Transitional Demands for the Global Pandepression

• Free public education at every level for every human being in the world.
• Guaranteed basic and preventative health care for every living person
• Guaranteed safe and sanitary housing for all people.
• Guaranteed sufficient healthy nutrition for all human beings.
• Guaranteed minimum income for every adult person in the world.

At the current level of productive and industrial capacity, cultural and technological development and global awareness, each of these demands is realizable within 10 years.

If we turned our individual, local, rational and regional, national and global attention toward these ends, we have every thing that we need so see them come to fruition. The possibility of this is only inhibited by the voracious desire for power and control exercised by a tiny minority of humanity, not one percent but .01 percent.

Their power is upheld by an increasingly unstable and heavily rigged simulated market divorced from real production of goods and services and the natural exchange of the products of human labor.

Our real creative and productive capacity is restricted by the imposition of a fiction. The fiction depicts a competitive ‘meritocratic’ market that has not existed in fact for nearly a century.

To achieve these ends and by their achievement we put end to war, wasteful acquisitiveness and petty individualism. We open the door to a safe, and healthy world in which the real capacity of human intellect, creativity, inquiry and labor is achievable. We can free ourselves collectively from self imposed poverty.

It is a choice that we can make now. It is a demand that we must make. It is either this or decent into barbarism.

Financialization and the Real Economy.

The simple idea, the way to get a handle on the economic aspects of the present situation–that is the spectre of global depression resultant of pandemic–is to face the fact that, unlike the crisis of the past 4 decades, ’87, ’03, ’07-8-9, the impact on the economy is a direct impact to the “real” or “material” or natural economy.

This is not a crisis of over production, and it does not present the same opportunity to the capitalists as might a war. It does not destroy capital and open the door to a new market or the reconstruction of an old market. It directly impacts the flow of goods and the productivity of labor. It does so in such a way as to present the responsibility directly to the worlds ruling classes of owning their position. The alternative is for them to blatantly and directly unveil their callousness and illegitimacy, as well also as to threaten them directly to the extent that virus’ will only to a certain extent respect class barriers.

Try as they might, and as impossible as it may be for them to see. There is does not exist a financial tool such as adjustment to interest rates, tax rebate gimmicks, or federal purchases of equities to solve the problem. The problem is real, and so only real solutions will be those that really effect the real economy. That is to say that only the organized provision of real goods and services and direct support to the material well-being of the mass of society will bring any sort of relief, either to the financial structure, or, of course to the real human beings whose condition is affected by the pandemic and by the clumsy attempt to ebb its advance.

Discussion: What would be the nature, and structure of ownership of an institution such as Facebook in a socialist world ?

• What is the political economy of Facebook?

• How could such an institution be nationalized?

• Could it be made a global social property?

Please respond in any media format, WordPress FB or Twitter.

Martin Luther King Jr. on the consequences of violence and war

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says “Love your enemies,” he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else? The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Quoted from page 53 of the 1963 book The Strength to Love in the chapter entitled “Loving Your Enemies”

https://rawlinsview.com/2011/05/03/hate-multiplies-hate-violence-multiplies-violence-and-toughness-multiplies-toughness-in-a-descending-spiral-of-destruction-dr-martin-luther-king-jr/

The Democrat and Republican parties are not classical model parties in the European tradition. They are better understood as institutions of the state.

Thoughts for conversation

A correct understanding of the Democrat and Republican parties and their function in the mechanism of the “two party system” is to see them as structural institutions of the state.
In part because much political theory is viewed through the lens of the European experience especially that of France, Russia and the British Parliamentary model, the understanding of the evolution of two party system in the United States has been flawed.
20th century movements and political organizations operating outside of the two party system found themselves locked in a trap. They remained small fractured organizations with little honest hope of gaining mass influence.
Progressive, libertarian, Stalinist, democratic-socialist and grass roots conservative factions operating on the inside typically choose which of the twin traps in which to be lost. Their activists are co-opted systematically. Their messages are lost in the factional clash called “partisanship.”
The ruling class and the political caste that serves them are not so naive about this system. It is common knowledge that the major corporations and big ruling class donors play between these two institutions funding them each intermittently–quite often concurrently–and that their armies of lobbyists and professional influencers are enmeshed within both institutions.
The tactical options are presented as a sort of triage of bad choices: operate outside of the two parties in a system structured to marginalize non-conformity and challenges to power, choose to work within the Democratic structure, choose to work within the Republican structure.
The apolitical partisanship that is fostered by these institutions serves a function not so different from that of racism and xenophobia in terms of the insidious way in which it divides the mass of the society pitting working people against one another and setting up cultural litmus tests as barriers to common understanding and human solidarity. We are recruited by social media and other interventions to play the role of pawns in the factional conflicts and electoral gamesmanship between elements of the American plutocracy.

