If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
retired UAW Local 909 General Motors President and Bargaining Chair
Against precarious work—shorter working hours with full wage compensation—Down with fascism and imperialist wars
April 23, 2026: Call by the International Coordination Group (ICOG) for May 1, 2026: In the Middle East, the danger of a global conflagration has intensified enormously following the imperialist attack by the U.S. and Israel on Iran and Lebanon. Russia’s war against Ukraine continues unabated. Worldwide, the shifting of the burdens of war and crisis onto workers and their families through price hikes—such as for gas, gasoline, or diesel—is placing an enormous strain on people. While billionaires like Elon Musk grow ever richer, hundreds of millions worldwide are fighting for their very survival.
A destructive battle for raw materials and markets is raging in the international automotive industry. The consequences are mass layoffs and a massive intensification of exploitation in the workplaces. In more and more countries, fascist and ultra-reactionary governments are dismantling democratic and workers’ rights. In response, there have been general strikes in India, for example, with over 250 million participants. In Russia, Belarus, and Iran, democratic trade unions are banned, and union activists are imprisoned and tortured. 120 million people worldwide are fleeing their homes. With imperialist wars and a rollback in climate policy, environmental destruction is advancing at a massive pace.
Resistance is growing worldwide against warmongering, the expansion of the war economy, and oppression. On February 6, dockworkers organized an international day of strike against war preparations and arms shipments. In the U.S., the fascist President Donald Trump is increasingly on the defensive with his hunt for migrants and his waging of war. The “No Kings” mass movement demonstrated on March 28 with over 8 million people. Union members are standing up to protect migrants and courageously opposing the ICE terror groups.
Governments in many countries are shifting to a war economy and beginning war preparations. In response, protests are successfully developing, including at plants of major automotive corporations such as Ford, Volkswagen, and CATL. During an international day of action at Stellantis on March 24, colleagues opposed plans to close seven plants in Europe. This was a result of the 3rd International Automotive Workers' Conference, which took place from November 20–24, 2025, with over 250 participants in Pune, India.
The delegates discussed and adopted a Joint Resolution titled “Automotive Workers Against Exploitation, Right-ward Developments, and Fascism, the Threat of War, and Environmental Destruction”. It states: “In many countries around the world, auto workers are waging tough struggles and strikes. … It is our task as the International Automotive Workers' Coordination to fight in solidarity with the workers… We wage these struggles as part of the fight for social transformation, for a society free from exploitation and oppression. This requires us to take responsibility for the future of humanity.”
At the automotive workers' conference, the resolution “Unite all auto workers to honor the 140th anniversary of May Day in 2026!” was unanimously adopted.
“The International Automotive Workers Coordination initiate a call for automotive workers of the world to initiate or join militant commemorations of May 1st - May Day – on this, the 140th anniversary of this holiday honoring the militant traditions originating with the U.S. working class and thereby demonstrate to the world, we are prepared to defend our interests as part of a growing international working class movement.“
Take to the streets and squares on May 1, 2026!
In the U.S., over 2,000 May Day demonstrations are planned this year, a change from the former practice of union leaders to only take action on Labor Day in September. Their protests include the fight against the rise of fascism in the U.S. In France, trade unions are resisting government plans to weaken the May Day holiday. We stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Turkey and other countries who are courageously taking to the streets, even when their demonstrations are obstructed, suppressed, or banned.
Take action, organize, and demonstrate against exploitation, for peace and against imperialist wars, against oppression and fascism, against the ongoing destruction of the environment!
My immediate view on something like this is it is not a "crazed" rant from some psychotic individual. In fact, I am reluctant to judge any individual in this situation especially after reading this statement. After all, we don't refer to our troops that kill people abroad as "crazed", or cops that shoot unarmed people as "crazed" we say the troops are heroes and the cops defending their lives.
I will say this, just as the Luddites smashed machinery and in the early days of the US labor movement workers took to acts of violence, bombing and sabotage directed at the enemy's power, we have to accept in my view that in the absence of any social force, political party or workers movement we will see more of these individual acts of resistance to the savagery of the market and it's perpetrators.
