WHAT IS SEXISM?
Sexism means that, on the personal level:
*a 35-year-old Los Angeles textile worker, a wife and mother of three, works a 50-hour-week for $200 and then labors another 30 hours a week in her home without pay as cook, laundress, and nurturer;
*a 20-year-old single Indonesian woman earns a wage of $40 per month in an electronics factory that hires only women;
*a 60-year-old Mexican grandmother rises early six days a week, makes tortillas for her family, and then puts in another ten hours making tortillas and selling them in downtown Taxco;
*a 42-year-old New Jersey homemaker and mother of four finally leaves her husband after repeated beatings, but loses her house and ends up with her children in a welfare motel full of drug dealers and prostitutes;
*a 10-year-old Sudanese girl shrieks in pain as her aunt, wielding a razor, cuts off her clitoris;
*a 35-year-old Canadian accountant snaps at her underpaid El Salvadoran nanny while she angrily ponders how her own boss shrugged off her suggestions at work;
*a 58-year-old Russian agricultural worker mumbles her resentment that she has to do heavy manual labor while her male co-workers have been trained to operate tractors and receive considerably more pay;
*a 24-year-old pregnant Chinese agricultural worker, having just learned that she is carrying a girl, wonders whether her in-laws, in need of a male grandchild to help support them in old age, will pressure her to have an abortion and try again for a boy;
*a 40-year-old Haitian immigrant to the U. S. , recently divorced, realizes that he never took the time to get to know his children, and that now it is too late to build a relationship with them;
*a 50-year-old waitress, exhausted after eight hours on her feet, wearily fixes dinner while her husband, also just home from an exhausting day, puts up his feet and has a beer. She could be from any country.
On the statistical level, sexism means that:
*female Korean workers make 51% of men's wages;
*of the 188 workers killed in the May 1994 Thai Kader Industrial Toy Company fire, most were young women;
*between three and four million women in the U. S. are battered by their partners every year;
* ?million women die every year in the world from illegal abortions;
*largely because of prostitution and polygamy, over 10% of the population of Uganda--some __ million people--is dying of AIDS.
*in 1991 and 1992, 6. 7 million female fetuses were aborted in India when it was learned that they were female.
From the above examples, we can conclude that sexism comprises both practices and ideas. It relates to the work women do--whether they're paid a wage or not. It is present in a range of societies--capitalist, socialist, formerly socialist. It signifies women's inferior status in relation to men and, at times, their violent victimization by men.
Sexism is both the practice of superexploiting women workers and the ideology of gender dualism and male supremacy that justifies this practice.
In this pamphlet PLP will present a communist analysis of sexism. We shall argue that sexism, while often felt in the most intimate aspects of our lives, is rooted not in "human nature" but in capitalism's drive to benefit from the grossly underpaid, and often unpaid, labor of women. We shall point out that sexism hurts working- and middle-class men, both materially and psychologically, and they have a direct interest in fighting it. We shall also argue that only communism--the abolition of classes--can put an end to sexism. The fact that socialist societies have failed to emancipate women is proof not that sexism is not based in class society, but, on the contrary, that only the complete eradication of wages and classes can lead to equality between women and men.
WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF SEXISM?
Ruling elites would like us to believe that men's possession of superior social status is a function of their innate superiority. Various patriarchal religions--Islam, Christianity, Judaism--teach that God has ordained men to rule over women. Right-wing social "theorists" argue that women's subordination is derived from men's greater strength and aggressiveness.
Sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, for example, argues that child-rearing is not a role socially assigned to women but a "natural" function.
Anthropological evidence, however, indicates that women's oppression is not a function of "nature" but is instead closely linked with the rise of market societies and class divisions. Hunter-gatherer societies--the types of social formations in which practically all humans originally lived, and do so for tens of thousands of years--are largely egalitarian. There may be a division of labor based upon gender: among the Inuit of the Arctic, men conduct the seal hunt, whereas women make clothes from skins; among the Mbuti of Zaire, hunting is carried out largely by women beating the bushes and men holding the nets. But because the entire social unit is engaged in labor that is necessary for the group's survival, there is no devaluation of "women's work. " Indeed, often the tasks undertaken by women--gathering nuts and fruits, hunting small game--are more crucial to the group's survival than the big-game hunting undertaken more exclusively by men.
Moreover, in most hunter-gatherer societies, the division of labor is not rigid. Among the Mbuti, women and men can change roles in the hunt. Among the Innu (also known as the Montagnais-Naskapi) of Canada, women would work for hours without interruption smoking deer hides while their husbands cared for the children. While women in such primitive communalist societies carry out biological reproduction, there is no separation of "home" and "work," and all labor is seen as productive activity. Furthermore, power is shared on a gendered but egalitarian basis. When Iroquois warriors wished to carry out raids, they had to get the approval of the women, who could supply or not supply food for the expedition as they chose. Women routinely have enjoyed full respect in communalist societies, which have been organized along matrilineal lines (that is, in which kinship is determined by descent on the mother's side).
Communists do not want to romanticize the life of hunter-gatherers: a life close to nature is harsh in many ways. Moreover, the model of "separate but equal" characterizing gender relations in many communalist societies is foreign to modern notions of social equality. (In many hunter-gatherer societies, gods are Great Hunters and goddesses are Great Mothers. )But it is important to be aware that most of human history has been lived in an egalitarian mode. The vast social gaps between classes, genders and races in present-day society--which to many of us seem as "natural" as the air we breathe--are actually of relatively recent appearance and short duration.
As societies become more settled and capable of producing surpluses, however, the differences between "men's work" and "women's work" become more significant. In times of scarcity one tribe raids another and carries off its surpluses--and its women, who take on value by virtue of both their gathering and their
child-bearing (and hence labor-producing) capacities. In most societies the first slaves were captured women. Moreover, the kinds of surpluses typically amassed by men--herds, pelts--are more readily exchanged in trade. As a society moves away from the production of use values for subsistence, then, and toward the production of exchange values for trade and profit, the gendered division of labor previously based upon mutual agreement becomes increasingly coercive. Women work for men--whether husbands or owners--rather than for a group in which they are equal participants. As Engels pointed out in On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, class society becomes patrilineal, then patriarchal (that is, characterized by male rule), as wealthy men come to insist that their assets be passed on to their own children.
The link between women's subordination and class hierarchy emerges most dramatically in places where colonizing powers encountered societies that were either communalist or at least less rigidly stratified. Anthropologist Eleanor Peacock, for instance, notes that the fur traders and Jesuits were shocked by the sexual egalitarianism of the Innu and instituted patriarchal order by issuing payments only to male members of the tribe; it was only then that cooking and cleaning became institutionalized as women's work. While previously the !Kung San women of South Africa had spaced their children widely and foraged freely, after their families were settled on profit-producing cattle stations they became economically dependent on their wage-earning husbands and home-bound by large families.
Colonizing Europeans, accustomed as they were to women's subordination, clearly viewed equality between women and men as a threat to the "brave new world" they wished to establish around the globe. But we should be aware that in many places they encountered class societies where sexist inequality was already firmly entrenched. In India, for example, women performed unpaid domestic labor long before the arrival of the British. Among the Yoruba of West Africa, it was not just Europeans but also local male entrepreneurial capitalists who displaced women traders and undermined their authority. It was the growth of class society, and not just the arrival of European colonialism, that deprived women of economic autonomy and social status.
Sexist inequality in precapitalist societies, while pervasive, has taken quite different forms. In Islamic countries, most women have been kept behind the veil and in the home; men do not even permit them to go to the market. Among the Yoruba, by contrast, women have for centuries functioned as traders--even though the commodities and trade routes they control have become increasingly less central to the economy. In Vietnam, women have traditionally performed heavy work in the fields, whereas in Cuba their agricultural work has generally been light and sporadic. What the range of tasks grouped as "women's work" reveals, then, is that the sexual division of labor has little to do with the intrinsic nature of any kind of work. It is the fact of the label "women's work" that matters, for this dismissive categorization enables the superexploitation of vast numbers of female producers.
SEXISM AND CAPITALISM
While sexism clearly predates capitalist society, capitalism reinforces--indeed promotes--sexism every day because it profits enormously from sexism. And while certain aspects of male dominance in various countries--e. g. , India, China--can be traced to survivals from earlier modes of production, the main reason for women's continuing subordination here as everywhere is their continuing subordination to capital. Some college-educated women in industrialized countries may have gained greater economic and personal independence in the past century. But for the vast majority of the world's women capitalism has meant more degradation and harder work. The liberation of women is inseparable from the destruction of capitalism.
Women as Waged Workers
Since the beginnings of capitalism women have worked for wages as part of what is known as the "formal sector" of the economy. The "dark satanic mills" of the textile industry in England and the United States were originally staffed by women (and children) laborers working up to 16 hours a day under horrific conditions. In recent decades, however, there has been an explosion in the use of women workers in factories all around the world. Some 70% of the workers in the Mexican maquiladoras (factories close to the U. S. border) are women, as are some 80% of the workers in the Asian electronic industry. In Indonesia and the Philippines, women workers--usually young unmarried women--work for pay that is often less than subsistence. In Java, young women jute workers, even if they live at home, do not make enough to cover lunches, clothes and bus fare to and from work. Korean women in electronics factories in a few years often wear out their eyes peering into microscopes and have to return home or seek other jobs. Haitian garment workers can earn as little as 14 U. S. cents per hour, with no fringe benefits. Governments throughout Asia and Latin America ban unions and legislate the terms of women's employment, effectively acting as pimps to the johns of international capital.
Capitalist corporations justify their superexploitation of the world's women by arguing that these women's wages are marginal to their families' earnings. Never mind that more than half the male workers in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, are unemployed or underemployed, or that one-third of the families are in fact headed by women garment workers: the view of women's waged work as secondary to their "real" function as housewives permits, indeed justifies, the gross undercompensation of women's work. Moreover, corporations invoke stereotypes of women's presumably "feminine" essence to rationalize women's assignment to routine, exhausting tasks. A Malaysian government advertisement to international corporations boasts of the "manual dexterity of the oriental female"; INTEL in Malaysia proclaims that its female employees are "more disciplined and easier to control" than men. Exploitation of the labor power of young women of color offers higher yields than any other industrial investment in the world today. The conjunction of racism and sexism is, from the standpoint of capital, unbeatable.
There has also been a global explosion in sex tourism; somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 young women from desperately poor rural families sell their bodies to wealthy male tourists in Bangkok alone. Many young female landless peasants driven to the cities in China's brutal return to "free market" capitalism can make a living only through prostitution; international and local businessmen are happy to hire their services. For millions of women around the world, capitalism means selling not only their labor power, but their bodies, in order to survive.
Women as Unwaged Workers
Important as the superexploitation of women's waged labor is to the contemporary capitalist economy, this is only one facet of women's profitability to capital. For the majority of the world's women work hard but receive no wages at all. More than half of the world's work is currently expended in the "informal sector" of the economy, that is, the self-employed production of handicrafts and foodstuffs for the market. In Latin America, 60% of urban workers are not proletarians (wage-earners), but peddlers, traders, and craftsworkers. Most rural laborers are in fact "semi-proletarians" who work for wages but also have to farm the land and engage in petty craft production to eke out a livelihood. But informal-sector female employment is not restricted to the so-called "Third World. "Many U. S. women workers supplement their meager wages by working many extra hours as "representatives" for Amway or Avon. The "family wage" (the wage one worker earns to support an entire family) has always been more of a myth than a reality for most of the world's male workers. But in recent decades capital has paid below-subsistence wages to more and more workers, both male and female. It is understood that non-wage-earning members of these workers' households--overwhelmingly women--will find a way to supplement the family income: hence Guatemalan women's production of purses and tablecloths, Indian women's weaving of lace mats, U. S. women's door-to-door hawking of soap and perfume.
From capital's point of view, such production is simply an extension of a woman's household tasks, undertaken in her "leisure" time. And, given the "housewife-ization" of women, many women also see their own work in this way. Peasant women in Oaxaca, Mexico, refer to their petty commodity production as an extension of their householding activities: not "trabajo" (work) but "ayuda" (helping out). That such a use of women's "free" time results in a 16 to 18 hour workday is conveniently overlooked. From a technical standpoint, capital does not "exploit" these nonwaged workers, since they--or their husbands-- usually market their product themselves, either to a consumer or to a middleman. Clearly, however, the existence of these "invisible" nonwaged informal sector workers--who, often working with their children, can bring in more than half of the family's annual income--allows capitalists to pay waged workers much less and thus increases the surplus value they gain.
Women's work is profitable to capitalists not just in the formal and informal sectors of the economy, however, but also in the home itself. For the great majority of the tasks that can be classed as "housework"--cleaning, shopping, cooking, laundering, mending--are essential to producing, on a day-by-day basis, the labor power (of both female and male workers) that creates surplus value for bosses at the point of production. Moreover, the various functions associated with child care--from help with homework to visits to the park to plain old "babysitting"--are, while often pleasureable, clearly "work" that is necessary for producing the next generation of laborers. Since most housework and childcare tasks are performed by women, in their status as housewives women actually work for free for the capitalists as daily and generational producers of labor power. But because this work is done in the home and is seen as part of a woman's "natural" function, it is not, in fact, usually seen as productive work. It is in fact invisible.
Women's work in the home is, then, productive activity, and not simply an extension of their "reproductive" role. Or, to put it another way, reproduction is production, insofar as both modes of activity create value. Again, as with women's nonwaged work in the informal sector, it cannot be precisely said that capital "exploits" women in the home, insofar as housework and childcare do not create surplus value. But it is capitalism that turned the definition of "work" into "wagedwork" to begin with: throughout most of human history work has had nothing to do with money. Clearly capital would have to pay waged workers a lot more if all the tasks involved in producing labor power were turned into wage-earning jobs! That wealthy people themselves have always viewed housework and childcare as "productive" tasks is shown by the willingness of the rich to pay workers to cook, launder, shop, and clean house for them, as well as to take care of--even "mother" and at times breastfeed --their children. What is apparently a "natural" expression of "reproductive" femininity for working-class women is apparently not required for the bourgeois woman in her "reproductive" role.
It is relatively useless to debate whether women are paid low wages because they are viewed as housewives or whether they are treated as housewives because they receive lower wages than men outside the home. The main point is that capitalism, building upon developments in earlier forms of class society, has managed to destroy the domestic economy in which men and women together contribute use values toward the community's survival. Around the globe capitalism has created dual spheres: a "public" world of work, where proletarians, both male and female, exchange labor power for wages; and a "private" world of the home, where women--regardless of how many hours they have worked in the formal or informal sectors--presumably fulfill their biological and spiritual destinies as nose-wipers and floor-scrubbers.
Women and the Welfare System
Particularly in the U. S. , there has recently been a vicious sexist (and racist) assault on welfare recipients. Women without partners who are trying to raise children are stigmatized as irresponsible, stupid, and sexually promiscuous. The "problem" of welfare is seen as the "problem" of the welfare recipient.
What is obscured in the fascist attack on poor mothers is that it is capitalism that has created the welfare system. AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) is a way of getting that sector of the workforce which is employed to pay for sustaining--and raising the children of--that sector of the workforce which is condemned to be unemployed. When the government designates 7% unemployment as "normal" and the Federal Reserve continually raises interest rates (and thus cools down the economy) whenever unemployment goes much below this level, it is pretty clear that many millions of U. S. residents are meant to be unemployed. The problem is not that welfare recipients lack the drive to work; the problem is that there are no jobs--much less the kinds of supports (decent health insurance, day care, etc. ) that single mothers need if they are to raise their families.
The bosses set up, and still need, welfare. Originally it was a way to enable a certain sector of the employer class to hire very poorly paid male workers (e. g. , hotel, restaurant, and other service workers) and have their children--sometimes born out of wedlock--supported through other workers' taxes. Until fairly recently, the U. S. economy has had jobs of one kind or another available to the largely marginal work force coming out of these welfare families. Recently, however, with the fluid movement of capital across national borders, U. S. capitalists have no real need for this sector of the population. They can hire workers in Indonesia for much less. They would just as soon most welfare recipients dropped dead. Hence the current drive toward welfare "reform," by which is meant cutting and eventually eliminating welfare.
While the bosses no longer need welfare recipients or their children as workers, however, they still need them as scapegoats. At a time when millions of U. S. workers are losing their jobs, their benefits, and their former wage levels, welfare recipients supply a convenient target for the anger and frustration of that segment of the working class which is still working. The sexist and racist stereotypes that have been pouring out of the mass media are rooted in this effort to deflect workers' hostility from the bosses to mothers who are without partners and without waged jobs. Lies are spread that welfare recipients stay on welfare for many years (whereas the average stay is two years); that they have large families (whereas the average welfare family size is 1. 9 children); that they are mainly black (whereas about the same number of white and black families are on welfare). It is no accident, moreover, that one of the main targets of Charles Murray's and Richard Herrnstein's recent racist pseudoscientific tract The Bell Curve is welfare recipients.
Welfare recipients are not "pathological"; capitalism is.
SEXISM AND MEN
Some people might grant that women are superexploited under capitalism. But they might still object that men and women just "are different" in fundamental ways that go far beyond the obvious anatomical differences between the sexes. They might also say that men benefit from sexism.
Communists disagree. We think that it is not male "nature," but the way that both men and women are socialized in a society based on maximizing profit, that leads some men to oppress women. We think, moreover, that men do not benefit from women's subordination, even though some men enjoy certain advantages that function as bribes to bind them to the existing class system. Communists see sexism as a class question and argue that it is directly in the interest of men and women of the working and middle classes to fight sexism.
Violence Against Women
Some would cite male-against-female violence as proof of an intrinsically aggressive--and oppressive--male nature. There is no doubt that violence against women is one of the most grotesque features of human interaction in class society. In traditional Vietnamese society, men could take concubines, but unfaithful wives were trampled by elephants. Chinese women for centuries had their feet bound to signify their subordination to men. To this day millions of adolescent girls undergo cliterodectomies (that is, removal of external genitalia) in parts of Moslem Africa to guarantee that they will experience little or no sexual pleasure, and thus be "faithful" to their husbands when they marry. But again, violence against women is not just a "Third World" problem. In the United States, domestic violence is rampant: the single most common cause of women's ending up in hospital emergency rooms is battering by a spouse or partner.
Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people in the world accept such manifestations and levels of violence as normal. Some men, attempting to justify their own or their friends' brutal practice, argue that it's "natural" for a man to beat "his" lover or wife--even that doing so makes the relationship sexier. Some women, while hating men for what they do, cynically agree that violence is intrinsic to men. The fact that male violence against women occurs in all segments of society, moreover, is sometimes cited as proof that this practice is not based in class oppression, but in "maleness" as such.
Communists argue that men's violence against women--while often apparently unrelated to economic issues--is in fact inseparable from men's perception of women's subordinate social positions as both waged and unwaged producers. If women, no matter how hard they work, are viewed and valued as second- or third-class contributors to a family's welfare, then men can assume that their superior earning power entitles them to power and authority. The primary models for human relationships in class society, moreover, are models of dominance and hierarchy. Bosses--whether Chinese landlords, African heads of state, or Italian capitalists--relate to "their" producers as masters to underlings. In dominating women within the family, men simply reproduce the main form that "difference" takes in society at large.
Furthermore, while men's violence toward women creates disruption and instability in many homes, it is a source of great stability to capital, insofar as it encourages male producers, however exploited and oppressed, to think that there's someone they too can kick around, that "a man's home is his castle. "Domestic violence is a safety valve for capital, siphoning off vast amounts of middle- and working-class men's frustration and anger at their own subordination and alienation. Moreover, it reciprocally strengthens capitalism by teaching children very early that inequality and oppression are "natural": if they witness patterns of hierarchy and brutality between their parents, they grow up expecting to find these in society at large.
The main form of human relationship in class society is possession, and the dominant mode of interaction is coercion. While slavery is out of date in all but a few places in the world, wage slavery is the order of the day. At least for the time they labor in the office or factory, workers are essentially "owned" by their bosses. Moreover, they are essentially coerced into labor; if they do not work, they are "free" to starve. Small wonder, then, that love--or what is called love--so often takes the form of possessiveness, and that struggle manifests itself as force. Men may take advantage of their (generally) superior upper-body strength and higher energy hormones when they brutalize the women they live with. But male anatomy and hormones are not the causes of present-day male violence; capitalism is.
How Men Are Hurt by Sexism
Some might concede that male violence against women both reflects and strengthens a hierarchical and coercive social order. But they might nonetheless maintain that men benefit from women's subordination. After all, they generally make higher wages than women. While it is true that in different parts of the world women make somewhere between 50% and 75% percent of what men earn, this does not mean that men gain from that differential. Men's wages are held down precisely because women's are especially depressed. If a woman makes $3. 60 a day sewing baseballs for Rawlings in Haiti, it makes it all the easier for other U. S. -owned Haitian industries to hire men at, say, $4. 50 a day; the few elite families who own 44% of Haiti's wealth laugh all the way to the bank. The differential between male and female wages serves mainly to divide the working class and hurts all workers. If male workers buy into the notion that women's work is worth less than their own, they are not only making it easier for bosses to superexploit women; they are also making it easier for the bosses to exploit them.
But, some might argue, even if men do not benefit from sexist pay differentials on the job, many husbands, fathers, and brothers still have someone to do housework for them. If a man and a woman both stagger home from work, and if she then starts cooking and doing laundry--and helping kids with multiplication tables at the same time--while he flips on the TV and has a beer, isn't he gaining from the situation?
In one sense, yes: there's nothing enjoyable or fulfilling about washing sheets and scrubbing pots. To the extent that husbands or fathers shoulder such tasks off as their wives' or daughters' "natural" domain, they get more leisure time for themselves. (In fact, the average husband adds about five hours a week to a wife's domestic workload. )By treating the women they live with as domestic servants, men become complicit with capitalism's systemic inequality and, in particular, with the ideological rationalization for paying women so little for the work they do. The few privileges that a man gains from having a woman perform various personal services for him are thus greatly outweighed by the losses he experiences from the fact that (1) his daughter earns less than a subsistence-level wage as a maquiladora worker; (2) his wife earns so few dollars for all the hours she puts in as a "self-employed" Amway distributor; (3) he himself has just been reclassified and taken a big pay cut because his boss now assumes that every adult in the modern family of the 1990s is working. Men's entrapment in the notion that women's work is less valuable than their own--and that much of it should be performed for free, for "love"--is one of the principal barriers to their understanding their own exploitation.
There needs to be an out-and-out struggle against sexism in the ranks of the working class. Without such a struggle, it will be impossible to make a revolution. Men workers must recognize that women are and have always been leaders in the struggle for emancipation of the dispossessed--from the abolitionist Harriet Tubman to the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai to the many women currently leading garment factory organizing internationally as members of PLP. Sexist behavior will not be tolerated in the ranks of the revolutionary movement we are building. Any man who considers himself a fighter for the working class is practicing complete hypocrisy if he does not participate fully and equally in the domestic production taking place in his own home every day. To lift a hand in violence against a female member of his class is, moreover, to commit a counterrevolutionary act.
Sexist Culture as a Reinforcement to Male Supremacy
While men should be struggled with sharply around issues such as domestic violence and domestic labor, violent and oppressive male behavior is reinforced daily by the mass culture of capitalist society. Our world is full of images that reinforce the notion that women are inferior and should be owned and dominated by men. Take the typical liquor ad gracing an urban billboard: a woman in an evening gown with a deep cleavage smiles seductively next to a bottle of vodka. Some might contend that displaying the half-clothed body of a young woman beside a bottle of liquor does not signify her inferiority. But this use of the woman's image objectifies her sexuality. She is--visually at least--made "available" to all who gaze upon her. She is, moreover, linked to the vodka as an object of possession: if you buy the vodka, you also get the woman, or at least a happiness comparable to what her actual presence might bring. (The "you" here is assumed of course to be male; women join in the gazing game by narcissistically identifying with the model. )While male images are also commodified--that is, turned into objects for sale--by advertising, rarely are men reduced to their bodies, or body parts, the way women are. If this is not inferiority, what is?
Mass culture barrages men and women with negative representations of gender that shape sexual desire along the lines of oppression, violence and possession. Pornography brutally objectifies women, much of it associating the most satisfying sexual intercourse with rape and other forms of violence. Some music videos feature half-naked women gyrating and crawling at men's feet. Male rappers frequently link asserting masculinity with insulting women. Many movies promote highly stereotyped images of male toughness and female passivity; even movies featuring supposedly emancipated women characters allow the camera plenty of shots lingering on the female anatomy. Stores sell Wonderbras for women and "I hate bitches" T-shirts for men--and fine plenty of buyers for both. Romantic songs depict the highest happiness as either possessing or belonging to the "loved" one.
Both women and men are constantly being urged to objectify themselves along the lines of gender dualism, that is, the notion that women and men are fundamentally different, and in fact defined in opposition to one another. How often do we hear the phrase, "the opposite sex"? To be female is to be not-male, and above all to be male is to be not-female. Capitalist corporations make big profits from consumer items devoted to reinforcing gender identities--from G. I. Joe and Barbie dolls to sports cars and fur coats. Moreover, capitalism as a system is ideologically shored up by the dissemination of the notion that women and men are just plain different--and that women are inferior to, and dependent on, men.
Women clearly bear the brunt of this sexist dehumanization. Women who enter into relations with men often encounter violence, abuse, and endless labor; women who are celibate by choice or circumstance are often derided as "old maids" and seen as "not real women. "Sometimes women even internalize notions of inferiority to the point of damaging themselves and other women. It was women who bound their daughters' feet in traditional China and who to this day wield the knife cutting off the young girl's clitoris. Many women tell their friends and daughters to accept male violence as part of woman's lot in life. But men are also hurt, psychologically as well as materially, by the assumption that they should assume the "dominant" role. If women are stereotyped as natural nurturers, men are supposed to be involved with their children's upbringing as rule-makers and rule-enforcers. The average father of a newborn, it has been shown, hold his baby less than one minute per day. Some men may feel relief that their wives take responsibility for helping kids with their homework; actually, they are missing a valuable opportunity to be close to their children. The emotional isolation from their children that many men experience--and that they often come to regret too late in their old age--is directly traceable to dichotomized notions of what mothers and fathers "ought" to be and do. Furthermore, many men are repelled by the grossness, even violence, of locker-room banter and wish to talk about their emotions--with the women in their lives, with male friends--but have not learned the most basic vocabulary for doing so. The rigid categories of gender into which men and women are pigeonholed in capitalist society inhibit full human development in men and women alike. The great majority of men and women have a common interest in doing away with a society that produces such barren and alienated human relations.
SEXISM AND FASCISM
Under "ordinary" capitalism, we have been arguing, women and men have a vital common stake in fighting sexism. As capitalism moves deeper and deeper into fascism, however, the fight against sexism becomes a matter of life and death.
The Nazis used sexist ideology as a crucial component in solidifying their political base. "Male" and "female" were rigidly dichtomized in Nazi propaganda. The Nazis preached "Kinder Kuche Kirche" ("Children Kitchen Church") as women's proper domain; established stud farms in which especially "beautiful" young women were chosen to bear the children of officers of the Reich; and--for German women--criminalized abortion. The Nazi high command was notorious for their bisexual carousing, but, as a matter of public policy, gay men and lesbians--who clearly did not fit into the official Nazi gender categories--were declared enemies of the state and exterminated in huge numbers. As part of the Nazis' biological doctrines of race and nation, women and men were reduced to their biological "essences" and, when found wanting, wiped out.
