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David Harvey’s Jacobin interview on Marx’s Capital

A promotion of the “life-style” politics of the pseudo-left

By Nick Beams
21 July 2018

The Jacobin magazine, which functions as a kind of house journal for the middle class
pseudo-left milieu, in particular the Democratic Socialists of America, has published an
interview with the academic David Harvey, purporting to show why Marx’s Capital is “still
the defining guide to understanding—and overcoming—the horrors of capitalism.”

Harvey, variously described as a social theorist, a historical-materialist geographer and

sometimes a Marxist, has attracted a wide following over the past decade in the wake of the
global financial crisis due to his online lectures on Capital and a number of books critical
of capitalism and its irrationalities.

The interest in his writings and lectures, particularly from among younger people and
students, is an expression of the growing hostility to capitalism, increasingly regarded as
having failed, and the growing receptiveness towards socialism, coupled with a turn to
Marx in the search for answers to the mounting problems and crises caused by the ongoing
breakdown of the capitalist order.

But as with all of Harvey’s work, this interview does not provide a clarification or guide to
Marx but serves to prevent an understanding of his masterwork, seeking to render him
suitable to the political and life-style sensibilities of a middle class “left” audience.

This emerges from the very outset of the interview. Asked to give an overview of the three
volumes of Capital, Harvey says: “Marx is very much into detail and it’s sometimes hard to
get a sense of exactly what the whole concept of Capital is about.” This has been a
recurring theme virtually since the day Capital was published—that it is too difficult and
too dense to be comprehended.

Capital is certainly no easy work but that difficulty arises not from Marx but from the fact
that capitalism is the most complex form of socio-economic organisation in the historical
development of mankind.

However, as Harvey well knows, Marx provided a very clear explanation of the essential
thread of his theoretical labours.

In the postface to the second edition of Capital, Marx favourably cited a Russian reviewer
of the first edition published in 1867 who had set out the objective logic of his analysis.
The reviewer had begun by citing Marx’s famous Preface to the Critique of Political
Economy, published in 1859, in which he set out the materialist basis of his method.

There Marx had written: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. … At
a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict
with the existing social relations of production … From forms of development of the
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social
revolution.”

Basing himself on this explanation, the Russian reviewer concluded that Marx “concerns
himself with one thing: to show, by an exact scientific investigation, the necessity of
successive determinate orders of social relations, and to establish, as impeccably as
possible, the facts from which he starts out and on which he depends. For this it is quite
enough if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and
the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over.”

In other words, Capital was the application of the theory of historical materialism, worked
out by Marx and Engels in the late 1840s, to the analysis of capitalist society in which the
central social relation of production was the buying and selling of the labour power of the
new social force, the working class, which this society had brought into being. It was aimed
at demonstrating how the very development of the productive forces to which this new
social order had given rise inevitably came into conflict with the social relations on which it
was based, leading to social revolution and the transition to a new and higher form of
society.

While Capital was grounded on a thorough-going scientific analysis of capitalist society, it

was not an academic treatise. It was written with the aim of providing the working class, its
historical gravedigger, with the theoretical weapons necessary for its overthrow and the
transition to a higher socio-economic order, international socialism.

It is highly significant, therefore, that in Harvey’s interview on Capital and its significance,
the words “social revolution” and “working class” never appear.

What then is the essential content of the interview? It is the dressing up in Marxist-
sounding terminology of the politics of the middle class pseudo-left, focusing on protests
against some of the irrationalities and outrages of the capitalist system, concerned not with
its overthrow but “life-style changes.” Its role is to seek to divert those seeking answers
away from a real grappling with and understanding of Marx’s masterwork.

Harvey presents the three volumes of Capital as something of a jumble, that Marx was
saying “in volume one, I deal with this, in volume two I deal with that and in volume three
I deal with something else.”
Harvey goes on to say that Marx has in mind “the totality of the circulation of capital” but
then points to a problem because Marx did not complete volumes two and three (they were
edited by Engels from Marx’s drafts) and so they “aren’t as satisfactory as volume one.”

The upshot of this focus on circulation is twofold. First, it leaves the impression that there
is no inherent logic to Marx’s presentation. Second, it downplays the centrality of capitalist
production, dissolving it in the process of circulation, a move which, as we shall see, forms
a key foundation of Harvey’s political perspective.

Contrary to Harvey, Marx is very clear on the logic of the three volumes, which he sets out
at the beginning of volume three.

There he explains that the investigation in volume one concerns the process of capitalist
production itself, leaving out the external secondary influences on this process. But as he
notes, the analysis does not complete the life cycle of capital and so in volume two he
considers how the process of production is supplemented by the process of circulation.

In volume three the issue is to “discover and present the concrete forms which grow out of
the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole.”

“The configurations of capital, as developed in this volume,” he writes, “thus approach step
by step the form in which they appear on the surface of society, in the action of different
capitals on one another, i.e., in competition, and in the everyday consciousness of the
agents of production themselves.” [1]

The materialist method employed by Marx is to ascend from the most abstract forms to the
concrete. Capital, therefore, begins with the cell-form of the capitalist economy, the
commodity, in which the product of human labour—the basis of all society—presents itself
in the social form of a product produced for exchange.

The significance of this starting point was noted by Lenin:

“In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most
common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered
billions of times, viz. the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in
this ‘cell’ of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all
the contradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the
development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this society in the
summation of its individual parts, from its beginning to its end.” [2]

From the analysis of the commodity and its value, Marx reveals the origin of money as the
material expression of value. The analysis of money discloses the nature of capital as self-
expanding value.

The most decisive breakthrough made by Marx was to discover the source of this self-
expansion. The issue which had tortured the minds of Marx’s classical predecessors in the
science of political economy, in particular its two leading representatives, Adam Smith and
David Ricardo, was how, on the basis of market relations in which equivalents exchange
for equivalents, could a surplus arise? In particular, how out of the most important
exchange in commodity-capitalist society, could profit rise, if equivalents were exchanged
for equivalents according to the laws of the market.

Marx established that the commodity that the worker sold to the capitalist was not his or her
labour, as had previously been maintained, but the capacity to work, or labour power.

Like every other commodity its value was determined by the time taken to reproduce it, that
is, it was determined by the value of the commodities needed to sustain the worker and
enable the raising of a family to produce the next generation of wage workers.

The surplus value appropriated by the capitalist owner of the means of production, to whom
the worker sold his or her labour power, arose from the fact that the value of labour power
was less than the value created by the worker in the course of the working day. That is,
while it may take, say three hours, for the worker to reproduce the value of labour power,
the working day extended for much longer and this additional, or surplus, value fell to
capital.

This epoch-making discovery had vast political implications. Marx was by no means the
first socialist. Others before him had trenchantly criticised the operations of the capitalist
system and pointed to its irrationalities, the increasing exploitation of the working class and
widening social inequality. But as Engels explained:

“The socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capitalistic mode of
production and its consequences. It could not explain them, and, therefore could not get the
mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad.” [3]

It was necessary, Engels continued, to present the capitalist mode of production as

necessary during a given historical period and also to present the inevitability of its
downfall and to lay bare its essential character. The critics had attacked its evil
consequences rather than reveal the secret of the thing itself. This was revealed by the
discovery of surplus value.

With these two great discoveries, he concluded, the materialist conception of history and
the revelation of the secret of capitalist production, socialism became a science. The next
step was to work out the details.

Marx’s discoveries revealed that not only was the working class an exploited class but, in
laying bare the source of that exploitation in the social relations of capitalism itself,
established that it was a revolutionary class. That is, to secure its own emancipation the
working class had to overthrow the entire system of social relations, deriving from wage-
labour—on which capitalism was grounded.
One of the most important “details” to which Engels referred, was the way in which the
contradiction between the growth of the productive forces under capitalism and the social
relations based on wage-labour—the contradiction that was the driving force of social
revolution—manifested itself in the capitalist economy.

This was discovered by Marx in his analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He
demonstrated that this tendency—the nemesis of the capitalist mode of production whose
driving force is profit—arose from the very development of the productive forces to which
it gave rise.

The sole source of surplus value and profit, the basis for the self-expansion of capital, is the
living labour of the working class. But the more capital grows the greater must be the
extraction of surplus value from the working class in order to expand it yet again. To the
extent that the extraction of surplus value fails to keep pace with the growth of capital, the
rate of profit tends to fall. This leads to a crisis to which capital responds by reorganising
production, in order to intensify exploitation in order to continue. But the very development
of these crises, growing ever more serious, drives the working class into struggle against
the capitalist system and its ruling class.

This is the source of the realities of “everyday life,” as Marx put it, in which we see the vast
accumulation of wealth and an enormous growth in the productive forces and the social
productivity of labour on the one hand and the growth of poverty, misery and degradation,
accompanied by ever widening social inequality on the other.

