and hoping for an apocalyptic rupture. NXIVM, with its focus on networking and professional success, promised to help its adherents better themselves—and thus the world. Its perilous psychological traps, in other words, are not outliers but, rather, all around us.

In a video advertising NXIVM that appears in The Vow, actor and higher-up Allison Mack waxes rapturous on the revolutionary potential of empathy: “If we actually understood compassion the world would be a much better place. Not even the world. Like .003 percent of the world, if they could just have a little dose of love, everything would change. Everything.” Former NXVIM propaganda master Mark Vicente doubles down on this philosophy later in the series. “The only sustainable way to change a society,” he says, “is if the wealthiest, most powerful people meet with this education and this will trickle down to everything else.” It’s a theory of change similar to what Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “trickle-down feminism,” in which wealthy women, correctly diagnosing that the world is full of injustice, posit that their own success and happiness will benefit all others that are oppressed. They can “make the world a better place”—a phrase that litters NXIVM media—while furthering, rather than threatening, their status.

Mack and Vicente’s theories about empathy would not sound out of place coming from the CEO of any wellness start-up or Silicon Valley consultancy. In that familiarity lies the secret to understanding NXIVM: how its members slipped from the apparently innocent pursuit of professional success to facilitating and enduring horrific wrongs, and how its leader Keith Raniere was, for a time, able to shape a persona of innovative brilliance.

 

NXIVM was founded in 1998, when Raniere, fresh out of things to do after an earlier pyramid scheme was shut down by the State of New York, met Nancy Salzman, a nurse and self-professed hypnotist. Together they created a self-improvement course called Executive Success Programs (ESP). ESP combined cognitive-behavioral therapy with group therapy and a sprinkling of Steiner seminars, Ayn Rand, pop psychoanalysis, and Scientology. Hardly anything in NXIVM was original, but the course was styled as the expression of Raniere’s unique genius. Committed adherents progressed “up the stripe path,” taking courses to collect colored sashes, like earning belts in a martial art.

Consistent with its trickle-down philosophy, NXIVM targeted celebrities, the rich, and the powerful. Their cash and influence helped Raniere and Salzman open centers all over the world, which grew quickly; members made commissions on new recruits (and the recruits their own recruits brought in). Raniere founded numerous companies under the NXIVM umbrella, all to advance the group’s “ethics.” Two of these offshoots, Jness and the Society of Protectors, focused respectively on “empowering women” and creating a “network of honorable men.” They paved the way for the blackmail-driven, secretive women’s group DOS, whose branding ceremony, when exposed, led to NXVIM’s downfall. Last October, Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison for sex trafficking, racketeering, and possession of child pornography. Now, the centers are shut down; the other top-tier members await sentencing; the websites are gone. Only a few dozen supporters still believe.

Over a decade ago, after the Albany Times Union reported that he had manipulated and had sex with several minors, Raniere stepped back from the spotlight and into the shadows. Unlike in many other cults, recent recruits were drawn in not by Raniere’s charisma, but through the NXVIM seminars held in office parks and hotel ballrooms, where he was dangled as the mysterious “Vanguard,” the creator of the program and one of the smartest people alive. These seminars not only promised greater professional success but also linked personal goals to altruism. NXIVM’s mission statement claimed the company wanted to “raise human awareness, foster an ethical humanitarian civilization, and celebrate what it means to be human.”

That statement, as ludicrously grandiose as it sounds, echoes language used by the startups of our era. In the S-1 filing for the failing co-working company WeWork, founder Adam Neumann wrote, “Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness.” Like a good tech businessman, Raniere boasted constantly of various “patent-pending” technologies that could produce human happiness at scale, using logic that is common across Silicon Valley. And his supporters, introduced to him once they had completed at least one course, lapped it up. Vicente fell in love with Raniere’s genius because, he recounts in The Vow, “He made joy a math, a reproducible formula.”

Raniere also cultivated eccentricities to rival those of tech’s most celebrated founders. According to a 2003 Forbes cover story, “The World’s Strangest Executive Coach,” he had no driver’s license and walked for as many as twelve hours a day; both The Vow and Seduced feature stories of Raniere taking his acolytes for late-night strolls through the cul-de-sacs of suburban Albany. NXVIM’s annual corporate retreat at a campground only differed from the mandatory fun common at other companies in its extreme personalization (it was held on Raniere’s birthday and called V-week, short for Vanguard week). In videos of the event, followers bounce around with lanyards around their necks, signing up for events and intensives and mounting the stage to give speeches, perform dances, and sing to Raniere. He looks back up at them, mouth slightly agape, eyes shining—like Charles Manson watching his followers give a TED talk.

