The Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Persistent Fragmentation of the Left

I will not repeat all of the postive, supportive comments already made about the Occupy Wall Street Movement, that no doubt, have already been offered by all those here on HubPages and elsewhere who consider themselves liberals, leftists, or progressive politically. The Occupy Wall Street Movement is a fantastic example of a youth that is aware, engaged, and politically tenacious. If you've been following the news, in a vague way, you know that the movement has spread, inspiring similar actions across the country.

What I am about to write, here, is not a criticism of these young people and their movement. What follows is yet another general criticism of the Left in the United States, and I suppose the global Left as well.

There is something that the Right seems to understand much better than the Left, on an intuitive even instinctive, gut level. What the Right understands, it seems to me, is the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of issues across the economic, social, and political landscapes. The Left and Center are still stuck on trying to solve one issue -- in isolation -- at a time. Because of this the national and global Left are not as powerful as they could be.

A common criticism of the Right by the Left is that the former has the same few solutions to all problems: cut taxes, reduce government spending, tighten our national borders, get prayer in schools, and teach creationism (or intelligent design, as its called today), and so on and so forth. Some might call this simple-minded..... I am not doing so, but some might. But one thing this simplicity is, is coherent and powerful and galvanizing.

Despite these Occupy Wall Street uprisings, the steady, constant, and coherent passion still seems to be on the side of the right-wing. They have a constant, working alliance of the religious, social, cultural, economic conservatives, libertarians, and hawkish national security heads.

The Left is divided into all kinds of movements: environmentalists, anti-death penalty activists, anti-globalization people, the peace movement, child advocates, homeless advocates, animal rights movement, etc.

Anti-globalization/Anti-war (peace) movements

What American imperial militarism and neoliberal economic globalization have in common is the predatory encroachment of the ruling class of the United States upon, principally the Third World without the impediment of Cold War rival the Soviet Union; indeed Russia itself got a taste of neoliberal, IMF structural adjustment shortly after the fall of the U.S.S.R, and the chaos, misery and disorder this caused (by the way, the lifting of price controls sent inflation soaring, which forced middle class Russians to sell their personal belongings just to eat) gave rise to Vladimir Putin, whatever one chooses to think of him (Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt & Company). New York, 2007. pp. 223 & 225-237).

If one reviews the economic history after World War Two, one discovers that U.S. strategic planners consistently made choices that favored power (the American empire) and finance capital (which has social and economic marganalizing consequences) over manufacturing (mass employment in such has necessarily socially and economically broad-based, top-to-bottom redistributing effects, assuming strong unionization is present) and therefore the health of the U.S. economy as a whole. Some of those choices involved setting up ideological and strategic satellites in East Asia (Japan) and West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace (who had lost twenty million of its citizens fighting off Hitler's forces).

After the war the U.S. offered a deal to Japan. The deal was the U.S. would help put Japan's economy back together with plenty of technology transfer in exchange for allowing the United States to have lots of military bases there, on the tiny island of Okinawa. Japan's economy was rewired to become a model of "export-led" development.

That might have been okay, but soon Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, and other East Asian countries followed suit, eager to duplicate the success of Japan -- this was a movement sometimes referred to as the "flying geese pattern," with Japan as the head goose. The result was massive overinvestment and production that didn't even pretend to a balance between supply and demand. Products were not created by these countries that their people could actually use; rather they serviced the demand of the population of the imperial patron, the United States and Western Europe. But as the pay and credit of the working classes of the West couldn't stretch any further to continue supplying the demand, you have overproduction.

You can learn more about this by reading a very good book by the late East Asian specialist Chalmers Johnson, BlowBack: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2000). 

Anti-war (peace)/Anti-globalization/Anti-capitalist movements

I don't know the exact number (there's probably few who do know) but you and I both know that the United States has, perhaps thousands of military bases all over the world in at leas one hundred countries. Why is that?

Isn't this very fact an admission by the American ruling class that the economy couldn't absorb all of those Americans overseas? What would happen if all U.S. military personnel were recalled from all bases throughout the world? The answer is social chaos, is it not? After all, the military is a career choice of last resort for millions of poor people of color. The armed services are an employment program; and as such the young boys and girls in Okinawa, Germany, Japan, the DMZ in Korea, England, the Middle East, and Africa most likely enjoy a much more comfortable, higher standard of living than they would stateside.