It is important, however, not to view fascism as a past historical phenomenon restricted to Italy and Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. Fascist regimes have thrived on almost every continent in the twentieth century, and most formerly "liberal democratic" countries have entered into a fascist phase. While anti-black and anti-immigrant racism are in some ways the "cutting edge" of the contemporary U. S. movement into fascism, sexism is playing a crucial role. The attack on affirmative action portrays both women and people of color as leeches on the body politic--when actually these programs, in giving a certain limited "advantage" to some women, blacks, hispanics, etc. , have helped to sustain--or at least halted the slide--of the wage levels of all workers. The current promotion of "family values" and the attack on abortion rights are baldfaced attempts to reinforce male supremacist ideology and subdue women's demands for equality on the job. The "family values" campaign--sponsored by the Republican right, but catered to by the Clinton Democrats--supports an increasingly authoritarian state by claiming as its model the "natural" patriarchal family. Those who do not conform to this model are not "real Americans. "
Moreover, the recent rise in homophobic assaults--which are rarely punished--and the various moves to rescind homosexual civil rights are part and parcel of the almost hysterical gender dualism fostered by fascism. The climate of fear and prejudice built up around AIDS, and the drive to reduce spending on AIDS--conveys the Nazi notion that some people--sexual "others"--are spreading disease and unworthy of life. Homophobia here supplements racism: while most "second wave" AIDS cases involve not white homosexual men but blacks and latinos of both sexes, the homophobic disgust whipped by the Pat Buchanans and Jesse Helmses blends into a racist disregard permitting and justifying massive neglect. Clearly the placement of gay men and lesbians in the economy of capitalism is different from that of women as a group, insofar as the former are not as such subject to sexist superexploitation. "Homophobia" and sexism" are related but by no means equivalent phenomena: the former is ideological, whereas the latter is both ideological and material. Nonetheless, capitalism in its fascist phase does all it can to encourage workers to think in terms of categories that divide them from other workers: race versus race, nation versus nation, gender versus gender. To the extent that homosexuals call into question the dichotomous gender categories dualism that sustain sexist ideology, they are the targets of increasingly vicious sexist attack.
SEXISM AND SOCIALISM
Some would argue that, even though women are clearly oppressed and exploited under capitalism, societies which supposedly emancipated workers from class exploitation did not free women from various forms of exploitation and subordination. Women cannot and should not look to communist parties to free them in the future, it can be argued, because communist parties have not freed them in the past. Women are oppressed by both capitalism and patriarchy--that is, male rule--and any movement for women's liberation cannot rely exclusively upon the eradication of class.
Communists in PLP do not agree with this position. We think that women's subordination is caused by class society, and class society alone. While socialism failed to emancipate women, it also failed to emancipate the working class: the two failures are inseparable.
This is not to deny the very real initial achievements of socialism in the arena of fighting sexism. In China, Vietnam, and Soviet Asia, socialist revolution meant that practices such as foot-binding, bride price, child and contractual marriage, polygamy, wife-beating, and veiling were immediately made illegal. According to the 1950 Chinese marriage law--which coincided with the Land Reform Act--women attained equal rights to own property. In the USSR, divorce became readily available after the Bolshevik Revolution (and some millions of women flocked to take advantage of it!). Tens of thousands of women in the Soviet East took part in ceremonies to burn the foul, hot, heavy horsehair veils that symbolized their possession by their husbands. In Cuba, the 1970 marriage law stipulated that men and women equally share child-rearing and domestic labor. In all socialist countries, abortion was--at least for a while--made legal and free, and prostitution was almost entirely eliminated. Under socialism, in other words, centuries-old oppressive practices were instantly wiped out by law. Many "rights" for which women were--and in many cases still are--struggling in capitalist "democracies" were treated as women's unquestioned human inheritance.
In addition, some important steps were taken toward reorganizing the economies of socialist societies so that women could enjoy in practice the freedoms and rights guaranteed by law. In the USSR, day care centers were established at factories, offices and collective farms so that women could breastfeed and care for their children during the workday. In some places community dining halls were set up, and certain domestic chores--e. g. ,laundry--were socialized. The most dramatic steps toward eliminating "women's work" in the home were taken during the commune movement of the late 1950s in China, when 90% of rural women joined the waged work force because nuclear households were for a time essentially dissolved and virtually all household tasks were socialized. During the Great Leap Forward, 4,980,000 nurseries and kindergartens were set up in rural China, along with 3,600,000 public dining rooms.
Yet socialism ultimately failed women. Women never participated fully in political life in socialist countries. While active on the local level and significantly present in secondary leadership, women numbered fewer and fewer the higher the level of political responsibility. In 1976 there was a total of some 197 Politboro members from the Eastern European countries, Albania, and China; of these, only 10 were women. In the same year, the USSR had 75 top government posts; none was filled by a woman.
Despite women's shouldering guns and undertaking many "men's" tasks during the period of insurrection, moreover, work quickly fell back into being ordered--and compensated--along gendered lines, even if the content of the gendered categories at times altered. In the USSR, older women were streetsweepers, and heavy manual work in the fields was done by women, whereas men tended to drive the busses and operate the tractors. The popular Soviet image of the smiling young woman driving the tractor was a myth: females never totaled more than 4% of the total number of tractor drivers. Perhaps not surprisingly, Soviet male agricultural workers earned on the average 25% more than women. At the same time, the health care professions--including the job of doctor--became highly feminized. As a consequence, however, being a physician in the USSR became no great shakes: by the 1970s doctors (mostly women) started at wages only 2/3 those of skilled workers (mostly men).
The payment of unequal wages to women and men for comparable work in socialist countries was compounded by a retreat from the commitment to socializing domestic labor. At the height of collectivization in the USSR, no more than 30% of worksites had daycare centers and dining halls. These were attacked only to the most profitable enterprises: the primary purpose of such facilities was to maximize production, not to lay the basis for new relations between women and men and new forms of the family. The Chinese experiment in socialized domestic labor collapsed along with the rest of the commune movement in the early 1960s. The argument advanced in defense of the cutback in socialized domestic services was that it had proven too costly to pay wages to workers to produce the labor power of other workers--that is, to do what women had previously done for free. Besides, it was said, grandmothers were available for child care in the home. But these cutbacks inevitably meant that women were increasingly given mixed messages under socialism. On the one hand, they were urged to participate as waged workers in the formal economy. On the other, they were not being given the support systems necessary for such participation. Women were essentially being told that they should work full-time for pay and then part-time for free.
Even the equal wages paid to women and men in a few lines of work did not establish full equality, for women were not paid when they took time off work--as they routinely did--to tend to necessary domestic tasks. Women's domestic labor in the home became once again uncompensated and therefore invisible. While cooking a pot of borscht for a neighborhood dining hall had been viewed as productive--that is, waged--labor in the USSR of the 1930s, by the 1950s this was see not as a public productive task but a private reproductive one. Not surprisingly, the inequality in men's and women's earnings was accompanied by an inequality in the amounts of leisure time they enjoyed in socialist countries. In Czechoslovakia of the 1970s, women were reported to have eleven hours a week less leisure time than men.
Gender inequality persisted after socialist revolutions partly because sexist assumptions were deeply rooted, especially in men. "A hundred women are not worth a single testicle" was a Vietnamese saying many hundreds of years old. Some men reacted violently to the prospect of losing control over the domestic services of their wives. After 100,000 Bukharan women burned their veils on International Women's Day in 1927, hundreds were murdered by their husbands or fathers. In 1950-51, tens of thousands of young Chinese wives who demanded equality in their marriages either were murdered by their husbands or committed suicide after being socially ostracized.
Another reason why socialist countries never eradicated sexism is that none ever undertook a concerted campaign to call upon men to shoulder their part of the burden of domestic labor. Revolutionary movements from Mozambique to Vietnam featured the poster-figure of the young woman bearing a baby in one arm and an AK-47 in the other; none, however, promoted the icon of a young man in the same posture. During the period of socialist construction in Vietnam, "new cultured families" were held up as models, but they were praised for their harmonious relations and their commitment to raising socialist-minded children rather than for setting examples in sharing household tasks equally. In the USSR of 1944, women who had ten children or more were honored by entry into the "Order of Motherhood. "In 1974, a Soviet study announced that women's presence in the home with children under the age of four was an absolute necessity--a "finding" that, needless to say, called into question the nation's entire network of daycare centers.
But the main reason for the persistence of male dominance in socialist societies was not feudalistic survivals or the recalcitrance of men. The primary reason sexist attitudes could not be rooted out was that women's productive work was not being valued equally with that of men. Cuba could legislate till the cows came home that men and women were to be equal partners in domestic labor. But as long as Cuban men worked in "men's" jobs and earned substantially more than their wives or daughters, it was impossible to convince them that they "ought" to wash shirts and do dishes. The Chinese government can proclaim against female infanticide; but as long as a male child promises to be a better compensated earner than a female, and thus a better support for his parents in their old age, the murderous practice will persist.
Moreover, as socialism moved away from egalitarianism and back toward market capitalism, women's unwaged labor in the revived informal sector of the economy became increasingly important to the subsistence of the working class. In agriculturally based socialist economies, the private plots that provided families with food for subsistence--and, increasingly, with commodities for petty exchange on local markets--were tended almost exclusively by women. In villages following ujamaa (communalization) policies in socialist Tanzania, for example, married women still tended plots owned by individual families, while their husbands received wages for work on the communal farms and even marketed the surplus product of their wives' domestic labor. Under socialism, in other words, Tanzanian wives saw little change in their position in the relations of production.
It could be said, indeed, that socialist accumulation--that is, the production of the surplus needed to jumpstart socialist economies--took place largely off the backs of undercompensated women working in the formal economy and uncompensated women working in the informal economy and in the home. Even under socialism women continued to experience sexist exploitation. It was not failures in governmental propaganda or the tenacity of traditional attitudes, but continuing material inequalities between the valuation of men's and women's labor, that guaranteed women's continuing subordination to men.
Socialism failed women, then, not because proletarian revolutions did not address "patriarchy" along with class oppression, but because they did not eradicate inequality. Bent upon above all developing the productive forces and committed to eliminating wages and producing for use only in an ever-receding communist future, socialism places primacy upon accumulation over the social relations under and through which accumulation takes place. Because of this tragically mistaken priority, socialist societies have not simply slowed in their advance toward, but have in fact at this point entirely backtracked away from, the movement toward communist egalitarianism. Retaining wages as a means of compensating workers for the work they have done and of motivating them to do more, socialist societies have lapsed into the essentially capitalist practice of equating productive work with waged work in the formal sector. While they have made attempts to exhort men to view women as their equals, these societies have never recognized all necessary human labor as labor that is equally productive and equally valuable. The consequences of this failure have been devastating, for men and women alike.
COMMUNISM AND THE FIGHT AGAINST SEXISM
Socialism failed to emancipate women, but communism will succeed. Women do not need separate organizations to guarantee that their interests will be safeguarded in revolution--after all, the Bolsheviks and Chinese Communists had such organizations, and women still got the short end of the stick. What is needed is an international, multiracial party consisting of women and men that is uncompromisingly committed to communism--that is, complete equality. PLP is that party.
Communism Versus Socialism
Through a critical analysis of how twentieth-century socialist movements have been derailed and destroyed, primarily through their own internal weaknesses, PLP has determined that fighting for socialism is a waste of time and effort. It is necessary to fight from the outset for nothing less than a society in which women and men work not for wages, but out of commitment to the collective--that is, for communism. They will produce not for exchange, for there will be no money: they will produce for use. While this program may sound utopian, we should remember that throughout most of human history people have in fact lived in this way--although in primitive, undeveloped societies that were at the mercy of nature. It is only class society that has destroyed people's incentive to work voluntarily and cooperatively in ways that fulfill the needs of both the individual and the group; it is only class society that has made money the sole means of compensating and motivating labor. The great majority of the world's people have it in their interest, however, to live without wages and without social hierarchy. We don't need the bosses or their money.
No matter what skeptics may say, only communism can abolish sexism. Women's superexploitation and subordination are directly linked to the predominance of exchange-production over use-production under capitalism. Much of the work women currently do consists in creating things and performing services that people need--but never getting paid for doing so. Women will continue to be domestic slaves, superexploited workers, and second-class citizens as long as capitalism lasts, for capitalism is happy to have them just where they are.
It is only under communism that all production will be for use, and all socially necessary labor recognized as productive labor--and therefore that the stigma currently attached to "women's work" will be removed. This is not to say that, in the first stages of communism, there will not have to be rigorous ideological struggle to break down the traditional sexual division of labor. Both women and men will be used to doing things in the old way. We will have to use all available aspects of the cultural apparatus--movies, videos, books, the visual arts, sports, social clubs, and of course the schools--to demonstrate how poisonous sexism is for the entire working class. But--unlike the comparable ideological struggles sporadically undertaken under socialism--this struggle will be materially sustained by the abolition of any difference in compensation--that is, in any different payment for men's and women's work. All work will be unwaged. As communism develops, then, there will be no material basis for differentiating between "women's work" and "men's work"; there will only be human work, divided between the sexes in egalitarian and creative ways that we can only begin to imagine. There will be no more division between "public" and "private" spheres. And, as a consequence, there will be no dualistic conceptions of "male" and "female" that set the mold for human development--no superiority and inferiority, no dominance and submission.
Communism Versus Feminism
The feminist movement, while attracting to its ranks many energetic and honest people committed to ending women's subordination, does not effectively fight sexism. Indeed, because it posits that not capitalism but something in men is the cause of women's oppression, it usually turns women and men against one another. Lacking a class analysis, it proposes that all women have more in common with one another than bourgeois women have with bourgeois men, and working-class women with working-class men. Feminism only leads anti-sexist fighters back into the arms of capitalism.
Feminism takes up important issues, but in a counterproductive way. Anti-pornography feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, for example, legitimately point out how pornography degrades women and fosters violence against them, but they build the illusion that capitalist governments can pass laws that will safeguard women--even though, as we have pointed out, violence against women is one of capitalism's most important safety valves for channeling and controlling working- and middle-class men's alienation. Moreover, some anti-pornography feminists--e. g. , Dworkin--demonize all male desire for women and treat all heterosexual intercourse as rape. Pro-choice feminists, while legitimately resisting the fundamentalist religious right's attack on abortion, treat the issue of abortion in individualistic and middle-class terms as a woman's "right to control her own body. "This strategy separates abortion rights away from other aspects of reproductive health care of equal importance to working-class women--contraception, prenatal care, maternity benefits--and turns a working-class public health issue into a right-of-privacy issue. It is perhaps no accident that the logo of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) is the Statue of Liberty! Finally, equity feminists--that is, feminists such as those in NOW (National Organization for Women) seeking equal legal and economic treatment for women--ignore capitalism's systemic need to superexploit women's labor, both paid and unpaid. Equity issues often turn out to be "glass ceiling" issues concerned with the small percentage of middle-class women who face discrimination in professional and middle-management jobs. The millions of women who toil in mostly-female garment and electronics factories are untouched by the demands of equity feminism. Even the demand for "comparable worth"--that is, equal compensation in female-coded jobs--leaves untouched the vast arena of work performed by women in the home for free, as well as women's participation in the unwaged "self-employed" (informal) sector of the economy.
Feminists may come away from United Nations-sponsored conferences abuzz with celebrations of global sisterhood. But all the "women of the world" do not have the same interests. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, who is presiding over vicious welfare cuts to unemployed women and lay-offs of women state workers, has nothing in common but biology with the women whose lives she is helping to ruin. The woman president of Turkey who recently sent in the Turkish army to destroy Kurdish "strongholds" is the enemy of all oppressed Kurd workers and peasants, women as well as men. The list could go on.
If the great majority of the world's women are to be freed from the massive sexist exploitation and oppression that they face, their slogan must be not "women of the world unite," but "workers of the world unite. "
Join PLP to Eliminate Sexism
Progressive Labor Party, which is organizing around the world, stands for complete equality between women and men. In the area where we are most developed, the United States, women and men occupy positions of equal importance and influence within the organization, at all levels. In areas where we are less developed but growing rapidly, such as India and Mexico, we carry forward an uncompromising struggle to bring women into all levels of leadership. Knowing that no one in capitalist society comes to the communist movement free of sexist ideas and attitudes, we struggle around issues of sexism in a collective way. But the struggle is sharp; communists do not tolerate sexism in word or deed.
PLP works hard to organize women workers, who, as both females and proletarians--and often as people of color as well--are frequently the most class-conscious and militant fighters. PLP's international concentration in the garment industry is largely a concentration among women workers; this organizing will not succeed unless garment workers and their families understand the nature of sexism and fight it tooth and nail--both on the job and in their personal lives. But we do not call upon women to form women's caucuses, nor do we have any special women's groups within our own ranks. As the foregoing analysis shows, we believe that sexism hurts men and women alike, and that therefore it is best fought by women and men together.
The great majority of women and men have only their chains to lose, and a world to win.
(4th Edition, February 1995) published by the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
In the fall of 1994, the newsletter of the Los Angeles chapter of Mensa (an organization for people with high IQs) published an article calling for the sterilization of individuals with low IQs. This open advocacy of Nazi-style fascism coincided with the outrageous anti-immigrant racism centered on California's notorious Proposition 187. In the wake of Prop. 187, organizers had also begun to push the so-called "California Civil Rights Initiative." This would bar affirmative action programs for women and minorities in all state government jobs, contracts, and schools. Nationally, Democrats and Republicans alike were converging on a plan for "welfare reform." This campaign justified brutal cutbacks in vital services by using vile racist and sexist stereotypes of black women having "too many babies."
The pending welfare bill would make recipients work 35 hours per week for their checks, at a median wage of $2.43 an hour. In the wake of Prop. 187, employers slashed wages in garment and other California industries based on immigrant labor. Prisoners in the US are increasingly serving as virtually slave labor, sometimes even for private enterprises. "Three strikes and you're out" will swell their ranks. These measures -- all justified by racism -- drive down wages across the board. It is no exaggeration to say that racism is the cutting edge of a very sharp attack on the lives and livelihoods of the entire working class.
This racism is fueled by professors who dress up their prejudices in the language of science and wrap themselves in the cloak of "academic freedom." Traits such as criminality, alcoholism, intelligence, and homosexuality, we are told, are biologically determined. Daniel Koshland, editor of the influential journal Science, even suggested a genetic basis for homelessness. The federal "Violence Initiative" seeks biological "factors" in crime and proposes drugging large numbers of young children (mainly black boys) in the name of "violence prevention."
Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's book The Bell Curve (1994) is the most alarming recent example of this trend. The authors assert that the government should reduce the number of children born to poor "low IQ" mothers by eliminating welfare and tightening immigration. Otherwise, they say, it will have to set up a "virulently racist custodial state" to control urban "high tech Indian reservations." That's some choice: eugenics or fascism! Although they present nothing new or scientific, they are given wide exposure by the mass media, from "Nightline" to Newsweek, from the New York Times to The New Republic, from Discover to the Rolling Stone.
Murray and Herrnstein explain in their preface why they wrote their slick and revoltingly racist book. In the late twentieth century, they say, "the principle of equal rights triumphs" but the US has become increasingly polarized. On one side are the "fortunate ones [who] commonly have six-figure incomes" while "in the other group, life gets worse, and its members collect at the bottom of society." And "pressures from these contrasting movements at the opposite ends of society put terrific stress on the entire structure." They want to influence policymaking in the face of this social crisis. To be blunt: they are among the leading theorists for the fascist agenda.
CHARLES MURRAY, BOSSES' MOUTHPIECE
The Bell Curve fits squarely in the sordid tradition of American Eugenics. Amid growing labor militancy of the 1910s-1920s, US leaders used IQ tests and Eugenics to weaken class unity with anti-immigrant racism. When anti-racist rebellions rocked the country in the mid-1960s, soon followed by a strike wave, Arthur Jensen's anti-Black update on Eugenics -- also centered on IQ -- took center stage. Now along come Murray and Herrnstein, warning that class conflict will tear the country apart and encouraging white middle-class readers to blame "less intelligent" Black and Latin workers for everyone's problems.
The first edition of this pamphlet appeared nearly twenty-five years ago. It was a response to the resurgence of academic racism encouraged especially by the work of a Berkeley psychologist, Arthur Jensen. Students and teachers distributed thousands of copies of three editions on campuses across the US. They helped to organize mass, often militant, protests that put the academic racists on the run.
"Letters I have received from professors at Berkeley and elsewhere lead me to believe that there may have been voices which might have been heard in the controversy had they not been silenced by fear," Jensen whined in 1972. "In the 1970s," Murray and Herrnstein complain, "scholars observed that colleagues who tried to say publicly that IQ tests had merit, or that intelligence was substantially inherited, or even that intelligence existed as a definable and measurable human quality, paid too high a price. Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could be jeopardized by speaking out."
To that we say: "Hooray!" Imagine how much harder it would have been for the Nazis to carry out their program of genocide if anti-racists had driven Nazi professors underground in the 1920s and early 1930s instead of vice versa. The PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY is proud of the role we played in helping to organize the International Committee Against Racism to galvanize the opposition to the academic racists. But Herrnstein and Murray add: "Research on cognitive abilities continued to flourish, but only in the sanctuary of the ivory tower." Anti-racist students, workers, and professors must step up the fight against academic racism so there will be no sanctuary anywhere for the Nazi theorists of today.
The present edition of "Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class" has two main goals. The first is to arm our readers for the fight against racist ideology. The second is to explain why we believe that this fight can only be won, finally, by destroying the capitalist system that relies on and nurtures racism.
EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY
The "Old" Eugenics: From IQ Tests to Gas Chambers
Stanford professor Lewis Terman was a leader in the Eugenics movement seventy-five years ago. According to Eugenics, the so-called "inferior races" included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Mexicans and black people. Eugenicists said they had too many children, and the so-called "superior white race" didn't have enough. That, they said, caused social problems such as poverty and crime. "Inferiority" and "superiority" were measured with Terman's Stanford-Binet IQ test. Eugenicists successfully campaigned for restrictive immigration laws and forced sterilization.
Government and business leaders supported eugenics. The Carnegie steel fortune, Harriman railroad money, and Rockefeller's oil profits backed institutions like the Station for Experimental Evolution and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Together with the US Public Health Service, the ERO set up an inspection station at Ellis Island in 1912. Here most new immigrants to the US were given IQ tests. Over 80% of those from southern and eastern Europe were declared "feebleminded." The Second National Conference on Race Betterment, held in 1915, included representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation, US Steel, Ford Motor Company, Aetna Life Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance, National Cash Register Company, and the Carnegie Foundation.
During World War I, the US President was Woodrow Wilson, who had segregated all federal civil service jobs and had given his official blessing to the pro-KKK movie "Birth of a Nation." He appointed racist Harvard psychologist Robert Yerkes to the position of Chief of Army Testing. Yerkes and his eugenics colleagues gave IQ tests to tens of thousands of new recruits. They concluded (of course) that their tests proved black and immigrant people to be inferior. Yerkes' protégé was Carl Brigham, founder of the Educational Testing Service (the outfit that runs SAT tests today). Brigham reported that "Negro," "Alpine," and "Mediterranean" people were inferior to "Nordics." His report helped persuade Congress to pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. This law cut off almost all immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Many who were locked out of the US by this law later died in Hitler's gas chambers.
The main impact of Eugenics was to spread racist ideas far and wide. Big businessmen and the government officials who served them feared the working class movement that was gaining in numbers and militancy during the 1910s and 1920s. Their fears intensified when capitalist intervention failed to crush the 1917 Russian socialist revolution. Immigrants were among the strongest and most radical leaders among workers in the US. They helped to organize the Communist Party. Thousands were deported as "dangerous aliens." The US rulers used eugenics, along with the Ku Klux Klan and other fascist organizations, to weaken the unity of the industrial working class and to build support for the racist and anti-communist terrorism perpetrated by the government itself.
By 1930, thirty-four states had laws against marriages between whites and blacks (and sometimes Asians as well). Twenty-four states had passed laws calling for sterilization of the "feebleminded," criminals, and paupers. By 1927, Terman's home state of California had sterilized nearly 4,000 people, mostly from immigrant families. Some 80,000 were eventually sterilized in state institutions across the country. In Lynchburg, Virginia alone, 8,000 children were sterilized between 1927 and 1972. When the Nazis passed the racist German Sterilization Law in 1935, they modeled it on laws already on the books in the United States. The Nazi "final solution" was a logical extension of the ideas of Terman, Yerkes, and Brigham.
Allan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus, William Tucker in The Science and Politics of Racial Research, and Stefan Kuhl in The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, have all demonstrated the close ties between American eugenicists and German Nazis. Among Hitler's American supporters was the textile magnate Wickliffe Draper. He paid for the establishment of the Pioneer Fund in 1937 to support "race betterment" in the United States. Draper wanted to send black Americans "back" to Africa. He distributed the Nazi eugenics propaganda film "Hereditary Defective" to high schools and churches across the US. Later, the Pioneer Fund began to bankroll professors and journals (notably Mankind Quarterly) dedicated to racism and eugenics. As we will see, virtually all the research seeking cause-and-effect links between IQ, social behavior, and race in the US from 1937 to the present has come from the fascist Pioneer Fund-Mankind Quarterly network.
Jensenism: Bosses' Response to Anti-Racist Rebellion
In the ten years following the 1954 US Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools, racist theoreticians (with the help of the Pioneer Fund) carried the Eugenics flag in the southern states. Then anti-racist rebellions began to rock the rest of the country: Harlem (New York City) in 1964, Watts (in LA) in 1965, Detroit in 1967, and almost everywhere in 1968. Black workers began to give important leadership in strikes that united black and white in sharp struggle against the bosses: the Newport News shipyard, General Electric, General Motors, the US Post Office, and many more.
Re-enter Eugenics! In 1969, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen published an article in the Harvard Educational Review entitled "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Its main point -- that black children are genetically less intelligent than white children -- was broadcast over the length and breadth of the land by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and Life, among other media. The Pioneer Fund bankrolled Jensen's work to the tune of over $1.1 million dollars. For 22 years, Jensen collaborated with Nobel-prize physicist William Shockley, also a Pioneer Fund beneficiary. "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals," Shockley wrote in 1972, "so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably be used by the pragmatic man in the street."
In 1992, the unabashed Nazi Roger Pearson -- with the help of Jensen -- edited Shockley's collected ravings on "Eugenics and Race." Murray and Herrnstein do not even try to distance themselves from this fascist confederation. Of Shockley they say only that he was "as eccentric as he was brilliant" and that "he seemed to relish expressing sensitive scientific findings in a way that would outrage or disturb as many people as possible."
The same Richard Herrnstein followed Jensen's suit in 1971 with "IQ," published in the Atlantic Monthly at the urging of editor Robert Manning. (As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1961-64, it had been Manning's job to lie about the early stages of the Vietnam war.) Three other magazines began pushing the Jensen/Herrnstein/Shockley theme with particular energy: Commentary, Encounter, and The Public Interest. All three -- and Irving Kristol, who at one time or another edited all three -- had been exposed in 1967 as being controlled by the CIA. Their heavy involvement in "Jensenism" shows clearly that the government was behind it. Around the same time, too, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the US Public Health Service began giving lavish grants for a whole new field of Jensen-style research known as "human behavioral genetics." David Rosenthal, Chief of Laboratories at NIMH, joined Jensen, Herrnstein, and 47 others in signing a statement in American Psychologist endorsing the "hereditarian" view of human behavior.
No wonder, then, that Fortune magazine praised the "hard-headed realism" of the new "nativists" (that is, racists), singling out Jensen and Herrnstein as their leaders. No wonder that, in the words of then-White House advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "the winds of Jensen were gusting through the capital at gale force." You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the US ruling class was promoting Jensenism to whip up racism and to build support for cuts in education and social services.
The consequences of Eugenics, new or old, are disastrous. Whether it leads to the repression characteristic of the US in the 1920s, or to the brutality of Hitler's Germany, is but a matter of degree. When eugenicist thinking starts to become popular in the press, and in the thinking of government officials, and when it is taught in the schools, the working people and students are in for trouble.
But as thousands, and then millions, join the fight against racist eugenics, it will be the racists and their bosses (the big capitalists) who are in for trouble. Through the struggle against academic racism, students and workers come to understand better the thoroughly racist nature of capitalism itself. Many will become communists and join the fight to smash capitalism and build a new society based on equality and cooperation. In spite of the rise of fascism around the world, a bright future is waiting for us to seize it.