So, why not call the bluff of this whole system? Why would it not be possible to consider an all of the above approach to the triage? Why not form an electoral front with sufficient cohesion to run independently where possible and enter the primary system and legislative races of either party formation without at any point sacrificing principles or political identity. Why could an organization composed primarily of working class persons not operate as a cohesive third party both outside and inside each of the two halves of the electoral institutions of the American State?

Support Rawlinsview Blog

Web hosting, editorial and technical costs

$15.00

Article Describes SWP intervention into opposing pro/anti Trump Rallies in Portland Oregon

This article describes first hand the interactions of the working class socialist political party, The Socialist Workers’ Party, (SWP) with attendees at the well publicized and well documented contending rallies in Portland Oregon in recent weeks.

Vol. 81/No. 24      June 19, 2017

 SWP opposes moves to ban Trump rally in Portland, campaigns there

Militant/John Naubert

Mary Martin, SWP candidate for Seattle mayor, right, discusses party’s working-class program with Trump supporters, others, during protests in Portland June 4.

 BY MARY MARTIN

PORTLAND, Ore. — Socialist Workers Party members spoke out against efforts by liberal Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler to cancel a June 4 rally scheduled to support President Donald Trump as well as oppose the frenzied liberals’ campaign to drive him out of office. When Wheeler failed, Trump supporters faced anti-Trump protesters, including an anarchist “Black Bloc”-style group determined to come after them. And local cops, reinforced by state police, were out in force.

Wheeler had urged the federal government to ban the event after two people were killed on a train here by Jeremy Christian, an ultra-rightist bigot, shouting anti-Muslim slurs. The two men who were killed, and another who was injured, had come to the defense of two young women targeted by Christian, one of whom was wearing a headscarf. Christian has been charged with murder.

Joe Gibson, organizer of the pro-Trump rally, told participants he would eject any white supremacists. He and other speakers said Rick Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, the two men who were killed on the train, were heroes. Gibson had thrown Christian out of a prior pro-Trump event.

After a relatively peaceful hour of contending protests, some anarchists in black masks threw bricks at police. The cops responded by detonating flash-bang grenades, arresting 14 people and shoving people from one end of the park to the other. The cops kept up a barrage of announcements amplified to a deafening level, ordering protest participants to disperse.

A team of Socialist Workers Party members, including myself, the SWP candidate for mayor of Seattle, set up a campaign table and introduced the party and its working-class perspective to people from both events, as well as passers-by, for over two hours.

One woman who introduced herself as Ardith told SWP member John Naubert that she was a Trump supporter and had come to the rally from south Oregon, mainly because she wanted to talk to the anti-Trump people. She said while some were open to discussion, one man told her insistently, “Why don’t you just go over there across the street where the fascists are?”

Naubert said the SWP explains that the working class is the true target of the hysteria about Trump in the liberal bourgeois media, late night “talk” shows and radical anti-Trump protests. These forces all see the working class as stupid, reactionary and dangerous. Ardith said she enjoyed the discussion and bought a copy of The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.

There were a number of others like Ardith. “William Jones, wearing camouflage pants, a bulletproof vest, a T-shirt and carrying an American flag on a pole, sat along a concrete barrier in front of City Hall,” the Portland Oregonian reported, “conversing with anti-Trump protesters about whether socialism can exist in a capitalist society and whether Trump will make life better for anyone not wealthy.

“Jones said he likes to keep an open mind and debate people, trying to change opinions or let others change his,” the paper reported.

David Servillo, a hospital worker in Portland who is originally from France, told us he thought it would have been wrong to shut down the Trump rally as the mayor demanded. “It’s a democracy, right?” He was delighted to see the titles on revolutionary politics in French displayed on the party table. He decided to buy a subscription to the Militant and a French edition of Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.

There were some anti-Trump demonstrators who didn’t appreciate the SWP. At the end of the protests, SWP members packed up their materials and prepared to leave. A group of anarchists tried to get into it with Trump supporters, stacking newspaper boxes in the streets to block police. The cops started sweeping the streets and ordered people to disperse.

One anarchist seeking to attack Trump people, and not looking too kindly at the SWP, grabbed our table and threw it, along with our bookrack, into the street to obstruct a cop car.

Participants from the Trump rally stopped to help us recover our table and rack from the street and carry them and our literature to our car.

“I’m glad to see your paper says that ‘workers are the target of the liberals’ fury,’” Miles, one of the men helping us, told me, looking at one of the headlines in the Militant. “I didn’t start out as a Trump supporter, but I couldn’t stand Clinton. Now I have friends who are liberal who won’t talk to me.

