One Crisis after Another for US and Global Capitalism

Socialists cannot simply criticize what is; we must have a clearer explanation of how a democratic socialist society will work.

“Forget Iran”, writes Anna Fifield in the Financial Times, “BP has become enemy number one in the US.” (1)

One can only imagine what aliens with a bird’s eye view from afar must think watching the developments on the planet Earth over the last 5 years.  “Surely, the entire planet is doomed,” they would say to themselves.  Economic collapse, a Sovereign Debt crisis, endless wars, massive poverty and destruction, people dying by the millions each year from disease and lack of access to such basic necessities as water-------and all amid fantastic wealth and abundance.

Welcome to the free market.

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is not only an environmental disaster; it is threatening to disrupt the delicate global economy and is beginning to create further political crisis within the capitalist class at home and internationally. My local paper last week had a headline painting a pretty rosy outlook for the economy, an effort to undercut the fear and anger people feel.  The reality before the Deepwater Horizon event was bad enough but the catastrophe has increased the divide between what is and what their mass propaganda tells us; they certainly don’t want anger at corporations to undermine their manufactured fear of Iran and their fear shows how easily the Iran bugaboo could be replaced by mass anger at capitalism itself.

The price of gold, which has risen to an all time high of $1,251.20 a troy ounce, is a good indicator of the serious crisis that global capitalism is facing, and a reflection of the crisis of confidence that exists among the class that rules.  So strong is demand for the safest of investments that there has been a resurgence in gold storage, similar to cold storage without the risk of the merchandise rotting if there’s a power outage.  “Vaulting” has “become highly profitable,” writes the FT because gold storage fees are calculated as a percentage of gold prices. Many banks are also considering building new vaults to meet demand. (2)

The rhetoric from the Obama administration and other folks in Congress is becoming worrisome.  President Obama says he “Wants some ass to kick,” and has gone on the warpath against BP in response to the anger that exists throughout the country.  Talk show hosts have been getting calls from people asking why a “foreign country can come in and take our oil” as a quarter of BP’s production and close to a third of its reserves come from its US operations. The continued nationalist rhetoric referring to BP as British Petroleum, a name it no longer uses, and the talk that government intends to “keep its foot on BP’s throat” can backfire: “Picking on foreigners is an odd road for the US to travel down…” writes the Financial Times, “The US is by far the largest holder of corporate foreign assets in the world,” its editorial reminds them. (3) After all, the overthrow of the democratic secular regime in Iran by the US in 1953 was about US corporation’s controlling oil as are the Iraq and Afghan wars, not to mention all the covert operations in the Central Asian corridor.  (4)

It is not only the rise of national tensions that concerns the more sober sections of the capitalist class, especially “foreign” capitalists like the British. US Interior minister Ken Salazar’s remark that BP should pay for the lost wages and any other expenses incurred by the US government’s ban on deepwater drilling is even worse as it could open up a can of worms for US corporations at home and abroad.  It is not an accident that alongside extensive articles on this subject, the Financial Times has an in depth look at the recent Bhopal settlement in India.

The guilty party here was the US Corporation, Union Carbide, and its pesticide plant in Bhopal, India.  A local court just found 8 people associated with the plant guilty of “criminal negligence” in the deaths of some 30,000 people in and around what was once a beautiful lakeside city. They were sentenced to two years in jail and fined $2100.  You read it right, $2100. And this comes 20 years after the fact.  “This Bhopal judgment will be quoted in courtrooms everywhere in the favor of multinationals,” says one survivor. (5)
According to authorities, 325 tons of toxic material still remains at the site but “All the charges against the US parent company were extinguished after the settlement,” says one Bhopal activist.  Union Carbide, a part of Dow Chemical, paid $470 million in compensation 20 years ago and then “wiped its hands of responsibility,” say the Times.“But if European companies are held accountable in the US, why not US companies when they are abroad?” adds the Bhopal activist, an unpleasant thought indeed for the capitalist class.

This is problematic and cooler capitalist heads are trying to prevail.  The number two Republican in the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor, has called on Obama to stop “demonizing” BP and focus on stopping the leak.  Cantor sees that not only BP but the entire US oil industry could be further hurt by the administration’s rhetoric, especially if they prolong the ban on drilling.  It depends a lot on how the anger within the US population can be contained, especially coming on the heels of the economic crisis and hatred of bankers and Wall Street that ensued.  Americans hold 39% of BP’s shares which is also a concern, but it is the attack on corporations and capitalism in general that is their greatest fear.  More cuts are on the way as huge US deficits at the state and federal level have to be brought down.  The bailout of the financial system has to be paid for, Iraq and Afghanistan have to be paid for, all through a combination of cuts in public services and tax increases. Fueling the anger that people, feel towards corporations at times like these is not helpful.

Cantor and others like him recognize that it will be harder to sell the cuts, and social unrest in response to them made more likely, by the attacks on BP and the Obama administration continually drawing attention to corporate malfeasance. Republicans want to do well in the next election and with pro market corporate candidates like Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina in California, and Paul Ryan, another influential Republican on the budget committee advocating a partial privatization of Social Security and abolition of corporate income and inheritance taxes, its best the attacks cease.  However, if faced with the possibility of domestic revolt or upsetting the British government or British capitalism, the latter will have to go.  It is a terrifying thought, like their fear of a return to the protectionist wars of the thirties; but, like all of us, we are forced at times to make choices in circumstances not of our own choosing.

The concern of global capitalism that the hatred of BP could get out of hand and spread is justified.  “Mr. Obama has every right to ask BP for a large check, he is not entitled to a blank one,” The Times editorial points out.  But the issue for working people should not be compensation.  The issue is about ownership of society’s productive forces.  The US military machine blows up civilians at weddings and in their homes and hands over $100 or so per person and an apology.  We call for the end of the war not increased compensation.