It is not the correct approach, it will not achieve our aims, the emancipation of the working class and society from capital. but we have to see it as the desperate act of a worker acting in anger and with no organized force that can resolve what is a real crisis facing working people today, in the US and throughout the world. Richard Mellor FFWP Admin
"Accused White House Correspondents’ Dinner gunman Cole Allen sent a sprawling, crazed manifesto to family members about 10 minutes before Saturday’s attack, sources told The Post.
The 1,052-word missive obtained by The Post Sunday morning — signed Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen” — outlined his “rules of engagement” for the shooting and stated he believed it was his righteous duty to target administration officials."
Cole Allen’s manifesto in full:
"Hello everybody!
So I may have given a lot of people a surprise today. Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused.
I
apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”
I apologize to my colleagues and students for saying I had a personal emergency (by the time anyone reads this, I probably most certainly DO need to go to the ER, but can hardly call that not a self-inflicted status.)
I apologize to all of the people I traveled next to, all the workers who handled my luggage, and all the other non-targeted people at the hotel who I put in danger simply by being near.
I apologize to everyone who was abused and/or murdered before this, to all those who suffered before I was able to attempt this, to all who may still suffer after, regardless of my success or failure.
I don’t expect forgiveness, but if I could have seen any other way to get this close, I would have taken it. Again, my sincere apologies.
On to why I did any of this:
I am a citizen of the United States of America.
What my representatives do reflects on me.
And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.
(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)
While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)
Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.
Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible
(aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*
Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)
Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security
National Guard: same as Hotel Security
Hotel Employees: not targets at all
Guests: not targets at all
In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)
I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.
Rebuttals to objections:
Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.
Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.
Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.
Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.
Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?
This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.
Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.
Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.
Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.
Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack
Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.
I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.)
Thank you to my family, both personal and church, for your love over these 31 years.
Thank you to my friends, for your companionship over many years.
Thank you to my colleagues over many jobs, for your positivity and professionalism.
Thank you to my students for your enthusiasm and love of learning.
Thank you to the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships, for your perspectives and inspiration.
Thank you all for everything.
Sincerely,
Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen
PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.
Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.
What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.
No damn security.
Not in transport.
Not in the hotel.
Not in the event.
Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.
I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.
The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.
Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.
Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no one would have noticed shit.
Actually insane.
Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up; I want to cry for all the things I wanted to do and never will, for all the people whose trust this betrays; I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.
I am not fond of conspiracy theories but conspiracies do exist. Like the author, I am perplexed as to what really happened here; I would not be surprised at anything these days. And I think that the author does capture the general mood in US society at the moment. And in a way, it's a mood that is a reflection of Trump's decade long effort to undermine the public trust and all the institutions of bourgeois society; the universities, the mass media, the courts, the political establishment and bourgeois democracy itself. Long before Trump, the general population here had very little faith in the political system, the body politic and the two capitalist parties that dominate it. There's a bit of a feeling that we can't trust anyone. And that makes people vulnerable.
What the fuck just happened? That’s not a rhetorical question anymore, it’s the only honest one left standing in a country that now processes crisis the way it processes reality television: loud, confusing, half-explained, and immediately repackaged for maximum narrative advantage. Here’s what we know so far: a 31-year-old “lone wolf,” a teacher from Tarzana by way of Torrance, educated, not exactly the cartoon villain profile, somehow navigates one of the most heavily secured environments in Washington and gets close enough, with multiple weapons, to trigger chaos inside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Shots are reported. A Secret Service officer is hit but saved by a vest. Hundreds of people dive under tables. Agents sprint through aisles. A mentalist, Oz Pearlman, finds himself face-to-face with Trump on the floor, both men bracing for something they can’t yet see, because in that moment it didn’t even feel like a shooting, it felt like something about to explode. Confusion first, then noise, then fear.
That’s the sequence. Not clarity. Not control. Confusion. And somehow, in the middle of all that, we’re supposed to accept that a guy with weapons just… ran past a checkpoint at an event guarded by the United States Secret Service. Just like that. No friction. No system catching it before it becomes a national incident. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to say that’s insane, you just need to have ever walked through a metal detector in your life and noticed that they usually catch the obvious stuff.