 

Unlike Scientology, which has tax-exempt status as a church, and countless other smaller cults that never bother to report their financial dealings to the state, NXIVM was run as a for-profit company. But it never turned an actual profit. For most of its twenty-year existence, NXIVM was largely sustained by sisters Sara and Clare Bronfman, the heirs to the Seagram liquor fortune. According to a civil suit filed in the Eastern District of New York, they invested as much as $150 million in the cult. They were originally pulled in not by earnings projections but by Raniere’s shtick. He was a concert pianist! He spoke three languages before he could even talk! He was inventing a new kind of mathematics!

If the emphasis on personal appeal over business fundamentals seems naive, it is a naivete common—and in fact encouraged—in the contemporary investment world. When Silicon Valley venture capital group Founders Fund “finds entrepreneurs with ‘audacious vision,’ ‘a near-messianic attitude,’ and ‘wild-eyed passion,’” writes Charles Duhigg in the New Yorker, “it essentially seeks to give them veto-proof authority.” These Silicon Valley parallels not only serve as a damnation of that culture but—and this is crucial—are part and parcel of what gave Raniere and NXIVM the legitimacy they needed to operate. Founder reverence is everywhere. While it usually leads to bad business decisions, in the case of the Bronfmans it twisted them into complicity with much more illegal and sordid schemes. If recruits ever started to feel like the Vanguard worship was a little much, they could always look around and locate such dynamics in the outside world.

What’s more, the company’s recruitment model often trapped new recruits in a cycle of debt peonage. If you couldn’t afford the introductory five-day class at $3,000 a person, you were invited to do it anyway and pay later—either with credit cards or in the form of labor owed to another member. One ex-member interviewed in Seduced says Mack “offered to pay for the intensive ahead of time in exchange for the work that I did for her.” As she kept taking increasingly expensive classes, she quickly ended up $100,000 in debt. The only way to pay this back through NXIVM, besides recruiting, was to teach for the company. But the requirements for earning money frequently shifted. According to the Eastern District of New York civil suit, out of the more than 16,000 people who took courses, fewer than a hundred ever received income from the company. As members tried to pay off their debt, they were forced to perform more free labor, pushing them deeper into the cult—all while being charged for the classes they were mandated to take. Any doubts were stifled by the NXIVM concept of “at-cause”: you alone were responsible for your emotions, especially your feelings of victimhood.

These tactics were designed to distance members from their family and friends outside of NXIVM. When you chose the “coaching path,” as Catherine Oxenberg says of her daughter India in Seduced, “it was your life. Keeping you very busy and very distracted, not having time for other commitments. People were working 24/7. Your commitment had to be absolute.” Much of this commitment was enacted in the form of reproductive labor. India moved into Mack’s Albany-area house, where, in lieu of paying regular rent, she cleaned, cooked, and acted as a personal assistant while she worked to reach the rank where they would pay her for coaching (a goalpost that kept moving). The debt and desire for income also kept people in when the worst abuses started to come to light. In The Vow, Sarah Edmonson, a struggling actor turned top NXIVM recruiter who became a key source for the Times story about the cult, discusses the idea of leaving the group, but she falters: “I’m so dependent, like this is my income, too.”

Edmonson had already been branded with an amalgamation of Mack and Raniere’s initials when she said that; she had already given blackmail materials (“collateral”) to join the secretive ingroup DOS, said her vows to her “master,” and taken on “slaves.” These deeply disturbing requirements were coated in a vaguely feminist veneer. “She made it sound like a bad-ass bitch boot camp,” Edmonson told the Times, recalling how first-tier member Lauren Salzman pitched the group. Edmonson used that logic to justify handing over her collateral—nude pictures, a recording saying her husband was abusive, the deed to her house—at which point she found out about the more overt abuse of the group’s structure, including the branding. Each woman had six “slaves” who, through texts littered with chain-link emojis, would ask their “master” for permission to eat and sleep. They were commanded to clean each other’s houses, run errands, and send Raniere nude photos. Behind it all was Raniere, the secret “grandmaster,” who gave them the “assignment” of “seducing” him. They would also be commanded to recruit their own “slaves” from the NXIVM rank-and-file, expanding the network. Still finding justifications after the fact, Edmonson says in the CBC podcast Uncover that part of the appeal was to “imagine having six people . . . doing work for you . . . how much money you’ll save.”

In its imagery of slavery, NXIVM drew on forms of power and violence that haunt America. The company also made use of contemporary structures that leave people vulnerable to exploitation, leveraging immigration status for financial gain. As the Eastern District of New York civil suit alleges,

Defendants also recruited people from foreign countries, offering false promises of educational or financial gain. Ultimately, they left these recruits in compromised circumstances, without an immigration status, leaving them working for little or nothing, accumulating debt and fearful that if they left the NXIVM community they would be arrested and deported.