The discovery of the secret of surplus value as the basis of the capitalist accumulation
process and the contradictions arising from it, had, as we noted, far-reaching political
implications. It concretised, as Marx had set out in in his early writings, the revolutionary
role of the working class.

“It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the
moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in
accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical
action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation, as well as in the
whole organisation of bourgeois society.”[4]

The key to Harvey’s politics is his rejection of and outright hostility to the analysis made by
Marx of the revolutionary role of the working class which is central to Capital. Therefore,
as far as his “socialism” is concerned it is clouded in the mists of pre-Marxist conceptions.

“Capital has built the capacity, technologically and organisationally, to create a far better
world,” he says in the Jacobin interview. “But it does so through social relations of
domination rather than emancipation. This is the central contradiction. And Marx keeps
saying, ‘Why don’t we use all of this technological and organisational capacity to create a
world which is liberatory, rather than one which is about domination?”

Here Harvey follows he road taken by previous “social theorists” who, while identifying
some of the irrationalities of the capitalist mode of production, separated Marx’s scientific
analysis of capitalism from its central purpose, that is, the arming of the working class for
the revolutionary struggles in which it is driven by the crises of the profit system.

The Frankfurt School, for example, sought the agency for social transformation—insofar as
it had not completely abandoned such a perspective—in the “cultural criticism” of the
irrationalities of capitalism and “consumerism.”

Paul Sweezy, the “independent Marxist”, writing in the 1960s, wrote off the working class
in the advanced capitalist countries and glorified the national liberation movements in what
was then known as the Third World.

Herbert Marcuse, the darling of the New Left in the 1960s, maintained that the working
class had been completely integrated into advanced capitalist society—and was even a
potential basis for fascism—and found the agency for social change in the marginalised
sections of society.

On the basis of his historical materialist analysis, Marx was well aware of the fact that the
advancement in the productive force under capitalism had created the basis for socialist
society, free of class exploitation and domination “in which the free development of each is
the condition for the free development of all.”

But he rejected as utopian any perspective which sought to bring about this transformation
by drawing out the contrast between what was possible under a different form of social
organisation and what presently existed in capitalist society. Such a perspective made the
socialist transformation a question of the criticism of capitalist society by so-called
enlightened individuals.

The crucial question for Marx was what was the social material force—the class—created
by capitalist society itself, which would be the agency, the driving force, of this
transformation. Today, the point at issue is not that socialism will somehow be more
advantageous for humanity—that was already clear in Marx’s day—but that it is an historic
necessity if human civilisation is to survive and progress.

The contradictions of capitalism are not, as Harvey attempts to portray them, the contrast
between what would be possible under socialism as compared to present reality but are
rooted in the inexorable drive of the profit system towards the impoverishment of the
working class, the development of authoritarian forms of rule and war, threatening the very
destruction of human civilisation, and a relapse into barbarism. For socialism to become a
reality and not simply a dream of human advancement, there must be a social force in
capitalist society whose material interests drive it forward to its realisation. That force is the
working class, that is, the class separated from the control and ownership of the productive
forces which is compelled in order to sustain its existence to sell its labour power.

One of the most significant historical developments of the past three decades has been the
transformation of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population into proletarians,
forced to sell their labour power. Hundreds of millions of peasants in China, India and
elsewhere have been transformed into wage workers while in the advanced capitalist
countries hundreds of millions of people, employed in what were once considered secure
“middle class” occupations, have discovered, through relentless job cuts, downsizing and
cuts in their incomes, that they are proletarians with nothing to sell but their labour power,
no less than the millions engaged in the factories.

In his criticism of the utopian socialists of his day, Marx pointed to their dreams of
experimental realisation of their social utopia as they opposed all political action by the
working class.

It is therefore significant that Harvey says nothing in his interview about the resurgent
movement of the working class, manifested in the widespread teachers’ strikes in the US,
the strike movements in Europe and in countries such as India after decades of suppression
by the trade unions and the social democratic and labour parties, and focuses attention on
“life-style” movements.

“Now, there are revolts against certain things that are happening,” he writes. “People are
beginning to say, ‘look, we want something different.’ I find little communities all around
the place in urban areas, and in rural areas, too, where people are trying to set up a different
lifestyle. The ones that interest me most are those which use new technologies, like cell
phones and the internet, to create an alternative lifestyle with different forms of social
relations than those characteristic of corporations, with hierarchical structures of power,
that we encounter in our daily lives. To struggle over a lifestyle is rather different than
struggling over wages or conditions of labour in a factory.”

Of course Harvey does not leave matters there. He would rapidly lose all credibility in the
eyes of those who consider him to be an interpreter and a guide to Marx if he did. And so
he maintains that those who are struggling over lifestyle issues, or race, or the environment
need to recognise from the standpoint of the totality of capital the relationship between
those struggles and how they are related to the forms of production. Putting them all
together provides a picture of what a capitalist society is all about “and the kinds of
dissatisfactions and alienations that exist in different components of the circulation of
capital, which Marx identifies.”

Harvey recognises the struggle of the working class, though it is not so much as mentioned
in the interview, but he identifies it as purely the struggle over wages and conditions within
a given factory, and thus purely within a trade union perspective.

But as workers are coming to realise, on the basis of their experiences, even struggles
which begin on this limited basis rapidly extend to embody broader, political, issues.
Workers fighting for improved wages and conditions are immediately confronted not just
with the management of the individual corporation or firm within which they work but the
apparatuses of the trade union bureaucracy and behind them the capitalist government and
the state.

Every struggle of the working class, whether it begins over wages, social conditions, health,
pensions or today the increasing use of internet censorship to try to prevent them organising
themselves, places them more and more directly in conflict with the entire capitalist
organisation of society and raises the question of political power, that is, which class is to
rule. As Marx put it, every class struggle is, therefore, a political struggle.

The political aim of Harvey’s work now comes into clearer focus. It is aimed at
subordinating the struggles of the working class to the politics of the pseudo-left and
middle classes concerned with questions of sexual orientation, life style and individual, not
class, identity.

This political orientation makes clear why Harvey, insofar as he deals with questions of
political economy and the structure of Capital, seeks to downplay the centrality of
production and dissolve it into the question of the circulation of capital.

He maintains that if one really wants to understand Marx’s conception of capital, “then you
can’t just understand it as just being about production. It’s about circulation. It’s about
getting it to the market and selling it, then it’s about distributing the profits.”

The issues related to circulation and the distribution of profits are, of course, vital to an
understanding of the capitalist economy, its movement and contradictions. But the key
point at issue is this: what is the essential determinant of the structure of society, its
political relations and state apparatus and the driving force of its development.

In volume three of Capital, Marx directly addresses this question as follows:

“The specific economic form in which the unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct
producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly
out of production itself and reacts back on it as a determinant. On this is based the entire
configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production
and hence also its specific political form.”

It is in the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate
producers, Marx continues, “in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the
entire social edifice, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and
dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.”[5]

As Marx goes on to point out, the same economic forms can display variations and
gradations in the political forms of rule, depending on a series of external factors and
historical circumstances. But there is no question that the essential content of these various
political forms is the mode in which surplus labour is pumped out of the immediate
producers.

Volume one of Capital is concerned with the way in which under capitalism, a specific
historical mode of production, this unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the immediate
producers, the working class, through the system of social relations based on wage labour
to yield surplus value.
Harvey wants to de-emphasise or outright dissolve this fundamental structural foundation
by pointing out that there is more to capitalism than simply the production of surplus value
—there is also the process of realisation, detailed in volume two and distribution in volume
three.

However, the essential foundation of capitalism is in production—not the production of

commodities as such, or the means of production, the production of the material needs of
society as a living organism—but the production of surplus value which forms the essential
driving force of this society.

Volume two is concerned with the relationships pertaining to realisation. But this, it must
be emphasised, is the realisation of the surplus value, its transformation from the
commodity form back into money so the process of surplus value extraction can begin
again. Likewise, volume three is concerned with the distribution of this surplus value
among the various owners of property in the form of profit, interest and rent.

In his recent writings, Harvey has drawn out the connection between his focus on the
process of circulation and realisation and his downplaying of the centrality of the
production of surplus value and his political perspective.

In his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, Harvey writes:

“Struggles at the point of valorisation inevitably have a class character … Those at the
point of realisation focus on buyers and sellers and trigger fights against the predatory
practices and accumulation by dispossession in the market place … Such struggles are not
well theorised. In the field of social reproduction issues of social hierarchy, gender,
sexuality, kinship and family and the like become much more predominant and the primary
political focus shifts to the qualities of daily life rather than the labour process. These
struggles have often been ignored in the Marxist literature.”