And then, because this is where the whole thing tips from alarming to absurd, within hours the narrative bends. Not toward accountability, not toward “how the hell did this happen,” but toward branding. Toward optics. Toward the President of the United States jumping on social media to explain that this is exactly why he needs his “big, beautiful, secure ballroom,” as if the takeaway from a security failure isn’t to fix the security but to build a monument to ego on the grounds of the White House. You can’t make this up. Shots fired, chaos in a ballroom, and the first instinct is real estate marketing. That’s not leadership, that’s a pitch deck. That’s a man who, even in a moment of national instability, is thinking about camera angles, ratings, and square footage. “How does it look on TV?” might as well be carved into the Resolute Desk at this point, because everything, everything, feeds the spectacle.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country keeps burning in slow motion. War tensions escalating with no coherent endgame. An economy squeezing working people while corporations quietly post record profits. ICE raids ripping through communities like a traveling storm system. Federal institutions hollowed out, expertise replaced with loyalty tests and cable-news cosplay. Billions of taxpayer dollars moving in ways that feel less like governance and more like a shell game. And always, always, Epstein. The name that refuses to die, the questions that never get answered, the silence that gets louder every time someone tries to pivot away from it. Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, like a drumbeat under everything, steady and unresolved. But sure, let’s talk about the ballroom. Let’s talk about the “perfectly timed” crisis that suddenly dominates the headlines while everything else slips into the background.
And here’s the part that should scare people, not because it proves anything but because it reveals everything: the reaction. Not just yours, not just mine, millions of people immediately asking whether it was staged, botched, manipulated, or conveniently timed. Not because they’ve got smoking-gun evidence, but because trust is gone. Completely gone. As one observer put it, maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t, but the fact that so many Americans instinctively believe it could be theater is the real story. That’s the damage. Because when trust evaporates, every crisis looks like a con, every “breaking news” moment feels like another act in a long, dangerous performance, and even genuine fear gets filtered through suspicion. That’s what happens when a government treats reality like content, you don’t just lose credibility, you lose the ability to be believed even when something real happens.
So what the fuck just happened? Maybe it was a catastrophic security failure. Maybe it was incompetence layered on top of arrogance. Maybe it was exactly what it looks like: a system so degraded, so distracted, so obsessed with optics that it can’t even secure its own stage. But what’s undeniable is this, within hours, it became part of the show. Folded into the narrative. Weaponized, monetized, spun. Another episode in the United States of Guntopia, where “just as the founders intended” has become a grotesque punchline to a country that can’t tell the difference between governance and performance anymore. Shots fired, people scrambling, and the President thinking about his ballroom. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about where we are, nothing will.
-Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.
Trump Amplifies Savage Racism, Denounces India and China as:
"Hellholes”Full of “Gangsters with Laptops”Bent on Destroying America.
US President Donald Trump has reposted American political commentator and radio host Michael Savage's podcast, where he referred to India, China and other nations as "hell-holes". In his racist rant calling for changes in the United States' birthright citizenship law, Savage alleged that people from the two Asian nations come to the US to "drop a baby in the ninth month", and the law turns them into "instant" US citizens.
The Republican president also shared the transcript and video of Savage's podcast ‘Savage Nation', where he slammed the US Supreme Court's arguments on birthright citizenship.
The radio host attacked the idea of automatic citizenship for children born in the US to non-citizens, calling for a national referendum instead of leaving it to the courts.
"A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring in their entire family from China, or India, or some other hell-hole on the planet," he wrote in the letter.
The letter also describes Indian and Chinese immigrants as "gangsters with laptops" who have "stepped on our flag".
"They've done more damage to this nation than all the mafia families put together. In my unhumble opinion. Gangsters with laptops. They've robbed us blind, treated us like second-class citizens, let the third world triumph, stepped on our flag, et cetera," he wrote.
Savage claimed he "used to be a great supporter of Indians in India" until, according to him, he realised the prospect of "white men" getting jobs at a high-tech company in California is 'nil'.
Meanwhile, this is insane. Chinese engineers have single-handedly revolutionized the RV industry in the span of five years making American RVs into pure overpriced, 100% junk.
The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money. Marx
The so called free press, some 90% of our news comes from these ten corporations: source
Comrades, sisters and brothers,
My blog Facts for Working People seems to have a respectable audience. Last month it had 94,000 visits and as of today, 4-21-26 61,000 visits. In September last year it had 147,000, a record. Someone is reading it. I used to pay FB to get a wider audience or to direct a commentary at a specific area but that has become increasingly more complicated.