Therefore the the extent that American's military shadow has grown steadily over the globe since the 1980s, is at least in part, reflective of the extent to which the American economy has been ailing, suffering outsourcing of jobs, the destruction of manufacturing, de-industrialization, while soaring along with finance for the elites, thus polarizing the gap between the haves and have-nots.

So, in order to keep Congress from cutting the Pentagon's budget in a serious way, there has to be other threats out there! THERE JUST HAS TO BE!!!

One again choosing the empire and finance over the broad health of the American economy, Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971. This act broke apart the post-war Bretton-Woods agreement, which among other things, had fixed the exchange value of international currencies. We were fighting the Vietnam War at the time and the government didn't think we could afford to maintain the gold standard and keep fighting the war.

Now currencies would be allowed to "float," somehow being valued by the market. This act helped nurture the field for the rise of finance capitalism and its favoritism over making things. But it came by way of the government, again, deliberately choosing the American imperial project and finance capital over American manufacturing; and of course, this tilt toward empire and the speculative paper-shuffling economy became much more pronounced under Ronald Reagan. Though I do suspect Reagan may have had magical hopes about how most Americans might be able to use the liberalization of finance to their personal advantage. I've called this the Prometheus Effect, a thesis I developed in another hub, if you're interested...

http://wingedcentaur.hubpages.com/hub/Ronald-Reagan-A-Republican-Prometheus

Capitalism

As you know, capitalism depends for its survival on constant growth. Because this is so captalism can never be limited to the realm of one country's national borders. You always need new markets, new sources of labor, and natural resources. The powers-that-be for America has known for more than a century now that American capitalism could not survive without going global, as it were (Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p.297; Kinzer, Overthrow, p.34).

In his book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii To Iraq (2006) Stephen Kinzer wrote:

"By the end of the nineteenth century, farms and factories in the United States were producing considerably more goods than Americans could consume. For the nation to continue its rise to wealth, it needed foreign markets. They could not be found in Europe, whose governments, like that of the United States, protected domestic industries behind high tariff walls. Americans had to look to faraway countries, weak countries, countries that had large markets and rich resources, but had not yet fallen under the sway of any great power" (Kinzer, p.34).

There is some suggestion, here, of the necessity of great powers to maintain unequal power relations between themselves and "developing" countries, in order to maintain the workability of Western-driven global capitalism. Note how the United States, at the end of the nineteenth century, was blocked from finding new markets in Europe because those countries, politically powerful, could and did protect their domestic industries behind high tariff walls, which the politically weaker countries of the Third World could not do.

Kinzer tells the fascinating story of how the Hawaiian Islands came to be part of the United States. It seems that the United States overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, in effect, to protect American and European sugar interests (Kinzer, pp. 9, 13, 14, & 15).

In 1890 the U.S. Congress passed a tariff of imported sugar. The American-held sugar operations in Hawaii were instantly faced with ruin. The value of white-held sugar exports from Hawaii fell from $13 million to $8 million. The powers-that-be handled it this way: this branch (sugar) of the business division of the American ruling class at that time colluded with the relevant portion of the political branch of the American ruling class, to arrange the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the annexation of Hawaii (Kinzer, pp. 15, 16-17, 19-23, & 24-30).

It seems to me that you can't REALLY effectively work on the issue of U.S. imperialism without addressing what's called "globalization," and you can't do that without coming to grips with the nature of corporate capitalism itself.

Anti-War (peace) movements/Anti-globalization/Anti-capitalism/Environmental movements

What does anti-war activism have to do with anti-globalization and anti-capitalist activism (these two issues are actually the same since capitalism cannot exist except globally but...) and environmental protection issues? They are connected intimately, as should be the activists movements which concentrate on these isolated, lonely concerns.

Capitalism causes environmental degradation --- not deliberately but it is a by-product of the pathological competition it engenders.

Capitalist X wakes up in the morning with some money, which he uses to buy labor power and a management apparatus, a factory building and technology. Mr. X puts them all together, imposing an organizational form on the whole mish-mosh, to produce something to sell in the marketplace. He sells his product in the market and ends the day with more money than he had at the beginning of the day.