THE IQ ARGUMENT
For the last 75 years, IQ tests have been the main pseudo-scientific justification for racism against immigrant and black workers. The racist argument goes like this:
Lie #1. IQ measures some important trait that can be called "general intelligence." This trait (called "g") differs significantly from person to person. It correlates highly with success in school and later life.
Lie #2. According to the methods of population genetics, IQ is highly heritable. As much as 80% of the difference among people's intelligence may be genetically determined.
Lie #3. Racial differences are also inherited. So, though nobody claims to have absolute proof, genetics probably explains black-white differences in average IQ scores.
Lie #4. Success in modern society depends on intelligence.
Lie #5. That's why liberal social programs have failed to create equality.
We don't have room in a short pamphlet to itemize everything that's wrong with these arguments. For those who wish to learn more about the IQ controversy and the history of scientific racism, we have included a list of publications that have demolished these lies. The issues are really not very complicated.
All of us should be prepared to expose and attack the bosses' racist lies, especially when they come up in classrooms and textbooks. But we will not sit on a platform with a Charles Murray or an Arthur Jensen and debate the equality of billions of non-white people. The struggle against these racists is not solely or even mainly an intellectual one. We must build a mass movement uniting students with workers and youth to stop the Nazi ideologues -- along with all other Nazis -- in their tracks.
Lie #1: "IQ Tests Measure Intelligence"
IQ tests are supposed to measure an inborn trait called "g," or "general intelligence." Murray and Herrnstein's phrase "cognitive ability" means the same thing. But defining "intelligence" is a political question .
In a capitalist society (like ours) that is based on a struggle between opposing classes, the answer will depend on where you stand in that struggle. What's smart for capitalists is the opposite of what's smart for workers. For example, business professors from the University of Wisconsin, UCLA, and Harvard are now developing a theory of "agile management." This means eliminating job categories and using more temporary workers and part-timers in order to reduce labor costs and increase profits. It is smart for the US capitalists, because it helps them to compete internationally. But to workers -- for example, at Boeing, where "agile management" is being introduced -- it seems like a pretty dumb idea. As of February, 1995, it has already meant the loss of 6500 jobs, or 6% of the Boeing work force. It will mean more work for less pay for those who remain. What's smart for workers is to organize and fight back.
It is smart for bosses to promote racism and individual competition among workers, but it is smart for workers to overcome these divisions and unite as a class against the bosses. From the point of view of the communist Progressive Labor Party, rebellion and revolution are the most intelligent kinds of behavior working people and students can adopt. Obviously Murray and Herrnstein -- and the makers of IQ tests -- disagree.
Every type of measurement assumes some form of distribution of intelligence. For example, it would be scientifically valid to develop a test that 99% of the population would pass. Then we would "find" that 99% of the population is intelligent and 1% or so is mentally defective. Such a test would assume that intelligence is simply an attribute of the normal functioning human. It would not be useful at all for those wishing to defend social inequality. After all, if pretty much everyone is intelligent, why should a few be richer and more powerful than the rest?
Existing IQ tests assume that intelligence is a single thing that can be measured with one number. They assume there are large differences in intelligence, that most people have a mediocre amount, a few have a lot, and some very little. By the definition of these tests, half the population is "below average" in intelligence. Only a few (Murray and Herrnstein's "cognitive elite") are smart enough to make decisions and run things.
Some influential psychologists, notably Howard Gardner, deny that "g" really exists . But Murray and Herrnstein blow them off by claiming that its existence is "beyond significant technical dispute" within the "classical tradition" of their field. This is like arguing that astrology and fortune-telling are scientific because astrologers and psychics all agree. The whole tradition of psychometrics (IQ testing) was built up around the same assumptions about intelligence that Murray and Herrnstein believe in. This whole tradition is racist and elitist to the core. The crucial research in this field for the last 50 years has been funded primarily by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund.
The early testers loved and admired the ruling class. Listen to Terman: "Moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence." Or E.L. Thorndike, one of the most important figures in the history of US educational psychology: "Our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves." But it took many tries before they came up with a test on which the rich would come out on top and the poor on the bottom. In fact, it took a lot of work to come up with a test that would serve its stated purpose: to correlate well with other measures of "success" such as class background and performance in school.
Here is Herrnstein's own account of how Binet constructed the prototype IQ test: "He took some children rated by their teachers as the brightest and the dullest ... and subjected them to a lengthy series of tests.... A number of the tests worked, which is to say they distinguished between the two groups of children." The testing manual for the Stanford-Binet Scale says, "Many of the so-called performance test items tried out for inclusion in the scale were eliminated because they contributed little or nothing to the total score." That is, when checked with teachers' ratings, they did not match, so they were dropped. The IQ tests were designed to reflect a racist and elitist school system that was itself designed to reproduce a grossly unequal social system.
Much has been written about just how the tests reflect their makers' biases. They are heavily weighted toward language: not just everyday language, but the sort of vocabulary found mainly in literature. They put a high premium on speed, on motivation, on willingness to cooperate with the tester. Many questions require that the child either believe in bourgeois values like patriotism, or be cagey enough to give the answer the tester wants. But the main point is that if they weren't biased, they wouldn't serve their intended purpose: to justify inequality.
One way to see this is to look at the history of gender differences in IQ. On Terman's original (1916) Stanford-Binet, the average score for women was about 10 points less than for men. Twenty years later, the political climate had changed. The 1937 version was standardized for sex. Some questions were added and some dropped, equalizing the means for men and women. Presto! All of a sudden, the tests showed women to be as "smart" as men. Testmakers could easily use the same procedure to eliminate average differences between black and white people, or between the working class and the capitalist class.
If the testmakers did that, the "predictive value" of the tests would be lessened. Those who did well on the tests wouldn't be as likely to do well in school or to make a lot of money. That's what happened when women's scores were equalized. It was no longer cool to say that men were smarter. But the US was (and is) still a very sexist society. Women were (and are) not treated equally in the workplace, so the test lost some of its ability to predict who would do well in later life. In just the same way, as long as racism keeps black and immigrant workers in the worst jobs at the lowest pay, attempts to equalize "racial" differences in average test scores would lower the "predictive value" of the tests.
All this "prediction" is really after-the-fact rationalization. Capitalism requires inequality and competition. The whole idea of "intelligence" as something that people have in different amounts exists only to justify capitalist inequality and competition.
Lie #2: "IQ Is Highly Heritable"
There's no reason to assume that "intelligence" is a trait that varies widely from one person to another, and certainly no reason to think that IQ measures anything of the sort. But even if we cared about IQ, the argument about "heritability" would still be bogus.
You can measure how much a trait varies among the individuals in a population. "Heritability" is a statistical method of estimating how much of the variation can be accounted for by genetic variation in that population, but only in a given environment. The heritability of a given trait might be extremely high and yet have (as Lewontin, Rose and Kamin point out) "absolutely no predictive power for the result of changing the set of environments." To illustrate: several diseases (such as phenylketonuria and Wilson's disease) are known to be single-gene disorders. However, whether or not possessors of that gene develop the symptoms of the disease depends entirely on whether or not their environment includes appropriate medical or dietary interventions. Popularizers, and sometimes researchers themselves, confuse the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "genetically determined" and the social concept of "unchangeable." These things are not at all the same. We all have genes for hair color, but people change the color of their hair all the time!
In any case, the studies generally cited to "prove" the heritability of IQ are either seriously flawed or totally fraudulent. The main so-called "evidence" for the heritability of IQ comes from the studies of identical twins Jensen cited twenty years ago. The Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin has shown that Jensen's whole argument depended on fraudulent "data" collected (or made up) by Cyril Burt over a 40-year period. Others have confirmed Kamin's findings.
Murray and Herrnstein have two things to say about this embarrassing fact. First, they tell us -- without citing arguments or evidence -- that we should believe two other writers who claim they have vindicated Burt. Second, they say, new studies by Thomas Bouchard have come up with a figure for the heritability of IQ that is almost identical to Burt's.
Bouchard was Jensen's student. His team has received more money from the Pioneer Fund than any other recipient -- well over a million dollars to date. In 1979 he began his "Minnesota Twins" study with a pair of separated identical twins named Jim, whose first and second wives had the same names, who both drove Chevys and who had given their dogs the same name. Mass media publicity rounded up other pairs of separated twins who were eager to show off their identical tastes for particular brands of beer or cigarettes. This whole circus would be laughable except for the fact that Bouchard's "findings" are cited in current human-genetics textbooks to show that social behavior is "in the genes."
And the third authority Murray and Herrnstein cite for the literature on heritability of IQ is Penn State professor Richard Plomin -- yet another Pioneer Fund recipient! Other critics have already deconstructed in detail the pseudoscientific hocus-pocus of this neo-Nazi cabal. Stephen J. Gould, for example, has pointed out that the correlations Murray and Herrnstein report between AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) scores and NLSY (National Longitudinal Study of Youth) data are extremely weak. With all the funds and resources at their disposal, Murray and Herrnstein were unable to do little more than cobble together 800 pages of pathetic lies. The Bell Curve is no more scientific than Hitler's Mein Kampf. In the next section we will show the direct links between these two monuments of master-race theory.
One final point about statistics. Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen and the others, make much of correlations between IQ and other statistics, such as rates of poverty or crime. Correlation is often confused with causation. Correlation simply means finding that two characteristics tend to be found together. Causation is a much stronger claim that the two are interconnected in such a way that one leads to the other. One of the first lessons in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, or even a common cause. For example, your age over the last ten years shows a strong statistical correlation with the size of the national debt: both have been increasing steadily. But did one cause the other?
Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen, admit all this. In fact, they go out of their way to say that we can't assume that Eugenics and IQ testing actually influenced immigration policy in the 1920s just because they accompanied each other in time and goals. But if correlation doesn't imply causation, then their whole book really says nothing at all. Since when do Nazis care about consistency -- let alone the truth?
Lie #3: "Black People Are Not As Smart As Whites"
This centuries-old racist slander is behind the whole IQ charade. And there's not a shred of a reason to believe it.
Jensen, in the mid-1970s, accepted as fact a grotesque list of physical differences long cited by ardent racists as supposedly distinguishing black from white people. Like him, Murray and Herrnstein just assume that there are biologically distinct "races." "Some ethnic groups differ genetically for sure," they write, "otherwise they would not have differing skin colors or hair textures or muscle mass." This is just plain ridiculous. Skin color is only skin-deep. Some people who are socially "black" have fairer complexions than some who are socially "white." Quite a few "white" individuals have recent African ancestry (less than 400 years) and may not even know it, while many "black" individuals have as many Europeans as Africans in their family tree.
Racial categories are not a fact of biology. There is no single physical trait, or combination of traits, that separate human beings into "races" as they are commonly understood. There never was. All humans originated in Africa. Even after they dispersed, warfare and trade guaranteed intermarriage and the mingling of population groups over thousands of years. It does not even make scientific sense to speculate about the evolution of distinct human "races."
Seventeenth-century scientists invented the division of humanity into "races" in order to justify the domination of European ruling elites over people in other parts of the world. As Martin Bernal showed in Black Athena, racist European "scholars" systematically rewrote human history in order to invent a "white European" race that was not "contaminated" by any intermingling with Africans and Asians. They could not then, and have not since, even come to agreement among themselves on how many "races" there are, let alone how to distinguish them.
In colonial America, judges and legislatures created legal definitions of "black," "white," and "red" people. These suited the convenience of plantation owners eager to control and exploit a large and potentially rebellious workforce. Since that time, bosses (whether plantation owners or industrial capitalists or the politicians who represent them) have maintained racial segregation in a variety of forms for exactly the same reason. That's why "race" is a nasty fact about our society, not a biological fact of any sort.
Laboratory evidence now coming in on human variation indicates that genetic differences among human beings are even smaller than previously supposed. For example, the genetic differences between two people coming from different continents are much less than those between two lowland gorillas from the same valley. Black Africans are genetically closer to white Swedes than to black Australian aborigines, who are genetically closer to East Asians. The more research is done, the more obvious it is that "race" is not a valid biological concept.
There is no relation (even a statistical one) between heritability within groups and heritability between groups. Suppose someone chooses to believe, in spite of the best scientific evidence, that "races" are distinct populations. Suppose they choose to believe the shoddy (or outright fraudulent) "evidence" that IQ is heritable. They still can't legitimately conclude that "racial differences" are genetic in origin, because heritability only measures the extent to which variation within a population comes from genes. It says nothing about whether variations among different populations are genetic.
Murray and Herrnstein know this; they even say so. However, they insist that social environments for black and white people in the US just aren't different enough to explain differences in average IQ test scores. In other words, their whole argument hangs on denying the depth and extent of racism in US society today. When you cut through pages and pages of statistics and references, Murray and Herrnstein's position is no different from that of the Ku Klux Klan: "the problem isn't racism; it's the black people themselves."
Murray and Herrnstein's monstrous lie that racism is all but gone sets up their attack on affirmative action programs. They push the slander that black people are getting into schools and jobs instead of supposedly smarter white people. This pits white workers and students against black workers and students. Racism like this divides and weakens the whole working class!
Hitler bragged about his "Big Lie" technique: if you say something often and loudly enough, people will begin to believe it. He might have added: especially if you buy some professors and have them write it up in scientific journals. Charles Murray has fed at the capitalists' trough for decades. The whole field of alleged hereditary racial difference in intelligence has been bought and paid for by outright Nazis. If you believe them, you might as well believe that the Holocaust never happened.
"There are differences between races, and they are the rule, not the exception," say Murray and Herrnstein at the outset. One of their favorite experts on "racial and ethnic differences" is an Irish psychology professor, Richard Lynn. Lynn has hauled in $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund. Leon Kamin's review of The Bell Curve in Scientific American does an excellent job of tearing apart Lynn's so-called research and exposing his fundamental dishonesty and exceptionally gross racism. ("Who can doubt," Lynn wrote, "that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization.")
Murray and Herrnstein claim that black Africans have lower IQs than African-Americans. This, they say, shows that genes determine black-white IQ differences in the US. This comes from Lynn, who scrounged up eleven studies to "prove" it. Five took place in apartheid South Africa and a sixth in 1952 in the Belgian Congo, where colonial rulers had slaughtered millions of black people. The best study Lynn could find was one which even the author said did "not at all" indicate that intelligence is inherited. The author himself pointed to poorer schooling for black students and difficulty with English as a second language as reasons for the subjects' poor performances.
For an overview on "race and intelligence," Murray and Herrnstein recommend two books by three Pioneer Fund recipients: Audrey Shuey, Frank C. J. McGurk, and R. Travis Osborne. McGurk is the main authority they cite to "prove" that IQ tests are not racially biased. He was one of the "scientific" mainstays of the segregationist movement in the southern US. In 1959 McGurk and Shuey became leading members of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, first publisher of Mankind Quarterly. Other members included Senator Jesse Helms and the oil billionaire Hunt brothers. Arch-racists in the South introduced Shuey's book in court during the 1960s to argue for continuing school segregation and denying the vote to black people. University of Georgia professor Osborne also testified in court against school integration. Osborne was still, in 1992, trying to prove the long-discarded theory that brain size is somehow related to intelligence.
A Newsweek review of The Bell Curve (Oct. 24, 1994) called its scholarship "overwhelmingly mainstream." If that's true, it only serves to prove that fascism is now the mainstream for the US ruling class.
ROGER PEARSON AND THE MANKIND QUARTERLY KLAN
LIE #4: "Success depends on intelligence."
Capitalism defines success as making a lot of money. But only a few can be really rich, because the only way to make a lot of money is to exploit the labor of a lot of other people. A somewhat larger number get to be middle-level bureaucrats and professionals who make more money than workers but much less than the big bosses. This has nothing to do with the distribution of "intelligence." It has everything to do with the fundamental nature of capitalist society.
Since few of us will ever be successful in capitalist terms, schools and employers use so-called intelligence and achievement tests to sort and select people. This promotes competition among workers and youth. Instead of uniting, we just try harder to climb over our class sisters and brothers. The tests also lead many to believe the lie that it's your own fault if you don't "make it." This can make us passive. Elaine and Harry Mensh document an important point in The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality. They show that IQ tests exist to "prove" that most people -- workers, and especially black and women workers -- are not smart enough to be leaders or thinkers or deserve a lot of money. IQ tests thus legitimize capitalist inequality.
Liberal reformers want more money for schools. They say that more people should have the chance to be successful in capitalist terms. This is an illusion. A college education is no guarantee even of a steady job, let alone riches. Middle-level managers and technical people are losing their jobs like crazy. About 14% of recent university graduates with Ph.D. degrees in math are unemployed. Is that evidence that they have low intelligence? Many professionals have come to the US fleeing poverty and political repression, but their credentials don't count here. Teachers, nurses, and doctors are scrubbing floors, driving cabs, and working in factories. Did they lose their "intelligence" when they crossed the border? Black workers (including those in professional or technical positions) earn less, on the average, than white workers even when you control for age and level of educational attainment. We live in a racist system of class oppression, not a "meritocracy" where the "cream" rises to the top.
Fortune magazine made an interesting point when Herrnstein first came up with his "IQ and the Meritocracy" nonsense. In general, it noted, college professors have higher IQs than business leaders. But business leaders are richer and (in that sense ) more successful.
If anything, it's the scum that rises to the top. Those who are willing to exploit others, or to help the bosses do their dirty work, are rewarded for it. The more ruthless the exploitation -- for example, the rip-off of black, latino, other immigrant, and women workers in the U.S., or the horrors of child labor in India, Pakistan, and Thailand -- the more successful the capitalist. Much of what passes for college "education" is designed to convince students that they deserve better than most workers because they are "smarter." The "better" jobs they hope to get -- as teachers, social workers, managers, etc. -- would often put them in positions where the bosses will expect them to help keep workers down. Students and professionals have to choose sides in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. Do you have a particular fondness for racism, sexism, gross economic inequality, imperialist war, and all the cultural degeneracy and political repression that comes with fascism? If not, it's "smart" to choose the side of the working class.
Eugene Debs, a socialist labor leader who lived in the early part of this century, put it well. "I want to rise with the working class, not from it," he declared. The capitalist definition of "success" serves only the capitalists. For the rest of us, real "success" means smashing capitalism itself.
Trying to "make it" under capitalism is like scratching for the biggest crumbs from a shrinking loaf. We all want a better future for ourselves and our kids. But success in school isn't the way to go. Communism is. The working class, once united, can take over the whole bakery. We will build a new society without "races," without "nations," without money. Our principle will be "from each according to commitment, to each according to need" -- not "the market rules." No one will be better or worse off than anyone else. Social inequality, the material basis for racism, sexism, and other divisive ideologies, will disappear. We will struggle hard against these bosses' ideas among the people. And we will allow no "free speech" or "academic freedom" for professional racists and neo-nazis, no matter how many letters of the alphabet trail after their names.
LIE #5: "That's why liberal social programs have failed"
The social agenda of the academic racists has changed little over the last eighty years. Eugenicists in the 1910s and 1920s hoped to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country and to coerce the "unfit" (mainly, the poor) into having fewer babies. Nazi intellectuals in the 1930s wanted to justify imperialist war and genocide. US racial theorists in the 1950s fought to uphold segregation and "white supremacy." Jensen in 1969 argued for cutbacks in Head Start and other educational programs for workers' children. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson, in Crime and Human Nature (1985) pushed for more cops, jails, and "tough on crime" legislation.
Murray and Herrnstein make parts of their agenda for the `90s very clear. They want to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country. They think welfare programs should be slashed to force poor women to have fewer babies. They suggest that programs like Affirmative Action, which helped to integrate workplaces and colleges, should be dropped. They link crime with genetically low intelligence, lending support to "tough on crime" policies and to the racist "violence initiative" of the National Institute for Mental Health and other agencies. They say that the poorest quarter of the US population is a "net drag" on society and that there is "nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching" them. Funds "wasted" on the "disadvantaged" should be reallocated "to programs for the gifted" -- meaning, of course, mainly the well-to-do.
Murray and Herrnstein seem to be testing the limits of the present political climate with their assertion that the ruling class should choose between their eugenic policies and a "custodial" fascist state with "high tech reservations" (concentration camps) for the "underclass." Their "logic" thus leads directly to the gas chambers.
Murray and Herrnstein have one thing going for them that their predecessors, by and large, did not. That is the indisputable fact that thirty years of liberal reform programs -- the legacy of the Johnson's "Great Society" -- have failed to create social equality. In fact, income gaps between black and white workers, which decreased somewhat between 1965 and 1975, have been increasing ever since. Real wages for all workers have at best held steady, and more often have fallen, especially for younger workers. The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to grow. Thirty years ago, a 4% unemployment rate was considered recessionary. Today government economists consider at least 6% to be necessary. They raise interest rates to "slow the economy" if it drops lower.
True, the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, and labor movements of the last few decades won some significant reforms. When Jensen attacked education programs such as Head Start in 1969, many anti-racists responded with studies showing that such programs did raise IQ scores and enhance children's prospects for success in school. Similarly, it is easy to show that Affirmative Action programs, limited as they have been, did go part of the way toward knocking down racist barriers that historically kept black and other "minority" individuals out of more skilled and better-paying jobs. Social programs like WIC, AFDC, Medicaid, and Medicare have meant the difference between survival and starvation for many.
But the "War on Poverty," which Murray has made a living on criticizing, was never meant to create equality. Its few reforms mainly produced an illusion of change while maintaining the reality of class inequality. It was meant to pacify the militant rebels who were rocking US cities, and the many more who supported them.
Now these reforms have mostly been cut back or dismantled altogether. Many are on the chopping block as this pamphlet goes to press (February 1995) amid congressional debates over welfare "reform" and the balanced-budget amendment. President Clinton has made it clear that Democrats differ from Republicans only over the details of this massive attack -- spearheaded by racism -- on the whole working class. Asked about Murray's 1993 Wall Street Journal article advocating cutting single mothers off AFDC, President Clinton responded: "I think his analysis is essentially correct." (Nation's Business, August "94)
In the same way, as Adolph Reed, Jr. noted in his Nation review of The Bell Curve, "we can trace Murray's legitimacy directly to the spinelessness, opportunism and racial bad faith of the liberals in the social policy establishment. ... Most of those objecting to Herrnstein and Murray's racism," Reed continued, "embrace positions that are almost indistinguishable, except for the resort to biology." These liberals agree with Murray that IQ tests "prove" black people (and workers generally) are less intelligent. They simply offer different excuses. "Lack of prenatal care," they say. "No breastfeeding. Not enough mental stimulation for infants." What a phony debate! Both sides are just building support for racism and class inequality.
Liberal reformers promoted cultural theories of racial and class inferiority to push government programs such as the "war on poverty." They wanted to change the alleged inferior values and lifestyles of impoverished workers so their children would be "smarter." Workers and our children don't need to be smarter. We need to be more class-conscious. We need to fight harder to unite our class across the bosses' lines of "race" and "nationality." We need to become clearer on the fact that you can't help people by becoming part of the system that is grinding them down. The way to help the working class is to fight to smash that system.
ONLY COMMUNISM CAN DEFEAT RACISM AND FASCISM
Liberal social programs have failed, and will continue to fail, because of the fundamental nature of capitalism. Even in its heyday, capitalism required a large pool of unemployed and impoverished workers to drive wages down. The present era is one of ever-sharpening international capitalist competition (imperialism). This competition demands that the bosses turn the screws ever more tightly on the workers in order to maximize profits. This, in turn, demands fascist rather than liberal-democratic forms of rule in order to suppress the anger inevitably developing within the working class, and especially among the most exploited, oppressed, and impoverished.
The choices are narrowing. Murray and Herrnstein, advocates of the Violence Initiative, and other academic racists offer us fascism as a solution to the profound crisis in contemporary capitalism. With liberalism less and less appealing as an option, many potential anti-racist activists are simply wallowing in despair. This passivity gives aid and comfort to the fascist enemy. But there is another alternative: to build a revolutionary party and a mass movement with the goal of smashing capitalism and building an entirely different system, communism.
"But hasn't communism failed?" many ask. We say it hasn't really been tried. From the Soviet Union to eastern Europe, from China to Cuba, socialism was tried. And socialism failed to lead to communism, as revolutionary leaders had promised. Instead it maintained fundamental capitalist institutions such as wage-labor and nation-states. So in the end it reverted everywhere to open capitalism.
A big part of the reason that revolutionary leaders thought they needed to build socialism rather than communism right from the start was that they didn't think the masses of people (workers and poor peasants) were "ready" for communism. In effect, these leaders bought into the idea that the masses weren't smart enough to recognize that communism was in their best interest. They thought they needed to "buy off" intellectuals and people with technical training because the workers wouldn't be able to run society by themselves.
We disagree. If "intelligent" means "fit to rule," then no group in the world, no "cognitive elite," is more intelligent than the working class acting collectively in its own interest as a class. The fight against racism is the key to developing this class unity.
Under communism we will do away with the foolish idea of judging people on the basis of a test. We will do away with the ruthless judgments of the marketplace that say you and you are "worth" more and you and you are "worth" less (or even, according to fascists like Murray, "worthless"). Instead of setting ourselves up in judgment on people, we will dedicate ourselves to assessing and meeting their needs.
Call us "idealistic" if you will -- but we are convinced that there is nothing more realistic than fighting for a communist world of comradeship and equality.
HOW TO FIGHT ACADEMIC RACISM
To cut off the killer weed of racism at its root, we need to destroy the capitalist system that nourishes it. Thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of workers, students, and youth must join the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY and help to win millions more to fight to make egalitarian communist society a reality worldwide.
Such a movement cannot develop without an all-out fight against racism. Racism is the cornerstone that supports all class exploitation. It drives down wages and the quality of life for "white" workers and students as well as for the super-exploited and super-oppressed "minority" workers and students. In the present period, racism is the cutting edge of a growing fascism that could turn every bit as horrible as German Nazism.
But for this very reason racism is capitalism's Achilles heel. The fight against racism (academic and otherwise) will grow and sharpen. Workers, increasingly looking toward communist leadership, will reject racism and nationalism in favor of class unity. Students and youth will see in this united working class movement a real alternative to capitalist dictatorship.
What You Can Do:
* Form study-action groups to discuss the ideas in this pamphlet Bring these ideas to clubs and organizations of all sorts, on and off campus. Hold forums, teach-ins, and rallies to expose and attack racist ideas. Build real grass-roots unity among students of different "races" and "nationalities" -- not just a top-down "rainbow coalition" of groups.
* Use all available media, from leaflets to school radio stations and newspapers to `zines and the Internet, to attack racist ideas and to promote anti-racist action. Try to get teachers to use this pamphlet and other anti-racist materials in the classroom. Set up regular literature tables as centers for anti-racist agitation and organizing.
* Sign, circulate, and collect funds for the nationwide ad/petition campaign "Oppose the Resurgence of Academic Racism."
* Find out which teachers and textbooks at your school do racist research or push racist and anti-working class theories. Challenge them in class, protest them, try to get rid of them. No academic freedom for racism and fascism!
* Join with workers on and off campus to fight racist programs like the Violence Initiative and welfare "reform." Support strikes and anti-racist rebellions whenever they happen. Attack corporate recruiters for companies which support academic racists like Murray as well as exploiting their workers.
* Write up your experiences for Challenge newspaper, and sell Challenge to your friends, classmates, and co-workers. Contact the Progressive Labor Party to be in touch with others involved in the campaign against academic racism.
We can't afford to be passive in the face of the present racist onslaught. No racist incident is too small to fight over. No racist movement is too large to take on. Organize, organize, organize!
Recommended Reading
Joseph Graves, Jr. and Terri Place. Race and IQ revisited: Figures nerver lie, but often liars figure. SAGE Race Relations Abstracts.