In Seduced, we hear from Daniela, who moved from Mexico with her family when she was sixteen to take NXIVM classes. Once, while returning from a visit home, she was stopped by immigration, so Raniere arranged for her to enter the country through Canada. “I was without a doubt a captive from the moment I was an illegal in this country,” she testified in court. “As time progressed it became clear to me that I could not leave.” Just after turning eighteen, she was coerced into sex with Raniere—who also, she says, raped her underage sister. He eventually impregnated Daniela, got her an abortion, and became jealous when she said she had a crush on someone else. With the support of other high-ranking members and her family, he confined her to a single room as punishment—where she was kept for two years. “I feel panic, I feel horror, I can’t even think straight,” she wrote in journal pages splayed across the screen in the show. “I feel dread. I really feel like I’m in a nightmare.” When Daniela finally got out of the room, she was dropped at the Mexican border without any papers.

 

All the coverage of NXIVM attempts in one way or another to answer a fundamental question, quoted here from Uncover: “How does someone join a self-help group and end up in an alleged sex cult?” But focusing on Raniere’s simpering charisma and manipulative talents—which were, undoubtedly, significant—as all of this media does, doesn’t explain why so many were drawn to the group, especially for the years Raniere only interacted with people who were already hooked. We risk missing the most obvious answer, which the audience’s repulsion and identification and anger circle around: in some respects, it wasn’t a very far leap.

The most extreme aspects of NXIVM, of course, are beyond most of our experiences. But our culture is thick with demands that we sacrifice ourselves for our work. The cult’s language of striving, which seamlessly aligned altruism and personal success, is common. And in a world that isn’t built around human needs, the drive to fulfillment often leaves us scrambling in self-destructive directions.

The uneven economic recovery from the coronavirus will place fulfillment out of reach for more people even while the mountain of hollow humanitarian language grows. (“To all of our Amazon retail heroes,” the narrator intoned in a company ad last year, “we want to thank you.”) As the chasm between our desire to improve our lives and our ability to actually do so grows, more grifters will surface, offering ladders to nowhere.

There’s a thrill—and a warning—in looking at the people who got suckered and abused in NXIVM. We are not them, but there are moments when we hear things that remind us of our meditation apps or our corporate-bonding sessions or the humanitarian promises of our favorite brands. In the NXIVM story, we see these shiny surfaces rupture, and peer at the human misery that keeps them churning.

Comparisons of China and the U.S. in Their Roles as Global Hegemons ~~ dmorista

~~ Written by dmorista ~~

I would like to present what I consider to be a realistic view of China’s current role in the World, and compare it to the time that the U.S. was similarly dominant in Global affairs. There is no doubt that the Chinese Revolution that evolved in 1949, after defeating the direct military power of capitalism, as manifested in the colonial / comprador forces of the Kuomintang, was a great triumph for the Chinese people. After the initial victory they had to turn to the much longer term and more complex issue of developing China into a modern nation; and concomitantly raising the society up from the intense poverty and humiliation that had been so severe in the period from the mid 1800s - the victory of 1949. The triumph of the Chinese Communist forces in 1949 was a victory for the people of the world, but had been achieved at a terrible cost. Chairman Mao himself lost both of his brothers and a female cousin who had been adopted and raised in his family as a sister during the long struggle against the imperialists / colonialists. No family in China came out of the 20+ year civil war, Japanese Invasion, and revolution unscathed.

After the 1949 victory the new government took numerous long-needed measures. They confiscated the land holdings of the rural landlords and distributed that land among the landless peasants. They built schools and clinics for the people in the villages and cities. They trained hundreds of thousands country medics known as the "barefoot doctors"; not to the standards found in posh clinics in the advanced capitalist countries, but to a standard never seen before by the poor of China. They built state industries that provided housing, medical care, schools, and pensions for their employees and their families. By the late 1970s the Chinese were poised to begin a new stage of the development process. They had a sound foundation of a universally literate, and relatively healthy population to build on.

The late 1970s were a time when the Capitalists of the U.S. and other western countries were looking to move as much of their investment in industrial production away from the unionized, high-wage, and more closely regulated core capitalist countries. Much of that investment went to Taiwan (where the main remnant of the Kuomintang fled), South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. At that point East Asian development was still led by Japan, but the Japanese never allowed foreign companies to invest in their economy, they generated all of their own investment capital and set up very favorable industrial and technological licensing arrangements. The leading geostrategists of the U.S. ruling class viewed Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong as the main bulwarks encircling and controlling China; and those 5 societies were given very wide latitude in their economic actions. That was true even when those business initiatives harmed the U.S. domestic socioeconomic system, and in addition they were given huge amounts of technological processes originally developed in the U.S., and overwhelmingly developed at public expense.