The money he has left over, after he has paid himself and his executive team, his workers, lawyers, the light bill, taxes, etc., is his profit. When he gets up the next morning the question he asks himself is: 'How can I reinvest my money to expand my business, to increase the profit-making capacity of my firm?

This is the question he asks himself, and this is what he must do. There is no alternative. If he doesn't reinvest, his rivals surely will. With the enormous extra profits they rake in due to this reinvestment, one or more of them will have the strength and financial werewithal to swallow up his firm, say, through a "hostile takeover," "leveraged buyout," or some such -- like a whale swallowing a mere minnow!

This is the constant fear that powers modern corporate capitalism. You can't just sit still and hold your own. You have to keep growing, or you may find yourself elbowed out of the market. So it is not merely "greed" that motivates corporate capitalism, it is FEAR as well -- this is a point I will return to.

What does the capitalist reinvest in?

Well, you might invest in new technologies, perhaps automation which can replace human workers, which means you can lay people off. Yaaah!

You might invest in new technologies, which form the basis of some kind of NEW product offering you want to sell to the people.

You might invest in marketing and advertising to persuade people to buy your products, when there is no difference, effectively, from those products of your rivals.

You might invest in the search for new markets. If your market is not at home, you may find it abroad somewhere. If the targeted population can't afford to buy your products due to suppresed real wages (which started to happen in the mid-1970s) then you simply lend them the money to keep up demand and consumption (which they did by introducing the credit card, big time, in the 1970s).

You invest in politicians from both parties. You always want tax cuts, tax write-offs, and "tax holidays" (when you are investing abroad. You're always looking for special credits, such as the "oil depletion allowance" bestowed upon the U.S. oil industry. You invest in the best, most aggressive lawyers and the most imaginative financial services people, to make use of all available "tax minimization" strategies.

After all, everybody knows that while corporate heads whine about the high taxes they are liable for in the United States, first of all their talking about the official tax rate -- which is only thirty-five percent, when it had been ninety-one (91%) in the 1950s. But corporations tend not to pay the actual thirty-five percent their liable for; their "effective tax rate," what they actually pay is down around twenty percent.

These strategies are, in my opinion, reflective of acts of desperation on the part of American corporations, because since the 1970s they have been having a harder and harder time trying to figure out ways to PRODUCTIVELY reinvest their extra profits, or the surplus product, in the language of Marx.

The connection to environment

When the capitalists absolutely cannot find a way to reinvest their "surplus product," you get a general crisis associated with unemployment, bankruptcies, lay offs, stock market devaluations, the write-down of assets, and the destruction of capital.

One of the ways states have historically used to stave off this outcome is by engaging upon massive building projects.

So you have all the big capitalists standing around, looking at each other, not knowing how to reinvest their surplus product. Things slow down, if not come to a grinding halt, the system loses its upward and onward momentum. People are thrown out of work, and others ready to enter the workforce are not hired.

Now the government has to come in and say: Not to worry, give your surplus product to us. We know how to put it to work. We shall hire all those people you have discarded and then some; ad we shall put them to work in repairing the infrastructure of American. Indeed, we shall go further than that. We shall reconfigure the landscape of the entire country!

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This is what was done during the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal was a package of Keynsian stimulus projects, banking reform measures, and social provisions such as Social Security, enacted by the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But the New Deal wasn't quite enough. It had been America's entry into World War Two which really pulled the United States out of The Great Depression. When the war was over many people were afraid that America would slide back into depression. What were they going to do?

Part of the answer was an arms race with the Soviet Union. But the major solution came in the form of the installation of the interstate highway system and the suburbanization of America, and -- here's where the environmental thing comes in -- this project rested upon access to cheap oil.... which, of course, brings us to the Middle East!

The major environmental threat comes from the use of oil, which substantially contributes to global warming. But its the reorganization of urban life in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s (which depends on tons and tons and tons of cheap oil) which is the central cause, if you will, of the environmental situation; it is not peripheral things like too many plastic bottles and so on.

What imperialism, globalization, capitalism, and environmental degradation have in common, then, is that they are all driven by the need to -- in Marxist language -- absorb the surplus product. Remember, its not enough just to make profit, you have to reinvest the profit in such a way which enables you to make more profit next time, because if you don't one of the big fish are gonna get you. Snap!