What follows from this dissolving of the centrality of the production of surplus value
within the capitalist system is that “the social and political struggles against the power of
capital within the totality of capital circulation take different forms and call for different
kinds of strategic alliances if they are to succeed.”[6]

There is no question what kind of “strategic alliances” Harvey has in mind—alliances with
sections of the radical petty bourgeoisie and its concern for life-style politics and even
sections of the bourgeoisie itself.

This is done on the basis of a misrepresentation of Capital, implying that it was not directed
to politically and theoretically arming the working class for social revolution but was aimed
at merely drawing out the irrationalities of capitalist society.

By this means, Harvey is seeking to misdirect those who are turning to Marx and have
followed his own work in the hope that it might provide a guide. He seeks to divert them
away from a struggle in the working class, to mobilise it as an independent revolutionary
force, and channel them into the milieu of pseudo-left and middle-class radical politics and
there to fight for “strategic alliances” that ensure the continued domination of the
bourgeoisie and capital.

Notes:

[1] Marx, Capital Volume 3 (London: Penguin, 1991) p. 117

[2] Lenin, Collected Works Volume 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961) p. 360

[3] Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969) p. 38

[4] Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975) pp. 44–45

[5] Marx, Capital Volume 3 (London: Penguin 1993) p. 927

[6] David Harvey Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2018) p. 48

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/29/re-the-green-new-deal-first-shoot-the-economists/

Re: The Green New Deal: First, Shoot the Economists

by Rob Urie

Photograph Source Senate Democrats

Note: please do not shoot economists. The title is a metaphor.

Soon to be released research from the United Nations is expected to place species loss,
a/k/a mass extinction, as an environmental threat equal to or greater than climate change.
Industrial agriculture— vast expanses of monoculture crops managed with chemical
fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, will feature prominently as a cause. This plant
agriculture supplies people with increasingly toxic and processed food and antibiotic and
hormone dependent factory farms with animal feed.  Together, these link the model of
capitalist efficiency economists have been selling for the last two centuries to
environmental crisis.

Understanding the theoretical precepts of Western economics is crucial to understanding

these crises. Capitalism is scientific economic production, a method in search of
applications. Its object is to maximize profits, not to growth nutritious food sustainably. As
industrial agriculture has demonstrated, these objectives are antithetical. Crop yields have
increased as the nutritional value of the food produced has declined. But far more
troublingly, the narrow focus on profits has led to a form of environmental imperialism
where interrelated ecosystems are viewed atomistically.

Mass extinction is largely attributable to the drive for economic control— the expansion of
industrial agriculture to feed factory farm animals has been both geographic and intensive.
The annihilation of insects through pesticide use on crops has led in turn to the annihilation
of the species that feed on them. Interrelated ecosystems are systematically destroyed
through a logic that does not ‘work’ otherwise. Leaving ecosystems intact upends it. When
value is granted to what is destroyed, industrial agriculture ceases to earn a profit. In a
broader sense, this means that it never earned a profit in the first place.

Unlike the narrow technocratic fixes being put forward to resolve global warming, mass
extinction points to the systemic problems within capitalist logic. Within it, reconfiguring
pieces of the world has a limited impact— so small in fact that the impact is considered
‘external’ to production processes. In an interrelated world, reconfiguring pieces—
including annihilating or favoring them, impacts the broader relationships within the
system. Were capitalist production not rapidly killing the planet, such esoterica could have
remained within the purview of academia.

But it is killing the planet, suggesting that the organizing logic of capitalism is
fundamentally flawed. Mass extinction and climate change are related through it to
capitalist production. Theory here ties quite precisely to actual practice. Through the
production of so-called goods, capitalist industries put greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere and the greenhouse effect began. Industrial agriculture used herbicides and
pesticides to kill unwanted species and catastrophic species loss began. These problems are
of both type and degree. This is why more capitalism won’t solve them.

Recognizing 1) that capitalist production is deeply integrated into how people get by in the
world and 2) that abruptly ending these practices would put billions of lives and livelihoods
at risk, young socialists in congress have proposed a transition program. A Green New Deal
would assure that people’s basic needs are met as a planned transition to a sustainable
economy is undertaken. With climate change and mass extinction already well underway,
the alternative is an unplanned transition in which the lives of billions of people are put at
risk.

Not content with having acted as apologists for rapidly accumulating environmental crises,
economists are now coming out of the woodwork to give their advice on the limitations of
any transition program. In the first, the claim is that ‘we’ can’t afford one. In the second, it
is that even if we could afford such a program, it would cause inflation. Both assertions
proceed from the premise that Western capitalism is a neutral basis from which to proceed.
Phrased differently, were doing nothing to result in the loss of lives and livelihoods for a
billion or more people, the fault would lie with nature.

Were environmental destruction truly ‘external’ to capitalist production, its solution would
be simple: stop producing it. For instance, if greenhouse gas emissions are external to fossil
fuel production and consumption, they could be foregone. However, were doing so
economically viable while maintaining profitability, they never would have been produced
in the first place. The social impact of this sleight-of-hand has been to allow capitalists to
claim profits based on 1) costs necessary to capitalist production but 2) that would reduce
or eliminate profits if they (capitalists) were forced to bear them.

(With apologies, a bit of economic arithmetic is needed to fill out this point:

Profits = Revenues minus Costs), or P = R – C. C = (Cd + Ce); where Cd is direct costs and
Ce is externalized costs. This can be rewritten as: P + Ce = R – Cd. Then define Pt = Pd +
Ce, where Pd is the direct profit and Pt is the total profit to producers. Here environmental
destruction is a direct benefit to the capitalists who produce it through costs not borne by
them).

The affordability argument is a canard: capitalists have already absconded with the
“profits” that make a Green New Deal necessary. These profits are either equal to or greater
than the cost of cleaning up the environmental mess they created, or the totality of profits is
less than their cost in terms of environmental destruction. In the prior, the Green New Deal
is affordable. Capitalists have already proven it is by putting its costs in their own pockets.
In the latter, three centuries of capitalist production have been a net loser once
environmental costs are considered.

The question then is not affordability— paying for a Green New Deal is a political
problem, not an economic one. Proponents of MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) have
argued 1) that government spending is independent of tax revenues, therefore 2) the Federal
government could create the resources needed to fund the program. As far as it goes, the
Federal government spends resources into existence quite regularly. Challenges from
‘economists’ are 1) whether this could be done on the scale of a GND and 2) whether doing
so would be inflationary?

In more intuitive terms, George W. Bush launched his multi-trillion-dollar war against Iraq
without any apparent concern for how to pay for it. Both Mr. Bush and Barack Obama
committed trillions of dollars in public resources to bail out Wall Street and the auto
industry in the 2008 economic meltdown without any publicly stated plan for how to pay
for them. More broadly, the Pentagon is the bedrock of the American economy, doling out
hundreds of billions of dollars each year to private military contractors, many with profit
guarantees (‘cost-plus’), to fight wars with no known enemy, largely for nominally
‘private’ interests. The Pentagon is also the largest domestic consumer of fossil fuels.

MMT emerged from two branches of economics that are quite distinct from the more
implausible fantasies that inform mainstream theories— chartalism and institutional
economics. Mainstream studies ‘proving’ that sovereign governments can’t stray too far
from balanced budgets assume institutional equivalence between the U.S. in the present and
say, Croatia. The MMT people of whom I am aware seem bright. I doubt this is their
contention. But even if it were, it has no bearing on what the Federal government of the
U.S. can do in present circumstances.

However, the political problems are more vexing. One need not be a Marxist to accept that
Western governments serve the interests of the rich. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson
and his colleagues have spent their careers collecting and interpreting empirical evidence
that supports this conclusion. Given this relationship of economic to political power, a
logical leap can be made that those whose wealth derives from destroying the environment
will use their political power head off a Green New Deal. And more particularly, to keep
themselves from paying for it.

MMT is useful in that it provides options. Either 1) the rich can be made to pay for a Green
New Deal, 2) the Federal government can fund it or 3) some combination thereof. In any of
these cases, the problem with not politically sidelining the rich is that their wealth and
political power comes from environmental destruction. Even if they wrangled out of paying
for the transition and cleanup, the survival of the planet depends on shutting down the
source of their wealth and power. The liberal theory that this could be achieved through
electoral politics usually proceeds from radically understating the problem.

To the extent that maintenance of the status quo can be used to represent a generic
‘moderate’ position, any substantive challenge to the status quo would be extreme by the
quantum of the challenge. So, how about doing nothing— no challenge. The planet cooks,
mass extinction accelerates, and billions of lives are put at risk. How about implementing
only politically feasible solutions given the current distribution of political power. Tweaks
could be made as environmental crisis accelerates until survival dictates that more radical
measures than would have been needed in the first place are implemented. Moderation in
the face of crisis isn’t moderate.