Breggin, Peter and Ginger Ross. The War Against Children. (documents current racist Violence Initiative)
Chase, Alan. The Legacy of Malthus (an encyclopedic history of scientific racism)
Gould, Steven J. The Mismeasure of Man (includes detailed critique of IQ testing movement)
Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth (more general analysis of recent trends in genetic determinism)
Kamin, Leon. The Science and Politics of IQ (exposes Burt's fraudulent "research")
Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (documents collusion between US and German eugenicists during the 1930's and Pioneer Fund financing of Nazi "research" from 1937 until the present.)
Lewontin, R. J., Stephen Rose, and Leon Kamin. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (excellent scientific overview)
Mensh, Elaine and Harry. The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality (demonstrates that IQ testing is a pseudoscience that legitimizes inequalities in the US and imperialist exploitation in Africa.)
Tucker, William. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. (excellent historical critique of racist research in the US from the 19th century to the present.)
Smash Racist "Violence Initiative"
*In 1992 a top federal mental health administrator, Frederick K. Goodwin, compared black urban youth to violent, hypersexual monkeys, declaring that "some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles."
* The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) issued a 400-page report, Understanding and Preventing Violence (1992), backed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation, that called for more attention to alleged "biological and genetic factors" in violent crime, for research on "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior" and on whether "male or black persons have a higher potential for violence than others, and if so, why?" The study proposed in this report is now being carried out in Chicago under Harvard professor Felton Earls.
* Chicago Tribune science writer Ron Kotulak won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-day front page series "Aggression: The Monster Within" (December 1993). Kotulak wrote that "simple screening tests will be developed to determine levels of serotonin and noradrenalin. Anti-violence medications conceivably could be given, perhaps forcibly, to people with abnormal levels." Dozens of studies along these lines, financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, currently target black and Latin youth.
* The Human Genome Project plans to sponsor a new version of a University of Maryland conference originally titled "Genetic Factors in Crime" that was postponed amid charges of racism but is now tentatively scheduled for October, 1995.
Put these developments together and you have the "Violence Initiative." This is racist ideology in action. It must be stopped! See the PLP pamphlet "Biological Determinism Feeds Fascism" for more details.
A Century of "Crime in the Genes"
One of the most fertile fields for eugenics was the search for biological causes of crime. In 1887, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso claimed he could identify criminals by physical characteristics. For example, he said thieves had small, restless eyes while sex criminals had bright eyes and cracked voices. In general, Lombroso said, the more "apish" a person was (thick skull, large jaw, long arms, darker skin) the more likely he or she was to be a criminal. This racist garbage was introduced in criminal trials and did a lot of damage in its time.
The Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton set out in 1926 to update Lombroso's techniques with financial support from the Social Science Research Council. Unlike Lombroso, Hooton categorized his 17,000 research subjects according to nationality and race. By the time his book Crime and the Man appeared in 1939, English and American critics found Hooton's views to be uncomfortably similar to those of the Nazis. However, he had meanwhile promoted his racist ideas among his students, a whole generation of physical anthropologists and physicians.
Pro-Nazi "race hygienists" held their Fourth Congress of Criminal Biology at Hamburg in June 1934, building on two decades worth of "research" on the supposed genetic basis of crime. Two years later, the Nazi "Justice" minister funded fifty research centers nationwide to investigate links between genetics, race and crime, especially in young offenders. In 1939, Nazi boss Himmler ordered that genetic examination be a routine part of criminal investigation.
Undeterred by this precedent, Columbia professor W. H. Sheldon tried to link crime with individual variations in physique during the 1940s. He concluded that 200 Boston delinquents were preponderantly "mesomorphic" (square, muscular) in contrast to a group of 4000 college students. The New York Times recently exposed the fact that Sheldon's eugenic experiments continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. The bosses' elite colleges and universities -- including Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Wellesley -- forced first-year students to pose nude for Sheldon and his associates in the name of "screening for poor posture." Sheldon, a stone racist, wrote in a 1924 paper that "Negro intelligence" comes to a "standstill at about the 10th year," with "Mexican intelligence" stopping at age twelve.
Wilson and Herrnstein cited Sheldon's conclusions in Crime and Human Nature (1985) as evidence of the "constitutional" underpinning of the criminal personality "trait." As critic Leon Kamin noted, however, they omitted mention of later studies such as one that showed a sample of Princeton students to be more "mesomorphic" than the Boston delinquents. In the words of historian Elazar Barkan, Herrnstein and Wilson's book was "testimony that Hooton's ideas have been rejuvenated at Harvard."
Fight Builds Against Racist "Violence Research" in Chicago
Harvard's most recent contribution to crime "research" is euphemistically called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It is run by child psychiatrist Felton Earls, from the Harvard School of Public Health with funds from the US Department of "Justice" and the McArthur Foundation (i.e., insurance profits). This project hopes to study over 11,000 children between 1994 and 2002 and to find ways to predict which ones will become violent criminals. Researchers say that "special attention will be given to conditions that develop before birth (during the mother's pregnancy), as well as in infancy and early childhood." This project has been in the works for over a decade, and its entire history involved searching for biological causes of crime.
The Earls study is also racist to the core (even though Earls himself is black). It is designed to analyze the interaction of "community characteristics" and individual traits. Chicago is one of the most segregated large cities in the world. "Neighborhood" boundaries are almost always drawn along "racial" or "ethnic" lines. Studying "neighborhoods" in Chicago is a code-word for studying "racial differences." It is a slick way to claim the project is studying both the individual and the "environment" while ignoring the real cause of crime (and its biggest perpetrator), the capitalist system itself. For example, a high unemployment rate will be taken as characteristic of a "neighborhood" when the truth is that it comes from decisions made by business people and bankers downtown to close factories in the "neighborhood."
The Chicago Coalition Against the Violence Initiative is organizing against this racist mega-project. For more information, call (312) 761-0580 or write to P.O. Box 268287, Chicago IL 60626.
EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY
1916 -- "Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew." -- Lewis Terman, author of Stanford-Binet IQ test
1969 -- "There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions...The number of intelligence genes seems lower, overall, in the black population than in the white." -- Arthur Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
1994 -- "A substantial difference in cognitive ability distributions separates whites from blacks. ... Latino and black immigrants are ... putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence." -- Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, pp. 315; 360-61.
Charles Murray, Roger Pearson and the Mankind Quarterly Klan
Much of The Bell Curve's racist drivel comes from Mankind Quarterly, whose principle is that the "Negroid" race is inferior to all others, and from professors funded by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund (PF). Behind this fascist gang stand important members of the US ruling class.
Seventeen authors cited in The Bell Curve are Mankind Quarterly (MQ) contributors. Ten are former or present editors or members of its editorial advisory board. MQ's avowed purpose is to counter "Communist" and "egalitarian" influences in anthropology. From its start in 1960, its founders and funders believed that white people were genetically superior. Robert Gayre was the founder of MQ and its editor-in-chief until 1978. As a champion of South African apartheid and a member of the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia, he testified in court in 1968 that black people as a group are "worthless." Other MQ contributors have included Henry Garrett of Columbia University, who wrote pamphlets for the pro-segregation White Citizens Councils; Corrado Gini, the leader of fascist Italy's eugenics movement; and Ottmar von Verschner, a leading Nazi race-scientist and academic mentor of the concentration camp butcher Joseph Mengele.
The key figure in the PF network is Roger Pearson, who is close to Jesse Helms. Sam Crutchfield, a lawyer for Helms, has been the lawyer for Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man. The PF has given Pearson over $787,400, mostly for editing Mankind Quarterly and The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies. The last publishes articles by PF recipients, notably Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, and Richard Lynn. Thomas Ellis, a PF director, is a long-time friend and campaign manager for Helms.
In 1958, Pearson, living in London, led the Northern League. This white-power organization included former Nazi SS officials. Willis Carto, founder of the anti-black and anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, arranged a 1959 U.S. speaking tour for him. Pearson soon moved to the U.S. to edit the neo-Nazi publication Western Destiny. In Eugenics and Race he asserted: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide. "
This track record won Pearson influence in Washington, DC. In 1975 he became editor of the journal of the American Security Council. Retired military officers, corporate executives and conservative politicians formed this outfit. It promoted big military spending, cold war policies, and aid to the Nicaraguan contras and UNITA in Angola. The ASC was very influential during the Reagan and Bush administrations. It was closely tied to the military, the National Security Council, and the State Department.
Pearson also headed the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). In 1977 he became the international chair of this nest of fascist vipers. He organized its 1978 convention, which featured two U.S. Senators as keynote speakers. Then he was exposed as having recruited open neo-Nazis to WACL, and was forced to resign. Four years later, President Reagan personally thanked Pearson for his "substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad."
Charles Murray: Bosses' Mouthpiece
Murray is on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative public-policy research outfit which has also employed Richard Herrnstein's other pal, James Q. Wilson. Founded by the industrialist Lewis Brown in 1943, it has spent a half-century promoting social policies favorable to big business: tax cuts for the wealthy, dere
- Religion -- Tool of Bosses, Enemy of Workers
- Religion Is Ruling Class Ideology
- "How Can You Raise Children Without a Religion?"
- Idealism vs. Materialism
- Class Struggle and the Struggle of Ideas
- Materialism Suppressed
- Origins of Religion -- in Class Society
- The Agricultural Revolution
- Class Ideologies
- Religion Provides Divine Sanction for Ruling Class
- Greece
- The Social and Economic Basis of the Origin of Monotheism
- The Hebrew God
- Christianity: A Brief Outline
- Religions of Imperialism
- Uses of Religion by the Roman Ruling Class
- Roman Rulers Adopt Christianity
- Orthodoxy
- Progressive Aspects of Christianity for its Time
- Heresy
- Why Communists Must Fight Religion
Religion -- Tool of Bosses, Enemy of Workers
The working class is horribly exploited by the ruling class in every country in the world. Why don't the workers organize, smash the bosses, and create a better world?
The answer is: ideas. For thousands of years ruling classes have known it is essential for them to put false ideas in the minds of the people they exploit and kill.
For an idea to serve the interests of the ruling class it must teach the exploited classes that it would be either impossible, or wrong, or, preferably, both, for them to organize, defeat their exploiters, and create a society run in their interests. The general rule for such ideas is that they should keep the masses passive and loyal, divide them against one another and lead them to identify with, and unite behind, one or another section of the ruling class.
Ideologies -- sets of ideas -- that aim to keep the exploited classes passive, loyal, or divided, and teach them to support the rulers, we call ruling-class ideologies, because they originate in, are pushed by, and serve the class interests of, the ruling class. In today's world, the exploited classes are the working class, the proletarianized peasants or farmers, and the sections of other classes, including most "white-collar" workers, whose fate is tied directly to that of the working class. Ideas that serve the interest of the exploited classes we call proletarian or working-class ideas. In today's world, the only working-class ideology is that of communism.
The general rule for ruling-class ideas today is "A.B.C." -- Anything But Class, Anything But Communism. Ultimately, any ideas other than those of violent revolution and an egalitarian communist society will serve the rulers' interest. Religion, racism and nationalism are the main forms (the most common and successful) ruling class ideas take.
Religion Is Ruling Class Ideology
Religion is the oldest of the ideologies pushed by ruling classes to mislead workers. Its value to the bosses has always been, and is today, its universality. Religions claim to stand above the conflicts between bosses and workers, landlords and peasants, exploiter and exploited. They foster the illusion that these conflicts -- in fact the basic forces moving human history -- are secondary, temporary, relative, unimportant. According to religious thought, what's most important is that "we are all children of God." In other words, religion teaches that there is more uniting exploiters and the exploited than dividing them. Religion teaches a lie.
"How Can You Raise Children Without a Religion?"
Many people have been persuaded that good values cannot be taught except through religion. They think only belief in a "supreme being", a god, can provide the authority they think is necessary to get people to live productive, cooperative lives.
But what are these values? They're ruling-class values -- ideas that help the exploiters and harm everybody else. Religions brainwash workers and others into accepting exploitation. No religion can ever serve workers' interests.
NO religion is neutral! Religion serves the interest of the ruling classes. That's why religion is promoted and pushed avidly by every ruling class in the world. The values taught by every religion keep workers from uniting around the material demands that serve their interests, that save their lives.
The most important of these demands is that for an end to exploitation, the creation of a society of equality for all, run by the working class -- in other words, for communism. No religion ever tolerates this demand! All religions support inequality and exploitation. A few must be rich and many poor because "that's the way God wants it." Try to bring about equality and you're "fighting against God."
Every religion excuses violence by the ruling class against workers on the job, and ruling-class violence in war. But no religion tolerates working-class violence against the bosses. And every religion condemns working-class revolution.
Religions blame workers for the faults of the bosses and of capitalism. Without demanding an end to exploitation, religion spreads in the working class the illusion that a happy, productive life is possible for workers under capitalism. And while religious workers fail to have that kind of life, religion tells them: "It's your own fault", instead of blaming the exploitation of capitalism that ruins our lives.
Religion teaches the falsehood that "human nature is evil." This idea was dreamed up to justify the brutal oppression of the Roman Empire. We're supposed to blame ourselves or "our fellow man" for the evils in the world -- which lets the exploiters go right on robbing and murdering us!
Religion teaches workers to be passive. The values of religion sound good: don't steal, rob, have respect for others, etc. But in fact they are ruling class values. The "religious" ruling classes never obey them! So in reality religion teaches workers to honor, love, not to steal from, lie to, kill -- the bosses! Religion teaches workers to let themselves be exploited, in the hope of reaching a happy life "in heaven." Meanwhile, the bosses are free to exploit and kill us here on earth.
Idealism vs. Materialism
Religion is a form of idealism. Idealist philosophies begin with the assumption that a non-material world (and, therefore, a non-material creator) exists which is superior to the world of matter accessible to the senses.
The opposite of idealism is materialism. Materialist philosophy begins with the assumption that the material world exists prior to any mind that thinks about it and that, in fact, thought and "mind" are simply properties of highly organized matter.
Idealism and materialism, religion and science, arose as a result of the class struggle. This article will outline how this happened in ancient Greek philosophy, from which European philosophy derives. This kind of investigation should be undertaken to understand the development in other civilizations as well.
However, a materialist critique of the role of religion in the West should be of some interest to all workers and communists. The imperialism of European and American ruling classes has spread western culture and religions throughout the world, so that its effects are felt everywhere.
Class Struggle and the Struggle of Ideas
In the 7th century B.C.E. the kingship had been overthrown in Athens by an alliance of the urban mercantile classes and landowners who opposed the arbitrary rule of an all-powerful king (always the dangerous aspect of one-man rule, even for the aristocracy).
This was a momentous event for the development of philosophy. Class struggle had showed that social change was possible. Political institutions, therefore, were not "natural" or inevitable. Class struggle also revealed that what was "good" was relative. What was "good" for the aristocracy, that is, was not absolute, but was bad for other classes. The Greeks had discovered that "the good" was not an eternal value, set by the gods, but depended on what class you were in.
The urban, mercantile, anti-aristocratic classes of the ancient Greek city-states developed a philosophy based upon recognizing the universality of change in the world. This was pre-scientific thought of a high order. Heraclitus and other "pre-Socratic" philosophers were dialectical, recognizing that the world was made up from contradictory forces, just as human society was composed of classes with contradictory interests.
In their struggle against the powerful aristocracy, the urban classes developed materialism as a critical philosophy. The implications of materialism are critical and democratic. Materialist philosophy states that knowledge can be gained by studying change in the natural world, and ultimately in the social world as well. Evidence from the material world can be studied and theories built up to account for it.
In short, there is a method for discovering the truth which anybody can learn. No one has to "believe" what some authority says. A person can use their senses and reason and decide for themselves. Armed with these ideas, Greek materialists attacked aristocratic ideas and justified the rearrangement of social institutions to suit their own class interests.
Just as materialism was the ideological expression of the class interests of the urban mercantile classes, so idealism was the ideological expression of the class interests of the aristocracy. According to idealist thought there is a realm of existence beyond that available to the senses, and much more important than the material world.
Knowledge of this world can be gotten only by some kind of revelation from beyond the material world, and this revelation is given to only a few. Since only these few have knowledge, they must rule. The vast majority, who are incapable of knowing the truth, must simply obey. Naturally the wise are identified with the aristocracy!
There are other elitist implications of idealist thought. Since knowledge cannot come from studying the natural world (it only comes from revelation), then studying the changes that can be observed in the natural world can't lead to any real knowledge. Real knowledge comes from contemplation, not from active engagement with the material world. Of course, only the wealthy have the leisure to "contemplate."
Furthermore since, according to idealism, change is generally bad, a static society is the best society. The oldest political arrangements known to the ancient Greeks were aristocratic ones. These, therefore, are the only "good" ones, those most pleasing to the gods. Attempts to change society -- for example, by the urban mercantile classes to oust the aristocracy from power -- are morally wrong.
The materialist philosophers sharpened their analysis in criticism of idealism and the aristocracy. In science, they developed early versions of the theory of evolution and the first atomic theory. These achievements were remarkable for their time, although they were speculative, not based upon experiment. It took Western philosophy, mired in Christian religious idealism, more than two thousand years to surpass them.
The Greek materialists were sharp and merciless in their critique of religion. Xenophanes, about 500 B.C.E., wrote:
The Ethiopians made their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say their gods have blue eyes and red hair... If oxen or lions had hands and could draw with their hands as men can, horses would make their gods in the shape of horses, and lions like lions
-- each making the gods in their own image.
By observing the customs of different peoples of his day, this materialist philosopher deduced correctly that human beings make the gods, not the other way around. Xenophanes used arguments like this to attack aristocratic power, which justified itself by "the will of the gods." No wonder ruling classes have made tremendous efforts to suppress materialism and stifle its proponents ever since!
In politics, materialist philosophy expressed itself in the theory of "democracy," which meant, in effect, rule by the majority of free male citizens. The "sophists" (literally "wise men") directed the weapon of reason and observation against existing political institutions, politicians, and ideas, but always in defense of democracy and against the power of the wealthy aristocrats.
Early materialist thinkers arrived at many brilliant insights about the natural and human world. In fact, early materialism was a primitive form of scientific thinking. But materialism could not develop into full science. It was held back by the primitive level of social and economic development of ancient society. Based upon slave and super-exploited peasant labor, materialist thought was chained within idealist limits. The material basis for the idea of human equality to flourish did not exist. Here is why:
Because work was regarded as essentially slavish and ignoble, even the brilliant achievements of ancient scientists were regarded as curiosities. If work is slavish, then only "contemplation" can be "noble." Thus the slave system caused ancient materialists to shrink from the whole experimental basis on which science must rest.
Archimedes was the greatest scientific mind of antiquity. He discovered parabolic mirrors and the famous principle that bears his name -- that the apparent loss in weight of any object submerged in a liquid is equal to the weight of an equal volume of that liquid.
And yet Archimedes possessed such a lofty spirit, so profound a soul, and such a wealth of scientific theory, that although his invention had won for him a name and fame for superhuman wisdom, he would not consent to leave behind him any treatise on this subject: regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his efforts only to those studies, the subtlety and the charm of which are not affected by the claims of necessity. (Plutarch)
Archimedes' ideology was limited by that of the society of his day, in which work of whatever kind was considered ignoble. Contemplation and passivity, not experiment, were thought by idealists, the philosophers of the aristocracy, to be the only activities appropriate for gaining wisdom. No science could develop under these conditions.
Materialism Suppressed
Alexander the Great conquered the Greek city states in 333 B.C. and put an end to Greek democracy. With the social base for ancient materialism gone, idealism triumphed. Aristotle, the greatest idealist philosopher of all time, was Alexander's tutor. Naturally an enemy of materialism and democracy, Aristotle originated the first thoroughly developed justification for slavery, the notion of 'natural slavery.' With very little change, this idea became the basis of all idealist philosophies that justify inequality. It directly inspired the racist and idealist notions of "genetic superiority" pushed by apologists for exploitation today like Arthur Jensen or, more recently, Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve.
The idealists and their aristocratic bosses declared war on materialism. All of the writings of the ancient materialists were thrown out or destroyed. They exist in fragments only, while the voluminous writings of the idealists -- Plato, Aristotle, and even their later pupils -- exist in many copies.
Plato, the wealthy aristocrat who became the first and most famous idealist philosopher, sided with the aristocrats against democracy. He also hated materialism. One ancient story states that he deliberately bought up and destroyed all the copies he could find of the works of Democritus, the most famous ancient materialist, originator of the first atomic theory of matter. True or not, the story does show that even ancient writers understood the antagonism between materialism and idealism, the class struggle in the realm of ideas.
Materialism went underground. The only materialist work surviving from Roman times, Lucretius' de rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), exists in only one manuscript, and nothing is know about the author. No wonder: it is an extended attack on religion as the main cause of human misery! But Lucretius was an upper-class Roman. Cut off from contact with the masses, ancient materialism never developed an experimental basis, becoming speculative and undialectical (i.e. not able to account for change by examining the contradictions in all things that make change possible).
Materialism remained stifled for 1800 years until the emergence of modern forms of class struggle in the Renaissance. In fact, in its most developed, scientific form -- dialectical materialism, the working-class philosophy of communism -- materialism is still stifled and underground in every country in the world, since they are all dominated by capitalist ruling classes.
The rest of this essay outlines a materialist history of how religion began in the West. We examine how religion was used by the ruling classes of Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, and the Jews to help keep the exploited classes down. It concludes with an outline of the development of Christianity as an imperialist religion.
Origins of Religion -- in Class Society
For 90% of its existence, the human race lived under primitive communism -- collective, more or less egalitarian societies characterized by a low level of development of productive technology. Since there was no exploitation or inequality, there was no need to justify it. In pre-class societies most myths and beliefs were pre-scientific attempts to understand and control nature by magic, since it could not be mastered through science.
Usually, all members of the society could appeal to the spirits or gods. Certain persons normally became "specialists" in handling these spirits. Modern researchers call these specialists "shamans." They were considered skilled craftsmen like the makers of baskets, pots, stone implements, or clothing. In such societies there was no cult -- no priesthood set apart from and above the masses, who monopolized access to the gods, and used this monopoly to exploit the working masses.
The Agricultural Revolution
Class society was born with the "agricultural revolution", that began in Europe and Asia somewhere between 20,000 and 10,000 B.C.E. "Hunting and gathering" societies, the mode of production which preceded agriculture, generally did not allow accumulation of a large enough surplus to support a class of non-productive persons who live by exploiting the rest of the population. The "productivity of labor" in such societies is very low, because of the low level of technology (tools), so the labor of almost every individual, children included, is needed to ensure the community's survival.
Agricultural production permitted the accumulation of a large surplus for the first time in human history. (The "surplus" is that amount of goods over and above the amount necessary for a population to reproduce itself). Existence of a large surplus for the first time in human history made possible the evolution of a class of persons removed from the production of essential social goods.
It took thousands of years for a ruling class to evolve in the earliest agricultural societies. Some ruling classes seem to have originated when a militarily more powerful group, often from a nomadic, or hunting/gathering society, conquered a more settled, less warlike people and set themselves up as rulers.
But it's just as likely that the origins of the first ruling classes are the same as those of the first religions. Grain (which, if kept dry and away from pests, may be stored for a long time) was often kept in an area devoted to earth or vegetation gods. Both a priesthood -- a group that monopolized access to the wealth-bestowing gods -- and a ruling class may have evolved from the group of shamans who specialized in guaranteeing that the nature gods kept giving good harvests.
Class Ideologies
Class divisions in society led to a corresponding split in the concept of the world. The world was "turned on its head." Instead of humans as the maker of the harvest and of the gods themselves, the gods, products of the human mind, were said to have made humans! Though the gods resembled humans (and still do), they were said to have made man in their image, rather than the reverse.
The gods/humans, or heaven/earth split mirrored the class division on earth between the rulers -- the landowners and warriors, including the king and priests -- and the working masses. The gods become the "great bosses in the sky", to whom everything belongs. They can be approached only by the ruling classes, and respond only to them. Sometimes the rulers are imagined to be gods themselves, like the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, or the descendants of gods, like the Caesars of Rome. Religion is born.
Religion Provides Divine Sanction for Ruling Class
By time that the first written documents appear and some chronological record of history (at least of the history of the rulers) can be attempted -- about 3000 B.C. in the Near East -- religion is already serving what has always been, and still is, its main purpose -- to justify the domination and exploitation of the working people by a ruling class.
In agricultural societies, where the main source of economic wealth is farming the soil, the ruling class is the class of landowners. Throughout human history, the main form the political rule of landowners takes is monarchy, the king beginning as simply the largest and most powerful landowner. In ancient Egypt the whole religion was centered on the worship of the king as a god. This legitimized not only the rule of the Pharaoh (king) but of the whole Egyptian land-owning class.
Despite fierce class struggles by Egyptian peasants and craftsmen -- rebellions never mentioned by most history books -- the Egyptian religion always retained the idea of a divine king, and the power of the landlord class. The different conquerors of Egypt saw the wisdom of using the Egyptian religion to justify their power as well, and so supported it when they took over.
Greece
Greece made the transition from primitive communist -- nomadic, hunting-and-gathering, tribal society without classes -- to agricultural, class society much later than the Near Eastern kingdoms, and under their influence. Furthermore, Greek society developed around many separate cities, divided from one another by mountains and the sea. Strong merchant and craftsman classes developed alongside the landowners and peasantry. This led to a qualitatively different kind of class struggle within the Greek cities.
By 600 B.C. many Greek states had overthrown their kings, representing the dictatorship of the landlords, and established "democracies." Democracy was a form of government that corresponded to a coalition, or armed truce, between the various powerful classes: landowners, or "aristocrats" (as they called themselves; the term means "the best men rule"), and merchants and craftsmen, the "demo" or "people". But women, foreigners, and slaves were not considered to be part of the "people."
Corresponding to the many Greek cities were the many Greek gods. In the "myths", or stories about them, they were more or less equal, and often quarreled among themselves, as did the cities. Different cities, naturally, had different favorite gods.
Within a given city, different classes favored different gods. In Athens of the fifth century B.C.E. the merchants and craftsmen favored Hermes and Hephaestus. Hermes was a kind of messenger-god; Hephaestus, a blacksmith. These were gods of activity, corresponding to the industry of the democratic classes. The aristocrats expressed their different class interests by favoring Apollo, warrior, aristocrat, the god of "reason", and an aristocrat himself. The temples of Apollo were not in the city at all, but out in the countryside, where the aristocracy dominated.
In the mid-fifth century B.C., when the power and wealth of Athenian democracy's imperialism was at its height, the greatest temple built was the temple of Hephaestus. It was even larger than that of Athena, after whom the city was named and who represented the hope of all-class unity within the city -- a hope never realized.
Small statues of Hermes, the messenger/merchant god, stood all around the town. During Athens' war against Sparta, an aristocratic state, and other Greek states which wanted to break away from her imperialist grip (the Pelopponesian War), these statues of Hermes were suddenly mutilated. This was taken as a sign that the aristocrats of Athens were really siding with Athens' enemies, in the hopes that, if they won, they'd overthrow the democracy and set up an aristocratic oligarchy, or "rule by a few". This is, in fact, exactly what happened eventually.
The Social and Economic Basis of the Origin of Monotheism
Democracy -- the rivalry of different classes, and the coexistence of many Greek city states, represented the social basis of "polytheism", the worship of many gods. But by 333 B.C. the Greek city states had all been conquered by Alexander the Great, and 10 years later the whole eastern Mediterranean was under his power.
At the same time, Greek religion began to undergo a change. Less attention was paid by the ruling classes to the many gods. One god, "Father Zeus", was said to be the most powerful. Later he was even said to be the only god; the others were his servants, or even just Zeus himself in different form.
The evolution of monotheism is logical to the growth of imperialism. Polytheism did not provide a good justification for a strong empire with one all-powerful ruler. Plurality in the world of the gods might appear to justify plurality in the political world. "One god" in heaven provided a better justification for "one emperor" on earth.
The first appearance of monotheism, the worship of only one god (in Greek, monos = "one", theos = "god") had been in the Persian Empire, where monotheism, at first suppressed, quickly became the official religion. An Egyptian Pharaoh, Ikhnamen, had tried to replace traditional Egyptian polytheism with the worship of one god, Aten ( a sun god, like Apollo) in the 12th century B.C. But the Egyptian ruling classes were never won to this innovation, and returned to polytheism after his death.