Anti-war/Anti-globaliztion/Anti-capitalism/Environmentalism/Religious liberalism

What do the peace movements, anti-globalization (anti-capitalist), environmentalism have in common with the Religius Left?

Well, imperialism, capitalism, globalization, environmental degradation (due to overbuilding, causing bubbles and crashes in the property markets) and CALVINISM have this in common: they are driven by the necessity to absorb the surplus product! Yes, this is so even in the matter of religion. Let me explain.

Those of you familiar with my writings, here on HubPages, know that, for me, sixteenth century Calvinism (founded byJohn Calvin, the French theologian brought up in Geneva), is the psycho-ideological origin of capitalism itself; indeed, for me, capitalism is but monetized Calvinism.

Calvinism

It seems to me that the Calvinist influence has been so all-pervading, so insidious, actually, that our entire culture (both secular and religious) has been permeated with it. I think we in America, are not even aware of how Calvinistic we are.

Anyway, the central idea behind Calvinism was the doctrine of predestination. This meant that before God had created the world, "He" had already determined who would go to Heaven and who would go to Hell. People had no way of knowing which were which, and "He" wasn't telling.

Since people are always looking for a "sign" from "God," Calvinism became worked out, practically, down through the centuries as an auxiliary aspect of Christianity, which equated wealth with salvation. In other words, there came a time when the accumulation of property and wealth became (on a universal, unconscous level) a sign to one's neighbors that you enjoyed God's favor, because in the accumulation of wealth you had obviously worked hard for it, thus keeping yourself far away from the sin of SLOTH.

And so, by being "productive,' you had done honor to a God who had worked so hard to make the world a beautiful, bountiful place for the enjoyment of its stewards, humankind. The great German sociologist Max Weber talked about all this in his classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as you know.

So, the ruthless businessman engaged in seemingly pathological competition with his rivals, cutting corners in worker health and safety regulations, environmental emission standards, worker pay and benefits, truth in advertising, and so forth, is not just being "greedy"; he is, whether he realizes this consciously or not, is engaged in a constant, desperate, though twisted battle TO GET AND MAINTAIN HIS PLACE IN HEAVEN!

Most people, I think, on my end of the political spectrum, more or less believe that the world would be better off without religion. Some go so far as to say that human beings won't be able to "take the next step," as it were, until we get rid of religion. I don't go that far (first of all, I think that proposition is false). I think that all that need be done is to drain Western religion of its Calvinist content and spirit, which permeates it; and I therefore think that this should be an important area of concentration for the religious left in the United States. But, again, please note: Calvinism spawned capitalism which spawned "globalization," which spawns war and imperialism which spawns environmental degradation.

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Anti-war/Anti-capitalist/Anti-globalization/Environmentalism/Religious liberalism/Women's pro-choice/Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender liberation struggles/immigration rights

What does imperialism, capitalism, globalization, environmental degradation, oppressive religion (its Calvinist spirit and content), the socially conservative pro-life stance with regard to a woman's body, homophobia, and the conservative anti-immigrant stance have in common?

The answer to that question is the same as I have been giving. The answer is that ALL of those things are connected by the need for the capitalist owning class to absorb the surplus product. If you look back at the history of capitalism, you find that the Western nation ruling classes had actually first institutionalized homophobia, anti-abortion, and the anti-immigrant stance as economic necessities to make the system work, as it accomodated itself to industrialization. Later, these institutionalizations (with an 's') became embedded cultural attitudes.

In other words, the goal was to rearrange social life in such a way as to remake the human being into one used to a mechanized, routine-making, temporal schedule. Efficiency was king, now, at the start of the twentieth century and the attitudes and lifestyles of workers had to be remade in order to maximize efficiency.

Chris Harman talked about all of this in chapter three, I believe, of his book called A People's Histoy of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (2008).

There came a point, at the turn of the twentieth century when "[c]apitalism could no longer look for a supply of labour power outside the system. It had to take steps to ensure the supply existed, and that meant addressing the raising of new generations of people. Capitalists had shown few such concerns in the early days of the industrial revolution in Britain, and the industrial capitalists of other countries were usually just as indifferent. Women and children provided the cheapest and most adaptable labour for the spinning mills, and they were crammed in with no thought for the effect on their health or on the care of younger children. If capital accumulation necessitated the destruction of the working class family, then so be it!" (Harman, Chris. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso Books. 2008. pp.381-382).