I do not monetize the blog or its Facebook page. I am held to that by the old adage, “He who pays the piper calls the tune”. Unfortunately, a significant percentage of the blog traffic comes through Facebook.
According to Statista, total US ad spending was estimated at $455.93 billion by the end of 2025, and is expected to rise this year. Primary advertisers like Google, Amazon, drug companies, the health industry and others determine the content of the so-called news we get on television and in the print media. The coverage of Israel’s genocide and the present illegal war on Iran is an example, how strikes are reported for example.
I like The Andy Griffiths show here in the US, but it’s an old show and they know that seniors are watching it. So the viewer is bombarded with ads about ailments, some real and some concocted in the boardrooms of drug companies, that affect seniors and the advertiser has the drug you need; if you don’t think so, just ask your doctor.
I recall when the English singer Petula Clark had a show in the US and one segment had her doing a song with Harry Belafonte. She touched his arm or there was some physical contact and the Chrysler representative tried to stop it being aired; it might offend the southern viewer. Chrysler paid for the episodes through advertising. That shows us the root of racism and its society and its ruling class. There were no ads on our TV at that time and I thought it so strange a car company could do that.
I do not write for the blog like I used to as I always wanted it to be very much a working people’s platform and I think the readers are overwhelmingly working class and our allies. Among the middle class and academia. I initially hoped working people would send stories about life and work which hasn’t occurred; it’s just that working class people especially the blue collar sector in which I spent my working life, are not so familiar with writing in this way and some just don’t feel confident not only about writing publicly but also about defending what they write.
And while I would identify myself as a revolutionary socialist I do not have a sectarian approach to this and any contribution that is at least socially conscious, not racist or sexist can be published. The bottom line is does it advance the interests of working class people, does it help strengthen our class consciousness and working class unity.
But for numerous reasons I cannot write as much as I used to, not that I am skilled at writing but I did keep it going when it was getting maybe 100 visits a week.
I now publish pieces by writers whose work I think is important to the working class, or the class struggle in general, quite a few I subscribe to and others I would get off Facebook. I always have checked with the author’s initially even though they are in the public domain.
I subscribe to a number of sources, individual and institutional like the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and until recently Foreign Affairs and the Financial Times. I would like to subscribe to the FT print edition but it is just too expensive, and it’s fairly costly for a digital subscription.
I also have Zoom that is used for meetings of some of the folks that are around the Blog or support it and I just paid $170 to renew that.
I spend a good 6 -8 hours a day, sometimes more if I can and while I realize I benefit from it as it’s my only political outlet these days, if you are reading this and you are a regular reader of the blog can you afford to donate some funds to help? There is a donate button on the blog and it is easy to use although it is rarely used otherwise I wouldn’t be appealing here.
If a few people donated a small amount that would be helpful. Of course, I have had dreams of having some professional help me with design for the blog and building a You Tube channel that can be linked to it but I’ve given up on that. The blog and its FB page is fine.
The U.S. military’s secretive Special Operations Command plans to establish its first-ever center for AI-driven missions like targeted assassinations.
Autonomous warfare is all the rage at the Pentagon, where computers and artificial intelligence process intelligence data, select targets and then transmit kill orders to a waiting robot, or a “loitering” missile or airplane.
The new “Special Operations Autonomous Warfare Center” is referenced in the $1.5 trillion Department of War budget request to Congress this week.
Special Operations Forces refers to commando units like Navy SEAL Team, Army Green Berets, Marine “Raiders” and others who support “unconventional” warfare, and since 9/11, targeted killing. SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force of the Army are two of the most infamous of the secret units, and have been central to capture and decapitation operations like those in Venezuela and Iran.
One can say a lot of things about the rapid and chaotic adoption of artificial intelligence in the American military. But in this context, the term “autonomous warfare” is a euphemism for automated killing. (Autonomous intrinsically means acting independently, governing internally, or operating without external control.)
An unusually frank description of the role AI will play in the future comes from former Joint Special Operations Command chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal (ret.), who compared AI to “infant Hercules,” invoking the Greek god’s own role as a killer even in infancy.
McChrystal says:
“And like the infant Hercules who strangled two snakes sent by Hera to kill him in his crib, AI will grow to be strong — and a part of almost everything we do going forward.”