The Hebrew God
The Hebrews originated as one of many nomadic peoples. Little is known for sure about their origins. The stories in the Old Testament are certainly not accurate history, like bourgeois theologians and misguided religious people think they are. The ancestors of the Jews may have come from Egypt at some time between 1600 - 1300 B.C.; the name of the legendary founder of Judaism, Moses, is Egyptian. Or the story of Egyptian slavery may be a much later reflection of a struggle between a Jewish temple in Egypt and another in Jerusalem, and have never happened at all!
The Old Testament myths relates that the Jewish upper classes, the landed aristocracy and royal house, were constantly oppressing and exploiting the peasants and city population. They naturally intermarried with aristocratic women from surrounding kingdoms, who brought their gods and goddesses with them. Even in the book of Genesis, stories like that of the "Sons of God" lying with the "daughters of men" show that Judaism was at first poly-theistic.
The Hebrews had until recently been a nomadic, hunting, gathering, and herding people. The stories about Abraham and his descendants in Genesis show that memories about the more-or-less egalitarian past were valued highly by the common people. They told of better times in the past, when there were tribal leaders but no kings or aristocrats, before the appearance of agriculture with the attendant exploitation of the peasantry.
The Hebrews lived "between the hammer and the anvil" -- right between the huge Egyptian empire and a series of other empires: Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Syrian. As a result the Hebrew kings suffered catastrophic defeats. It was easy for the "prophets," the religious spokespersons of the exploited classes, to lay the blame for the Jewish kings' defeats on their polytheism, and tie this to their oppression of the poor. They were "unfaithful to the true god."
In this way monotheism became, among the Jews, the watchword of the social critics who opposed exploitation. The Pentateuch, or first five books, were written up from older stories so as to date the origins of the Hebrews to a time when there were no kings, no private property in land, and no priesthood. This was a standing contradiction and reproach to the contemporary state of affairs, with exploitation and injustice abounding, and with a temple cult presided over by aristocratic priests who were essential for the major religious rituals.
After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. the Jewish upper classes adopted Greek language, culture, and many philosophical and religious ideas. Meanwhile, among the exploited classes of town and village, the center of Jewish religion moved away from the temple and priestly cult, presided over by these increasingly foreign-seeming aristocrats, and towards smaller, decentralized "synagogues" or meetings.
Christianity, therefore, drew on both traditions of monotheism -- that of the Greek world, where it was a mainstay of a horribly oppressive, slave empire; and that of the Jewish world, where it was the symbol of resistance to ruling-class decadence in a world where materialism had never really developed.
Christianity: A Brief Outline
Sometime between the years 20 and 30 A.D. a Jewish teacher who called himself Joshua[1], after one of the great military leaders of Hebrew mythology, began to preach two interrelated ideas. He preached a war of the exploited peasants and the urban poor against both the Roman occupiers and the collaborationist Jewish upper classes. He saw this as a part of a religious reform, an effort to bring Judaea back to the "kingdom of god," that is, in conformity with god's wishes.
He first attached himself to the major religious reformer of the time, John the Baptizer, and continued on his own after John's imprisonment, probably taking some of John's followers with him. After much preaching and organizing work, Joshua entered into Jerusalem with his forces, greeted by a demonstration of popular support for his anti-Roman goals. He was announced as the Messiah, that is, the "anointed" political/religious leader, and occupied the great temple.
This act was an unmistakable challenge both to the Jewish upper classes (who comprised the temple priesthood), who exploited the masses as landlords and as collectors of the temple tax, and to their Roman masters, whose military garrison overlooked the temple. Upon the failure of the revolt its leader, Joshua, was captured and executed in the way the Romans reserved for rebels, by crucifixion.
Whether or not his followers believed that he had been resurrected from the dead, they continued his movement. His brother, James "the Just", who succeeded Joshua, was a respected rabbi mentioned by the Jewish historian Josephus. The Acts of the Apostles, which survives in the New Testament in a heavily re-written version, concedes that the Christian movement after Joshua's death was a part of Judaism, not a separate religion. It survived as such for at least several hundred years thereafter under the name of "Ebionites", or "the Poor." Apparently this was the real name of Joshua's movement, since Paul refers to it by that name too.
However, Christianity as we know it is descended, not from Joshua, called Jesus in Greek, but from Paul. Paul, who admits he never met Jesus personally, was the devotee of a Greek other-worldly, mystery religion which modern scholars call Gnostic.
Religions of Imperialism
The Gnostic religions were strongly elitist and escapist. They originated as a result of the evolution of class society.
With Alexander the Great's conquests, democracy ended for two thousand years. One oppressive, slave-holding empire succeeded another. Civil wars and slave revolts never succeeded in freeing the slaves, peasants or urban poor from exploitation.
Under these conditions, resistance seemed futile to many, and they sought escape in an afterlife. The vegetation religion of the early, communal society became a peasant religion of escape. Under the influence of wine, the peasants sought union with their god in spirit. Ceremonies were closed to outsiders; only the "initiated" could take part, and really achieve oneness with the Bacchus. Like many other gods and goddesses of vegetation, Bacchus was said to be killed and then reborn, just as people believed a seed had to "die" in the ground in order to be "reborn" as a new plant many times more splendid.
These religions were acceptable to the ruling classes because they laid the blame for suffering on human sin, not on exploitation. They were elitist and anti-egalitarian, since they taught that only a select few could really know what the god wanted. The educated middle classes were attracted to them because the violence of class struggle terrified them and they were repelled by elitism from uniting with the exploited poor and the slaves. "Gnostic", or "wisdom" religions added a special role for the educated; only they could be the elect and really achieve unity with the god.
By the time of Jesus' birth, Gnostic, otherworldly religions were everywhere in the Greek world. This is the immediate background for Christianity.
Paul may have been a Jew (as he claims in his own writings) or not; he was certainly a Gnostic. The earliest Christians had foreseen a better world in this life. Some of Jesus' sayings can only be explained in this way. In addition, the fragments of Papian, the earliest quotations (about 120 A.D.) from any Christian leader, make it clear that he thought in terms of a this-worldly paradise.
But Paul was already putting this off to the next world. Life on earth, then, became a punishment for inborn sin. This meant a severe, repressive government was needed to hold human sin in check, and Paul's writings state in no uncertain terms that the government must be obeyed. This world also became a test; only those who were "good" -- passive and obedient enough -- would gain union with god after death.
Every aspect of Pauline Christianity marks it as a religion whose doctrine evolved to suit the needs of an oppressive slave-holders' empire. Gone was the relative egalitarianism of the early mystery religions. In Christianity, the masses could only interact with the god -- for forgiveness, for union ("communion"), for happiness ("blessing") -- through an authorized priest. To guarantee control over the priests who dealt with the common people, they were put into an authoritarian structure controlled by aristocrats, who alone were chosen as high officers of the church (bishops, archbishops, -- the word "bishop" means "overseer" or "supervisor" in Greek, and was also one term used for the foremen who forced gangs of slaves to work faster). God was depicted as simply the greatest of all the slave owners and landlords, the "king of kings", "lord of lords."
The early Christian leadership mounted a sustained campaign to make Christianity acceptable to the Romans. The second century theologian Tertullian made the veiled threat: Christianity was spreading rapidly everywhere; if Christians wanted to return evil for evil, they could create tremendous disruption in the Empire. Yet, under the doctrine of the church "fathers," Christians remained passive and obedient to the Emperor even when they were tortured to death in large numbers.
The message was clear: Christianity was an ideal religion for an oppressive empire. Any exploiter would love to have his subjects accept this highly authoritarian ideology, every aspect of which suited the interest of the land-owning ruling class. It was only a matter of time before some emperor recognized this.
Uses of Religion by the Roman Ruling Class
The Romans aristocracy had learned the importance of religion in controlling their own lower classes. The aristocratic historian Livy, in his history of the Roman republic, wrote thus about the (mythological) origins of Roman religion:
Numa Pompilius [an early king of Rome, 6th century B.C.E.] decided upon a step which he felt would prove more effective than anything else with a mob as rough and ignorant as the Romans were in those days. This was to inspire them with the fear of the gods.
He then made up a story about his meeting at night with the goddess Egeria, by whose authority he set up Roman religion practices. According to Michael Grant, "almost every educated Roman . . . held precisely this view of his national religion and mythology, that it was something to keep the people quiet . . ."
The historian Polybius (2nd century B.C.E.) "expresses the belief that the ruling class arranges matters in such a way on account of the masses, who need to be impressed and 'restrained'" (Grant, 226; cf. Polybius VI, 56). Scaevola, the chief priest, wrote a few years later that
it is expedient that populations should be deceived in the matter of religion.
Scaevola's own father, also a priest, had put together some of the chief religious myths of Rome. The famous aristocratic apologist Cicero, noted for his hatred of any Roman who sided with the lower classes, stated in his Laws (II, 12) that
the people's constant need for the advice and authority of the conservative upper classes is what holds the state together.
The significant thing about this is how deliberately and consciously this use of religion for political purposes by the Roman upper classes was. It was the Roman emperor Constantine who declared toleration for Christianity and then made sure he controlled the myths that embodied it.
However, this was not basically any different than was done in ancient Greece and by the Hebrew ruling classes during Old Testament times. In Genesis, for example, Solomon is made to descend directly from Esau the Edomite and Heth the Canaanite because Jewish kings wanted to claim these lands. The whole story of the Egyptian Captivity of the Jews may well be due to an attempt by the Jerusalem priesthood to make a rival Jewish temple in Egypt look illegitimate. Certainly the Old Testament is no more "historically accurate" than the new.
Roman Rulers Adopt Christianity
Before acceding to the throne in 307 AD, Constantine had been "Caesar" (adopted son and successor) to the emperor Diocletian (284-305 AD). He had participated in the last, and the largest, attempt to wipe out Christianity. Diocletian was trying to keep the empire together. It was a massive system of class exploitation that had outgrown the technical ability of the emperors to unite. Constantine declared toleration for Christianity about the same time he built Constantinople and divided the Empire in two sections, East and West, in order to try to hold it together, while in reality recognizing the inevitability of division.
Under Diocletian, Christianity had been attacked because it challenged traditional Roman religion. On the ideological level, the Romans had tried to enforce loyalty among the different peoples in the empire by demanding that the local ruling classes, whom the Romans manipulated and through whom they ruled, make the Roman emperor one of the gods in their religion. The Jewish lower classes refused, and the Romans crushed them in two massive rebellions (66-73 and 132-5 AD).
When the Christians also refused to sacrifice to the emperor, the Romans persecuted them as followers of a Jewish rebel, as they knew well Joshua/Jesus had been. The four New Testament gospels were composed largely to rewrite history and convince early Christians and the Romans themselves that Joshua/Jesus had not in fact been the rebel the Romans had killed him for being.
Constantine's acceptance of Christianity as a favored religion represented his recognition that Christianity was an ideal ideology for the empire. Since Jesus belonged to no ethnic group -- Paul had made Jesus' Judaism irrelevant to his message -- he was the ideal "abstract man" for all peoples. Christians were not pacifists -- the imperial army contained one legion made up entirely of Christian soldiers -- but were so loyal to their bishops, or "overseers", that they would never fight back against oppression even when their families were tortured to death before their eyes.
Constantine demanded the Church leaders get together in a number of Church Councils to hammer out a unified "line" or doctrine. If the Church were to help unify the empire, the differences in doctrine that had grown up over time, and which reflected the relative autonomy of the bishops in different parts of the huge empire, had to be done away with and ideological unity imposed. The Emperor controlled the outcome of all of the church's Councils.
Orthodoxy
This marks a qualitative step in ruling-class control. For the first time in Western history, an empire of many diverse ethnic and language groups was united under one ideological institution that claimed god-given rights. The international ruling class of the late Roman Empire had a single religious ideology that supported the bosses regardless of where or who they were.
The emperor called together the church leaders (the "overseers", or "bishops") to work out a common set of teachings and a monolithic leadership. If Christianity was to be of any use to the Empire's ruling class, it had to serve as a force for unity behind the emperor.
But during the 275 or so years of its existence, the Christian church, like the Empire itself, had developed into a poly-centric organization. The different bishops in the major urban centers of the Empire -- Christianity was mainly a religion of the cities; hence the Latin word paganus, or "country-dweller", became synonymous with "non-Christian" -- were more or less independent of one another, and had their own differences in doctrine and interpretation of the Jesus story. There was no agreement on what "books" or stories should be considered divinely inspired ("canonical") -- that is, there was no agreement on what a "Bible" should be made up of.
Most important for the Empire were the questions of Church leadership and the nature of God. There was no one Church leader whose decision was binding and final. Any bishop was free to teach his own version of the religion in his area. Also, the question of whether Christianity was a religion of several gods, or of one god only, had not yet really been decided.
These issues were crucial because the Church's poly-centrism mirrored the poly-centrism that was tearing the Empire apart. Since 66 A.D. most emperors had come to power not from Rome, but by gaining a power base in a distant province and overthrowing the current emperor.
The rival leaders and teachings of the church, if left unchanged, would be a threat to the unity that Constantine wanted, since they would legitimize regional conflicts of interest and multiple leaders. Constantine demanded that the authority of the bishop of Rome be recognized as supreme; he wanted the leader in Rome where he could control him.
The question of the nature of god was even more important. Following late Greek religions, Christianity had developed a notion of at least three "divine beings" -- a father (identified with Yahweh, the God of the Israelites), a son (Jesus), and a "spirit of god" somehow different from the other two. A plurality of divine beings in heaven would surely legitimize the existence of a plurality of political rulers on earth.
However, if Jesus the "son" were not really a human being but only god the father in human form, then his sacrifice never really took place, since a god can't really die. So urging the exploited to "be like Jesus", suffer meekly, "turn the other cheek," -- to submit without protest to the injustices of the rulers of this world -- would make no sense, because a mere mortal cannot imitate a god. For the religion to help unify the empire and strengthen the authority of the emperor, there had to be one and only one god. But for Christianity to appeal to the exploited and teach them to love and obey their exploiters, Jesus had to be human.
Constantine demanded that the Church leaders solve this logically insoluble problem. They came up with the doctrine of the "Trinity" -- there really are three distinct entities, and yet there is only one god. Since this makes no sense, it was called a "mystery", a term meaning "believe it and don't ask questions."
The authoritarian nature of the Church, and through it of the Empire, was thereby doubly reinforced. "One god in heaven" meant there should be "one emperor on earth." Rebellion against the emperor was therefore "heresy", a religion offense as well. And, since Church doctrines were no longer logical, they could not be questioned. All the thinking was to be done by the Church leaders, helped, of course, by the Emperor. The role of the masses was simply to obey without understanding.
So the idea of "orthodoxy" -- Greek for "correct teaching" -- was created. This was a qualitative step forward in ruling-class ideological control. There was to be one set of carefully-defined beliefs inculcated into everyone from birth. These teachings were the same regardless of ethnic group, language, and social class.
No questioning them was allowed, no means provided whereby they could be legitimately questioned. All deviation from them was a sin, punishable by condemnation to an eternity of torture in Hell, compared to which the life of the most oppressed slave was a paradise. Deviation from these ideas was at the same time a political crime, punishable by the state through torture, imprisonment and death. The word "heresy" in Greek means "choice", something the masses must never have.
Progressive Aspects of Christianity for its Time
Christian ideology suppressed ancient scientific thought, suppressed ancient ideas of toleration towards religious and cultural differences. Ancient learning and literature was suppressed and even destroyed as sinful. To the bourgeois atheist, all this appears to be the depths of ignorance and backwardness.
But as dialectical materialists we must recognize the progressive aspects of Christianity as well. Christianity was universal, transcending the ancient tribal religions based on one ethnic group, just as the Empire united the Mediterranean, Western Europe and North Africa into a single political and economic unity.
Christianity encompassed the notion that all human beings were equal, at least in the sight of god. In so doing it provided the germ of a criticism of inequality on earth, even while guaranteeing the security of that inequality as part of the inscrutable will of god. Christian orthodoxy established the idea that there is only one truth, though it displaced the search for that truth from the material world to the realm of ideas.
Christianity gave concrete recognition to the reality of the class struggle in another way -- by recognizing the age-old desire of the exploited masses for a classless society free of exploitation, a return to the "golden age" or "the garden of paradise," and promised this to the masses, though relegating it to a realm after death. It recognized the class struggle, even while designed to control it in the interests of the ruling class.
However, other ancient religions which competed with Christianity for recognition by the Empire's ruling class contained these ideas also. And several of the Christian "heresies" gave far more recognition to the poor than did orthodox Christianity.
Christianity was the ideal religion for a vast slave-owning empire. The Christian concept of God was perfectly suited to the super-exploitation of slave labor, the economic basis of the Roman Empire.
God was the great slave-owner, a god of fear, who had his own son tortured to death by crucifixion and who did not shrink from inflicting the worst punishments imaginable on humans disobedient to his will. He demanded absolute obedience not only in act but even in thought.
In order to justify the slave-camp of horrors that the Roman Empire was for most of its inhabitants, Christianity borrowed from Gnosticism the notion of fallen human nature. Human beings were declared to be naturally evil, deserving only torment and death. They could be saved only by god's "grace", which only the church could dole out. And the church only gave this "grace" in return for strict obedience! The constant threat of disobedience, even in thought, was hell, an eternity of the worst tortures.
This also justified the unrelieved brutality of the ruling classes. Harsh government was needed to keep vicious human nature from running amok. As for exploitation, torture and slavery -- well, they were no more than fallen human nature deserved, and anyway the patient slave would be rewarded in heaven for a life of suffering on earth. As Joe Hill, an American working-class leader of the early 20th century, sang, the church offered the exploited "Pie in the Sky When You Die."
The pagan Roman emperors had only required their subjects to take an oath, and perform a symbolic sacrifice to a Roman god or to the emperor. This form of ideological control was obviously weak and ineffective. A person could perform these rites and speak the right words while inwardly remaining disloyal. Under Christianity Roman subjects were supposed to constantly search their innermost beings to rid themselves of disobedient thoughts.
The Church was run by the ruling classes, who filled virtually all the top positions. It also became a large landowner itself, exploiting slave, and later serf, labor. This direct ruling-class domination was necessary, of course, to guarantee that Christianity continued to embody the ideological values of the ruling classes.
Heresy
Under these conditions, any criticism of social and economic conditions had to express itself as a disagreement with the orthodox theology that justified the status quo. The ideology of the exploited took the form of "heresies," deviant versions of Christianity that rejected some of the ruling-class ideas. Since the Church hierarchy reflected the class structure of society, low-ranking priests from or close to the exploited classes were usually involved.
The sexism of the ruling classes -- always an important aspect of ruling-class ideology, an attempt to blame women for their super-exploitation -- reflected itself in the second-class status the Church forced on women, who were blamed as the cause of sin in humankind and a constant threat to male virtue.
Pre-Christian beliefs, usually more egalitarian and hostile to the oppressive church and relying on traditional magic, persisted among peasants, especially women. They were termed "witch-craft," and by the 18th century nine million women and children, more or less, had been tortured to death as "witches" by Catholic and Protestant churches alike.
The Protestant Reformation took place in the 1500s as the qualitative culmination of many social and political changes that had been developing for several centuries, and these were due to the growth of a money economy and production for a market. Capitalism in its early stages undermined the "feudal" economy, and the bourgeoisie -- the banking, merchant, and craft classes in the cities -- became more important economically and politically in relation to the landowning aristocracy upon whose class rule feudalism was based.
Protestantism preserved most of the traditional doctrines of Catholicism, but adapted the ideology to suit the new rule of the capitalist classes organized into centralized nation-states, the political form taken by capitalist rule. Today mainstream Protestantism is mainly confined to Northern and Western Europe, and those areas of the world like North America colonized by it. Fundamentalist Protestantism is being promoted aggressively among the working classes as a violently anti-communist and anti- working class ideology, especially among super-exploited workers in the formerly colonial world.
Why Communists Must Fight Religion
We communists fight for the working class. Workers cannot be free of exploitation and the miseries of capitalism until they have overthrown the ruling classes and run society by themselves. Communists have always studied the class struggles of the past, and this study shows that workers must organize under a party that fights for their interests and that will never sell out to the bosses -- a communist party. Violent revolution is necessary, since no ruling class yields power without a violent struggle.
Communists must oppose religion, because religion is always and everywhere a tool of the rulers to dominate and dupe the workers. Religion is essentially elitist and undemocratic. Communists are materialists. We must use science to unmask false ideas.
Throughout the ages, nothing has held back the struggle of the exploited for justice, nothing has caused as much passivity, as religion. We encourage all comrades and friends to criticize this article and write further articles exposing how religion keeps oppresses us all and serves the bosses
A PLP pamphlet
The Clinton Administration, the AFL-CIO and various non-governmental organizations such as the Global Exchange have launched a vast campaign against prison labor and sweatshops in other countries, mainly China, but also in Indonesia, India, Southeast Asia and Latin-America — anywhere but right here in the United States. Yet it is here in the U.S. that the ruling class and its government apparatus —federal, state and local — have established the largest forced labor sweatshop system in the world. The hypocritical cry of "human rights" by these rulers and their lieutenants is belied by the U.S. prison-industrial complex, the most inhuman system on the planet.
There are now approximately 2,000,000 inmates in U.S. prisons and jails.1 (Federal and state institutions are defined as "prisons." Local city and county institutions are defined as "jails.") Then there are privatized prisons run by large "correction" corporations. These prisoners, especially in the past decade, have become a vast source of slave labor and of billions of dollars in profits. "No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens…"2
The figures are staggering. The U.S. has incarcerated more people than any other nation, a half million more than China3 (which has nearly FIVE times the population of the U.S.). California alone has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, (in 1998, 160,000 inmates). That’s more than France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and the Netherlands COMBINED — just in California! Those five countries have a total population of 340,000,000, more than eleven times that of California.
Overall, the total "criminal justice" system in the U.S., including those in prison, on parole and on probation, is approaching 6,000,000. In the last two decades, 1,000 new prisons have been built in the U.S. Yet "prisons are more overcrowded than when the building spree began."4
Hundreds of thousands of these prisoners, possibly even half a million — over two-thirds of whom are black and Hispanic —are being forced to work for as little as 20¢ an hour, some as low as 75¢ a day! They produce everything from clothing, eyewear, furniture, electronic cable assemblies, aircraft parts, computer circuit boards, mattresses, printing, data entry, vehicle parts, "shrink-wrap" Microsoft software, meatpacking, telemarketing, and on and on. U.S. bosses, unable to provide youth, especially black and Latin youth, with jobs either entice them into the military or drive them into prison where they are "hired" at slave "wages." There they become part of the inmate population making products that undersell those made outside the walls, leading to thousands of layoffs and the lowering of the overall wage scales of the entire working class. The apparel industry has lost 8,000 jobs to the federal prison system alone,5 and federal inmates comprise only one-sixteenth of the total U.S. prison population.
Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix, told that Nike subcontractors pay Indonesian workers $1.20 per day, said, "We propose that [Nike] take a look at their…labor costs. We could offer [competitive] prison inmate labor right here in Oregon."6 In Soledad Prison in Monterey, Calif., prisoners work 9-hour days at 45¢ an hour producing blue work shirts that are exported for sale in ASIA. Even with transportation costs, they can undersell Asian sweatshops! State prisoners are making El Salvadoran license plates here more cheaply than can be made in El Salvador, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere!7
Capitalism’s bottom line is that prison labor is "good for the country." Before a scheduled conference of economists to discuss the effects of prison labor, a May 22, 1999 report in the Wall Street Journal summarized that, while "more expensive private-sector workers may lose their jobs" to prison labor, "assigning work to the most cost-efficient producer is good for the economy." And what could be more "cost-efficient" than forcing prisoners to work for 23¢ an hour?!
Profits, War, Unemployment And The Prison-Industrial Complex
It is the profit motive that creates the built-in incentives for increasing the prison population, for lengthening terms, for extending the terms of those already sentenced and for using all this as the newest feature of capitalist production. Profits are the foundation of capitalism. All the evils of this prison-industrial complex stem from the combination of its profit motive, of its need to enforce racism to divide, and extract super-profits from, the working class. But alongside the profit motive for such a vast operation is the ruling class’s need for social control of the working class to maintain that very profit system.
To strengthen their profit position in their long-rang worldwide fight for markets, resources, exploitation of cheap labor and control over oil supplies, U.S. rulers — especially the dominant Rockefeller wing — must be prepared to go to war, both "small" and big wars. Increasingly this means exercising more rigid control at home, over its own working class. It means militarization of society and a grinding down of workers’ living standards. What better way to accomplish this than to imprison millions (even while, as they themselves admit, "crime" is going down), using them as the absolute cheapest labor force and lowering wages and standards for the entire working class to boot? Given the fact that armed forces enlistments are falling short of minimum quotas, look for them to begin offering prisoners the chance to shorten their sentences by joining the military and "wiping their slate clean."
Furthermore, the tremendous increase in the jailing of non-violent offenders is a way to "reduce" unemployment, and keep the least skilled, and possibly the most rebellious, behind bars. The Wall Street Journal reported (Feb. 1, 2000): "Prisoners are excluded from employment calculations. And since most inmates are economically disadvantaged and unskilled, jailing so many people has effectively taken a big block of The Nation’s least-employable citizens out of the equation." What a way to deal with potential rebellions of masses of unemployed, who were a large part of those uprisings in the 1960s!
The Racist Roots Of The Prison-Industrial Complex
How did all this come about, from less than 300,000 prisoners in 1972 to 2,000,000 in the year 2000 and counting?
Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the Civil War, a system of "convict leasing" was introduced to carry on the slavery "tradition." Freed slaves were convicted of not fulfilling sharecropper arrangements or of petty theft — guilty or not — and then "rented out" to pick cotton, work in the mines, and build the railroads. In Georgia, from 1870 to 1910, 88% of the "leased convicts" were black. In Alabama, 93% of the "leased" miners were black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced convict leasing. The infamous Parchman Farm existed until 1972.
During the post-Civil War period, racist "Jim Crow" laws became the law of the land, mandating segregation in schools, housing, marriage and many other aspects of life. Now a new set of laws, with a marked racist character, enforces slave labor sweatshops in the criminal "justice" system through what has become known as the prison-industrial complex.
Prison Population Increase
The enormous increase in the prison population has several sources: (1) the imprisonment of non-violent offenders, including long prison terms for possession of microscopic amounts of illegal drugs; (2) the passage of "Three Strikes" laws in 13 states; (3) the lengthening of sentences; (4) passage of laws mandating minimum sentences no matter what the circumstances; (5) the tremendous expansion of prison labor, the profits from which creates the incentive to put more people in prison, for longer periods of time, with increased in-prison penalties which lengthen terms beyond the original sentence. All these factors increase potential profits for those investing in the prison-industrial complex.
A combination of federal and state laws greatly increased prison terms for possession of tiny amounts of illegal drugs. Federal law mandates five years without parole for possession of 5 grams (one-sixth of an ounce) of crack cocaine or of 3½ ounces of heroin and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of crack. (Interestingly enough, a 5-year sentence for possession of POWDER cocaine requires possession of 500 grams, or 100 times the amount of crack for the same sentence. The overwhelming majority of crack users are black and Hispanic; the overwhelming majority of powder users are middle- and upper-class whites. The "war on drugs" was essentially a racist war on black and Hispanic workers and youth.)
The Rockefeller drug laws in New York State, passed when Nelson Rockefeller was governor in 1973, made possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug subject to a mandatory sentence of 15 years to LIFE. Other states followed suit. During the 12 years that the liberal Mario Cuomo was governor of NY State (1982 to 1994), he added more prison beds — mainly for these non-violent offenders — than all the previous governors of the state COMBINED, going back 200 years! (More on this later.)