But are climate change and mass extinction really crises worthy of radical and far-reaching
action yet? The separate silos of climate and biology emerged from the modular premise of
capitalism, the one where the world is an accumulation of smaller pieces, rather than an
interrelated whole. However, the causal bases of both in capitalist production suggest they
are interrelated, and that the environmental crises already underway are symptoms of a
radically dysfunctional relationship with the world based on a fundamentally flawed
conception of it.

The IPCC says we’ve got twelve years from six months ago to cut carbon emissions in half
or climate chaos will ensue. Sixty percent of the mammals, birds, fish and reptiles on the
planet have been wiped out in the last fifty years. Given 1) that these crises are already well
underway and 2) the lead-time needed to keep them from becoming apocalyptic for even
the human chairwarmers in Congress is a matter of a few years at most, the time for radical
and far-reaching action is now. A transition will take place. The choices are whether it will
be planned or unplanned. An unplanned transition would indicate complete political failure,
with the social consequences that entails.

The problem with moderation is that it implies, against the evidence, that current
circumstances will persist into the future. The analytical starting point to solving a crisis is
to define the problem. The problems of climate change and mass extinction have been
defined. The next step is to develop solutions. If what is politically feasible falls short of
what is needed to solve the problems, then the problems as they are currently defined aren’t
solvable. Partial solutions leave the problems to be redefined in possibly far more dire
circumstances in the future. Regardless of whether action is taken, current circumstances
will not persist.

More fundamentally, capitalism is revolutionary, not evolutionary. It doesn’t simply

produce new iterations of old technologies. Monoculture planting using chemical fertilizers,
pesticides and herbicides is an integrated technology that replaced smaller scale, but more
environmentally integrated and sustainable methods. The same is true of building
technologies once mechanical heating and cooling systems and electric lights were made
ubiquitous. Existing technologies were replaced, not ‘improved.’ This is part of what makes
transition away from capitalist technologies so challenging— no fallback plan was left once
the old technologies were discarded.

The risk of inflation from a Green New Deal, raised by MMTers and a few lefties, deserves
some attention. The basic idea is that there is an existing relationship between demand for
goods and the quantity of goods produced at relatively stable prices. A Green New Deal
would require resources that will initially add to this demand, thereby raising the general
price level. A rising price level acts as a regressive tax, burdening those with the fewest
resources the most. Having the government fund the GND entirely would be the most
inflationary, funding it partially would be less so, and taking the entire funding from the
rich would be the least inflationary.

Without going too far into the weeds, this construction 1) narrowly defines inflation in
terms that benefit the rich, 2) gives credence to the conspicuously failed capitalist
conception of market pricing and 3) assumes that the form and function of political
economy that would emerge from a GND would resemble its starting point. In the first,
asset price inflation, a/k/a the wealth of the rich, goes very far in explaining why the rich
are rich and the rest of us aren’t. This isn’t simply a matter of rising stock prices. Relative
to corporate earnings and a host of other measures, stock prices are about as inflated as they
have ever been. Why isn’t this inflation considered problematic?

Next, the relation of environmental crises to capitalist production implies that market prices
are already wildly unrelated to the real costs of capitalist production. One way of measuring
this distance is to add back the cost of a Green New Deal needed to clean up the mess. With
a robust GND and luck, life on the planet continues. Without them, sayonara cruel world.
In a narrow sense the MMTers and a few lefties have a point. If existing market relations
remain intact and a GND increases demand for goods, goods price inflation will likely
result. But market prices that reflect the true costs of production would mean the end of
capitalism. Inflation is a relatively small part of the larger problem.

Given the relationship of capitalist economic theories to potentially world-ending

environmental crisis, capitalist economists have little to offer related to a Green New Deal.
In defense of their realm, their practice has been to serially understate environmental
problems and then offer the same canned ideology they were indoctrinated with decades
ago as cautionary tales. The question for a GND should be: what is needed to transition
from the environmentally apocalyptic path we are on to long-term sustainability while
insuring that everyone— every last person, has their material and social needs met?

Again, please do not shoot economists. Love them for their humanity. The title is a
metaphor.

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:Rob Urie

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by
CounterPunch Books.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/02/15/conf-f15.html

ISO and DSA bar Socialist Equality Party panel on the

fight against fascism from upcoming Historical
Materialism conference
By Joseph Kishore
15 February 2019

Socialism in Our Time, a public event organized by the journal Historical Materialism and
produced in conjunction with Jacobin Magazine and the Socialism Conference, has rejected
a proposed panel submitted by the Socialist Equality Party on “The fight against fascism
and the lessons of history.” Jacobin Magazine is produced by supporters of the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA). The Socialism Conference is directed by the International
Socialist Organization (ISO).

The decision to exclude the panel is a blatant act of censorship, motivated by the political
differences of the DSA and ISO with the Trotskyist politics advanced by the Socialist
Equality Party, the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth
International.

The SEP panel was to feature as its main speaker Christoph Vandreier, deputy national
secretary of the Sozialistiche Gleichheitspartei (SGP) in Germany. Vandreier is the author
of Why are they back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy and the Return of
Fascism in Germany, which will soon be published in English. The title of his presentation
was to have been, “Back to the 1930s: Trotskyist policy in the fight against war and neo-
fascism.”

The other speakers on the panel were to include WSWS Latin American affairs editor Bill
Van Auken, who has been active in the socialist movement for nearly a half-century. The
topic of his presentation was to have been “Bolsonaro’s victory and the debacle of Brazil’s
Workers Party.” The panel also included Socialist Equality Party member Fred Mazelis,
whose activity in revolutionary socialist politics spans 60 years. The title of his presentation
was to have been: “’It can’t happen here’—The Trump administration and the rise of the
far-right in America.”

According to its organizers, the conference, which will be held on April 13-14 in New York
City, is being organized around the themes of “Capitalism in Crisis,” “History” and
“Resistance Today; Mapping the Future.” The conference webpage states, “To prepare for
the fights ahead, we have to study the struggles that came before us.” It goes on to state that
the organizers “welcome contributions that address History of Social Struggles and
Movements; History of the Labor Movement; History of Organizations and Parties;
Legacies of Particular Thinkers and Activists.”

The deadline for submissions was January 21, with responses from the organizers due by
February 11. The Socialist Equality Party submitted its panel proposal on January 5. An
unidentified conference organizer sent the following email to the SEP on February 13: “I
regret to inform you that your proposal: The fight against fascism and the lessons of history
was not selected for presentation at this year’s Socialism in Our Time Conference.”

No explanation for the rejection was provided in the email, but it is obvious that the
rejection is based on nothing other than factional interests, rooted in the political alignment
of the DSA and ISO with the Democratic Party and the pro-corporate AFL-CIO trade union
bureaucracy.

The unprincipled and essentially anti-communist action of the ISO and DSA has objective
political significance and consequences.

Christoph Vandreier and the SGP have played, as is well known throughout Germany, a
leading role in opposing the growth of far-right and fascistic movements. The SEP panel
proposal explained that Vandreier would speak on “the significance of the revival of
fascism throughout Europe, including the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and
efforts within Germany to relativize the crimes of the Nazis and rehabilitate Hitler. He will
review Trotsky’s analysis of the origins of fascism in the 1930s and its relevance for
today.”

Vandreier is the author of Why are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political
Conspiracy, and the Revival of Fascism in Germany. Published in 2018, Vandreier’s book
analyzes the interaction of the relativization of the crimes of the Third Reich with efforts of
high-level state officials to legitimize and promote the neo-fascist Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD), which now functions as the official principal opposition party in
Germany.

Vandreier’s book will soon be presented at the Leipzig Book Fair. The English-language
edition of his book will be presented at next month’s London Book Fair.

In addition to his writing, Vandreier has been active in mobilizing university students in
Berlin and throughout Germany in opposition to the neo-Nazis. The International Youth
and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), affiliated with the SGP, scored a major victory
last month in the student parliamentary elections held at Berlin’s Humboldt University. In a
campaign centered on opposition to German militarism and the university’s defense of
Hitler apologists on its faculty, the IYSSE outpolled the youth organization of the state-
affiliated Left Party and received only a few votes less than the candidates sponsored by the
Green Party.

In response to its campaign against the pro-Nazi forces, Vandreier and the SGP have been
the target of right-wing attacks and denunciations in the capitalist media. In July, the
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic
intelligence agency, added the SGP to its official list of “left-wing extremist” organizations
subject to state monitoring.

The decision of the ISO-DSA conference organizers to reject the SEP panel and prevent
Vandreier from presenting his report denies those attending the New York conference the
opportunity to learn from the political struggle that is being conducted by Vandreier and the
German Trotskyist movement.