The Chinese were clever enough to set up investment opportunities in China that, while those opportunities allowed foreign capitalists to rake in high profits, were designed to benefit the Chinese Socioeconomic Order much more in the long-run. The early period in this development saw Chinese factories established that exploited the low wages prevalent in China, but the Chinese political and economic leadership always planned to move up the technological ladder to more capital-intensive and less labor-intensive industries. They have now achieved that status to a large degree. There were and still are struggles going on among the ruling class in China over how to proceed in the future. The Chinese East Coast industrialists were perfectly happy to keep running low-wage labor intensive industries supplying the West with consumer and capital products. But the Financial and Economic Crisis of 2007 - 2008 marked the end of the era when that strategy was the foundation of the process of Chinese development. The bottom fell out of the consumer markets of the West for a couple of years and those markets never completely recovered. It became obvious (for those who had not already figured it out) that Western consumers could not keep buying ever increasing amounts of Chinese products, when many of them had lost their jobs and had been immiserated. The longer term actions of the U.S. and other Western Transnational Corporations (operating to serve the interests of the ultra-rich who own them) undermined the U.S. Geostrategic position over the 40+ years from the late 1970s to the present day. The contradiction between the private interests of the American based rich, and the nation state that they command was resolved in favor of Private Wealth, and against the supposed Nation State they always claim to love and cherish.

In many ways the current situation of China resembles that of the U.S. a century ago, or that of England over two centuries ago. A major difference is that the U.S. and England rose to their respective hegemonic economic, political, cultural, and military positions as part of, and as a consequence of, the great expansion of European Power and the establishment of Capitalism. The Europeans burst out into the wider world around 1450 - 1550 and expanded from occupying their corner of Eurasia to taking nearly complete control of three other continents (North and South America and Australasia), with a series of strong footholds in Africa and eastern Eurasia. This did involve a tradition of conquest (greatly aided in the three "new" continents by the microbes that caused the "Old World Diseases"), but that came straight out of the human perception of how things were done in the 1400s. Conquest and domination were not any private preserve of White People or Europeans. The period of U.S. Hegemony merely marked the high water point, and ironically the end, of that 500+ year period of Euro/American Dominance.

The Chinese have, to large measure, taken up the types of economic activities that were prevalent in the U.S. and England during their analogous periods of hegemony. The Chinese now lead the world in capital intensive industrial production, and are busy building the infrastructure needed to extract resources from the less developed world. At the same time they are building significant infrastructure to permit the movement of globalized trade around the planet. And this is most particularly the case for Eurasia and Africa. This is not a charitable enterprise but is clearly one that the Chinese want to run in such a way that it also benefits the places where they build these projects. The Chinese socioeconomic project is run, first and foremost, to benefit the Han Chinese living in Mainland China. They are the world's largest ethnic group numbering some 1.5 billion people worldwide, and who compose about 91% of mainland China's population of 1.4 billion (1.274 billion), they are also the majority in Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The super rich and the political elite in China know that if they make sure enough benefits and prosperity flows to the Han Chinese population in the Mainland they will stay in power. Doing that now requires a Chinese led organization and mobilization of the world's resources. That process has, so far, fueled a strong enough socioeconomic situation inside China to supply both the riches the Chinese Oligarchs want to control, and even more riches to allocate to the great majority of the 1.274 billion Han Chinese living in Mainland China. Though that second allocation is on a much more limited per capita basis; despite the fact that the overall amount is quite large. The Chinese accomplish this degree of prosperity and social welfare through promoting the most profitable industries, and by socialist spending to bolster the socioeconmic conditions of the poorer elements of the Han Chinese population (and others as well). Earlier excesses of Capitalist Zeal by the East Coast Industrial faction of the Chinese Elites, who among other activities ruthlessly stole rural land from peasants and villages for use in industrial development schemes, were corrected and policies were modified. The Chinese have a long tradition of "The Mandate of Heaven" by which enlightened rulers maintain the loyalty of the overall population by making sure that the overall socioeconomic order is more-or-less just and takes care of the needs of the common people.

In many ways the current situation in China closely resembles that which existed in New Deal America. Both societies are/were the dominant productive political entity on the planet. The population profiles are also strikingly similar. The U.S. was, at that time, around 90% "White" and the policies that were pursued were arranged to provide some minimal living standard for that dominant population. The percentage of Whites slowly fell beginning at 89.8% in 1930 and 89.9% in 1940, then slowly declining to 89.5% in 1950, to 88.8% in 1960, to 87.5% in 1970, to 83.1% in 1980, to 80.3% in 1990. The decline of Whites as the dominant population accelerated after the 1965 Immigration Act, that reopened the U.S. to significant immigration for the first time since the early 1920s, and to a dominant flow of non-Europeans for the first time since the importation of slaves before the Civil War. (See, "HISTORICAL CENSUS STATISTICS ON POPULATION TOTALS BY RACE, 1790 TO 1990, AND BY HISPANIC ORIGIN, 1970 TO 1990, FOR THE UNITED STATES, REGIONS, DIVISIONS, AND STATES", Population Division, "Working Paper No. 56", "Table 1. United States - Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990", pg 19 {pg 29 per pdf pagination}, September 2002, Campbell Gibson & Kay Jung, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC). In the case of the New Deal America the terms of the economic arrangements were worked out by the largest and most successful mobilization of the American Working Class in the country's history. The ruling faction of the Capitalist Elite, led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, worked out an uneasy truce with the working class in the mid-late 1930s. There were numerous strikes and other socioeconomic struggles across the country, the single culminating strike was the Flint Sit-Down Strike in 1936 - 1937 that led to General Motors recognizing the United Auto Workers union as the exclusive bargaining agent for the entire production working staff of the company. Ford Motor was finally organized by the UAW in 1941. The resultant socioeconomic arrangements were called "The Treaty of Detroit" by labor and some business historians. They largely carried through until the mid-1970s when the U.S. ruling class began to change over from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism as their dominant organizing principle to maximize profits.