But with the need to preserve and reproduce labor supplies at home the English parliament rolled out a succession of laws restricting the hours which children could work and banned women from working in jobs which might damage their chances for successful pregnancy. Some capitalists took the trouble to build model worker villages, which usually included a strict ban on alcohol (ibid, p.382).

To drive the point home Harman emphasized that "[p]ractices which might challenge the model family, however widespread in the past, were branded as 'immoral' or 'unnatural.' So premarital sex, divorce, contraception, and discussion of sexual hygiene and sexual enjoyment were all castigated in a new climate of official puritanism. MALE HOMOSEXUALITY BECAME A CRIMINAL OFFENSE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN BRITAIN" (ibid, pp. 382-383).

And so Calvinism begat capitalism which begat globalization which begat (much of what we think of as) "social conservatism" (homophobia, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant stance) which begat imperialism which begat environmental degradation.

Anti-war/Anti-capitalist/Anti-globalization/Environmentalism/Religious liberalism/Women's pro-choice/Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender liberation struggles/Immigration rights/Activism against the "prison industrial complex" including the death penalty

What does imperialism, capitalism, globalization, environmental degradation, oppressive religion (Calvinism), the social conservatism of "pro-life," homophobia, and the anti-immigrant stance, have in common with the "prison industrial complex" and the death penalty?

Answer: the same thing, the need for the capitalist owning class to absorb the surplus product.

Question: What does the need for the absorption of the surplus product have to do with the prison industrial complex and the death penalty.

Answer: I don't want to be dramatic about this, but the system seems to frequently generate a near-overwhelming pressure for genocide. But we have to back up a step.

Finance Capitalism

The link I'm making between the capitalists's need to absorb the surplus product and the prison industrial complex has to do, first of all, with the current form of national and global capitalism known as finance capitalism.

Historically, this transformation of the mode of capitalism is nothing new. This always happens and always has happened throughout the three or four hundred year period of capitalism.

Industrial or manufacturing-based capitalism, no matter how successful, has always morphed into finance capitalism as Kevin Phillips has shown (Phillips, Wealth and Democracy, pp. 97, 138, 143-144, 171-174, 179-180, 185-186 & 195-196; Phillips, American Theocracy, pp. 13, 15, & 28).

Why? Why does industrial capitalism always morph into finance (virtual) capitalism? Well, the answer seems to be that in their heart of hearts -- and this was something recognized by theorists like Adam Smith and John Hobson --- "... capitalists do not really like being capitalists. They would much rather be monopolists, rentiers, inside traders, or usurers or in some other way achieve an unfair advantage that might allow them to profit more easily from the mental and physical work of others" (Johnson, Chalmers. BlowBack: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Metropolitan Books. New York, 2000. pp. 201-202).

Johnson went on to say that "Smith and Hobson both believed that finance capitalism produced the pathologies of the global economy they called mercantilism: that is, true economic exploitation of others rather than mutually beneficial exchanges among economic actors" (ibid, p.202).

Now, the practical, objective circumstances on the ground that seems to trigger this transformation to finance capitalism are any and all circumstances that erect insurmountable barriers to manufacturing production. This is what happened in the United States in the mid-1970s. The mid-1970s marked the end of the global monopolisitc hegemony of American industrial capitalism.

From about 1945-1975 American capitalism had no international competitors; the start of the period was the end of World War Two, and Western Europe and Japan were in ruins. But in the 1970s they recovered and began to challenge American industry. The long and short of it is that this competition pushed the profitability of American manufacturing DOWN!

Basically, 1980 to the present marks the thirty year period in which the American capitalist owning class decided that making things wasn't any fun anymore; and so they invested more and more of their surplus product in finance as opposed to manufacturing.