What McChrystal doesn’t mention is what happened when Hercules grew up. He spent his life carrying out killings on the orders of Eurystheus — a weak, cowardly king who hid in a jar and never had to understand anything. Hercules’s overwhelming power substituted for strategy.
In the most famous of his myths, Hercules fought the Hydra, a monster that grew two heads for every one he cut off. He was strong enough to keep swinging, but sheer power alone only multiplied the problem. He had to change his approach entirely to win. It’s a useful parable for a military that has spent two decades perfecting decapitation strikes only to watch the threats multiply.
Welcome to the era of CombatGPT. The Pentagon has since 2022 used AI in quarterly exercises for “target detection” involving personnel from all six military service branches. The computers pull together the ocean of information pieces that are collected every day — every minute — and extract the most important, according to the AI program, aggregating and geolocating the blips and dots into a potential target.
During the most recent Iran War, Middle East commander Adm. Brad Cooper felt it necessary to give assurances that the use of AI still includes a “human-in-the-loop” to make decisions. “Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot, and when to shoot,” he said. That statement, of course, contradicts the very idea of “autonomous.”
Cooper’s assurance echoes a long line of similar promises. The Air Force said the same thing about drones before the unmanned kill chain was compressed to the point where the “decision” became a rubber stamp. The pattern is consistent: a new capability is introduced with human-in-the-loop safeguards, the speed and scale of operations make those safeguards a bottleneck, and the bottleneck becomes the “Agree to terms” button on your computer most people click without thinking.
(Note that the FY 2027 budget request also zeroes out funding for Pentagon work in civilian harm “mitigation,” eliminating the element that might also be able to “autonomously” warn of direct civilian casualties and damage.)
Screenshot from the Pentagon’s FY27 budget request showing empty space for “civilian harm" mitigation"
The budget document doesn’t say what the Autonomous Warfare Center’s initial budget will be, but it doesn’t need to be large. The infrastructure already exists. Two decades of decapitation strikes have produced the targeting architecture, the intelligence pipelines, the kill chains. What AI does is remove the last friction — the human time spent correlating down to attacking a target.
Much of what the Special Operations Autonomous Warfare Center will be working with is already there. Both in Ukraine and in Iran, the military sees its challenge as dealing with “swarms” of low-cost enemy weapons, from one-way attack drones to relatively rudimentary ballistic missiles.
The Miami-based Southern Command, which is responsible for the shooting part of the drug war, has also established its own autonomous command to automate the tracking and killing of drug shipments where the speedboats and mini-submarines serve as the low-cost targets.
Nobody in Congress has so far asked about the creation of “autonomous” killing commands. The budget line item will likely pass without a hearing, buried in a special operations (and mostly classified) budget that receives less oversight than virtually any other part of the Pentagon. By the time the public learns what the Autonomous Warfare Center actually does, it will have been doing it for years.
McChrystal is right that AI will be “a part of almost everything we do going forward.” What he left out — what the myth he invoked actually teaches — is that the strongest weapon in the world is only as good as the mind wielding it. Hercules eventually learned that.
Spring books: a capitalist history, a transformation; controlling or replacing capitalism?
This post reviews some recent economics books published by various authors, both Marxist and non-Marxist. Book reviews by Michael Roberts
Let me start with a magnum opus, Capitalism – a global history, by Sven Beckert. Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches the history of the United States in the 19th century and global history. His ‘Capitalism’ is called a ‘monumental book’ by global inequality expert, Thomas Piketty, himself an author of an eariler gargantuan publication back in 2014 called Capital in the 21stcentury (Piketty’s suggestion then was that he was ‘updating’ Marx’s Capital from the 19th century).
Beckert in contrast is not trying to update or critique Marx’s Capital. Instead, as an economic historian, he aims to paint a broad canvas of the rise of capitalism from its early embryonic origins, that he takes back to 1000 years ago. He does not provide a theoretical analysis of capitalism as Piketty tries in his book. This book is very much more descriptive than analytical. He delivers a global view of capitalism , not confined what he calls the ‘eurocentric’ approach of others. That is the book’s merit, full of anecdotes and examples of capitalists at work worldwide. But the book’s de-merit is its lack of any systematic understanding of capitalism. Indeed, it is like the work of Adam Tooze – namely, it is ‘more the how, than the why’.