The arrangements of the "Treaty of Detroit" had to be overthrown through a generalized program of attack against the working people of the U.S. That process included numerous political assassinations of actual Populist leaders (not the faux right-wing Cultural Populism of Trump and similar monsters), an extremely active political and social surveillance and covert action campaign against working people, a very vigorous attack on the union movement that also featured numerous key assassinations, and significant attacks on the various popular organizations from the anti-war movement to the Black Panthers and everything in between. The political attacks and assassinations began in earnest in the 1960s and included, in chronological order the most significant though far from the only murders, those of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, Thomas Merton, Fred Hampton, and Walter Reuther (still president of the activist UAW at the time, in May of 1970). It is no accident the 3 of the 7 political murders were of African American leaders.

The Chinese are assuming the mantle of Global Hegemon at a time that is fraught with challenges, dangers, and opportunities. They must be more enlightened and far-seeing than was the case for the last couple rounds of Global Hegemons (the U.S. and the U.K.). It will still be a close run set of events. The Chinese are about 10 times as numerous and powerful as the core U.S. state and population was in the period from the mid 1930s to the mid 1970s. Technology and science has advanced immeasurably, but also there has been massive growth in the size of the existential problems that humanity faces, due to population growth and the horrific activities of the Capitalists. I certainly wish the Chinese, and all the rest of us, the best of luck in the coming years.  We are going to need to work together and get some of the breaks from fate and chance.

Culture of Violence ~~ LAURA FLANDERS

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/29/culture-of-violence/

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Culture of violence,” “culture of violence.” If I hear that phrase wheeled out one more time to excuse a mass shooter, I’ll scream. That doesn’t mean I’ll head to the gun shop.

Which is to say, when it comes to cultures, here in the USA, we’re lucky enough to be able to take our pick.

Even a cursory scan of history reveals that we have a vast variety of options.

Starting in the way-back 1600s, the nasty Pequot Wars were bloody, but only the plundering pilgrims were set on “wiping their enemies off the map.” As historian Bernard Bailyn once put it memorably to the Smithsonian Magazine, “The Indians were not genocidal on the whole.”

The Africans dead from slavery and the North Atlantic slave trade number in the tens of millions. Probably 30-60 million. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented 6,500 white terror lynchings after that. As soon as freed Black towns got up and running, and possibly competitive, white mobs burned them to the ground, as they did immigrant Chinese settlements in the same period once the dangerous work on the Transcontinental Railroad was complete. Many thriving Mexican towns on what whites wanted to be Texas met the same fate.

Given the bloody, butcherous history of white racist violence and slaughter, it’s remarkable that aside from a few smart, self-defense committees, non-violence, lawsuits and honest journalism have been, and continue to be, the dominant tactics of the civil rights movement.

Does the US have a culture of violence? Not the United States of women. Even after witch burning and sexual slavery and rape in marriage and rape in bondage and domestic terror and forced childbirth and forced sterilization and sex work…. When it comes to gender-based violence, women have mostly turned to mutual aid, not mass murder. One wonders how history might have been different.

In a “culture of violence,” you’d think LGBTQI people, and especially trans women of color — the most targeted group when it comes to hate crimes — would have every right, and most certainly the urge, to commit hate crimes right back. But they don’t. They — we — make their own culture instead, and it’s a hit.

Finally, kids. In 2016, the latest year for which I could find numbers, 1,637 children died from firearm related violence, and thousands more fear gun violence in their schools. And yet, no kid-led army has staked out the National Rifle Association and its toadies. Not so far. They demonstrate and organize.

To repeat, when it comes to cultures, the US has lots. We’ve simply allowed, until recently, a bunch of white western guys, rooted in one particularly patriarchal, white, hierarchical and militaristic set of values to write and enforce their own rules. That said, segregation, spousal rape, white crime on indigenous land, anti-LGBT hate crimes and domestic child abuse were all legal until very recently. The white, male, militarist culture of violence isn’t inevitable. It’s a societal choice. Let’s switch.