So we find that the Ford Motor Company, for example, in 2004 made $850 million before taxes from their activity of building and selling their cars and trucks, but through its finance arm, the Ford Credit Corporation, the organization garnered a record pre-tax profit of nearly $5 billion. "The new botton line, one could argue, is that manufacturing results have given way. Actual production of goods has become the showroom for a loan-originating business. In 1986 Salomon Brothers forecast exactly this kind of era in which credit operations would be the lucrative side of the business" (Phillips, American Theocracy, p.28)

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When a society makes this transition from manufacturing-based capitalism to finance capitalism, this transformation is called financialization. This happens regularly and periodically in capitalist societies when the capitalist owning class run into too many barriers to making and selling goods profitably. The rate of profit they get from manufacturing declines sharply from that which they had enjoyed in more prosperous times.

Therefore they find other investment channels for their surplus product (the extra profits you hold in your hand after taxes and other expenses). That other channel is either the stock market (trying to get "in on the ground floor" or the "next big thing" and this herd-like movement is the frequent cause of bubbles) or finance, investment in securities and derivatives. This is what started to happen in the United States in the late 1970s, when the global performance of American industrial capitalism hit a major slump, as they faced competition from Western Europe and Japan for the firs time in thirty years after World War Two.

Competition within financial capital, like competition within industrial capital, gives rise to innovation. Improvements in telecommunications technology made a huge difference in the amount and speed at which money could be moved all around the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Financial innovation, then, which has always been crucial to the functioning of capitalism, aided and abetted the deindustrialization of the United States, which started in the late 1970s -- by this we mean the offshoring of factories to other countries were labor costs are much cheaper and the regulatory environment is much more relaxed.

The globalization of American industrial capitalism necessitated the reworking of the financial architecture to accomodate this. In moving your money internationally on a regular basis, which starts to happen in this period, one had to be careful of international exchange rates; and this gave rise to currency hedging..... but let's move on.

Financialization has social consequences

This transition brings with it very real social conseqences, as certain kinds of employment are greatly increased (those involving finance, legal services, public relations, telecommunications, advertising/marketing, and the like, which require a college bachelor's degree or more), while due to the deindustrialization (which financialization aids and abets, remember) which attends it brings about a greatly decreased range of employment that had typically been the ticket for high school educated working into the middle class; I'm talking about manufacturing of course.

The redundancy of labor

According to the economist Richard Wolff, American capitalism had an unprecedented situation from about 1820 to 1970, one hundred fifty years of steadily rising REAL wages for workers in return for steadily increasing productivity, and of course, profits for the capitalist owning class.

Naturally, the owners of factories and such did not pay workers steadily rising REAL wages out of the goodness of their hearts. They did it because they HAD TO. From 1820 to 1970, says Dr. Wolff, we had a CHRONIC SHORTAGE OF LABOR. Indigenous people were not available, of course, their numbers having been dramatically reduced by war with European/American colonial forces and diseases brought over by the Europeans which the indigenous peoples had no immunity for; and of course most remaining "Native American" peoples were forcibly relocated to the west by American military forces.

Slave labor was used in the south. But the northeast and midwest was different. These regions relied on free labor. Owners of the means of production had to pay good wages to attract workers and to keep them, because if a worker was dissatisfied with his compensation (and other conditions, I suppose) he could possibly get a land grant and set up his own farm out west.

The four game changers

By the 1970s this chronic shortage of labor came to an end. Four factors converged to make it come to an end.

1. Computers and automation: more work could be done, now with fewer people, so people got laid off.

2. Women, wanting to see themselves in a different light, sought fulfillment outside of the home and joined the workforce.

3. In 1965 Congress passed a law which liberalized immigration into the United States; this dramatically started to increase the flow of people from Mexico/Central America who were looking for a better life.

4. Transshipment costs had fallen dramatically and this allowed businesses to relocate their factories to other countries overseas, where labor costs are vastly cheaper and the regulatory environment is more relaxed.

The result of all of this was that you had more people looking for less jobs. Finally, this brings us to the relationship of the need for the capitalist owning class to absorb the surplus product to all of the other social phenomena we've been discussing, as well as their relationship to the prison industrial complex.

So, when you have a situation like we've been describing, more people looking for less jobs, with the people of the working class at the disadvantage, you have surplus labor, uneeded and unwanted labor. And this situation always threatens to cause "social unrest." The state has to devise ways to control these disenfranchised, impoverished, possibly "dangerous" people, who, in the United States, because of its cultural history, tend to be lower class people of color.