As the blurb says for the book, “Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton , places the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework, tracing its history during the past millennium and across the world. An epic achievement, his book takes us into merchant businesses in Aden and car factories in Turin, onto the terrifyingly violent sugar plantations in Barbados, and within the world of women workers in textile factories in today’s Cambodia”.
Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from trading communities across Asia, Africa, and Europe. And capitalism can only be described as a global phenomenon. “This book understands capitalism as, above all, a global development whose local articulations can only be understood globally. The economic dynamics of a given place are inescapably shaped by its connections to the outside world. There is no “French capitalism” or “American capitalism”; rather, there is capitalism in France and America, which have contested and complicated relationships with capitalism elsewhere, indeed everywhere “
Beckert makes big claims for the revolutionary nature of capitalism. “It was a fundamental break in human history not just because it revolutionized economic affairs but because it turned human relations upside down; infiltrated our politics, societies, and cultures; altered the natural environment we inhabit; and made revolution a permanent feature of economic life. The capitalist revolution is the only revolution whose fundamental core is that it is ongoing, that it qualifies as a state of permanent revolution.”
But of course, he recognises that capitalism has its faults. “Capitalism is also distinctive for the particular kinds of social inequalities and global hierarchies it creates.” But Beckert does not want to take sides between those authors supporting and those critiquing capitalism. “On one side, Marx’s writings became sacred texts through which to filter the politics du jour; on the other side, scholars read capitalism’s history through the equally sacralizing lens of Adam Smith’s writings. This book strives to avoid either idolatrous extreme.”
Actually, it is not true that Marx did not recognise the great changes that capitalism made to human progress; or that Adam Smith saw no faultlines in market economies. But Beckert resorts to descriptive history rather than economic insight. As Beckert puts it: “this work is an effort to reclaim capitalism as a territory for historical investigation. This history will show that capitalism is neither a state of nature nor a process whose internal logic determines its eventual outcome in more than the most general way.” So the Marxist materialist conception of history and Marx’s explanation of the internal contradictions in capitalism are to be put aside; as are the views of mainstream neoclassical economists that markets and profit making are an eternal and beneficial feature of human social organisation. Instead, capitalism is a contingent history.
Beckert does not hide the brutal nature of the emergence of capitalism globally. “Although capitalism’s history is often told as a story of contracts, private property, and wage labor—that is, stylized as a history of the realization of human freedom—there is another story, equally important, about vast expropriations, huge mobilizations of coerced labor, brutality in factories and on plantations, fierce destructions of noncapitalist economies, and massive extractions of resources for private gain. Capitalism rested, as we will see in the chapters that follow, not just on productivity gains but on enormous appropriations”.
Many of the early sections of the book give the reader a panoramic view of the capitalist process at work across the world, even when other social formations like, slavery, feudalism and Asian despotism were dominant. Unfortunately, when Beckert gets into 20th century, the period when capitalism became fully dominant globally as the mode of production and social formation, Beckert’s analysis becomes weaker. He notes the post-1970s crisis of reconstructed capitalism, ie the neoliberal period, but it seems he remains confident that capitalism is here to stay despite the accumulating economic, environmental and geopolitical crises that we see accelerating in the 21stcentury. ”We can anticipate that capitalism will remain a global totality, even if the nature of that totality continues to change, perhaps in radical and surprising ways. We can expect capitalism’s enormous creativity to persist, along with its amazing adaptability.”
Or does he? “Eventually, however, there will be a moment when capitalism ends. Regardless of whether we fear or hope for that end, capitalism, like everything in human history, is finite, even if it is impossible to say when or how it will end or what will replace it.” But even if capitalism is to give way to a new stage of human social organisation, it will take a very long time and “be interwoven within capitalism itself, just as capitalism was itself embedded in noncapitalist societies for centuries.” Or maybe not – if the “ecological and social crises unfolding right now and right here become unbearable”. All these maybes are a product of his descriptive approach to the history of capitalism.
Another opus magnum is the latest book by former World Bank lead economist and global inequality expert, Branco Milanovic. I have posted several times on Milanovic’s indepth studies of global inequality, but this new book is not so much about inequality but more about what he considers is the great transformation in the world economy that is taking place –namely the movement of economic power from North America and Europe to Asia. “The first defining change is the much greater importance of, and the movement of economic activity towards, Asia and the Pacific.”