PAROLE
What is life like for the more than three million prisoners who have been released on parole? They can be stopped and searched at any time; their homes can be entered without a warrant; they need permission from their parole officer to borrow money, marry, drive a car or change jobs. If their parole is revoked, they are returned to prison without a trial to complete their full sentence. In California, felony convictions can carry an "indeterminate sentence," form one year to life, decided by the parole board.
Ninety-seven percent of the 125,000 federal prisoners are non-violent offenders. Two-thirds of more than 1,000,000 state prisoners are non-violent offenders." Crimes that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines or drug treatment — -or would not be considered crimes at all — in the U.S. lead to a prison term."8 (Our emphasis-Ed.)
The "Three Strikes" law passed in California as part of its "get-tough-with-crime" war led to the need for 20 new prisons just to handle the increase in inmates from that law alone. The law said that two prior felony convictions mandated 25 years to life for a third conviction for ANYTHING, no matter what the prescribed sentence for that third offense. And juries cannot be told a particular conviction is a third offense. The result? Third offenders have been sent to prison for 25 years to life for stealing several pairs of pants or possession of one gram (one-thirty-third of an ounce) of cocaine. One offender convicted of stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year terms!9
California’s prisons now house twice as many inmates as the number they were built for. State prison officials estimate California will have to spend $6.1 billion over the next decade just to remain at the present level of overcrowding! The counties will need another $2.4 billion to maintain the same double capacity. A number of California prisons contain 6,000 prisoners. However, proposals are afoot to construct "mega-prisons" which will handle up to 20,000 inmates each.
Such is the nature of this "growth industry" that David Myers, West Coast regional president of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the U.S., told a reporter his company is building three prisons in California entirely on speculation. That is, they have no contract with the state to house prisoners when construction is completed. However, this executive is confident that, "If you build it in the right place, the prisoners will come."10 Myers believes the CCA’s "low-cost, turnkey-ready beds [are] sure to attract business from the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and from U.S. marshals."
When New York’s Democratic governor Cuomo assumed office, faced with the effects of the Rockefeller drug laws, he had two choices: either repeal them and follow the non-prison sentences handed out in most countries, or keep the drug laws, "get tough" and build new prisons. He chose the latter. However, the state’s voters had just rejected a proposed bond issue to finance such a program. So Cuomo used the state’s Urban Development Corporation (UDC) —a public agency created in 1968 to build housing for the poor, and whose bond issues didn’t need voter approval — to issue bonds for prison financing, the biggest in state history. Wall Street’s investment bankers cleaned up. The total cost, including interest, would reach 7 billion dollars. In fact, Cuomo "sold" the infamous Attica prison for $200 million to the UDC, which then "leased" it back to the State. The UDC bonds issued to pay the state its $200 million will have netted $500 million in interest to those bankers by the time the bonds are paid off!11 Who said, "crime doesn’t pay"?
A Concentration Camp For Black and Latin Workers and Youth
The 700% increase in prisoners in the U.S. over the past 25 years has a marked racist character. Historically there has been a disproportionate number of black prisoners in the U.S. But the combination of long prison terms for non-violent offenders possessing an ounce or two of crack cocaine, the zeroing in on the predominantly black inner cities by racist big-city police forces, and the framing of tens of thousands of black youth by corrupt racist police (the recent revelations about the LAPD are only the latest example) has resulted in HALF the inmates in this country’s prisons being black (although they constitute only 10% of the population).
ONE SOLUTION....
Prison labor led to the Briceville, Tennessee, Coal Creek Rebellion in 1891-1892. When miners insisted on a contract barring union membership, unionized miners were locked out and "leased" convicts were forced to scab in the mines. Miners stormed the convicts' stockade and freed over 400 prisoners. The company gave in, rehiring the union miners and halted the use of convict labor.
Violent crimes have been about the same among black people as among whites for the past 20 years, and currently the "prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as black men." Yet because of the above racist factors, "black men are five times as likely to be arrested for drug offenses."12 Seventy percent of all prisoners in the U.S. are black or Hispanic. Two-thirds of all state inmates (97% of federal inmates) are imprisoned for non-violent crimes. Many are convicted because of inadequate legal representation. Many others are forced to plea bargain to avoid even longer prison terms. All this has trapped a vast pool of black — and increasingly Latino — men in the "criminal justice" system, to become fodder for the most exploitative profit-making since pre-Civil War slavery.
Presently one of every four black men in the U.S. is likely to be imprisoned at some time during his lifetime. One of every 14 black men is now in prison or jail. Black men, who constitute 10% of the male population in the U.S., are imprisoned at more than four times the rate of black men in South Africa where they constitute 75% of the male population! Can there be any doubt that black men in the U.S. are living in a fascist state?
This tremendous racist oppression of black people by the criminal INjustice system has helped lay the basis for the attack on Hispanic workers and youth. They are the fastest growing sector of the prison population, having increased from 7% in 1980 to 14% in 1992 to 20% currently. In Massachusetts, Hispanics are jailed for drug offenses at 81 times the rate of whites convicted of drug offenses. (For blacks, the rate is 39 times that of whites.) In California in the last eight years, the Latino population rose from 26% to 28% of the total, but the State’s Latino male prisoners nearly doubled, from 29,679 to 53,881.13
Since the U.S. ruling class had decided to "solve" the drug problem (that its system had created) by imprisoning millions of non-violent offenders in for from five years to life, a dual problem arose: how could they put hundreds of thousands of new "convicts" into prisons with the capacity to hold only tens of thousands? And if they solved that one by building new prisons, how would they pay for it?
This huge increase in prisoners and prisons, and the cost of both, led to the current "solution": use forced prison labor to pay for the costs of building and maintaining the prisons, which in turn enables all the sectors of the capitalist class that feed off this prison-industrial complex to reap billions in profits. Of course, the creation of these U.S. "maquiladoras" results in mass layoffs of workers outside prisons earning higher wages, both unionized and unorganized.
In much of the 20th century, prisons were used mainly for repression. Now they constitute a vast source of profit as well, with increased repression feeding increased profits. The nature of this system is utterly fascist. If not exactly duplicating Nazi Germany, it is fast becoming analogous to its forced slave labor and concentration camps on several counts.
Firstly, the corporation established within the federal prison system is following Nazi footsteps with its war production. Federal Prison Industries produces 100% of all army helmets, ammunition cases, body armor, I.D. tags, shirts and pants, tarps and canteen covers.14
Secondly, the German firms of I.G. Farben, Krupp, Daimler-Benz, and the subsidiaries of GM and Ford used Hitler’s slave laborers to produce super-profits for themselves (the concentration camps were not only for murdering Jews and others); so, too, do many Fortune 500 corporations use prison labor to extract super-profits here. (See "Prison Labor, States" below.)
Finally, the use of prisons in the U.S. as instruments of repression is increasing. If not quite equal to Hitler Germany, U.S. prisons have their own set of horrors—extreme racism, beatings, torture, deaths, sexual exploitation by guards, putting juveniles in adult prisons, sentencing non-violent offenders to long prison terms (from 15 years to life) and so on. (At California’s Corcoran State Prison, officials "staged ‘gladiator days’ in which rival gang members were encouraged to fight, staff members placed bets on the outcome, and matches often ended with inmates being shot."15)
STRIKE-BREAKING
In the mid-1980s, unionized flight attendants struck TWA. The airline set up a reservations operation with prison labor in California's Ventura Youth "Facility." This allowed TWA to transfer its ticket agents to the flight attendants' jobs. Thus, the use of prison labor, in effect, subsidized TWA's strike-breaking.
There are at least seven distinct ways profits are wrenched out of this vast U.S. prison population:
(1) Goods and services produced inside prisons by prison labor and sold by federal, state and local prisons/jails either to other government agencies, or on the open market or as exports abroad;
(2) The contracting out of prison labor (both inside and outside prisons) to private corporations at slave labor wages;
(3) The creation of vast new private prison corporations that profit both from housing inmates from state prisons as well as from using these inmates as forced prison labor;
(4) The construction of new prisons, using both prison and non-prison labor;
(5) Interest paid to banks and Wall Street investment houses on loans for the construction and upkeep of new prisons, both public and private;
(6) The venders of supplies to prison industries;
(7) The pay telephone racket set up inside prison walls by private phone companies for collect calls by prisoners to the outside world.
All these profiteers combined comprise what is now commonly defined as the Prison-Industrial Complex, one of the biggest growth industries in the U.S. This multi-billion dollar industry has its own trade shows, conventions, web sites, mail order catalogues, direct marketing campaigns, architectural firms, construction firms, Wall Street investment houses, plumbing supply companies, food service companies, and outfits selling "prison-specific" products: bullet-resistant security cameras, padded cells in "vast color selections," belts and shackles ("special for juveniles"), body orifice security scanners, razor wire, etc., etc. This industry even has its own Yellow Pages, with a list of over 1,000 venders. All this is largely based on the non-violent offenders (two-thirds of the two million) who, by even European capitalist standards, should not be in prison at all.
PRISON LABOR STRIKE
On January 1, 2000, 4,000 inmates at New York State's Sing Sing and Green Haven prisons were placed in "lock-down" for two weeks when 85 prisoners were accused of "plotting a strike," encouraging their fellow prisoners to stay in their cells and not to report to prison jobs. Several prisons "ran slow." The 85 were dispersed to other prisons. Those found with leaflets calling for a work stoppage were put in solitary.
Prison Labor — Federal
The federal government's prison labor program works through a federally established corporation, Federal Prison Industries (FPI) whose trade name is UNICOR. Federal law requires all federal agencies to buy FPI products when available, without competitive bidding from private companies. FPI is also allowed to sell prisoner-made products abroad. (Of course, the Clinton/Rockefeller/AFL-CIO/Global Exchange "human rights" hypocrites supposedly oppose importing prisoner-made products but are silent about exporting U.S. prisoner-made goods.) A pending bill would allow the FPI to sell on the open (private) market in the U.S. FPI's annual sales are running well over a half-billion dollars. It manufactures over 150 different products in 99 factories in 64 prisons (with 19 new ones in the works) in 30 states. FPI is the federal government’s 35th largest contractor, just behind IBM.
FPI pays prisoners in a 5-grade range, starting at 23¢ an hour and "topping off" at $1.15 (although the prisoner retains only half of even this tiny amount). FPI is exempt from any federal workplace and job regulations. "Inmates are forced into UNICOR jobs against their will and severely punished...if they object."16 When prisoners refused, for health reasons, to rip up asbestos tiles when renovating an Army medical center, their boss demanded, "You either rip up the tile or you go to the hole [solitary confinement]."17
In addition to the war production mentioned previously, FPI’s 27,000 prison laborers (and growing) produce 98% of the entire U.S. market for equipment assembly services, 93% of paint and artist brushes, 92% of all kitchen assembly services, 46% of all personal armor, 36% of all household furnishings, 30% of all headset/microphone/speakers, 21% of all household furniture 18% of all electrical hardware, 17% of all office furniture, and on and on. The real sweatshop character of federal prison labor is revealed by FPI’s chief operating officers, Steve Schwalb who "sees FPI making…toys and sneakers, almost all now made abroad."18 That means underselling sweatshops in Asia and Latin-America.
FPI will either set up its own factories inside prisons and underbid private companies or will offer to set up prison factories for lease to private corporations. Congressional testimony in 1996 reported a "pent-up demand for prison labor." FPI advertised for companies "interested in leasing a ready-to-run prison industry"; "be able to hire and fire selectively among inmates."19
In turn, this "private hiring of prison labor…whips up incentives for incarceration. Prisons…depend on the revenue. Shareholders in corporations profiting from prison labor [lobby for] longer sentences to expand their workforce….The system…builds upon itself."20
Of course, this enslavement of prison labor leads to layoffs outside the prisons. American Apparel in Selma, Alabama, which produced military uniforms, was forced to lay off 500 workers when it lost its contract to FPI. Virginia Metals in Orange, Virginia, went out of business, laying off 110, when FPI took over its government contract for office partitions. Northwest Woolen Mills in Rhode Island laid off 50 workers, earning $10.50 an hour, when FPI snared its army contract, based on paying prisoners 29¢ an hour.
Prison Labor — States
At least 37 states have legalized the contracting out of prison labor to private corporations that set up operations inside state prisons. The list of these prisons’ business clients reads like a Who’s Who of Corporate America: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T Wireless, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target stores, and on and on.
In 1994 state prisoners produced over $900 million worth of goods and services. With the vast increase in corporate use of prison labor, this may very well be twice that now. This does not include the value of services performed by prisoners just to maintain the prison. If the state had to pay outside labor even the legal minimum wage for this work, it would cost far more than the states pay prisoners. Many pay nothing for this prison maintenance work.
INNOCENT, GETS LIFE = "THE SYSTEM WORKS"
The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world retaining the death sentence. Since 1976 through August 1999, 566 prisoners were executed, the great majority being black. However, 82 of those on death row were able to fight their convictions hard enough to prove their innocence. That's one for every seven executed. How many more of those executed might have been found innocent (especially after being framed) partly depended on the deadlines for new evidence to be submitted on appeal. In Virginia that deadline was reduced recently to 21 days.
Before that, Earl Washington, Jr., had lasted 17 years on death row when DNA evidence found him innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted. "Too late," said the Virginia Attorney-General. Rather than release an innocent man, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment! Said the Attorney-General, this proves "the system works...."
Microjet in Monroe, Wash., makes aircraft components for Boeing in a rent-free factory, a 56,000-square-foot industrial building built and maintained by the state.21 Workers are paid $5 to $7 an hour but only receive 20% of that. (Boeing machinists earn $25 an hour.) In the same prison, "Redwood Outdoors" has a garment sweatshop making clothing for Eddie Bauer, Union Bay, Planet Hollywood and others.22 The Washington Marketing Group (WMG) employs prisoners to do telephone soliciting for Prudential Health Insurance, United Van Lines, the Red Cross, the American Cancer Society and the Leukemia Society.23
Omega Pacific’s owner told the Spokane Spokesman-Review (Feb. 2, 1996) that he "moved to prison because it’s rent-free," he has "no workers who don’t come in because of rush hour or sick children at home; workers don’t take vacations" and he doesn’t "have to deal with employee benefits or workmen’s compensation." I.G. Farben had the same advantages in Nazi concentration camps.
Oregon is spending $151 million to transform the State Mental Hospital into a combination women’s prison and men’s intake center which would "warehouse" prisoners up to 45 days and then ship them around the state as slave laborers. Says Prison Administrator Larry Henning, "This is strictly about good business. We’re using their labor to get the highest possible return while they’re incarcerated."24 In plain language, it’s a center which traffics in human beings, dispatching slave laborers to where they will produce the highest profit.
The Virginia prisons advertise in trade magazines and mail out brochures proclaiming, "Virginia’s Prisons. They Are Wide Open to Business: "willing, experienced workers"; "no benefit packages, no pensions, no health insurance, no vacations or sick leave." Virginia’s prison "wage scale" starts at 23¢ an hour and "tops out" at $1.53. The Governor puts it straight: "We complain about prison labor from China." Not to be outdone, he says, "Let’s have our own prisoners doing something…"25
Kwalu, a South African company, finds it cheaper to exploit 120 workers in South Carolina’s Ridgeland prison producing chairs for MacDonald’s and for retirement homes than it would manufacturing them South Africa.26 In the same state, Josten’s, which makes graduation caps and gowns, was considering expanding its business by contracting its work out to sweatshops in Mexico. But then they found it cheaper to set up a sweatshop in the Leath Women’s prison near Laurens, S.C. and have the sales "advantage" of labeling the garments "Made in America."
In Kentucky prisoners are paid 75¢ a day working at re-cycling centers. In North Carolina, 12 state prisons "rent out" 650 prisoners, men and women, as cheap labor to local towns. They’re paid 70¢ day. Wisconsin prisons advertise: "Can’t find workers? A willing workforce awaits."
Four states — California, Texas, New York and Florida — hold 35% of all state prisoners, nearly half a million. The South Florida Business Journal reported (July 9, 1999) state prisoners are employed as citrus fruit workers in South Florida, making the "Florida citrus industry competitive with Mexico." Of New York State’s 72,000 prisoners, half are employed at an average daily rate of $1.05.27
Texas, with the second highest state prison population, has become the great "importer" of prisoners from other states (of which more later.) Prisoners exported from Colorado to Texas for prison labor are paid $1 a day.
Finally there is California, which tops them all: the most prisoners, the most prisons, the most overcrowded, the highest budget ($5 billion per year, 18% of the total state budget) and laws which require all able-bodied prisoners to work. It was that edict which impelled the expansion of the prison industry program to "create jobs." (As one unemployed welder said, "It looks like the only way to get a job is to go to prison.")
The California Prison Industry Authority (PIA) was established to employ prison labor at "wages" of 30¢ to 95¢ an hour, with no benefits. Other State agencies are required by law to buy needed products from the PIA and nowhere else. After the passage of Proposition 139 in 1990, which allowed private corporations to use prison labor to make and sell products on the open market, the PIA began renting out space for in-prison factories at 1¢ to 3¢ a square foot. They pay no local, state or federal taxes.
This combination of the PIA and Proposition 139 was the "solution" to California’s skyrocketing prisoner population: make slave laborers pay for their upkeep in prison, for prison maintenance and even work on prison construction, while enabling Corporate America to make a killing. Is it any wonder that Bob Tessler sold his maquiladora sweatshop in Tecate, Mexico, and moved his data processing firm DPAS to California’s San Quentin prison? "We have a captive labor force. That makes the whole business profitable."28 And he can sell his data entry work and "literature assembly" a lot more cheaply to his clients — Chevron, Bank of America and Macy’s, among others — who are now also profiting from prison slave labor.
CMT Blues set up a garment sweatshop in a maximum-security prison in San Diego where 70 workers sew Tee-shirts for Mecca, Seattle CottonWorks, Lee Jeans and others. Workers are paid less than half the minimum wage. Two workers who exposed the fact that part of the work was switching garment labels from "Made in Honduras" to "Made in the USA" were given 45 days in solitary.29
Over 7,000 California State prisoners make products for CalState University, state hospitals, the prison system itself and the Dept. of Motor Vehicles. They even butcher beef and make salamis and burgers at PIA’s meat processing plant. At the Aveala State Penitentiary, prisoners slaughter ostriches in a custom-built abattoir for export to Europe at $40 per pound.30
CAPITALISM'S TREATMENT FOR THE MENTALLY ILL = JAIL
It is estimated that 10% of the two million in U.S. prisons and jails have serious mental illnesses. Twenty years ago most of them would have been treated in the mental health system (no great bargain). But then thousands of mental hospitals were closed down (budget cuts). Now these mentally ill people are picked up off the streets and thrown in jail. Mental illness now makes one a candidate for the "criminal justice" system. The Los Angeles County Jail is now known as the largest mental institution in the United States.
Private Prisons
The privatization of federal, state and local prisons and jails started picking up steam in the ’80s under an "enthusiastic" push from Reagan and Bush. But it became "the theme stock of the ’90s" under the Clinton administration. Clinton’s drive to reduce the federal workforce led to the Justice Department contracting out the imprisonment of undocumented workers and minimum-security prisoners to private prison corporations.
Private prisons are based on the selling of human beings — modern slavery. It involves the government auctioning off mostly young black men to the highest bidder. In the words of Thomas Beasley, the head of the largest private prison corporation, in promoting private prisons, "You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers."
Private prisons are the fastest-growing sector of the prison-industrial complex. There are 18 such corporations guarding 100,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest — the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut — control about 75% of the industry.
Private prison profits are based on the principle of the higher the occupancy rate, the higher the profit. "Rehabilitation" never enters the equation. In fact, the more the prison corporations can prolong the terms of prisoners, the more profit they rake in.
A private prison gets a guaranteed fee for each prisoner, regardless of cost. Therefore, every dollar not spent on food or medical care is another dollar’s profit. Again, modern slavery. The "secret to low-cost operations," says Virginia’s private prison administrator Russell Boraas, "is having the minimum number of officers watching the maximum number of inmates."31 Thus, the CCA has a state-of-the-art prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, in which five guards on day-shift and two on night-shift watch 750 prisoners.
Private prison inmates lose credit for "good time" when disciplined by guards (who also own stock in the prison corporation). CCA guards in Tennessee say they’re encouraged to write up prisoners for minor infractions and place them in "segregation." But the inmates not only lose "good time"; they also have 30 days added to their sentence, a bonus of nearly $1,000 for CCA!32 "We put ’em in ‘seg’ in a hurry," says one guard. A 1992 study of New Mexico’s women’s prisons found that inmates at a CCA prison lost "good time" at a rate EIGHT times higher than at state-run prisons.33 How glorious the incentives of the free market!
This extension of prisoners’ terms for profit extends to juvenile inmates, who understand only too well how money is being made off their bodies. One privately-owned juvenile prison in Texas houses 100 youths, "children really," said one guard. They are mostly black teen-age boys. One 14-year-old, upon being released, was told by a guard to "stay out of trouble. I don’t want to see you back here," to which the youth replied, "Why not? That’s how you make your money."34
WOMEN: FASTEST GROWING SECTION OF PRISON POPULATION (Or, One more cheer for "family values")
There are now 80,000 women in federal and state prisons, double the number of ten years ago. Women prisoners are increasing at a far faster rate then men. Of the 80,000 women, 56,000 (70%) are non-violent offenders. Over 60,000 (75%) are mothers. They often are jailed great distances from their children, so that there is minimum contact between mother and child. "That [makes] …it very difficult to integrate these mothers back into the care…of their children once they’re home." Racism plays a large role here as well: Black women are "eight times as likely as white women to be incarcerated." And "sexual misconduct by ‘correctional’ staff members" [continues] against female prisoners." (Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2000, from a General Accounting Office study and interview with Eleanor Holmes Norton who commissioned the study; also, from Atlantic Monthly, December, 1998.)
But private prison inmates are not just sitting around being "watched." The private prison operation has created a chain leading directly from corporations like Boeing straight to captive prison labor. In 1995, Lockhardt Technologies closed its Austin, Texas plant, laying off 130 workers earning $10 an hour, changed its name to Labor-To-Industry (LTI), and shifted its circuit board assembly operations to Wackenhut’s "Work Program Facility" in Lockhardt, Texas. There 180 prisoners take home 50¢ an hour while the company pays $1-a-year rent.35
These prisoners make computer components ("mother boards") for none other than Dell Computer. Dell is the most profitable computer company and its production techniques are touted as a model for other industries, especially auto and aircraft. Boeing has made Dell its sole computer supplier. Dell has mastered "supply chain management" — "complete flexibility about whether a particular function is performed by its own people or by outsiders."36 One of the keys to this is "just-in-time" production, which Dell applies to its parts production in Wackenhut’s prison, the ultimate in a "flexible workforce." No worry about strikes here! Prisoners are available at slave labor wages during peak demand and sent back to their cells during lulls. So everybody makes money: Boeing, Dell, LTI and Wackenhut — everybody, that is, except the 50¢-an-hour prisoners. No wonder Prudential Securities declares that, "The [prison] industry appears to have excellent prospects."
This industry’s thirst for profits knows no bounds. When a federal judge ruled that the overcrowding in Texas prisons constituted "cruel and unusual punishment," the CCA cut deals with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails, and share the profits. CCA’s building program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and AllState.37 This operation spread throughout rural Texas. However, liberal Democratic governor Ann Richards also reacted to the judge’s ruling. Following Cuomo’s example in NY State, she went on a state prison-building spree which "flooded the market," cutting into the source of private prison profits. (A law signed by Clinton in 1996 has given the states’ prison systems the legal ability to dispense with such court supervision and rulings, allowing free reign to overcrowding, violent and unsafe conditions.)
Not to worry. Capitalists will find a way. The private prison corporations in Texas began contracting with other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering them "rent-a-cell" facilities in CCA prisons in small Texas towns. By the mid-’90s, an "overcrowded" state would contact a "bed broker" — another profit-seeking middleman — who would search for empty Texas facilities at the "right price." The bed-broker’s commission is $2.50 to $5.50 per man-day; the county gets $1.50 per prisoner just for giving the private prison legal status; and the CCA gets $25 to $60 per man-day, depending on how crowded the jails are. This trafficking in human beings resulted, as one example, in Hawaii’s third largest prison now being located in Newton County, Texas.38
‘Crime Pays’
The CCA is now the largest private prison corporation in the world. From 1995 to 1998 it was among the five top performing stocks on the NY Stock Exchange. Founded in 1983, the value of its stock rose from $50 million in 1986 (when it went public) to $53.5 BILLION IN 1997.39 Its careful selection of the most lucrative prison contracts, its use of prison labor and its slashing of labor costs led the Wall Street firm of Paine-Webber to conclude, "Crime pays."
The CCA formed the Prison Realty Trust to speculate on buying prisons as real estate, raising $338 million from investors. Their Wall Street backers were Lehman Bros. and Paine-Webber. CCA is building a new $100 million prison in California’s Mojave Desert (a bonanza for the investment bankers), "gambling that cheap, empty prison beds will prove irresistible to California lawmakers."40
One of CCA’s seven-member Board of Directors is black, Joseph Johnson, the former executive director of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Said the Nashville Tennessean newspaper, the CCA "now looks like America….Johnson is African-American as are 60% of CCA’s prisoners." (Our emphasis) Johnson used his political connections to play a pivotal role in helping CCA swing a deal to buy a federal prison in Washington, D.C. for $52 million. This was the first federal prison sold to a private corporation (but not the last).
Wackenhut, the second largest private prison operator, started out as a hired strike-breaking outfit. It has worked closely with the CIA, helping it take over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California. This became a site to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons for shipment from this "sovereign nation" to the contras in Central America, circumventing a Congressional ban.41 It also developed a list of 4,000,000 U.S. "dissidents" before entering the prison market. It now operates in 42 states and in 50 countries with annual revenue exceeding a billion dollars.
Although the private prisons may be "state-of-the-art," the conditions for prisoners are brutal. A pregnant woman prisoner in a CCA prison "died of criminal neglect," after suffering in agony for 12 hours. Prisoners in a Bobby Ross Group Texas prison staged a rebellion over poor food. The same outfit’s prison in Montana was accused of starving prisoners and forcing them to wait days to see a doctor. Texas private prison guards were videotaped beating, kicking and administering electrical shocks to prisoners as well as turning loose dogs on them. British prison officials inspecting private prisons found "noisy" prisoners gagged with sticky tape, nearly choking them to death. They said conditions at a CCA-run immigration center in Houston were "the worst [they’d] ever witnessed."42 All in the name of profits.
The Pay Phone Racket.
Another enormously profitable feature of the prison-industrial complex is the installation of pay phones on prison property. One of the few contacts prisoners have with the outside world is calling relatives and friends. But they are only in a position to make collect calls, which is paid for by the person receiving the call. Thus, the phone companies have a captive market for the most expensive kind of call and they milk it for huge profits.
MCI has the contract with the State of California for prison pay phones. The average revenue for each phone is $15,000 a year. (The average pay phone on the street brings in $5,000.) MCI not only gets the highest rate for these collect calls but it also socks a $3 surcharge onto every call! The prison gets a 32% kickback on each call. This racket puts $1 billion into the coffers of the phone companies who get these prison contracts.43 (In one state, MCI illegally arbitrarily added one minute to each call.) RCNA charges inmates at the Florence, Arizona immigration detention center $22 for a 15-minute call to the East Coast. The INS gets a 35% kickback.
The "Rehabilitation" Mask
The liberals try to rationalize this gigantic exploitation by claiming putting prisoners to work will help "rehabilitate" them, "teaching them a skill, responsibility and prepare them for a job upon release." If the rulers were so concerned about such "teachings," why not pay the prisoners a decent wage? Because that would take away one of the main advantages for the bosses exploiting them: the tremendous super-profits extracted from 23¢-an-hour "wages." (And could it be that prisoners being paid such slave wages may be led to feel that getting a $5-an-hour, minimum-wage poverty-level job when they get out is an "upgrade"?)