Enter the prison industrial complex

Remember, the so-called "Golden Age" of American capitalism ran from about the end of World War Two, 1945 to 1975.

In the mid-1970s some of the most well-respected criminologists were actually predicting that the prison system, in the United States, would soon fade away. Many experts concluded that prison did not deter crime. The National Advisory Commission on Mainstream Criminal Justice Justice Standards and Goals issued a recommendation in 1973 that "no new institutions for adults should be built and existing institutions for juveniles should be closed." This advice was based on their finding that "the prison, the reformatory and the jail have achieved only a shocking record of failure. There is overwhelming evidence that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it" (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press. New York, 2010. p.8).

But there's another piece we have to add here. In the 1960s the central cities were losing manufacturing jobs. Factories were relocating either to the suburbs (remember the 1950s and 1960s were the era of the suburbanization of the United States) or to the American south (they weren't going overseas just yet). The instability this created in the "inner" cities among the African-American populations came to a head with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 -- there were riots in dozens of cities across the country. This situation was called the Urban Crisis.

The federal government gave more money to the central cities, so that they could expand public employment to fill in the gap left by departing manufacturing industry.

But by 1973 Richard Nixon began to cut off that money, because he felt that the United States could no longer both fight the Vietnam War and fund this urban stabilization program. This disproportionately affected communities of color in the central cities. Let's keep that in mind. Combined wth the financialization of the economy that was going on in the 1970s, you had the disproportionate amount of unneeded, unwanted labor among the African-American and Hispanic populations.

Now, in 1972 less than 350,000 people were imprisoned in the United States. But for people who supported a moratorium on prison construction, that number was obscenely high (ibid, pp.8-9). But to compare the United States to, say Finland and Germany, for example, we find that between 1960 and 1990 the official crime rates in those three countries were close to identical. Yet in that period the incarceration rate in Finland FELL BY SIXTY (60%) PERCENT. The German incarceration rate remained stable. The incarceration rate in the United States ROSE BY FOUR TIMES, EVEN THOUGH U.S. CRIME RATES HAD DIPPED A LITTLE BELOW THE INTERNATIONAL NORM (ibid, p.7).

There are over two million people in prison today, with most of that increase attributable to the "War on Drugs." The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, greatly surpassing nearly every developed country, and even Russia, China, and Iran. Michelle Alexander says: "No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid." In Washington D.C. it is estimated that three out of four young black men (most in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve some time in prison (ibid, pp.6-7).

Its doubtful that these statistics represent an honest attempt by the state to fight crime or drugs, since people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at "remarkably similar rates," with whites, statistically a little more likely than blacks to engage in drug crime; and moreover, drug crime was on the decline when the "War on Drugs" was declared (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. p.7).

What's an alternative explanation?

Again, Alexander writes: "Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns" (ibid).

So, I would just propose that the lower class communities of color were, on a structural basis, largely cut off from participating in the prosperity of the "Golden Age" of American capitalism, as well as the stock market/financial services boom of the 1980s and 1990s; and this created the social instability that the state moved to control with the war on drugs.

Let's go to the last category

Anti-war/Anti-capitalist/Anti-globalization/Environmentalism/Religious liberalism/Women's pro-choice/Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender liberation struggles/immigration rights/Activism against the prison industrial complex including the death penalty/Activism against the push to privatize public schools and the villification of teachers

This is the last category we'll do.

What does imperialism, capitalism, globalization, environmental degradation, oppressive religion (Calvinist elements), the "pro-life," anti-choice stance, homophobia, the anti-immigrant stance, the prison industrial complex including the death penalty, have to do with the push to privatize public schools and the villification of public school teachers?

What is involved is the same thing we've been talking about: the need for the capitalist owning class to absorb the surplus product.

I've already mentioned that since the end of World War Two, U.S. planners consistently made choices that favored the U.S. empire and finance capital over manufacturing and income and wealth redistribution at home. As I said before, in 1971 when Nixon took the dollar off gold standard (ending the post-war Bretton-Woods international system, when the more sensible choice would have been to end the Vietnam War and balance the budget) this seeded the environment for speculation; but this goes back to the end of World War Two when the U.S. put the Japanese economy back together as an "export-led" system. The United States guaranteed the prosperity of Japan by granting it unrestricted access to the U.S. market in return for allowing the U.S. to keep bases in Japan and giving at least verbal support of U.S. foreign policy.