The second big change is the result of that shift. As China became richer, the Chinese people also became richer. That meant that people who were in the lower-middle class in the US, Germany, or Italy, for the first time in the last 200 years, fell behind substantial numbers of people from Asia. “At the level of the nation-state, we have had a movement towards much greater importance of Asia in economics and politics. At the level of personal incomes, we see the decline of the Western middle class.”
Milanovic argues that the Industrial Revolution transformed the countries that were leading the industrialization—the UK, France, Northern Europe, then the United States, and finally Japan—and made their people much richer than people elsewhere. But In the last 40 years, we have had, for the first time, a serious challenge to that. Countries in Asia are now not only catching up but, in some cases, even overtaking Western countries technologically.
This has led to a new cold war not now based on ideology (capitalism v communism, as with the US and the Soviet Union), but now economically between the US and China. If China continues with real GDP growth rates 2-3% points higher than the US rate, within one generation, and a maximum of two generations, you will have the same number of people in China who are above the US median income as Americans. “If one thinks that the real sign of catching up is when China becomes equally rich on a per capita basis as the United States, it will take a long time. But before that happens, China as a nation would be much more powerful than the United States simply because it is so much bigger.” But see my forthcoming paper on Catching up , to be published by the World Association of Political Economy.
Milanovic says there are three views on the benefits or otherwise of the globalisation of trade and finance in the last 40 years. The mainstream one is that trade among nations benefits all countries and so leads to peace. Adam Smith is more nuanced and argued that only ‘balanced trade’ would maintain peace. But there is the Hobson-Luxemburg-Lenin theory, which holds that the big powers would fight for control of the resources and assets of the rest of the world and that would eventually lead them to war ie imperialism. Milanovic tends to a mix of the last two views. The end of globalisation and free trade has led to a loss of living standards for many in the West and thus “a huge dissonance between different parts of the Western population.” I would add that globalisation led to a massive transfer of value and resources from the Global South to the Global North, hitting living standards not just in the Global North but also for the vast majority in the Global South..
According to Milanovic, neoliberal globalism has now been replaced by ‘national market liberalism.’ Tariffs are being imposed and immigration controls are increasing. The world has moved from option two to option three. ”We still have neoliberalism, but only at the national level. We end up with a version of neoliberalism stripped of its international component.” Milanovic concludes that “we clearly have a global disorder.” But he lays his hope on the world moving towards a multipolar system. Eventually, “we can build a more equitable international system where major powers have a greater stake than they do now.” So a new balance of trade and finance and economic power can emerge. Option three becomes option two again, hmm.
Mariana Mazzucato is another rock star economist of the ‘left’, once called the world’s scariest economist. I have reviewed many of her previous books (search my blog). But it seems she does not really scare the international powers that be. She is regularly invited to speak around the world at various mainstream economic gatherings and as an adviser to governments. Her latest book is called The Common Good Economy. This follows on from a previous book, the Mission economy. – each time a new attractive title suggesting economic innovation and insight.
Mazzucato tells us that “Our economic system is broken. The climate crisis is accelerating. Inequality is deepening. Public trust is crumbling. Wealth concentrates in fewer hands while governments scramble to fix what markets can’t do, rather than to shape them from the outset.” So what should well-meaning governments do? Instead of trying to correct these ‘market failures’ and trying to patch up problems, governments need “to proactively build the economy we need”. She offers a ‘new theory of the common good, one which allows governments and businesses to develop purposeful economic relationships, creating value and building spaces where human flourishing can happen.”
As in previous books, she starts from the premiss that what is needed is ‘partnership’ between an ‘activist’ state and capitalist businesses – ‘participation and reciprocity’. You see “capitalism and workers’ rights are not in tension — they are co-dependent. Industrial policy that includes workers in design and delivery produces better outcomes for all.” So the answer is not to replace capitalism, but to strengthen worker representation in decision-making bodies, including corporate boards.