The political activities of the AfD and its network of pro-Nazi academics are reported on in
the United States by Breitbart and even more openly neo-Nazi publications. They will
welcome the decision taken by the Historical Materialism conference organizers. A major
opportunity to alert, inform and mobilize the left in the United States against the resurgence
of German fascism has been blocked by the DSA and ISO. This is the objective
consequence of their unprincipled anti-communist factionalism.

The action taken by the DSA and ISO exposes their politically deceitful claims to be
defenders of democratic rights, let alone fighters for socialism.

Protests against the censoring of the SEP panel should be sent

to: socialisminourtime@gmail.com. [Forward a copy to: sep@socialistequality.com]

Copyright © 1998-2019 World Socialist Web Site - All

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/02/inte-a02.html

Factional provocation, middle-class hysteria, and the

collapse of the International Socialist Organization
By the Political Committee of the Socialist Equality Party (US)
2 April 2019

The International Socialist Organization is collapsing just over a month after its national
convention, amidst factionally instigated denunciations of sexual assault and cover-up.

In the midst of a vicious purge of long-time leaders, ISO members have been stampeded
into voting for a resolution, proposed by the surviving leadership, “for building a new
model of revolutionary socialism” that begins with “develop[ing] a process for dissolving
the ISO.” The membership also voted to shut down, within the next two weeks, the
organization’s principal publication, SocialistWorker.org. These decisions effectively
liquidate the International Socialist Organization.

The ISO’s collapse has taken place with extraordinary speed. The chronology of the crisis
leaves no doubt that the collapse was instigated by a factional conspiracy organized by a
section of the leadership, which was implemented in two stages.

The operation began barely one month ago. In late February, the ISO held its annual
convention. A statement posted March 15 on SocialistWorker.org describes the event as the
“most painful” in the history of the organization. The convention, according to the
statement, was “devoted to reckoning with the damaging impacts of our past practices and
internal political culture.”

The convention voted for a drastic change in the composition of the ISO’s National
Committee and the Steering Committee (SC). The latter functions as the day-to-day
leadership of the organization. Selected on the basis of a racial quota system, two-thirds of
the SC were new to leadership. One half of these politically inexperienced and easily
manipulated members were “comrades of color.”

On Monday, March 11, the second stage of the factional operation began. A document,
written by a former member (identified only as FM), arrived by email at the offices of the
ISO. According to the March 15 statement, FM’s document was also sent to “allies outside
of the ISO whom we have worked with in socialist-feminist and queer activism.” The
timing of the document and the events that immediately followed its arrival leave no doubt
that it was solicited, if not entirely written, by a faction within the ISO leadership.

The document from FM revived a 2013 charge of sexual assault against a member of the
ISO, who had been elected to the new SC. According to the ISO’s March 15 statement, FM
had been a member of the National Disciplinary Committee (NDC) that originally heard the
2013 case.

FM’s document, which contained no new information or evidence supporting the

allegations made in 2013, was immediately seized upon as the pretext for a massive purge
of longstanding members of the ISO leadership. Amidst unrestrained hysteria, the SC
suspended, expelled and forced the resignation of leading members.

The timeline of events exposes the unprincipled, undemocratic and sordid nature of the
proceedings.

On Tuesday evening, March 12, just 24 hours after the arrival of FM’s document, the ISO
SC held an emergency meeting at which it “asked the respondent [i.e., the accused] to
identify himself and resign,” according to the March 15 statement. The individual resigned
from the SC and “said he would take a leave of absence.” The SC “voted to suspend him
and stipulated that a decision would be made on his membership status later.”
Two days later, on Thursday March 14, a “joint meeting of the NC, SC and other members
agreed unanimously to expel the respondent according to the original decision of the
NDC.” It took the decision, also without any due process or investigation, “to suspend from
membership three members of the 2013 SC directly involved in the outcome of the case,
while a complete investigation of what happened in 2013 takes place.”

Moreover, the ISO voted to “suspend from a position on any leadership body any member
of the 2013 SC, along with a recently elected NC member, who had played a role in
undermining the work of the NDC, for the duration of the investigation.”

Among those suspended was 80-year-old Joel Geier, one of the founding members of the
Independent Socialists, the predecessor to the ISO. Geier has since resigned. Eight former
leading members of the ISO have also announced their resignation. These include Sharon
Smith, the former national organizer, Paul D’Amato, Lance Selfa and Ahmed Shawki.

The 2013 allegation of sexual assault

The ISO SC has not released the document from FM, nor has it made available the specific
evidence that corroborated the 2013 claims of sexual assault. However, the resignation
letter from Joel Geier, dated March 21, provides information that discredits the claim that
there had been a cover-up.

Geier notes that he had been involved in drawing up guidelines for a new NDC, established
by the ISO in 2013, and that he advocated that the committee incorporate elementary
democratic rights for the accused.

The case in question involved a non-member claiming that she had been raped by a
member. The NDC voted for the expulsion of the accused. The SC overturned the decision,
for reasons explained by Geier.

“It was pointed out to them,” Geier writes, “that they had reached their conclusion without
the opportunity for the Respondent to present his own defense in a hearing, without his
ability to question the evidence and witnesses against him, without the opportunity for him
to raise questions to the claimant, even through an advocate.”

Moreover, the person who made the accusation refused to participate in the ISO’s internal
procedures.

After the intervention of the ISO SC, which sought to preserve some semblance of due
process, the NDC reversed its decision. Subsequently, an Appeals Committee decided that
there was “insufficient evidence to make a determination” in the case. No disciplinary
actions were recommended.

At the 2014 ISO convention, the proceedings and outcome of the case were reported to the
membership.
In unchallenged statements supporting the leadership purge, posted on Socialist W
orker.org during the past two weeks, the reversal of the NDC’s 2013 decision is denounced
on the grounds that any man accused of an assault must be presumed to be guilty. There is
no need for any fact-finding proceeding nor any presentation of corroborative evidence.
The accuser must be believed.

A March 20 post by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, titled “What Socialists Can Learn From
#MeToo,” exposes the hysterical psychology, akin to a lynch mob, that prevails among ISO
members recruited on the basis of middle-class identity politics. She writes that “because I
believe the accusation and am writing from my own perspective, I am going to use
straightforward rather than legalistic language: rape rather than alleged rape, survivor rather
than complainant, and rapist rather than respondent.”

Though Wrigley-Field admits that she “never read” any documents relating to the 2013
accusation, she complains that the investigation “was obsessed with procedure rather than
with truth and mitigating harm.” For Wrigley-Field, “truth” is determined by and made
equivalent to the assertion of the accuser. No procedural rules, demanding the submission
and examination of evidence, should be allowed to test, let alone directly challenge, the
accuser’s “truth.” Summing up the witch-hunter’s philosophy, Wrigley-Field proclaims:
“When we honestly believe that our rules are a barrier to discovering the truth, then fuck
the rules.”

The concealed political issues

In the statements issued by the ISO, there is no explicit reference to or discussion of the
political differences within the organization’s leadership that underlay the crisis that
erupted during the week of March 11, 2019. Readers are expected to believe that the
alleged mishandling of an accusation of sexual assault, which occurred six years ago, has
caused the political collapse of the International Socialist Organization.

This is preposterous and will be believed only by those who are either hopelessly naïve or
hopelessly stupid. The unleashing of a sex scandal in a political organization is aimed
invariably at generating hysteria, stampeding the membership and preventing an open and
rational discussion of program, perspective, strategy and the interests of conflicting internal
factions and social forces. Only in the aftermath of the organizational massacre, as the
smoke begins to clear, do the political interests and aims that precipitated the crisis begin to
emerge.

On the basis of statements that have been posted on SocialistWorker.org, as well as an

examination of the alignment of various key individuals, it is evident that the outcome of
the crisis has been an extremely sharp movement to the right.

* Issue 1: The ISO and the Democratic Party

The liquidation of the ISO has effectively removed an organizational barrier to the
integration of its dominant faction into the political orbit of the Democratic Party.
Prior to the February convention, the ISO was engaged in a protracted internal discussion
of the political implications of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to Congress. The
Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, is being elevated
into significant positions of power within the Democratic Party. With the 2020 election
approaching, the Democratic Party is exerting immense pressure to organizationally disarm
and integrate potential opposition from the left.

The DSA, which is a faction of the Democratic Party aligned with the presidential
campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, has been seeking to bring the ISO into its political
fold. Significantly, the March 15 statement of the SC states that the ISO (or, presumably, its
remnants) will “study how the ISO can relate to socialist campaigns run on Democratic
ballot lines.”