Secondly, if they’re so concerned about "teaching skills" to help prisoners get a job when released, why do corporations seek prisoners with long-term and life sentences to learn these skills? Because they want prisoner-workers who will not be getting out in a couple of years, so the bosses’ investment in skilled workers will not "be wasted." (And what do prisoners learn about "rehabilitation" from the profit-induced incentive to keep extending their terms while in prison?)
Thirdly, when workers who are learning, say, garment industry skills leave prison, what job will they get? A sweatshop job on the outside? Perhaps they wouldn’t be in prison if the system hadn’t presented them with such a dead-end life in the first place.
Fourth, if they’re so concerned about "rehabilitation," why are perhaps 5% of all prisoners with drug problems getting any treatment at all? Most of the one and one-quarter million non-violent offenders are in prison because of a drug problem. But funds for drug treatment in prisons, such as it is under capitalism, keep getting cut and cut and cut. How much good is a "skill" if one still has a drug problem, which U.S. capitalism used to imprison you in the first place?
Finally, if as they claim, there are now "only" 4% unemployed (probably a sizeable underestimate), even that figure means there are about five million jobless in a workforce of 120 million. If the 1¼ million non-violent offenders were released tomorrow, they would surely join the millions already seeking jobs and add to the unemployment figures (from which they’re now excluded). No, the "rehabilitation" rationale is simply a transparent liberal attempt to put a "humanitarian" mask on a brutal slave labor operation.
What Is To Be Done?
From all this evidence, one can easily conclude that any anti-sweatshop/prison labor campaign should concentrate its efforts on the most exploitative area of these twin evils: the U.S. prison-industrial complex. There profiteering exists in its most naked form. If a prisoner is thrown in solitary for refusing to work for 23¢ an hour, is it too much of a stretch to call that a concentration camp? Given that racism puts one of every four black men into this horror at some point in their lives, they, and millions more, are subject to fascism, plain and simple.
Opposition to prison slave labor should be raised in every union, mass organization, church, anti-sweatshop group, etc. The prison labor system drags down the conditions of the entire working class. It is in our own class interest to unite with our class brothers and sisters behind bars. Demonstrations outside prisons holding slave laborers and solidarity work stoppages and even strikes can be organized on behalf of our entire class, both in and out of the bosses’ prisons.
These conditions also lend themselves to organizing behind bars. Religious groups already do this. Texas prison laborers are trying to organize a trade union to fight these oppressive conditions. Communists and others who find themselves in jail for whatever reason should look on this as an opportunity to win working-class prisoners to left-wing and communist ideas. Those who have relatives or friends in prison should view them as potential organizers. Such organizing may seem nigh impossible, but how much more difficult is it than organizing within the bosses’ army?
Capitalism, No! Communism, Yes!
U.S. rulers claim their capitalist society is the most advanced of any in world history. What, then, does it say about this entire system if, in order to compete with rival bosses in their constant drive for maximum profits, U.S. bosses and their government have created this vast racist prison slave labor system to produce their profits and exercise social control over the working class? Instead of advancing humankind’s relations, capitalism is taking us backwards into slavery!
All sections of the ruling capitalist class are involved in this fascist prison operation. Elimination of this prison-industrial complex means the elimination of the profit motive, which in turn requires the elimination of capitalism itself. This can only be accomplished if the working class, which produces everything of value (most of which is stolen by the bosses as profit) adopts the goal, and fights for, a society in which the working class collectively decides on the production and distribution of this value according to need. That society is communism, in which the guiding principle of society will be the contribution, understanding, development and leadership of each and every worker.
This can only be achieved if a mass communist party—Progressive Labor Party—composed of hundreds of millions of workers leads our whole class to that goal. However, the capitalist class controls the state apparatus, as its prison-industrial complex so vividly reveals. The ruling class will not give up its control peaceably. A communist-led, armed working class will have to smash it with working-class violence, with communist revolution. That's the only way to wipe out the hell of capitalism, including the forced slave labor of the prison-industrial complex.
The Progressive Labor Party is building the long-term fight for communism. Join us!
Footnotes
1.The Washington-based Justice Policy Institute reported that "the U.S. jail and prison population will top two million" by Feb. 15, 2000. A similar figure was projected in the Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1999)
2. The Race To Incarcerate, by Marc Mauer
3. The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998
5. Wall Street Journal, July 22, 1999
6. Interview, in "Prison Labor: Workin’ For The Man"; Oct. 27, 1994
8. The Atlantic Monthly, December 1998
9. Palm Beach Post, Feb. 19, 1996
10. Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1999
11. Atlantic Monthly, December 1998
13. Steven Danziger: "The Real War On Crime: Report of The National Criminal Justice Commission, 1996; pp. 102-104
14. Hearing before the Subcommittee on Crime, of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, Sept. 18, 1996; p. 125
15. Atlantic Monthly, December 1998, p. 73
16. Subcommittee hearings, p. 17
17. Subcommittee hearings, p. 32
18. Wall Street Journal, July 22, 1999
19. Hearing before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Education and Workforce, Aug. 5, 1998
20. Christian Science Monitor, July 12, 1999
21. Prison Labor News, March 1997
24. Prison Legal News, May 1998. (Sources: The Oregonian, Statesman-Journal, and AP)
25. Prison Legal News, Nov. 1998. (Sources: Virginia Pilot, Richmond Times-Dispatch
26. Corporate Watch, Dec. 30, 1999; (www.corpwatch.org/features/prisons)
27. NY Daily News, Jan. 4, 2000
29. Corporate Watch, Nov. 2, 1999
32. "Private Prisons," by Eric Bates; The Nation Digital Edition (1997); (http://www.thenation.com)
36. New York Times, Jan. 26, 2000
37. Atlantic Monthly, December 1998, p. 65
40. Atlantic Monthly, December 1998, p. 76
A Progressive Labor Party Pamphlet
Introduction
As 1998 drew to a close, the U.S. economy looked like a crazy-quilt. The stock market had hit new highs earlier in the year. Then it dropped twenty percent over the summer. Then it started zooming again in late fall. The bosses' pundits were boasting about the lowest unemployment in three decades. Yet the loss of manufacturing jobs in 1998 alone surpassed 500,000. With every new announcement of a giant merger, thousands of workers were threatened with layoffs.
Still, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal ran headlines about "good times" ahead, pointing to rising life expectancies, the growing middle-class membership of black and latin women, and the decline of street crime.
What's the essential truth for the working class about the U.S. economy? Is the news fundamentally good, with a few minor clouds on the horizon? Or is the profit system in one of its periodic crises? From the media and most of the politicians, you would think that you had no reason to worry about the future-- and the present-- as you probably do. You would have to conclude that something must be wrong with you.
But before you head for the nearest bar or psychiatrist, the good news is that you’re not nuts—you’re right and they’re wrong. But that’s also the bad news.
In fact, our paychecks are lower than they were 25 years ago, and we’re working longer hours to earn them—if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. Drugs and prisons are claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of black and Latin men and women in U.S. cities. U.S. welfare recipients and prisoners are being used increasingly as ultra-low-wage labor, thereby dragging down the wage scale for all workers. Every day, cops are killing black and Latin youth in the streets.
Meanwhile, life expectancies are falling for large sections of the working class around the world. Free-market capitalism is ushering in the return of crime, poverty, prostitution, drugs, and premature death. Faces of starving adults and children in Africa grace the newspapers’ front pages. Inside, we read about children in Asia who are chained to tables to make Nikes for 18 hours a day, then locked up at night. In the streets of Brazilian cities, there are millions of homeless orphaned or abandoned children; tens of thousands are stalked and murdered by the police. Impoverished workers crossing national borders to find jobs are targeted for mob attacks and jailing, deportation, and murder by immigration officials.
With every shift of militancy in Iraq and fundamentalist Muslim areas, the U.S. threatens another military attack. India and Pakistan join the country club of nuclear terrorism. The economic crisis in Asia is plunging its working class back into dire poverty, even as it threatens to capsize the expanding economies of the U.S. and Europe.
No doubt you read about James Byrd’s being dragged to death by white supremacists behind a pickup truck in Texas. You feel terrible about it, but you think there is nothing you can do—not for the next James Byrd, or the starvation in Africa, or the slavery in Asia, or the victims of Latin American death squads.
We are all tossed on this same stormy ocean. At the helm, the economists, teachers, clergy, and politicians—the anointed "experts"—jostle for position and contradict one another right and left to explain what’s going on.
To understand the world, we have to understand capitalism, and that requires the science of Political Economy. What is Political Economy?
First, what it is not. Political Economy is not the same as the Economics taught in U.S schools. Economics is a pseudo-science based only on capitalism.
Political Economy, by contrast, originated with Karl Marx’s encyclopedic work Capital in the mid-1800s. Instead of taking capitalism as a given, it examines the history and conditions which led to the birth of capitalism, indeed to the birth of class society in general. It explores the inner workings of capitalism’s development. Finally, it examines the relationships between the social classes and brings to light the agents and means of capitalism’s death, and the death of class society in general.
It finds them in the working class, and in communist revolution.
Political Economy looks at the real world, a changing world, and poses questions designed to liberate the working class from capitalist wage slavery. It is the scientific synthesis of history, (true) economics, and political activity.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) looks to the science of Political Economy to build a movement of hundreds of millions of workers around the world, and to put an end to the era of capitalism. We seek to inaugurate the era of working class control—the era of communism.
Mostly examples from the U.S. are used throughout the pamphlet, but the concepts are applicable to workers throughout the world.
We emphasize that you can make a difference, you can be part of the struggle to liberate the working class from the dark night of capitalism. To do that you should, you must, join and build capitalism’s key opponent, a revolutionary communist party: the Progressive Labor Party. There is no other way.
The booklet is arranged as follows:
Section I, THE "ROSY DAWN" OF CAPITALISM: THE ILLUSION OF
PROGRESS, THE REALITY OF MASS MURDER, SLAVERY, AND ARMED ROBBERY
Section II, THE WAGE SYSTEM AND COMMODITY PRODUCTION:
THE ILLUSION OF FAIRNESS AND NATURALNESS, THE REALITY OF THEFT AND MURDER
Section III, THE WAGE SYSTEM: THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM, THE REALITY OF SLAVERY
Section IV, CAPITALISTS’ IDEAS ARE WORKERS’ CHAINS: THE ILLUSION OF TRUTH, THE REALITY OF LIES
Section V, CAPITALIST ECONOMIC CRISIS: THE ILLUSION OF ACCIDENT, THE REALITY OF INEVITABILITY.
Section VI, IMPERIALISM, CRISIS, AND WORLD WAR: THE ILLUSION OF A BYGONE ERA, THE REALITY OF THE WORLD TODAY
Section VII, FASCISM: THE ILLUSION OF STRENGTH, THE REALITY OF WEAKNESS
Section VIII, COMMUNISM: THE ILLUSION THAT WORKING CLASS LIBERATION WILL NEVER HAPPEN, THE REALITY THAT IT ALREADY HAS--AND WILL AGAIN
THE "ROSY DAWN" OF CAPITALISM: THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS, THE REALITY OF MASS MURDER, SLAVERY, AND ARMED ROBBERY
Capital comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.
— Karl Marx
Under capitalism, gigantic amounts of wealth are concentrated into a few hands—those of the capitalists. At the same time, an epidemic of life-and-death poverty spreads among the masses. Capital is not just wealth or a huge sum of money. Capital is the social relationship between the wealth of a few and the poverty of the vast majority who are forced to work for those wealthy few. Capitalism dominates everything in our lives, from the jobs we hold to the schools we attend, from the houses we live in to the clothes we wear, from the music we hear to the relationships we build.
Capitalism’s effects are so far-reaching that it seems natural, inescapable, a fact of human society. But capitalism has not always been the controlling force in people's lives, and it is far from natural. After more than two million years of human existence, capitalism emerged only a few hundred years ago. Its current status is the result of a long and continuing campaign of warfare, terror, and slavery that was, and is, driven by the need of capitalists for maximum profits. This need first arose as a result of capitalist relationships—in particular, inter-capitalist competition. It was not previously a human characteristic.
Marxist Political Economy isn't taught in any of our schools or universities. Knowledge and ideas lead to action, and communist knowledge and ideas lead to communist revolution. Understanding how capitalism began, and what social conditions keep it going, is absolutely critical to the struggle to build the revolutionary communist party, PLP, and to lead a revolution that will make capitalism a relic of the past.
The rise of capitalism
As a system which accumulates vast wealth and power in a few hands, while creating untold poverty and misery for the many, capitalism maintains itself through a system of exploitation called wage slavery. Using their wealth, the bosses create businesses and hire workers to produce something that can be sold. The workers get wages, while the capitalists rake in the profits. Day by day, wage slavery robs the working class of the product of its labor.
A system of wage slavery depends on two things: the capitalists must first have money to invest (capital), and the workers must have no choice but to hire themselves out for a low wage.
Capitalists first come by their capital in a process called primitive accumulation. The history of capitalism shows that primitive accumulation is almost always the result of direct robbery, cheating, mass slavery, war, and genocide. Besides concentrating vast amounts of wealth into the hands of a few, these crimes robbed the masses of their traditional ways of providing for themselves.
At its birth, capitalism terrorized tribesmen and peasants, men, women, and children in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Hollywood films paint the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a period of swashbuckling pirates and brave navigators. But more than 100 years ago, Marx wrote of it bitterly:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the uprooting, enslavement and entombment in the mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren [a game hunting preserve] for the commercialized hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
Marx's bitterness was well placed. Take just one example. It is estimated that more than $400 million (in 1970 dollars) worth of gold was stolen from the mines of Brazil by Portuguese capitalists in the 17th century. The number of Indian slaves murdered in this process is unknown, but Argentinean researcher Jorge Ledesma estimates that 90 million Indians were murdered or died fighting Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas.
Between 1680 and 1688, the Royal African Company (in which King Charles II of England owned shares) paid dividends of 300% on slaves, even though only two-thirds of the 70,000 slaves transported during those few years survived the infamous "middle passage" from Africa to the New World.
Millions slaughtered or enslaved to create a few hundred millionaires--that was the birth of capitalism.
The creation of the working class
Under feudalism, the predecessor of capitalism, it's true that millions of peasants were oppressed, exploited, and impoverished. But local traditions allowed subsistence farming on small plots of land, and the peasants were a valued asset to their feudal lords.
Capitalism, on the other hand, needs a class without access to farmland—a class potentially even poorer than peasants. And capitalism got it. New laws brought capitalist poverty and repression to the old peasant class. In Britain, the peasants were driven off their small plots, robbed of their livelihood.
In King George III's reign, there were 3,554 "Acts of Enclosure," whereby 5.5 million acres of peasant farmland were legally handed over to the capitalists. As a result, masses of people became dependent on wage work. This, of course, illustrates how only the class that rules determines what is legal and what is illegal.
The emerging capitalist state began passing more and more laws to hound dispossessed peasants. The aim of these laws was to drive the unemployed to the cities, where the factory system awaited them. And so the once self-sufficient peasants became workers, or wage slaves, completely dependent on the capitalists and their wage system for survival. But because they were no longer bonded to any lord, they were pronounced "free."
In reality, they were free only to starve.
Children also formed a convenient labor pool. By the 1800s, thousands upon thousands of child laborers were transferred from parish poorhouses to the factories. In factories with one shift, they were worked 15 to 18 hours a day. In factories with two shifts, they worked for a mere 12 hours. In these "youth" camps, "the beds never get cold . . . the day set getting into the beds that the night set had just quitted."
The forced dependency of the worker on the wage system for everything is one key feature of capitalism. The other is the collaboration of the state. Far from being neutral, laws serve the needs of the capitalist. These two features were mercilessly exploited during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Primitive but modern
Primitive accumulation is not simply a thing of the past. Wherever there is a peasant class to dispossess, capitalism moves in on them. One modern example is the dismantling of socialist China. Until recently, the cooperative farms owned by the villages had formed the backbone of the People's Republic of China. Rural workers, in fact, made up some 80% of the nation.
Then Deng Xaoping, Time Magazine's "Man of the Year," engineered China's headlong race into full-blown capitalism. Under his leadership, the so-called Communist Party of China passed a key capitalist law, called Central Document Number 1, in 1983. It had the same effect as the Enclosure Acts of King George III. Here's how William Hinton describes the process set in motion by the new law:
People with influence and connections--party cadres, their relatives, friends and cronies--were able to buy, at massive discounts, the tractors, trucks, wells, pumps, processing equipment and other productive property that the collectives had accumulated over decades through the hard labor of all members. It is doubtful if, in the history of the world, any privileged group ever acquired more for less. The scale of these transactions and the depth of the injury done to the average coop member boggles the mind. (William Hinton, "A Response to Hugh Deane," Monthly Review, March 1989)
In the wake of the new law, millions of Chinese workers have become uprooted. The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour of December 28, 1993, reported that there were already some 140 million migrant workers in China, and that their numbers were growing at a rate of 20 million per year. In desperate search of work, these displaced farm workers crowd the cities in the new enterprise zones. Meanwhile, health care programs have been terminated. Prostitution has reappeared, along with sexually transmitted diseases.
A Business Week report (October 31, 1988) noted widespread use of child labor: "Chinese investigators recently discovered children as young as 10 making toys, electronic gear, garments and artificial flowers. They work up to 14 and 15 hours a day at salaries ranging from $10 to $31 per month. Often workers sleep 2 or 3 in a bed in dormitories." Sound like Josiah Wedgewood's England?
The capitalist media, condemning only the infighting among various pro-capitalist factions, have touted China's shift to capitalism as a liberation. But to the media, only the liberation of the capitalist class matters. And the liberation of the capitalists, as always, means the enslavement of the working class.
Capitalism is by definition a social relationship between a handful of super-rich capitalists and the masses of more or less impoverished wage slaves—the workers—whom the capitalists dominate.
The uses of war
Not only does developing capitalism need primitive accumulation, but from time to time fully developed capitalism needs it as well. In periods like the present, when the falling rate of profit drives capitalism into crisis (covered in Section V), wars and civil wars give the victors new opportunities for primitive accumulation. In the 1930s depression, German Nazis looted the personal, commercial, and industrial assets of countries they occupied, such as Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The civil wars raging throughout the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and parts of Africa (Rwanda, Somalia) are examples of attempts by groups of local capitalists to replace their dwindling profits from exploitation with windfall profits from primitive accumulation.
None of these capitalist wars will ever liberate the working class, though it's the workers who die in the name of national freedom. All nationalism is reactionary, a position PLP has held for 30 years.
THE WAGE SYSTEM AND COMMODITY PRODUCTION: THE ILLUSION OF FAIRNESS AND NATURALNESS, THE REALITY OF THEFT AND MURDER
Under capitalism, money--in the form of capital--is God; people--in the form of workers--are things!
In every society, economic survival requires that people produce the things they need, distribute the products of this labor, and consume those products. To accomplish this, every society must determine what to produce, how to produce it, and for whom to produce it. In a capitalist society, these requirements are answered by class division, commodity production, private property, and wage labor.
Under capitalism, restaurant owners in Los Angeles pour bleach on the unsold food in their dumpsters to prevent hungry people from eating it. By the mid-1980s, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture was spending $20 billion annually on the destruction of crops and livestock. If you can’t buy it, you can’t use it--that’s the capitalist principle.
Primitive communism in prehistory—as well as the advanced communism that will replace capitalism—tells us that the questions of production, distribution, and consumption can be answered in a very different way
Capitalism is based on commodity production
Commodities are goods created for sale and are characteristic of all capitalist production. If I bake a loaf of bread for anyone to eat, that loaf is just bread. But if I bake a loaf of bread to sell, that loaf becomes a commodity.
Commodities have a dual value:
Use value. You can eat the loaf of bread you make; you can eat the bread you buy at the store. They both have value as food. Like all goods that society produces, commodities have a use. The use value of a loaf of bread is its value in the life of the consumer—a qualitative concept.
Exchange value. In a commodity-producing society, known as capitalism, the distribution of goods, or products, takes place as an exchange. This exchange occurs in a market system and requires money. Bread produced for sale comes with a price tag. If we don’t have the money, we don’t get the bread. The price of a commodity is related to its exchange value—a quantitative concept. Exchange value is what capitalist economists mean when they speak of just plain "value."
Property laws determine which individuals own the commodities that others produce. Commodities are distributed to consumers through a system of exchange. In a system governed by private property, the exchange of commodities is essential, because factory work becomes so specialized that individuals cannot produce by themselves everything they need to survive.
According to the capitalist laws of private property, the capitalists own the means of production: factories, mines, farms, railroads, airlines, bakeries, computer corporations. By these same laws, they also own all the commodities produced by the workers they’ve hired to do the work of production. The workers do not own any means of production, and as a result must work for the capitalists in exchange for wages. The workers’ labor produces the commodities, but the capitalists get to own and sell them.
Capitalism: where commodity production is king!
Commodity production (production for exchange value and profit) is devastating for the masses of workers. A glance at African agriculture shows how deadly it is. Squeezed by debt pressures, African economies have had to rip up traditional food crops and replant the land with cash crops—like coffee or cocoa—grown for export. The traditional crops have a high use value for African workers; they end hunger. But they have little exchange value on the international market.
During the 1980s, the overall export prices of primary products (coffee, cocoa, tea, etc.) fell by one-third. Africa lost $5.6 billion from the fall of commodity prices in 1991, a plunge that confronted 20 million Africans—by the estimate of the United Nations World Food program—with famine. This is just one example of the triumph of commodity production. Commodity production is murder!
The labor theory of value
In this section we explain the relationship of exchange value, price, and labor time.
How is the exchange value of commodities determined? Often we think of the value of, say, an apple as its price--50 cents or thereabouts. The purchasing power of 50 cents, however, can change wildly over the years. It is in no way tied to the apple.
A better way of thinking about the exchange value of a commodity is to measure its proportional exchanges with other commodities. In the U.S., one loaf of bread can be exchanged for about three apples. This was true ten years ago as well as today, even though the bread’s price has risen from $1 per loaf to close to $2.
While prices fluctuate, the exchange value of a commodity in the short run tends to be fixed relative to the exchange value of other commodities. Why should this be so? How are the proportions in which commodities exchange with each other regulated? Marx discovered that the exchange value of commodities is traceable to one universally common characteristic: human labor.
The production of a silk shirt requires more labor time than the production of an apple. The two items’ exchange values (and prices) reflect this difference. In other words, the relative values of commodities is determined by the relative amounts of labor time fixed in them.
As Marx wrote, "The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor expended upon its production based on the quantity of labor necessary for its production in a given state of society, under certain social average conditions of production, with a given social average intensity, and average skill of the labor employed."
In other words, the exchange value relationship among things is in reality a social relationship among people.
Marx necessarily emphasized the "average" in his definition of exchange value. For example, a slow worker might make two tables in one day, while an average worker makes five of equal quality. Without the idea of averages, the definition would suggest that the slow worker's two tables have the same value as the typical worker's five tables, a clear absurdity.
The capitalist explanation for the determination of value is supply and demand
But what about supply and demand? There is much evidence that a sudden change in supply can change the price of a product. For example, a head of lettuce and a pound of tomatoes are generally of equal exchange value, since they take about the same amount of labor time to bring to market. Two years ago, California had a deep winter freeze that killed most of the lettuce in the fields. With lettuce in short supply, its price in the stores suddenly doubled. The price of a head was now equivalent to that of two pounds of tomatoes instead of one pound. When lettuce from Chile was shipped in and a new lettuce crop was planted, the supply increased, and the price returned to its original level. A head of lettuce again cost the same as one pound of tomatoes.
There are many examples of fluctuations in supply and demand that cause short-run changes in the prices of commodities. Economists analyze these at great length because capitalist speculators can make a quick buck playing this "shortage game." But supply and demand cannot determine the price at which a thing sells when its supply and demand are equal. Nor can supply and demand determine the ranges in which these price changes occur. The only thing which can determine both the equilibrium price and the range is the exchange value, or average necessary labor time.
To illustrate this point, a new Toyota Camry might vary in price in the United States from $20,000 to $23,000 during a given year, while a gallon of gas might vary in price from $1.25 to $1.39 during the same year. But supply and demand do not explain why the Camry costs about 18,000 times as much as a gallon of gas. The only way to explain that long-term relationship is by comparing the quantity of labor involved in the production of the Camry and the gallon of gas.
As with any commodity, the total quantity of labor includes more than the labor that takes place at the Camry assembly plant. It also represents the labor required to produce the raw materials which go into the Camry, and the labor embedded in the tools, machinery, fuel, and buildings used up per Camry. Market prices may fluctuate with supply and demand. But the "natural price," based on exchange value between products, changes only when the amount of labor required to produce a product changes. For example, growing lettuce on less fertile land requires more labor for extra plowing and extra fertilizer, and even then the yield per acre will probably be lower. Similarly, the exchange value of oil might increase if the capitalists need to use oil with a high sulfur content, which requires more processing.
Labor power as a commodity, or the worker as a thing
In this section we shall explain labor power, which is different from labor time.
In a commodity economy, on average, everything is sold at its value—that is, its exchange value. As workers, we sell our labor power to the capitalists to carry out production for them. In return, we receive only the exchange value for our labor power.
Since the exchange value of any commodity is determined by how much labor time is required to produce it, the exchange value of labor power is determined by how much labor time it takes to produce our labor power. That means the amount of labor time required to produce the things which keep us alive and healthy enough to sell our labor power to the capitalists—in other words, our necessities of life (food, clothing, shelter).
If we are starving to death, or have no clothes or shelter, we become unfit for work and lose our labor power. Thus, the production of labor power consists in the satisfaction of the most elementary needs of the worker. That includes what it takes to raise children to become the next generation of workers.
At its most basic level, everyone who works for a living understands how this works. It often seems that we can’t ever get out of a hole. Just when the bills are paid off, the roof leaks. Fix that, and the car that takes us to work breaks down. Pay for that repair, and you need new shoes. Credit cards allow us to delude ourselves temporarily, but then the finance charges slap us awake again. When and if we receive a "cost of living" adjustment to our salary, it lays bare just this idea—that we are simply living to work and working to live. In exchange for our work, we are receiving just enough to be able to work another day.
A look at the chart below tells us where 40 hours work for 40 hours pay gets us. Year after year, working for wages produces the same result. Although the price of our labor power (our wage) appears to increase, this increase is due to inflation. Maddeningly, the price of the labor power—the wage—of the average factory worker remains about 30% above the barest survival income.
Survival income, or subsistence, is the baseline for the entire wage scale. An engineer may get a wage more than three times the subsistence level, and some factory workers’ wages may be 50% above it. But lower the subsistence level, and the whole wage scale will drop.
Under capitalism, labor power is a commodity. Workers cease to be human to the capitalist; they are treated as commodities, or things. People worked for years at the Ford Motor Co. assembly plant in Milpitas, California. The plant was never unprofitable, as hundreds of workers spent their labor power assembling automobiles. But Ford had "a better idea." The capitalists who ran the company decided that production could be even more profitable if the factory were moved to Mexico, where subsistence wages are lower. As a result, Ford discarded the machinery and the California workers with equal disdain.
Of course, the unemployed workers in Mexico had been made so miserable by capitalism that even these low-paid jobs may have improved their situation. But this improvement had nothing to do with Ford’s decision to move, even though the company often points to it to appear generous. An increase in profits was the only thing the company could contemplate. Playing one group of workers off against another, in this case across national boundaries, is the stock in trade of profit-making ventures.
Only an international Party can organize workers to act together across national boundaries. Only an international Party can enable the working class to defend itself against the capitalists, let alone defeat them.
Just as the capitalists must search the world for cheap oil, they must search it for cheap labor as well. To a capitalist, oil and workers are both commodities, both just things.
To restate: Workers produce commodities for the capitalists. For our labor power, we are paid wages. The capitalists take the commodities we produce and sell them in the marketplace. But the labor time required to produce our daily needs is significantly less than the labor time we spend in a day to make products for the capitalists.