Between 1950 and 1975: the U.S. TRANSFERRED CRUCIAL TECHNOLOGIES to Japan on "virtually concessionary terms" and opened its markets to Japanese products while tolerating Japan's protection of its own domestic market. The U.S. even supported the Japanese side in all claims by individual American firms that said they had been damaged by Japanese competitors unfair practices. Also, the United States allowed Japan to retain an artificially undervalued currency, givng its exports a price advantage for well over a decade longer than it did for any of the rebuilt European economies (Johnson, Chalmers. BlowBack: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Metropolitan Books, 2000. p.177).

Now, it should be noted that U.S. officials, at the time, never thought Japan would ever evolve as an actual economic competitor with the United States, that is until the United States's "steel, consumer electronics, robotics, automobile, camera,and semiconductor industries were either extinct or fighting for their lives" (ibid, pp.177-178). Listen to this part...

"By the time the Western world awoke to what had actually happened, economic growth in East Asia was self-sustaining and unstoppable by external actions (although many Asians thought this was exactly what the United States was attempting when its policies toward the area led to the meltdown of 1997)" (ibid, p.182).

One last quotation, if you please.

Johnson wrote: ".... the Japanese economy, still devoted to exporting a vast array of ever more sophisticated and technologically advanced manufactured goods primarily to the American market, was generating an industrial overcapacity that would eventually threaten the health of the world economy." Japan was later followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Phillipines, and most recently, of course, China. "Moreover, as much of Asia began to emulate the Japanese form of capitalism or became offshore manufacturing platforms for Japanese corporations, this overcapacity threatened to reach crisis proportions. The crisis came to an head in 1997 and has been a continuing feature of the international economy ever since" (Johnsn, Chalmers. BlowBack. p.189).

Here's my point

This state of affairs, I would argue, had many people, in the 1980s, asking the question: Gee Whiz! How come we're getting our clock cleaned in international competition?

It is my contention that the WRONG answer that many conservatives came up -- not paying attention to this economic history -- was: You know what it is? Its because the American worker is not smart enough, talented enough, prepared enough to compete on the global marketplace.

When conservatives were asked why they thought this was so, the answer they gave was: It is the fault of lazy public school teachers and those damn unions that coddle them!

Last point

Why did I put the picture of a Rubix's Cube on top of this hub?

Because capitalism did not emerge sui generis, out of nothing. Though its appearance was not deliberate, nevertheless its emergence required a simultaneous change in many areas of life. Social relations had to change. Attitudes to work had to change. Relations to natue had to change. People's view of themselves had to change (particularly in the religious realm with Calvinism). Technology had to change; the path to capitalism wouldn't have been possible without a revolution in agricultural production. Attitudes about the state's role in the economy had to change. And so on and so forth.

And so, any attempt to deliberately move to a different kind of economy, in my view, will require pressure to be put on ALL of the areas of life I've been talking about, including the widespread dissemination of economic history.

Its like a Rubix's Cube. You cannot solve one side at a time. The puzzle won't let you do that. You have to twist and turn and think it through, moving all the sides at the same time until you finally arrive at the sequence that makes all the sides solid at the same time.

Sources

1. Johnson, Chalmers. BlowBack: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Metropolitan Books, 2000. pp.177, 178, 182, 189, 201-202.

2. Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq. Times Books (Henry Holt & Company). New York, 2006. pp.9, 13, 14, 15, 16-17, 19-23, 24-30, & 34.

3. Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt & Company). New York, 2007. pp.223, & 225-237.

4. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 2003. p.297

5. Harman, Chris. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso Books. 2008. pp.381-383.

6. Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway Books. New York, 2002. pp.97, 138, 143-144, 171-174, 179-180, 185-186, & 195-196.

7. Phillips, Kevin. American Theocracy: The Peril And Politics Of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century. Viking (The Penguin Group) 2006. pp.13, 15, 28.

8. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press. New York, 2010. pp.6-9.

Hey y'all thanks for reading. If you're still here, let's go out with this....