There are already calls, like that of Robert Reich, for the taking over of BP’s holdings in the US. But we must surely recognize that there will be more Deepwater Horizons, more Exxon Valdez’s, more Bhopal’s.  Only the public ownership and control of the dominant sectors of the economy by working people and a democratic socialist plan of production will prevent further environmental and social catastrophe.

What do we mean by this?  This means that how we produce energy, for example, is not determined on the basis of profit but on social need and in harmony with the environment: this is impossible under capitalism.  The capitalist class propagates the idea that nothing gets done by committee, that workers cannot agree and socialism is for dreamers etc.  But this is not so, and the BP disaster is one example of what happens when profit driven capitalists decide our energy needs.  In the recent mine disaster it is revealed after the fact that workers knew and complained of problems, this is true of all situations; we know how best to work safely and efficiently.  Our efficiency is not based on the rate of return of investment, but what’s best for us as individuals, families, communities and global society.

It is not only the major industries themselves that must be taken under public ownership but capital itself. Finance houses and banks would be taken over, not the deposits of workers and the middle class, not our savings, the product of our lives work, but the institutions that hold them and determine how these resources are used in society. In this way, how capital is allocated is determined in a collective, socially productive way.  Capital would be allocated toward mass transit rather than the wasteful obsession with auto production.  A democratic socialist plan of production would likely not include drilling for fossil fuels one mile beneath the ocean as we allocated resources, human and financial, toward alternative energy sources.

This is not utopia.  The employers don’t drag workers into the Team Concept on the job because we don’t know about production.  They do it to use this knowledge to their advantage, to help them make profit.  They include us to steal our knowledge of production more efficiently while they retain ownership of the means by which we produce.

They suppress the history of workers’ struggles, strikes and revolutions because there is evidence of the new society in all of them.  The history of the US working class is a rich and militant history. Why is the Seattle General strike and the 44-day Flint occupation absent from the minds of so many American workers and particularly youth?  These great movements of the working class, like the civil rights movement, are ignored or at best sanitized, because they undermine the propaganda of the capitalist class that we cannot rule, that they are the masters of society; that capitalism is the only possible economic system.

The Seattle strike of 1919 is an embryonic example of what a democratic socialist world will look like. Workers formed committees for all aspects of daily life:
“Four days before the strike actually took place, the meetings of the General Strike Committee began. With their first session on Sunday, February 2, 1919, authority over the strike passed from the Central Labor Council, which had sent out the call, and from the Metal Trades Council, which had asked it, and was centered in a committee of over 300 members, elected from 110 local unions and the Central Labor Council, for the express purpose of managing the strike.

The first meeting was called to order at 8:35 in the morning, and continued in session until 9:35 that evening, with short intermissions for meals. From this time on until the close of the strike, there were meetings daily and at almost all hours of day and night, of either this General Strike Committee, or of the Executive Committee of Fifteen to which it delegated some of its authority. The volume of business transacted was tremendous; practically every aspect of the city's life came before the strike committee for some decision.”

This committee of workers is an example of how society can be managed on the basis of need not profit and without capitalists at the helm.  The General Strike Committee appointed an Executive Committee with certain powers as these minutes from the committee show:

"King County commissioners ask for exemption of janitors to care for City-County building. Not granted."

    "F.A. Rust asks for janitors for Labor Temple. Not granted." (The committee was playing no favorites: it is worth noting, however, that a few days later, when the Co-operative Market asked for additional janitor help because of the large amounts of food handles for the strikers' kitchens, their request was allowed.)

    "Teamsters' Union asks permission to carry oil for Swedish hospital during strike. Referred to transportation committee. Approved."

    "Port of Seattle asks to be allowed men to load a governmental vessel, pointing out that no private profit is involved and that an emergency exists. Granted." (Note: This was on a later date.)

    "Garbage Wagon Drivers ask for instructions. Referred to public welfare committee, which recommends that such garbage as tends to create an epidemic of disease be collected, but no ashes or papers. Garbage wagons were seen on the streets after this with the sign, 'Exempt by Strike Committee.'" (6) (7)

Committees on publicity, on finance and on tactics were also appointed, and many other issues taken up including the adoption of a resolution that no officer or committeeman should receive any salary during the strike. It is no wonder the capitalist class crushed it and practically obliterates these events from history.

While we obviously support the need for compensation in response to disasters like Deepwater Horizon, discussions in the workplaces, Union halls and among anti-capitalists of all types in the US should not be about compensation, concession bargaining or how best to fix the rotting capitalist system, but how to end it. They need to be about managing society and taking collective ownership of its resources; about how to wage a successful war against our enemies, for they will not go quietly; history is full of lessons for us. Working people must take this lead and we must reject in our own minds the capitalist propaganda that their system is the end of history and that workers cannot govern society; we must be able to paint a picture of the alternative.

The feudal aristocracy once said the same.  All ruling classes claim their system is the only system.  It was not from the head of the peasant that the dominant ideology of feudalism arose, that the King was King by god’s will.

There have been too many wake up calls of late; we cannot remain passive.  We cannot look to others to lead. Working people must come forward to fulfill the historic task that history has placed before us.


(1)  Frills and Spills, Financial Times 6-12-10

(2)  Ibid

(3)  US Must Hit Reset Button With BP FT, 6-12-10

(4)  See Michel Chossudovsky: War and Globalization

(5)  Bhopal Ruling Heightens Sense of Betrayal For Victims, FT 6-12-10

(6)  These quotes/minutes can be read in Jeremy Brecher’s book “Strike” and at the link below

(7)  http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/seattle1919_p2.html