* Issue 2: The ISO and the trade unions

In recent years, leading ISO members have acquired influential and personally lucrative
positions in the AFL-CIO. This development is exemplified in the rise last year of Jesse
Sharkey to the presidency of the Chicago Teachers Union. The March 15 statement
denounces the pre-purge ISO leadership for creating conditions in which “comrades with
decades of trade union experience were held in suspicion for fear that they might stray too
far from a course set by the SC.”

Sharkey, who supported the ISO purge, represents a stratum of ISO-affiliated trade union
bureaucrats who no longer want to be restricted by party discipline. The desire to free
themselves from ISO control has been intensified by the fact that Sharkey, as CTU
president, now plays a leading role in the Chicago Democratic Party. In the recent
municipal elections, candidates linked either to the CTU or the DSA won nearly a dozen
seats on the Board of Aldermen, giving the pseudo-left the role of junior partner to the next
mayor of Chicago.

The CTU under Sharkey, moreover, has endorsed Toni Preckwinkle, a long-time
Democratic Party operative, in the April 2 Chicago mayoral runoff.

* Issue 3: The ISO and financial resources

A major factor that underlies the conflicts within the ISO is control over resources. The
ISO’s assets run into the millions of dollars.

The ISO’s non-profit 501(c)(3) organization is called the Center for Economic Research
and Social Change (CERSC), whose active projects include Haymarket Books. In its 2017
tax filings, the latest year that is publicly available, CERSC reported an adjusted net income
of $3,177,938, with $3.6 million in revenue from book sales and over $1 million in
contributions and grants from foundations.

Among the major assets of the CERSC are nearly $200,000 in stock in Oracle, the US
computer technology corporation, and a similar amount in CTO (Consolidated-Tomoka
Land Co.,) a Florida-based real estate company. In 2017, the CERSC paid out nearly
$900,000 in wages and benefits.

The CERSC is a major beneficiary of grants from foundations. In 2017, this included
$225,000 from the Tides Foundation (established by an R. J. Reynolds tobacco heiress and
bankrolled more recently by billionaire George Soros) and $240,000 from the Lannan
Foundation, which has a close relationship with the ISO and its members.

The Lannan Foundation has given grants to several ISO members to write books, including
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a tenured professor at Princeton, who specializes in the
promotion of identity politics. It also provided the CERSC with a grant to purchase a $2.3
million building in Buena Park, Chicago to house Haymarket.

Notably, Haymarket Books, the publishing arm associated with the ISO, issued a statement
on Facebook solidarizing itself with the internal purge. Calling Haymarket “the flagship
project” of the CERSC, the statement declares that “we stand with and believe survivors.”
It continues:

“When concerns about actions outside of the CERSC on the part of some members of the
CERSC board came to our attention, we took immediate action. An entirely new board has
since been constituted with individuals who have our full support and confidence.”

Among the six executives or directors of the CERSC, listed in the last tax filing of the
organization, are four individuals who have been purged from the ISO: Sharon Smith,
Ahmed Shawki, Lance Selfa and Paul D’Amato.

The signatories of the Haymarket statement include Anthony Arnove, an editor at

Haymarket and one of the remaining directors at the CERSC. Also signing the statement
was Julie Fain, the managing editor of Haymarket Books and the wife of Jesse Sharkey, the
CTU president.

For all the talk of openness and transparency, it is to be expected that the settlement of
conflicts relating to the disposition of assets among the conflicting leadership factions will
take place in secret negotiations behind closed doors. Foundations and non-profit
organizations are subject to legal constraints. Those who presently have control of the
income and assets will be anxious to avoid lawsuits by those ex-leaders and foundation
shareholders who have been forced out of their posts.

Political conclusions

Whether or not the complete dissolution of the International Socialist Organization was the
intended outcome of the political conspiracy organized by a section of the leadership is not
clear. However, it is the logical outcome of the ISO’s right-wing, middle-class and
thoroughly opportunist politics, in which all the various factions involved have participated.
The ISO was eminently susceptible to a #MeToo-style operation. The membership of the
ISO was recruited on the basis of middle-class identity politics. Those who joined the
organization received no education in Marxist theory, let alone the central historical
experiences of the Fourth International. Perpetually operating in an environment of
unprincipled factionalism, rampant opportunism, political cynicism and extreme
subjectivism, the members are conditioned to reject concern for issues of program and
political principle. Their one abiding passion is hatred of the International Committee of the
Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site. Our fight for the political
independence of the working class, on the basis of the Trotskyist program of Permanent
Revolution, is condemned as “sectarianism.”

No serious assessment of the political causes of the breakup of the ISO will emerge from its
opportunist milieu. Rather, commentaries have been posted on SocialistWorker.org
assigning ultimate responsibility for the breakdown to a misguided adherence to “Leninist
orthodoxy” and, even worse, unrealistic revolutionary aspirations. Aside from the fact that
the politics of the ISO has had nothing to do, since its founding, with socialist revolution,
let alone Leninism, the political demoralization that pervades its leadership is summed up
by Paul LeBlanc. Ruminating on his six decades of opportunist political activity, he opines
that if organizations “aspire to do more than they can possibly do [i.e., seek to mobilize the
working class for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism], profoundly debilitating results
are inevitable.” [“Reflections on Coherence and Comradeship,” posted on
SocialistWorker.org, March 27, 2019]

Some are boasting that out of the wreckage of the ISO a “new model of revolutionary
socialism” will emerge. They are whistling as they pass by the graveyard. Their quest for a
“new model” is leading them squarely into the Democratic Party.

In the final analysis, the breakup of the ISO reflects the impact of the intensifying social
crisis, and the initial manifestations of class struggle, on the politically bankrupt
organizations of the pseudo-left. The ISO will not be the last victim of this process. As
Trotsky once said of the opportunist organizations of his day, “The great events which rush
upon mankind will not leave of these outlived organizations one stone upon another.” This
has proved to be the fate of the ISO.

Copyright © 1998-2019 World Socialist Web Si

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/04/15/fund-a15.html

Who funded the ISO? An analysis of the financial basis

of pseudo-left politics
By Eric London
15 April 2019
In March, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) voted to dissolve itself several
weeks after restructuring its leadership with a faction dominated by people recruited on the
basis of identity politics.

The ISO was, historically, the product of an opportunist fusion of Pabloites and
Shachtmanites in the aftermath of the breakdown of the anti-war and protest politics of the
1960s and 1970s. In the course of several decades, following the trajectory of middle-class
politics, the ISO moved ever further to the right. Its political line combined support for the
AFL-CIO bureaucracy, a general orientation to the Democratic Party, and support for
human rights imperialism. The increasingly dominant theoretical influence on the ISO was
exerted by various forms of identity politics, which developed into an obsessive, bordering
on psychopathic, preoccupation with issues related to race and gender.

On this reactionary basis, the ISO pandered to and recruited subjective middle-class
nationalists and feminists, particularly among a slew of academics, for whom politics was
largely a means of self-promotion and personal advancement. Whatever tenuous
association the ISO retained with the working class was mediated through the AFL-CIO
bureaucracy.

The right-wing forces the ISO cultivated and elevated into leadership took over the party in
February. Within a few weeks, allegations relating to an alleged incident of sexual assault,
dating back to 2013, were revived to provide a pretext for the dissolution of the ISO. Those
involved in instigating the dissolution are now publishing hysterical and self-fixated
screeds on Socialistworker.org. For example, Socialistworker.org presently features an
“Open Letter to Some Ex-Leaders of the ISO,” which includes the following account of the
author’s tortured path to self-awareness:

Due to my familial guidance, I have inserted myself into emotionally intelligent therapeutic
spaces when and where I felt they were applicable to me. Despite, of course, having some
critiques, this was a stage of my own psychological journey that I would never minimize in
regards to my own recovery and growth.

By accepting—and rejecting where I found it apt—the emotional knowledge of therapeutic

spaces and psychological theory, and fitting that into my political understanding of the
emotional realities of capitalism, I gained a somewhat unconventional perspective in my
criticisms of the left: namely, that without psychological and emotional understanding, we
will be incapable of delivering socialism.

The author continues:

I have been granted a model of dealing with one’s demons—I cannot fully express what a
privilege that is. I have been granted the necessary tools to walk the difficult path of
tackling one’s very self. It’s one of the foundational features of happiness, and one that, it
seems apparent to me, none of you possess. You would not be acting this way if you did.
While that may be an explanation for your abusive ways, it is not an excuse.
Reading such deranged postings, the old adage about the inmates taking over the asylum
comes to mind. But the adage needs to be amended. The inmates, having taken over the
asylum, proceeded as quickly as possible to burn it down.

The protracted right-wing degeneration of the ISO found expression not only in the
composition of its membership, but also in its financial structure.

A review of the tax filings of the nonprofit umbrella organization of the ISO and
Haymarket Books—the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC)—
reveals that the ISO was, to a great extent, funded by Democratic Party-led think tanks and
nonprofits.