Governments must encourage capitalist companies to invest but under what she calls “green and social conditionalities across all sectors” so “ensuring we socialize both risks and rewards through smart (??) public financing.” What is needed is not socialism, but with “strong social contracts into our industrial policies now, we can ensure this historic wave of green investment builds an economy that works for both people and planet.” We need “mission-oriented industrial policy that treats workers as co-creators of value — with conditionalities that share the rewards.” Mazzucato sort of admits that such a social contract with conditionalities placed on the big multinationals, the fossil fuel giants and the financial sector would be “a delicate task, as too much micromanaging with a shopping list of conditions can, of course,stifle innovation.” On the other hand, “close relationships with private firms could make governments prone to capture.” Indeed!
Mazzucato continues her merry way across the globe at conferences, government meetings etc to advocate ‘mission projects’; conditionalities on big business and a social contract between workers and bosses – all for the ‘common good’ economy. Dare I say it, but clever jargon and trendy titles do not make for radical change.
Ann Pettifor in her new book, Global Casino, does not even look for radical change. You see, unregulated global finance is causing the crises we see in the world economy. The global market in money – housed in the offshore ‘shadow’ banking system – holds $217 trillion in financial assets and operates beyond the reach of any nation’s taxman. Asset managers, private equity firms, and pension and sovereign wealth funds scoop up the world’s savings for investment and manage them as they choose, unaccountable to politicians or the citizens who elect them.
But it does not require socialist or very radical measures to sort this out. Pettifor: “societies and governments can take back control of the global financial system. We have done it before and can do it again. Indeed, it is imperative that we do so, if we are to manage the twin threats of climate breakdown and biosphere collapse.” Pettifor reckons that in those halcyon days after the second world war, a global financial order was established with the Bretton Woods agreement to manage ‘global imbalances’ and currency and trade flows as well as regulation of financial excesses and recklessness. But President Nixon blew all this up internationally when he took the dollar off the gold standard in the early 1970s and later government leaders deregulated the financial sector, turning the world economy into a giant casino. This was the reason for the global financial crash in 2008-9 – it has nothing to do with falling profitability of capital or any other rigid Marxist explanation. The answer now is to return to the post-war period of managed trade and financial regulation – simples. But I think not.
What is stopping a return to global regulation being implemented is the current ideology. Pettifor, in an interview on her book: “If you read the Financial Times, people who talk about managing trade are treated as mad Trotskyists. I dare not say it because I don’t want to be branded as a mad Trotskyist, I’m just a very moderate Keynesian, for God’s sake. But even my moderate views are considered extreme in the world of free markets. And how we overcome that ideology is the issue that we face.”
You see Pettifor knows what she is talking about – unlike the rest of us on the left. “What always strikes me about the great financial crisis of 2007–9 was that the Left didn’t know it was coming. I am very proud of having written The Coming First World Debt Crisis (2006), but the rest of the Left didn’t see it coming. People talked about globalization as if it was a given. And then when it blew up, there was no plan B. We didn’t even know it could happen. We were as stupid as the chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. The Left was as stupid as Greenspan, who said he didn’t believe it could happen.” Actually many on the left (at least the Marxist left) did see the financial crash coming (see my paper here). And what is this plan B to replace globalisation and unregulated speculative finance? According to Pettifor, it is restoring proper regulation. But regulation always fails. Indeed, since the Great Recession, there have been several banking crises, despite increased regulation.
Mazzucato offers us capitalism with ‘conditionalities’ for the common good and Pettifor offers us capitalism ‘regulated and managed’. Only one book proposes ending the capitalist mode of production and it is not by a feted academic, but by an Irish Marxist activist. James O-Toole’s Economics for the Exploited is written from a working class point of view. He explains clearly and simply how capitalism works and why it cannot deliver the needs of humanity any more.
O’Toole covers Marx’s law of value and answers its critics clearly (he explains Marx’s law of profitability and even deals with the so-called ‘transformation problem’). He explains the cause of economic crises, inflation and the rise of imperialism. And he outlines the case for a planned economy under common ownership and democratic control as the way forward for humanity and the planet.
“Modern humans have been on Earth for around 300,000 years. Class society is a few thousands years old and capitalism only a few hundred. There’s nothing “natural” about this system. In those few hundred years capitalism has brought us to the point where corporate greed could actually destroy the natural underpinnings of any advanced social order. The clock is ticking. This system isn’t natural. We can live in other ways. We workers produce this system. It’s in our hands. Workers have to take control.”
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