To Win Significant, Long-Term Change in America, We Need Class Struggle ~~ NICK FRENCH

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/biden-stimulus-american-rescue-plan-welfare-class-struggle/?fbclid=IwAR2NONMCj1BS7YxWgIrJdodddM4HjoJaOf1DO9uGJeCfi8z3kmuCfJiI9ZA

~~ posted for collectivist ~~

Analysis of Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) has been all over the map. Some commentators have hailed it as a sea change in American welfare and fiscal policy, or even the end of neoliberal orthodoxy. Others have emphasized the relief package’s shortcomings. The Left seems uncertain, wrestling with how to relate to the Biden administration and the (narrowly) Democratic-controlled Congress.

We are in uncharted territory, at least in light of the Democratic Party’s recent history of embracing austerity with open arms. But the Left should neither overestimate our strength nor the extent to which Democrats are championing a social-democratic agenda. The ARP is a temporary stimulus, the best workers can expect if they aren’t organized and fighting. We shouldn’t expect these limited relief measures to last, since the macroeconomic conditions which have persuaded capitalists to allow them can change like the wind.

If we’re to see more policies that materially benefit and structurally empower working people, the working class needs to be organized and militant.

The Stimulus Bill Reflects the Balance of Class Forces

Recent working-class movements and left electoral struggles — including the teachers’ strike wave, the Black Lives Matter protests, and Bernie Sanders’s two presidential runs — have helped shift public opinion in favor of progressive and social-democratic ideas, a shift that likely impacted the size and shape of the COVID relief package.

Knowing exactly how big of an effect these developments had on the passage of the ARP would require rigorous, empirical analysis. Still, we can make some educated guesses. The New York Times reported in July 2020 that last summer’s anti-racist uprising was the largest protest wave in US history, as judged by the number of participants. Bernie’s two campaigns activated millions of Americans around an ambitious and popular social-democratic agenda. Bernie’s campaigns also directly inspired workplace organizing efforts that helped lead to the 2018 teacher strikes and fights for worker safety at the beginning of the pandemic.

It’s difficult to believe that these developments and others in the past few years (like the rise of AOC and the Squad, DSA, and the Sunrise Movement) didn’t influence Biden and other Democrats to push through a more generous relief package.

But it is also hard to deny that the ruling class’s lowered fears of inflation, due to still historically low levels of working-class organization and militancy, made it easy for Democrats to pass a relatively generous stimulus. That is because Wall Street and significant sections of capital did not only not oppose the bill but actively supported it.As others have recognized, the ARP falls far short of structural reforms that upset the balance of power between labor and capital, let alone the more modest goal of higher taxes on the rich. The bill includes generous (if temporary) welfare measures but excludes a $15 minimum wage and further entrenches our country’s egregious for-profit health care system.

The ARP’s limits can largely be explained by the fact that it was passed with the blessing of much of the ruling class in the absence of mass working-class organization or pressure. Union density is still at a historic low: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that 10.8 percent of US workers were in unions in 2020, the second-lowest level reported since 1983. (That reflects a slight uptick since 2019, but that’s a product of greater job losses in nonunion jobs rather than more people in unions — the overall number of union members declined by 321,000).

Workers are also striking in historically low numbers. BLS reports that in 2020, there were eight major work stoppages (defined as stoppages involving at least one thousand workers, lasting at least one shift during the workweek) — the third lowest number since 1947, when BLS began collecting the data.

Twenty-seven thousand workers took part in major work stoppages that began in 2020. That’s a huge drop from the upsurge of 2018 and 2019, when about 485,000 and 425,000 workers went on strike, respectively. But even those numbers — driven largely, but not only, by the teachers’ strikes — pale in comparison to what was typical before the 1980s. From 1947 to 1979, there were only seven years where fewer than 1 million workers went on strike, with the number often surpassing 1.5 or 2 million.

 The Left’s real gains over the past few years should not lead us to overlook the fact that the working class is still extremely weak and disorganized. Without a significant upsurge of class struggle, there is little reason to expect deeper, more lasting pro-worker policies from Biden or Congress.

The great progressive legislative achievements of the United States in the 20th century — from the New Deal to civil rights legislation and the Great Society — were made possible by mass struggles. These struggles involved huge waves of workplace militancy, massive street demonstrations, and leftists organizing in and outside the workplace. Threats to profits, corporate control, and social stability compelled sections of the capitalist class and elected officials to enact reforms that institutionalized collective bargaining rights, expanded democracy, and established the rudiments of a welfare state.

Of course, democratic socialists have our sights set higher than a new New Deal or another Great Society. We want to go beyond capitalism entirely, by democratizing ownership, governance of firms, and the economy as a whole.