The “Big Three” Democratic Party-linked foundations supporting the ISO

A full 37 percent of CERSC’s funding has been from grants by Democratic Party-aligned
think tanks and nonprofits. Since 2007-08, CERSC has received $3,172,117 from
foundations and think tanks. In large part through these grants, CERSC’s revenue flow
increased four-fold, from $1,055,100 in 2007-08 to $4,245,626 in 2016-17. Its cash-on-
hand has increased by 1,175.6 percent, and its total assets have increased from $420,700 to
$2,956,775 (603.1 percent) over the same period.

A significant portion of the individual donations came from less than a dozen wealthy
individuals who gave over $100,000 each. We refrain from giving their names to preserve
their privacy, but several of these high-dollar donors also gave substantial sums to
establishment Democratic candidates and national Democratic Party campaign committees.

Of the revenue from nonprofit grants, roughly 85 percent—$2,709,617—comes from just

three nonprofits: the Lannan Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Wallace Fund.

A review of these three organizations’ histories and qualifications for grant-making shows
CERSC has developed close relationships with powerful institutional supporters and the
Democratic Party executives who carefully control the funds’ purse strings.

Decisions about granting such substantial portions of money are not made lightly. Well-
connected networks of money managers, attorneys and philanthropists study grant requests
and carefully determine which organizations meet the fund’s “mission statement.” Every
dollar spent must meet the goal that powerful corporate donors had in mind when
contributing to the fund. If an organization’s activity controverted the interests of the fund’s
contributors, it would not receive funding.

The Tides Foundation, established by an R. J. Reynolds tobacco heiress, is currently

heavily funded with millions of dollars from billionaire George Soros, who gave the
Democratic Party $20,664,693 to support its candidates in the 2016 election, according to
Opensecrets.org. Soros Fund Management was the sixth largest institutional backer of the
Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, funding her campaign to the tune of an additional
$10,556,763 million dollars.
The Tides Foundation funded the public relations campaign supporting Barack Obama’s
right-wing, pro-corporate Affordable Care Act in 2010 through the Health Care for
America Now organization. According to Influencewatch.org, the Tides’ largest financial
supporters include the Ford Foundation and commercial funds like the Vanguard Charitable
Endowment Program, the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund and the Schwab
Charitable Fund.

Other Tides funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the AT&T Foundation,
the ChevronTexaco Foundation and the Verizon Foundation. The US Agency for
International Development (USAID), a CIA-linked government organization, has also
provided funding for the Tides Foundation.

The Lannan Foundation is a nonprofit founded by J. Patrick Lannan, a financier who

advised John F. Kennedy and served as director of the International Telephone and
Telegraph Corporation for 36 years.

During the 1930s, before Lannan’s tenure, ITT funded Heinrich Himmler and, through its
subsidiary, C. Lorenz AG, controlled 25 percent of the German company that manufactured
parts for Luftwaffe jets during the Second World War. In 1972, the New York Times
reported that ITT was actively involved in pressuring the Nixon administration to
assassinate Chilean President Salvador Allende—a task which was accomplished the
following year with the coup that brought fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet to
power. Lannan was serving as ITT director at the time of ITT’s involvement.

The Times wrote in July 1972: “The ITT plan called for extensive economic warfare against
Chile to be directed by a special White House task force, assisted by the Central
Intelligence Agency; the subversion of the Chilean armed forces; consultations with foreign
governments on ways to put pressure on the Allende regime, and diplomatic sabotage.”
CIA documents published in 2000 showed ITT was actively involved in the coup itself.

Today, the Lannan Foundation’s revenue and funding for CERSC derives from a corporate
trust fund whose stockholdings include Amazon, AIG, American Express, Bank of
America, Northrup Grumann, Citigroup, Halliburton, JPMorgan Chase, General Motors,
Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Boeing, Bombardier, and many other banks, oil companies
and weapons manufacturers.

The Lannan Foundation is presently run by J. Patrick Lannan’s son, J. Patrick Lannan, Jr.,
who sat on the board of directors of Federal Signal Corporation for 20 years. In the mid-
70s, when Lannan, Jr. sat on the board, Federal Signal manufactured 70 percent of all civil
defense warning systems in the US and later acquired a massive $47 million contract from
the Air Force to manufacture military equipment.

The Wallace Global Fund, named after Democratic Vice President Henry Wallace, also
made major contributions to several Democratic Party organizations, including the
Wellstone Action Fund. The Wallace Global Fund is co-chaired by Henry Wallace’s
grandson, Scott Wallace, who ran for Congress as a Democrat in Pennsylvania’s 8th
Congressional District in 2018 and lost by a narrow margin.
According to its website: “We at the Wallace Global Fund see ourselves as a funder and
supporter of social movements; to do this, we are committed to using all of the tools at our
disposal to advance new ideas and strategies to achieve change. One way we do this is by
maximizing the impact from our investment dollars in addition to our grants.”

The Wallace Fund uses its endowment (overseen by RBC Wealth Management) to ensure
“strong democratic institutions.”

“The [Wallace] foundation is doing fantastic work,” Wallace told a local Pennsylvania
newspaper after winning the Democratic nomination. “We have it set on a good direction,
and I can continue to do that kind of work in Congress. Instead of researching and studying
problems and advising solutions, I will have the opportunity to write the solutions and work
across the aisle to get them done.”

Wallace raised $14,172,465 in his congressional bid, including $144,467 from the finance
and insurance industries, and campaigned on a pro-Israel platform, stating, “Israel
unequivocally has the right to defend itself and keep its people safe against threats from
both military aggression and terrorism.” His campaign website notes, “I firmly oppose the
BDS movement, which is hostile to Israel and incompatible with any balanced approach to
a two-state solution.”

Wallace also called for implementing Malthusean methods for controlling “population
growth.” Another major Wallace Fund recipient is “Population Connected,” whose website
states, “Irresponsible people who have more than two children should be taxed to the hilt
for the privilege of irresponsible breeding.”

Additional foundation grants for the ISO

Among the funds that support CERSC with tens of thousands of dollars are the New York
Community Trust, which gave the organization $20,000 in 2015. The New York
Community Trust is overseen by the Democratic Party government of New York City, and
its board of directors includes executives from the Ford Foundation and various corporate
and real estate firms. The pro-corporate Annenberg Foundation also gave CERSC $25,000
in 2016-17.

Though not yet reported in public tax filings, the website for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
operated by the offspring of the Rockefeller fortune, notes that it provided a $40,000 grant
to CERSC in 2018.

The donation was part of the fund’s “Peacebuilding Program,” which the website describes
as “focus[ing] on conflicts that have a disproportionate influence on global insecurity and
violence and in which the United States has a significant involvement.” This recent grant is
no doubt bound up with the open support given by the ISO to US imperialist interventions,
exemplified by its support for the CIA-backed “rebels” in Syria.
Grants from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund are selected by “Peacebuilding” program
director Perry Cammack, who, the fund’s website explains, “worked for more than a decade
on Middle East diplomatic, security, democracy, and economic issues in the United States
government. From 2003–2013, he worked as an advisor to then-Senators Joseph Biden and
John Kerry on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served as a member of the
policy planning staff of Secretary of State John Kerry from 2013–2015.”

A 2011 document explaining the purpose of the “Peacebuilding program” makes clear its
pro-imperialist character. Its aim is to “encourage an effective US approach to conflicts in
the context of a multipolar world.”

Further, the program’s directors “propose a program that aims to identify drivers of conflict
and address them through enhanced diplomacy and support for constituencies for peace. Its
approach would be to strengthen and align institutions and actors at the multilateral,
regional, state, and local levels. Lastly, it would take into account an evolving role for the
United States, encouraging it to address transnational threats through a new style of
engagement in the context of our multipolar world.”

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund also receives its money from a wide array of banks and
major corporations.

CERSC obtained $67,500 from the Hassib Sabbagh Foundation. The fund’s namesake was
the founder of the Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), which, according to
Wikipedia, was “the region’s largest multinational and one of the largest contractors
worldwide. Sabbagh was a billionaire and ranked 16th on the world’s richest Arabs” before
dying in 2010.

According to a 2010 obituary in the Washington Post, Sabbagh’s company “benefited from
the economic construction boom of Dubai and provided offshore services to the oil and gas
industries in the countries of the Persian Gulf.” CCC constructed part of “a 1,100-mile
pipeline to the coast of Turkey for a group led by BP, Europe’s largest oil company.”

In addition, the Post obituary noted that “Mr. Sabbagh was a donor to the Carter Center,
which was founded in 1982 by former president Jimmy Carter… Carter said in 2005 that
Mr. Sabbagh was ‘one of my earliest and strongest allies in pursuing peace in the Middle
East.’” Carter also called Sabbagh “a trusted adviser.”