“What’s your party’s name again?” he asked. “Thank you for being here.”

Related articles:
SWP protests assaults on political rights in Washington

Diamond Reynolds immediate witness to the murder of Philando Castile, tells her story clearly and directly.

Diamond Reynolds Speaks directly

Philando Castile’s fiancée Diamond Reynolds speaks her mind. “I just ask that we get justice”

“Bonapartism is after all the real religion of the modern bourgeoisie.”

Comments of Friedrich Engels in a letter 1866

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1866

Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in Margate, 13 April 1866

---

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

---

… So Bismarck has brought off his universal suffrage stroke even though without his Lassalle. It looks as if the German bourgeois will agree to it after some resistance, for Bonapartism is after all the real religion of the modern bourgeoisie. It is becoming more and more clear to me that the bourgeoisie has not the stuff in it to rule directly itself, and that therefore unless there is an oligarchy, as here in England, capable of taking over, for good pay, the management of state and society in the interests of the bourgeoisie, a Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form. [Emphasis added] It upholds the big material interests of the bourgeoisie even against the will of the bourgeoisie, but allows the bourgeoisie no share in the government. The dictatorship in its turn is forced against its will to adopt these material interests of the bourgeoisie as its own. So we now get Monsieur Bismarck adopting the programme of the National Association. ^[1] To carry it out is something quite different, of course, but Bismarck is hardly likely to come to grief through the German middle class. A German who has just returned relates that he has already found many who swallowed this bait; according to Reuter the Karlsruhe people have accepted the business and the profound embarrassment which this affair has caused the Kölnische Zeitung ^[2] clearly indicates the forthcoming turn of events…

---

Notes

1. The National Association was set up on 15-16 September 1859, at a conference held in Frankfurt on the Main of bourgeois liberals from the German states. Its purpose was the unification of all German states except Austria under Prussian hegemony. After the Austro-Prussian war and the creation of the North German Confederation on 11 November 1867, it disbanded itself – Progress Publishers.

2. Kölnische Zeitung – German daily newspaper published in Cologne since 1802; it was the organ of the big Rhenish bourgeoisie and the National Liberal Party; in the 1870s it was regarded as Bismarck’s mouthpiece – Progress Publishers.

---

1865 Letters

Countermobilizations stop Trump Rally in Chicago

March 11, 2016

Reuters reports that counter-demonstrations forced the closure and rescheduling of a Chicago rally by supporters of proto-Bonapartist Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump

Trump’s Chicago rally called off for safety reasons amid chaos

CHICAGO | By Emily Flitter and Fiona Ortiz

U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump canceled a rally scheduled for Friday night in Chicago after the event turned into a chaotic scene with thousands of attendees split into opposing camps of supporters of the Republican front-runner and protesters inflamed by his candidacy.

A Trump campaign staffer took the stage nearly a half hour after the rally was slated to begin and said it would be postponed for safety reasons. A campaign statement issued slightly later said the event would be held on another unnamed day.

text links to full article.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-trump-rally-idUSKCN0WE00O

Statistics on Incarceration: US holds 22% of all the world’s prisoners

Reprinted from:

Vol. 80/No. 10      March 14, 2016

 

US capitalist ‘justice’ …some facts

World’s jailer-in-chief
• World’s highest incarceration rate: US has 4.4% of world population but 22% of world’s prisoners.
• Some 7 million people (1 in 35 adults) are today in federal or state prison, local jails, or on parole or probation. • 5 percent of adult males and 17 percent of adult males who are Black are or have been behind bars.

‘Plea bargains’ and the right to a trial
• 97% of federal and 94% of state convictions in criminal cases result from the accused pleading guilty to charges horse traded by prosecutors and defendants’ lawyers.
• In federal cases in 2003, defendants insisting on their right to a trial got sentences averaging nearly three times longer than those taking a “plea bargain” (12.5 years vs. 4.5 years).

Life sentences, death row, and the ‘hole’
• More than 10 percent of US prisoners are serving life sentences, nearly a third life without parole.
• Some 1 in 20 state and federal inmates are in the “hole,” solitary confinement, or other punishment cells (2005).
• 2,984 people are on death row (2015).

Class, race, and incarceration
• The vast majority of those behind bars are from the working class. Some 40% are Black.
• 1 in 10 men in their 30s who are Black is in jail or prison any given day.

From The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class

Related articles:
Class struggle in US and the Cuban Revolution today are focus of new books on the Cuban Five
‘A powerful indictment of capitalism: how prisons grind up human beings, serve rulers’ class interests’
Students in Matanzas, Cuba, eager to learn about class politics in US