To achieve socialist transformation, workers need to organize and empower themselves to wrest control of their workplaces from capital, to socialize finance, and to institute public ownership of health care, energy, transportation, and other major economic sectors. In the meantime, we can fight for reforms, like Medicare for All and a jobs guarantee, that make it easier for workers to organize and fight back. But winning even these reforms will require increased pressure from below. 

As policy, there is plenty to like in the ARP. But debate about policy pros and cons threatens to obscure more fundamental questions about the balance of class forces in society and what the bill does — or doesn’t do — to change that balance. In other words, the real problem with the bill is about power: Who has it and who’s using it to demand or give relief?

Right now, it’s the capitalists. And nothing they’re doing is significantly giving workers more power. To change that, we need more class struggle.

How China is building a non-imperialist model of international development ~~ Michael Dunford

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/how-china-is-building-a-non-imperialist-model-of-international-development

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

China’s South-South model of international development suggests a new, anti-imperialist model of global governance may be taking shape. Photo from Pixabay.

China presents its Belt and Road Initiative as a way to address global deficits of development, peace and governance and has called for an international community with a shared future, while some of its critics see these initiatives as a challenge to a Western-dominated liberal world order and an attempt at securing hegemony.

In many ways, China does challenge the Western liberal model and its domination of international discourse and practice—as its distinctive foreign aid practices show—though there is little evidence China is seeking global hegemony. As a new white paper makes clear, China’s path is founded instead on a moral order (Confucian but also socialist) involving lofty ideals of universal harmony (the Great Way), the concept of repayment of kindness by kindness, a tradition of internationalism and a sense of responsibility. That these values might drive international development cooperation derives from the fact that in China the state is not controlled by economic class interests, as is the case in Western liberal capitalist societies.

In some respects Chinese aid is similar to Western aid in that it involves concessional financial flows. However, the aims, principles and practices differ. Moreover, a Western attempt to co-opt China and other emerging aid donors has failed, with implications for the future of development finance and the shape of the world order.

Official Western development assistance dates from the activities of colonial powers in their overseas territories, and is rooted in the idea that developed countries had responsibilities to civilize less developed nations while bringing an overall military, economic and political strategy to prevent the spread of communism and create markets for companies based in the United States. Since 1961, North-South aid has been overseen by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). The outcome has been an interventionist model involving coordination, harmonization, monitoring, evaluation and accountability requirements, complex multi-tiered organizational structures and high administrative costs. After the debt crisis, developed countries conditioned aid on a set of neoliberal policy, political and governance reforms.

From 1950, China provided aid to Third World countries. From the 1980s it received DAC aid. In the new millennium DAC aid to China declined, while China emerged as a major provider of South-South aid. China provides grants, interest-free loans and concessional assistance advanced by the Export-Import Bank of China (CHEXIM), as well as preferential export credits, while the China Development Bank (CDB) provides patient capital.

China’s principles and practice do differ significantly from Western aid. China’s aid is based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. These principles reflect the desire of countries that suffered from imperialism and colonial and semi-colonial rule for respect for their territorial integrity and sovereignty, treatment as equals and non-interference in their internal affairs. These horizontal South-South relations of mutual respect differ from vertical North-South power relationships and stand against the view that Western civilization has the right to impose its norms, values, and social model. In a world of multiple civilizations, China calls for a community with a shared future whose principles include equality and mutual benefit, respect for sovereignty, absence of conditionality and the promotion of self-reliance.

Mutual benefit or mutual advantage (and reciprocity) indicates that for China aid is not a unilateral gift—instead, China seeks win-win outcomes. Win-win outcomes are advantageous for the donor and the recipient. This path implies equal partnerships and partner ownership and responsibility, and is reinforced by the notion of equality: the nations involved are equal and not organized into vertical North-South relationships between dominant and dominated countries.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is expected to cost more than $1 trillion, and aims to build connectivity and cooperation across China’s main economic corridors. However, critics see it as a challenge to the liberal world order and the Western-dominated framework of international development cooperation.

The administrative model is also simpler. In contrast to the complex modalities for fund transfer and management of DAC, Chinese foreign aid is mainly delivered through in-kind transfers. Aid does not require unduly complex project appraisal as China considers that feasibility and implementation issues involve co-responsibility of the recipient country (whereas DAC donors are often distrustful of local actors and strongly interventionist). China funds host-country government-selected projects that DAC does not consider developmental, while its aid is often perceived as ‘real aid’ because it does not involve high consultancy and managerial costs, whereas DAC donors tend to develop assistance strategies that predominantly reflect the donor’s goals.

Learning from the successes and failures of policies a country itself chooses plays a vital role in helping it assume responsibility and find a development path that suits its conditions. An important aim is to make the recipient countries self-reliant and help them escape dependence.

Another feature shared with other East Asian countries is the view that infrastructure is crucial. Yet another is that China gives a good deal of assistance to relatively less developed countries. Japan, South Korea and China all focused on infrastructure construction as a foundation for export-led industrialization and linked aid with direct investment and trade. This threefold combination of aid, investment and trade that mixes concessional and non-concessional loans and can involve agreements to purchase recipient exports at above-market prices conflicts with the liberal OECD-DAC model.