CERSC has also received $25,000 from the UNZ Foundation, a right-wing organization led
by Republican businessman and former California Senate candidate Ron Unz. Alongside
support for the ISO, Unz has also supported neo-Nazi anti-immigrant groups like VDare.
The Harvard Crimson reported in 2016:

“Over the course of his career as a conservative intellectual and political activist, Ron K.
Unz ’83—now a candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers and US Senate in the state of
California—has donated tens of thousands of dollars to an organization he describes as
‘quasi-white nationalist.’
“Unz’s public tax filings connect the Silicon Valley multimillionaire with VDARE, a group
the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an ‘anti-immigration hate website,’ in
addition to several writers who have published articles arguing that white people are
genetically superior and homosexuality is a transmittable disease, among other extreme
views.”

CERSC is not obligated to report the content of its grant requests to the IRS as part of its
tax filings. CERSC’s grant requests would, however, make for interesting reading. How did
CERSC pitch the ISO and Haymarket to the New York City government, the Obama
administration official leading the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, or the managers of the
fortunes of Democratic Party activists like George Soros and Scott Wallace?

These powerful Democratic Party-linked nonprofits would not have given over $3 million
in corporate money to CERSC if the organization had anything to do with socialist
revolution or fighting for the interests of the working class.

Haymarket Books

Haymarket Books has become the chief vehicle through which CERSC deploys the funds it
acquired through grant contributions.

In 2015-16, CERSC reported $1,615,833 in contributions and grants, but just $1,157,602 in
income, which came largely from book sales. In 2016-17, however, CERSC’s contributions
and grants fell by over half-a-million dollars to $1,067,688. However, CERSC’s income
rose to over $3 million despite this fall in contributions. The difference was to be found in
the increased profitability of Haymarket.

The high dollar nonprofit grants from prior years allowed CERSC to dramatically increase
expenditures on book promotion, printing and distribution costs, travel associated with
book sales and, critically, royalties to authors.

From 2007-08 to 2016-17, CERSC spending on book sales increased more than any other
expense. In 2007-08, the organization spent just $40,347 on travel, $66,190 on book
promotion, $56,997 on book distribution and $46,419 on royalties to authors.

By 2016-17, however, CERSC was spending $629,549 on travel (a 1,460 percent increase),
$237,478 on book promotion (258 percent increase), $693,107 on book distribution costs
(1,116 percent increase) and $533,223 on royalties (1,048 percent increase). The sharpest
increase since 2012-13 was in spending on royalties, which skyrocketed by 501 percent
from $88,707.

The Haymarket expenditures on royalties, book distribution and book promotion are a key
mechanism by which the ISO and other pseudo-left organizations expand their influence by
gathering a network of academics through publishing contracts and book writing grants.
In this way, powerful figures within the Democratic Party are cultivating an intellectual
climate based on racial politics and academic anti-Marxism.

A March 27, 2019 article in the Chicago Reader notes that “Haymarket publishes 40 to 50
books a season” and that many books “have gone through several printings of up to 60,000
copies each.” The Reader quotes Haymarket publicity director Jim Plank, who says
Haymarket’s readership has grown “explosively” in recent years.

The article shows how Haymarket is seeking to cultivate a broader audience on issues of
racial and identity politics:

“There are many, many people who are becoming politicized in new ways,” Plank told the
Reader, adding that Haymarket’s audience includes “anyone who’s remotely on the left.”
Plank explained, “For us, it’s obvious that there’s people who read across all identities and
political perspectives, who are looking for things that reflect themselves. That’s where we
start from.” The Reader explained that Haymarket does not force “white editors” on
“writers of color” and that “Haymarket’s editors cultivate relationships with up-and-coming
writers of color.”

The Reader notes, “Following its commitment to publishing diverse voices, Haymarket
hires more people of color than most publishers. Of its staff of 18, Plank says, about 66
percent are white, and 33 percent are people of color.” Haymarket’s increasing sales have
also led to an increase in CERSC employee compensation, according to the organization’s
tax filings.

Haymarket and CERSC issued a statement on Haymarket’s Facebook page after the ISO
crisis emerged in public that affirmed Haymarket’s status as “the flagship project” of
CERSC. The statement explained:

“When concerns about actions outside of the CERSC on the part of some members of the
CERSC board came to our attention, we took immediate action. An entirely new board has
since been constituted with individuals who have our full support and confidence.”

The break-up of the ISO has undoubtedly produced a vicious, back-room struggle over
CERSC’s resources. The intensity of the ISO’s crisis was clearly heightened by the high
stakes of taking control of the increasingly lucrative and influential Haymarket Books.

Ultimately, the boosting of Haymarket as a purveyor of identity politics is inextricably

linked with the ISO’s rightward political direction and its increasingly affluent social
composition. The millions of dollars CERSC received from Democratic Party-linked think
tanks put wind in the sails of those upper-middle class forces within the ISO that took over
the organization and immediately dissolved it.

In public statements posted in the aftermath of the ISO dissolution, the organization’s long-
time former leaders—even those who voted for liquidation—have expressed regret that the
crisis led to the destruction of the entire organization after over 40 years of existence. But
the ISO has reaped what it had sown. In the end, it collapsed under the weight of the right-
wing forces they themselves unleashed.

Copyright © 1998-201

The Center for Victims of Torture: Contact Us

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https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/about/contact: www.humanrightsfirst.org . Since 1978, Human

Rights First has been matching asylum seekers with pro bono attorneys through our Asylum Legal
Representation Program, giving refugees a chance to live their lives free from fear. Human Rights
First has helped thousands of refugees gain asylum in the United States. These refugees include
torture survivors, victims of religious, political and ethnic persecution, and men and women who
are fleeing from bias-motivated violence based on gender or sexual orientation.

I ended up calling their texas office and they said to call the media office at 202-547-5692 to report
cases of torture. I ended up talking to someone, but the number given to the media office (which
is what I received from the first individual that I called) sent me to their Washington office. I was
told by someone there to contact an NGO here, but that is a no go. She did not tell me who I could
contact. After I tried to call mom irrationally insisted that “I would get them into trouble” if I
merely called and asked someone for some type of help. Someone is threating her that the very
same government will do away with their life savings if we get help or ask for help. Who could get
them into trouble for doing something as simple as trying not to get tortured: the victims? Who is
interested in us not getting help? Not asking for help, and doing away with the rest of our lives in
silence? She said that my question was outside of her jurisdiction, but she deals with Asylum cases
from people from other countries other than the U.S.

Contact

New York
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New York, NY 10004
Tel: (212) 845 5200
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Tel: (202) 547 5692
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The UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture

(https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Torture/UNVFT/Pages/ContactUs.aspx) Mailing address:
UNVFVT, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights UNOG – OHCHR
CH-1211 Geneva 10 Switzerland.

Physical location: Palais Wilson, 52, Rue des Pâquis. Geneva 1201 Switzerland
Phone (41) 22 917 9315, Fax (41) 22 917 9017, Email: unvfvt@ohchr.org
Webpage address: http://www.ohchr.org/torturefund

Hello,

I am writing because I would like to know if you could help me with the following question: If I
know of current (isolated) victims of torture of the U.S. government to whom should I relay the
information so that the victims may receive some help and/or legal representation?

Gonzalo I. Gil

https://redress.org/ (REDRESS UK) REDRESS LONDON

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Tel: +44 (0)20 7793 1777 Email: info@redress.org
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Den Haag, the Netherlands
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Chamber of Commerce File Registration Number 66793319

https://www.icj-cij.org/en/contact-the-court: The International Court of Justice

Contact the Court

International Court of Justice
Peace Palace
Carnegieplein 2
2517 KJ The Hague
The Netherlands

Telephone : +31 70 302 23 23

Fax : +31 70 364 99 28

https://iici.global/contact/ (Institute for international Criminal Investigations) Anna

Paulownastraat 101, 2518 BC Den Haag The Netherlands Google Maps +31 70 364 4660
+31 70 363 2300
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To call Switzerland from Venezuela, dial: 00 - 41 - Area Code - Land Phone Number 00 - 41 - 12 Digit Mobile Number

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Telephone: +41 22 917 9220 (offices in Switzerland)

Email: InfoDesk@ohchr.org

Hello,

I wanted to know if you could answer the following question: If I am aware that a torture
operation is being run by the U.S. embassy in a particular country to whom should I send that
information so their victims may be helped?

Gonzalo I. Gil

ACLU: Call us: 00 + 1 + 212-549-2500 (national office of ACLU). If I am in need of

telling someone about current victims of torture who do I need to talk to so the victims
may get help. Who to tell so the victims are no longer isolated and w/o legal
representation.