DAC donors have neglected infrastructure and productive activities. As early as the 1970s DAC countries and multilateral institutions shifted attention from growth to poverty alleviation and from transport infrastructure, agriculture and industry to social sectors (health, education, clean water). This switch was strengthened by the rise of non-governmental organizations whose agendas and sectional interests came into play, shaping welfare and development programmes. After the fall of communism, development finance agencies adopted new mandates relating to Western conceptions of democracy, human rights, capacity building, and good governance and paid more attention to the environment, gender and the reconstruction of countries devastated by war. And yet in the case of poverty alleviation it is a Chinese path of development-oriented poverty alleviation that has achieved the most astonishing results.

More recently, the Western model has been subject to explicit criticism and a new narrative has been advanced: it centres on a combination of aid, investment and trade in driving structural transformation.

Chinese involvement offers prospects of sustainable and higher growth through access to credit, low cost consumer goods, cheaper and more appropriate capital goods, industrial transfer and new market opportunities. The China induced commodities price boom increased export revenues of many developing countries, although the ability to take advantage depends on the capacity of governments to promote linkages. The existence of China alongside other donors also strengthens the negotiating position of developing countries seeking fairer agreements. China seeks outcomes that are mutually beneficial but the distribution of the gains (and perhaps losses) in each country depends on a multiplicity of factors.

Numerous studies suggest that projects funded with DAC development assistance funds damage the environment and displace people, and that, while beneficial for some sections of the population, most do not benefit. As in the DAC case, Chinese programmes have come in for criticism on these and other grounds. In DAC circles, it was argued that Chinese aid increased the risks of recipient debt default as it reduced the incentives to adopt Western liberal economic and good governance reforms. Yet more critical were the voices that claimed China was engaging in debt-trap diplomacy.

This claim ironically reflected the allegations made about the World Bank and USAID in John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Perkins claimed that political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries was pressed (including by US security agencies) to accept substantial development loans for large construction and engineering projects contracted to American companies. These benefitted elites and saddled developing countries with unrepayable US dollar loans to ensure they served US interests. In the case of China the strongest claims were made about the Port of Hambantota that Sri Lanka sold on a long lease to a Chinese state-owned port operator to repay external debts—the debts due for repayment were not however Chinese loans which amounted to about 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s external debt but maturing international sovereign bonds (for a detailed account, read Johns Hopkins University professor Deborah Brautigam’s recent analysis).

Port of Shanghai, Yangshan Deep-water Harbour Zone. Photo by Alex Needham/Wikimedia Commons.

Other claims that, for example, China does not employ local workers are also questionable, as is the criticism of deals in which exports of natural resources pay for construction projects. This particular course of action derives from China’s own experience when it accepted Japanese loans with which it paid Japanese companies to construct the infrastructures that underpinned China’s subsequent growth and that were repaid with exports of coal and oil.

The new millennium saw the establishment of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, new financial commitments and the rise and fall of an aid effectiveness agenda, reflecting the emergence of new donors and the developmental success of countries that did not adopt the Western liberal model. Generally speaking, the growth in Chinese aid and South-South co-operation was welcomed as a complementary source of much needed assistance, but it was also criticized for deviating from DAC rules and practices.

DAC’s initial aim was to co-opt China and other new donors, as it had with earlier new members through the establishment of the China-DAC Study Group, possible trilateral activities and the aid effectiveness agenda. China learned from these engagements about management, accounting and evaluation methodologies and social and environmental safeguards, but institutional and political collaboration proved elusive.

Instead of adopting Western liberal norms and values, China asserted its right to promote its own values and vision of mutual benefit, mutual respect and responsiveness to developing countries’ perception of their own needs. And in the face of disproportionate Western control of international institutions—and development finance needs beyond the capacity of existing institutions and private capital markets—China helped establish new development finance institutions, announced the Belt and Road Initiative and established the China International Development Cooperation Agency, marking perhaps a decision to compete with the liberal Western order rather than just complement it. These institutional changes raised Western concerns about US leadership, the role of transparency, procurement, and environmental and social safeguards and the impact on contractors’ commercial interests. Chinese leadership responded that it will set high standards and increase its financial commitment to existing institutions.

The outcome was a deep crisis of the Western paradigm and of Western-dominated multilateralism. DAC donors placed increasing emphasis on national interests, mutual benefit and aid as a catalyst for private investment and in some cases merged their aid agencies with ministries of foreign affairs and trade. This crisis and the continued progress of China’s Belt and Road Initiative suggests that new structures and new (pluricentric) models of international governance may well be taking shape, although their emergence faces considerable resistance from the governments of the United States and its allies.