Therefore the wage paid to us for our labor power (based on the exchange value of our labor power) is lower than the total price of the commodities we produce (based on the exchange value of the commodities, which in turn is based on the total time we spend laboring for the capitalist each day).
The average exchange value of the commodities produced in a day includes not only the labor time we workers put into it directly that day, but also the labor time put into making the raw materials and fuel which go into the day’s product, as well as the labor time put into making that portion of the machinery and building which wears out in a day.
In other words, workers receive in wages only part of the value of the commodities we produce, often only a small part. Wages represent that part of the workday that workers labor to provide for their own subsistence. Profit comes from the balance of the workday, the hours that we essentially labor for free, putting money into the capitalist's pocket.
The capitalist’s profits are then turned into more capital, and used to further exploit the workers.
In this relationship lies the basis for the inhumanity of capitalism on the one hand, and the alienation of the workers on the other: the conversion of people into things, and their recognition that everything in capitalism works against them.
Capitalism, then, is commodity production. And commodity production rests on the exploitation of the working class. Once we realize this, we can understand that there can be no such thing as "progressive" capitalism. Whether it is the anti-apartheid capitalism led by Nelson Mandela, or the Palestinian capitalism espoused by Yasser Arafat, capitalism condemns the working class to wage slavery.
PLP fights for a communist revolution, which will abolish commodity production, profits, and exploitation, along with the capitalist class that lives off them. We will lead the working class to replace production based on social division and widespread coercion with production based on social solidarity and political incentive. Production will be organized only for the satisfaction of social needs.
"Your labor or your life"--profit is theft from workers
Our discussion of labor as a commodity has shown that profits come from the value of the labor stolen from the workers by the capitalists. Marx called this portion of value surplus value. On average, surplus value = profit.
Let’s use an example from an article in Challenge (December 8, 1993), based on a real garment factory in Los Angeles. (For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that, on average, the prices are equivalent to the exchange values.) A group of 25 workers--sewing machine operators, washers, and a cutter--produce 1,100 pairs of pants each day. The workers average $48 per day in wages, for a total of $1,200. The boss spends an additional $2,293 on materials, electricity, and wear and tear on machines, for a total of $3,493 in daily expenses.
When the pants are sold, the boss receives $5,500, or $2,007 more than expenses—in other words, profit. To the $2,293 spent on materials, electricity, and wear and tear on the machines, the workers have added a total of $3,207 in exchange value to the pants. But the workers do not receive the whole $3,207 for their labor time. They receive only $1,200 for their labor power, while the boss takes the surplus value of $2,007—that is, one boss takes almost twice as much as the 25 workers get all together.
This is theft, pure and simple. But since the bosses own the system, they make such theft legal. Furthermore, they try to hide the theft by claiming that they are paying for the whole day’s work.
The net result is that each worker gets $48 for the day, while the boss gets $2,007, which is more than 40 times as much as each worker! This is the dirty, not-so-little secret of capitalism, and how great wealth co-exists with great poverty.
In summary, surplus value is that portion of value created by the worker that is not paid to the worker, but instead is stolen by the boss, as profit. As Marx wrote,
In order that he may be able to receive surplus value, the capitalist must find in the market a commodity whose use value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value--a commodity whose use creates value. Such a commodity exists--it is human labor power. Its use is labor and labor creates value. The owner of money buys labor power at its value, which is determined, like the value of every other commodity, by the socially necessary labor time requisite in its production (that is to say, the cost of maintaining the worker and family). Having bought labor power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is to set it to work for the whole day (say 8 hours). Meanwhile in the course of 4 hours ("necessary" labor time) the worker produces sufficient to pay back the cost of his own maintenance; and in the course of the next 4 hours ("surplus" labor time) he produces a "surplus" product or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay him.
In addition to workers who manufacture a product, this principle applies equally to workers who provide a service, such as retail, hospital, school, or mass transport.
Surplus value is legalized theft, taking place on a gigantic scale. In 1993, corporate profits totaled $225 billion. (This does not include the untold billions of dollars consumed by capitalists in write-offs for executive salaries, interest payments to bankers, business lunches, country clubs, socially useless advertising, fancy offices and other "expenses," as well as corporate taxes which are also produced by workers’ surplus value and pay for all government functions.) All of this money represents wealth stolen from you and me, from our class, and distributed to a small number of capitalists, who make up less than 1% of the total population.
The heart of the relationship between workers and capitalists is exploitation; the capitalists exploit the workers by stealing surplus value from them. But the capitalists present the relationship as a fair exchange between human beings who are more or less equal. It is made to look like a square deal; you sell your labor, you get paid for it. You work 40 hours, you get 40 hours' pay, right?
But Marxist analysis makes it clear that you do not sell your labor—you sell your labor power. If you truly sold your labor, you would get paid for the surplus value you produced. But in reality, you may work 40 hours, but you get paid for only a portion of those hours. In fact, the wage system is a tremendous con game that hides the capitalists' daily theft of surplus value from the working class.
Capitalism’s drive for profit is ruthless. Because the system exists to make profits, it does not matter how it makes those profits, what it produces, or what happens to workers in the process. Sweatshops, layoffs, minimum wages, schemes to circumvent minimum-wage laws, elimination of benefits, moving production to lower-wage-rate countries, and, most important of all, intense racism and sexism to divide the working class and "justify" huge wage differentials--all of these forms of exploitation are rooted in the nature of capitalism.
When capitalists talk about productivity, efficiency, and increasing profits, they are talking about trying to change the ratio of "necessary labor time" to "surplus labor time" in their favor. They want to reduce the part of the work-day that workers work to maintain their existence and increase the part of the work-day that workers produce profits for the boss. It is just another way of squeezing more out of the workers.
How does the middle class fit into this scheme?
There are only three possible relationships to the means of production. A few people own them, many more work them, and a third group does neither, but rather provides some service. The latter group includes everyone from high-paid Wall Street lawyers to low-paid nurses’ aides and cab drivers. While one can quibble about various borderline categories, such as truck drivers who deliver finished products to the stores, this does not change the essence of the exploitative relationship between the capitalists and the production workers.
Insofar as the workers have to pay for, say, health care, this is included in the cost of their subsistence (the value of their labor power), whether it is paid directly through their paycheck or in the form of employer-provided health insurance. And insofar as the capitalists have to pay for a doctor’s services for their own personal health care, they have to take it out of their profits for their own personal consumption. Either way, it reduces that part of the surplus value available to the capitalists for reinvestment to expand their capital.
For this reason, the capitalists are embarked on a campaign in the U.S. to reduce the cost of health care, in particular (and to a lesser degree all other services, including the schools). If they can get doctors and other health care personnel, as well as other service providers, to provide the service for less, the capitalists will be able to drive down the cost of workers’ subsistence and therefore their wages.
The capitalists, fighting against the resistance of the workers, aim at driving down wages below the level necessary for workers’ subsistence, and letting them go without health care altogether. And, in fact, they do this, which accounts for, among other things, the 15% or so of the U.S. population without any health insurance.
The main point is that even when we take into account the so-called middle class of professionals, who provide services rather than material commodities, the essence of the relationship between the capitalists and the commodity-producing workers remains the same. Furthermore, the essence of the relationship between the capitalists and the professionals and other service providers is also antagonistic, as the service providers are in competition for that portion of surplus value which would otherwise go toward capital expansion.
(There are, of course, exceptions to this antagonism, including that minority of professionals who willingly help the capitalists hide the true nature of capitalism and maintain their political and economic power. The capitalists are perfectly willing to pay for racist professors, or for the clergy who help pacify workers’ fury, or for the politicians who get rich in exchange for their faithful service to the system. The capitalists consider these to be worthwhile, even if non-productive, investments.)
Because of the essential antagonism between the capitalists and the providers of services, members of PLP work among and organize the service sector of the working class, public as well as private, as well as among professionals. All of these groups need communism.
Industrial workers, however, have the most power to affect the ruling class’ profits, since they can halt production of the commodities that are the source of capitalist wealth—through strikes. The industrial working class is therefore central to the process of communist organizing.
Maximizing profit is not a matter of choice for the capitalists
The liberal media, politicians, and professors often criticize the "greedy" capitalists, as though one more reading of Charles Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol" might lead them to take less profit and pay workers higher wages. This wishful thinking is based on a complete misunderstanding—or deliberate lie—about the nature of the inner workings of capitalism, and, in particular, of capitalist competition.
Every capitalist, like it or not, is forced to maximize profits in order to stay in business. If they do not continually move to lower their costs to the bare minimum and expand their share of the market, their competitors will drive them out of business.
It is not a matter of choice for the capitalists, but rather a matter of life and death. Greed is not the cause, but rather the result of this dog-eat-dog competition. Asking capitalists to be less greedy is equivalent to asking them to commit suicide.
Racism and sexism are central to maximizing capitalist profits
When the capitalists pretend that superficial characteristics, such as skin color or gender, determine a person’s worth, they are simply engaged in squeezing still more out of all workers.
In fact, racism is the greatest single source of profits. While earlier capitalists made huge profits from the slave trade and slavery itself (as we saw in Section I), modern-day capitalists reap windfall profits from the gap between black and white wages in the U.S. This difference alone accounts for over 30% of total corporate profits!
But not only does the wage differential enhance the profits made off of black and Latin workers. By promoting racist and sexist divisions among workers, by destroying unity and reducing workers’ power to fight, the capitalists are able to lower the entire wage scale. Profits are boosted even higher. The entire working class, including white workers, is pushed nearer to bare subsistence levels.
So capitalism, with its competitive drive for survival, forces the capitalists to maintain and deepen racist systems all over the globe, something they are perfectly willing to do, despite all pretensions to the contrary. Clinton’s recent campaign to sprinkle apologies all around the world for the racist and genocidal practices of past U.S. rulers is a thinly veiled attempt to pretend that the rulers of today are the good guys. But racism, like profit maximization, is not a matter of choice for the capitalists; it cannot be eliminated by reforms, or by struggles for "civil rights." There is only one way to eliminate racism, and similarly sexism, and that is to obliterate the profit system that feeds on them. That requires communist revolution.
Communist revolution
The working class is central to capitalism, because workers produce all the surplus value, as well as all other exchange value. This is the power of the working class. Of course, the capitalists won’t admit, and may not even understand, that they get all their profits and capital from labor. They pretend that their profit represents nothing more than a combination of their own wage for the more valuable work of running the business and a reward for their cleverness at selling things at a price higher than their value.
In order to pull off this monstrous deception, the capitalists need help from a wide variety of supporting institutions and propagandists. The capitalists create an elaborate network of theories and ideologies to hide the class nature of their system. The universities, the press, the legal system, the science academies, and even the unions all collaborate to hide the reality of exploitation and to deaden revolutionary class consciousness. (We will cover this feature in more depth in Section IV.)
Capitalism will push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit necessary for survival. As Marx acknowledged, workers have no choice but to fight against the constant lowering of our wages.
But at the same time, the working class should not exaggerate the ultimate effectiveness of those everyday struggles. "Winning" such fights simply maintains the price of our labor power for the moment—and the global misery that is the norm today. It does not eliminate the constant and grinding theft of the value produced by our labor. It does not eliminate the racism and sexism used to justify wages below subsistence level for a huge percentage of the world's working class. It does not eliminate the excess deaths caused by such poverty. It does not eliminate the unemployment and the wars of capitalism.
Rather than fight for "a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work," the working class must fight to abolish capitalism and the wage system altogether, and to work for the emancipation of the working class. Only then can the working class establish a "fair" system: communism.
Only a revolution that enables the working class to take power can destroy the wage system that supports capitalism.
Clearly the fight before the working class, especially on the job, is a political one. If we allow the struggle to be narrowed to wages and working conditions, we will leave untouched the political power of the capitalists and their system of exploitation. The chief role of the unions is precisely that—to insist that the battle for wages and conditions is all that concerns the working class. To the point that they succeed, the unions do capitalism a great service. That is why the revolutionary PLP has formed in opposition to the unions. PLP is the only communist movement in history to put forward the slogan, "Abolish Wage Slavery," as our immediate goal. We aim to participate in all the struggles of the working class—even ones about wages and conditions. But we fight today with the aim of building a revolutionary class consciousness. We are not content with merely making adjustments that capitalism might accept for the moment.
No one underestimates the task that communists take on. Its scope--political, cultural, agitational, and confrontational--demands an all-around approach to our fellow workers—what PLP calls base-building.
Base-building, in turn, requires the consistent and expanding sale of a revolutionary newspaper. PLP’s newspaper, Challenge, is a key tool in the revolutionary politicization of any struggle against the capitalists. The struggle to recruit distributors of the paper is a strategic one in the battle for communist revolution.
THE WAGE SYSTEM: THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM, THE REALITY OF SLAVERY
At about 5:50 a.m., Monday through Saturday, a guy named Bob enters the crowded locker room of a waste-disposal works in Detroit, hollering out his trademark greeting: "Good morning, wage slaves!" This section is dedicated to Bob and workers like him, in the hope that more of us will adopt his agitational techniques and expand on them.
Whether we teach school, work in an auto plant, or build houses, we are all wage slaves. Anticommunist propaganda and education have triumphed to the extent that we fail to see the wage system as our key enemy.
Nevertheless, the wage system is capitalism, and so we realize the revolutionary scope of what PLP is setting out to do. Clearly, the goal of abolishing the wage system is beyond the ability of a trade union. It calls for the organization of a mass revolutionary Party. And while the task of winning people to fight for a society without a wage system appears at first to be daunting, it turns out that capitalism, with all its horrors, actually helps us.
From primitive communism to scientific communism
As in all investigations, it is best to start this one with the understanding that everything is in motion. Motion, or change, is central to the philosophy of dialectical materialism, another name for Marxism.
Just as ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Greek slavery was superseded a thousand years ago by feudalism and serfdom, which was in turn superseded 400 years ago by capitalism and its wage system, so too capitalism will be replaced by communism. Throughout the course of human history, each transition was a revolution which required armed struggle by the new ruling class against the old. So, too, will the transition to communism require armed struggle by the working class (the new ruling class) against the capitalists (the old, or present, ruling class).
Looking back in history, we find that work is central to the development of human society. It is through work that human consciousness and culture have developed. Language, for example, is the capability that organizes us to work. The origins of language trace back to the coordination of human efforts in the performance of tasks. Work and language combine to produce a human being that is qualitatively different from an animal being. Language, allows us to have a history, for one thing. And because work is central to the development of language, work is central to our very essence.
For two million years, until only a few thousand years ago, human beings lived in communities with a social arrangement called primitive communism. They cooperated to hunt, pick, or produce what they needed to live, and they educated and entertained each other to make life interesting. Work was a rewarding experience for everyone, because work was performed for the common good.
But under capitalism, work—the very essence of being human—is owned by the capitalists and called "a job." A job—to most people, the very word sounds like a prison sentence. To an increasing number it is, in fact, a death sentence. By owning and controlling the means of production, which is protected by their monopoly hold on state power (covered in Section IV), the capitalists force the workers to compete for jobs.
No job, no wages! No wages, no money! No money, no life!
Within this wage system, then, are born the modern features of working-class life under capitalism. There is alienation (with its sense of purposelessness and "me, me, me" individualism), competition (fostering, among other things, racism and sexism), and the domination of capital (where the lack of money creates a sense of weakness and despair). Yet the struggle for survival against the system also generates the opposite feelings: collectivity, purpose, confidence, and rebellion. The two sets of feelings exist side by side in all of us.
Only communist revolution can restore the dominance of the better feelings. And communist revolution can only succeed if we correct the errors of the earlier revolutions in the Soviet Union and China and abolish the wage system. Work will be generated by social needs. Rather than fostering competition and putting down a brother or a sister, it will promote social solidarity and respect for one another—what communists call comradeship. This is the communist world for which PLP fights.
Capitalism profits from unemployment and is incapable of abolishing it!
Everyone knows the media trashes welfare recipients. Fewer realize that the purpose behind that trashing is to drive a wedge between the employed and unemployed sectors of the working class.
What is carefully kept from us is that capitalism needs unemployment. It inevitably produces it and profits from it.
Competition forces all capitalists to minimize the number of workers they employ, while driving many capitalists out of business. Both of these inevitable developments produce unemployment. While expansion of some businesses decreases unemployment, it is inevitably coupled with the closing of other businesses. The net number of jobs invariably fails to keep pace with the growth of the working-class population. In time of war, we may temporarily have the illusion of full employment, but only because millions of workers are sent to kill and die.
Nowhere does capitalism achieve full productive employment, though its paid "experts" habitually lie about this question. Let’s examine their sleight of hand in covering over the true unemployment rate. After any unemployed workers look for work so long without success that they give up, or run out of unemployment benefits, or are thrown into prison, or join the army, they are no longer counted as unemployed. They "disappear," artificially and falsely lowering the claimed unemployment rate.
It’s a neat sleight of hand, but it’s no magic. It’s just a bald-faced lie.
Anything even approaching full employment is a big danger to the capitalists. By reducing competition among workers, it shifts the bargaining power for wage rates in favor of the working class. This means that the working class can keep a bigger share of the surplus value produced by us but normally skimmed off by the capitalists. On the other hand, if wages can be driven down, the capitalist share of the surplus value grows.
When capitalists turn to automation, robotics, or globalization (exporting plant and jobs wholesale) to increase their profits, they also create a vast pool of unemployed workers—what Marx called capitalism’s "reserve army of labor." This "army" acts as a weight pulling down the wages of employed workers. Unemployment is a permanent feature of modern capitalism because capitalists need it. Capitalism has an urgent interest in creating permanent high unemployment.
The "reserve army" is not created by the movement of people (legal or illegal immigration), as the capitalists would like us to believe. Indeed, the reverse is true--the movement of people is largely caused by unemployment, with workers seeking job opportunities in other geographic areas.
Neither is high unemployment a product of high birth rates and "overpopulation," as the UN Conference on population and birth control in Egypt claimed. In a system based on human needs (communism), the economy would expand to fill the needs. Unemployment is created solely by the relentless capitalist drive for profit. Full employment slashes profit for the capitalist, and therefore it can never be reached. With each announcement of a drop in the U.S. unemployment rate (whether true or false), the Federal Reserve either raises interest rates or threatens to do so, and the stock market drops. The capitalists are sending a clear message: Falling unemployment, while good for workers, is bad for investment and profits.
In a communist system, on the other hand, all adults could contribute to the needs of the working class, including the limitless expansion of such social needs as schools, hospitals, and working-class culture. Unemployment would be a relic of the capitalist past. (History demonstrates that full employment is achievable. During the capitalist depression of the 1930s, for example, when unemployment in the capitalist part of the world was around 30%, there was no unemployment in the Soviet Union.)
Here is one of capitalism’s main contradictions: The same huge pool of unemployed workers that the system needs to maximize profits also spells the system’s end. The "reserve army" is politically volatile. With development of a mass communist consciousness, capitalism could not control the situation. The employed and the unemployed would see how each is being used to keep the other down. Class unity and the need for class struggle would be as obvious as A-B-C. It’s no surprise, then, that the capitalists use racism, sexism, and anti-communism to blunt or stamp out class struggle.
The job of the PLP is to win the "hearts and minds" of the working class to communism and workers’ power. One of the best ways we do this is by bringing our long-term strategic outlook to our co-workers, and continually battling to prevent this outlook from being drowned out by short-term tactical considerations. Challenge, our Party’s newspaper, is an invaluable weapon in this struggle. We devote money and energy to its weekly production and distribution, but we need to do much, much more. We need help. And one of the key reasons we are producing this pamphlet is the expectation that, once armed with a revolutionary class analysis, more of us will become confident and active Challenge distributors, and eventually members of PLP.
Capitalism needs to keep wages to a minimum
According to a series in the New York Times in March 1996, "The Downsizing of America," the U.S. working class has lost more than 43 million better-paying full time jobs since 1979. These have largely been replaced by lower-paying, part-time jobs. When Clinton brags that he has created 350,000 new jobs through NAFTA, alone, he is deliberately masking the fact that these jobs are held by far fewer workers, many of whom hold more than one of those jobs.
Further, because part-timers show up to work week after week like the full-timers, the capitalists claim that workers can subsist on a lump sum equal to less than what the full-timers get. And if workers can subsist on less, the capitalists see no reason to pay more. Part-time jobs thus have the general effect of driving down the subsistence pay of all workers.
The same is true for overtime. When you get a lot of overtime pay, you stop noticing that your regular wages don't really cover the cost of living, at least not in the way that they used to. So the capitalists find it even easier to skip the next wage adjustment for inflation.
At the same time, heavy overtime means fewer jobs overall. So unemployment goes up, and these increases in unemployment make it possible to lower wages yet again. Meanwhile, the boss saves even more money by refusing to pay benefits to part-time workers or to increase benefits proportional to overtime work. Overtime work, like part-time work, intensifies the exploitation of the working class.
Wage slavery--an exaggeration?
The capitalists pay the workers' wages, but where do they get the money? From the surplus value previously created by the workers. (Originally, as we saw in the discussion of primitive accumulation in Section I, they stole it outright). The difference, then, between ancient slave societies, like Egypt and Rome, and modern capitalist societies can be summed up as follows:
- In ancient slavery, all the slave's labor appears unpaid, but the owner pays for the slave's subsistence.
- In wage slavery, all the worker's labor appears paid, but the boss pays only for the worker's subsistence.
In either case the boss pays, and only pays, for the workers’ subsistence, and in either case the rest of the workers’ labor time is stolen.
True, under wage slavery, we are free to leave our "master," but that merely means we are free to find another master or starve to death. Wage slavery is in reality full slavery for the vast majority of workers.
To add insult to injury, the capitalist media advertise the success of that small minority of workers who manage to rise above this level of slavery. They use this minority to make the rest of us feel that our own personal shortcomings are responsible for our enslavement. But a few exceptions don’t change the rule.
"Capitalist production, therefore," Marx wrote, "produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer."
Or, as Bob in Detroit says every morning, "Good morning, wage slaves!"
Class war--an entire system cannot be dismantled piecemeal
Overtime is up. Part-timing is up. Unemployment is up. Workfare and prison labor are up. Racist poverty is up. Deportations and murder of immigrants are up.
Capitalism has launched a full-scale attack to lower the subsistence level of the U.S. working class. Whereas the wage system, especially, veils this attack, the communist science of Political Economy exposes it. The underemployed part-timers aren’t the lone victims. The unemployed youth don’t stand alone. Nor do the immigrant farm workers living in the open fields in which they work, nor the prison laborers building planes for Boeing. And nor do the overworked, overtaxed, and underpaid full-timers.
We are all collectively the target. This is class war, and it cannot be fought by a few here and another few there. Nor can it be fought successfully with any idea of compromising with capitalism.
Over 100 years ago, Karl Marx pointed out that
...within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labor are bought about at the cost of the individual laborer: all means for the development of production transform themselves into means for domination over, and exploitation of, the workers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the laborer in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working time.
The wage system is at the heart of the system Marx so accurately described over 100 years ago. Who needs it? The liberation of the enslaved majority of mankind cannot come unless our revolution smashes wage slavery. That is the revolution the communist Progressive Labor Party is organizing!
The old communist movement wanted communism and had tremendous triumphs. But it fought for socialism, which kept the wage system. PLP, with the advantage of hindsight, has concluded that we need a direct fight for communism. But we can only wage that fight with a mass party of millions of workers in every region of the world, and with the support of many hundreds of millions of others. The PLP has got to grow in membership, influence, and support. The aim of this pamphlet is to win all of us to deepen our commitment and activity in building the communist revolution we all need.
CAPITALISTS’ IDEAS ARE WORKERS’ CHAINS: THE ILLUSION OF TRUTH, THE REALITY OF LIES
By their control over the way history is taught in schools, the ruling class makes capitalism look like the natural state of affairs. They teach that human activity has always been organized in the same way, with a small ruling class dictating to the entire human species. They teach that characteristics spawned by capitalist social organization, such as selfishness, racism, and sexism, stem from universal, fundamental, and unchangeable human nature. How can there be any point in even trying to improve the condition of the working class, when our biological natures prevent any such improvement?
All of these claims are falsehoods deliberately invented by the capitalist ruling class, with the help of that small group of well-paid intellectual prostitutes who believe they have a stake in the present capitalist order: most historians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists, entertainers, and artists, and virtually all politicians. The purpose of these lies is obvious. Without them, no small class could maintain its power over the vast majority.
By far and away, however, the main weapon the capitalists use is the armed power of the government, what communists refer to as "the state." The state consists primarily of the armed forces, the police, the prisons, and the courts—the legal agencies of force and violence against the working class. When the capitalists find it necessary, the state is also used against competing capitalists in war.
How did the capitalists gain control of the state?
How is it that the government is controlled by the capitalists? All states, and indeed all institutions in any society divided by class, have always been controlled by the class which owns the means of production. Under capitalism, it is not hard to see that only the rich capitalists can afford to stake the kind of money required for political campaigns.
As Lenin put it, "Every few years we get to vote for our oppressors."
If an unusual politician even tries to act consistently in favor of the working class, he or she is isolated, ridiculed by other politicians and the mass media, possibly thrown off the ballot. If necessary, they are assassinated, though they are by no means the only targets of assassination. Kennedy and Lincoln, for example, were victims of a rivalry between different groups of capitalists. The main point is that under capitalism, money rules.
Their wealth also gives the capitalists control over their society’s other institutions, such as the schools and universities, the mass media, the think tanks, and so on. Indeed, it is through these institutions that the capitalists try to enchain our minds.
A mind in chains is a body in chains
If the capitalists had to call on the state, in all its naked strength, to fight the entire working class on a daily basis, it would expose the nature of their class rule and put the whole fraudulent setup in danger. Slaves who know they are slaves rebel continually.
As a safer alternative, capitalists use a variety of first-line thought weapons. These are lies that prevent workers from gaining the understanding that we constitute a potentially powerful political force. They keep us convinced that we are powerless. The main thought weapons are racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism, religion, and anti-communism, but foremost among these is racism.
Capitalists need racism like maggots need garbage
Capitalism goes to extreme lengths to promote racism, because racism drives a wedge between workers. For example, the government and the media regularly pretends that the "reserve army" of the unemployed is overwhelmingly of one "race" or ethnic group. This lie enables the capitalists to make it appear that unemployment is caused not by the class needs of capitalism, but rather by the physical or language characteristics of the unemployed. Racism deadens workers’ class consciousness, and leads some groups of workers to think that capitalism is not their problem. Racism among workers tears the working class apart.
Capitalists and their liberal apologists in the media and universities pretend that racism consists merely of prejudice or discrimination or racial inequality. But these concepts imply that it just exists because it is handed down from generation to generation, in both the working class and the ruling class, and that it is hard to change peoples’ minds about such a deep-rooted tradition.
In this way, the capitalists hide the fact that they continually and deliberately generate racism anew, in a variety of forms, because they cannot maximize their profits and compete without it. Even more important, without racism they would face an invincible rise in class consciousness, which would ultimately oust them from power.
Racism is an entire system of practices and ideas that feed off one another. It cannot be boiled down into any one of its components. Nor can it be eliminated one component at a time.
The capitalist state generates racism by the deliberate targeting of black workers for imprisonment, Latin immigrants for deportations, and Native Americans for the concentration camps called reservations. Meanwhile, the capitalist media puts forward a barrage of false explanations, blaming the victims by labeling them as criminals, alcoholics, or stealers of jobs and tax money from white workers.
The capitalists’ schools and mass media hide the true history of working class unity in the struggle against exploitation. They pretend that discrimination against black and Latin students is the result, rather than the cause, of lower graduation rates and grade-point averages, and subsequent lagging income levels.
By continually barraging the entire working class with racist propaganda, the capitalists set the stage for winning the least class-conscious sections of the working class to act as agents of terrorism against other sections of workers. The recent grisly murder of James Byrd in Texas is the inevitable—and desired—result of this unrelenting campaign.
If any section of workers can be terrorized, all become more fearful. So the Klan and the Nazis, the militias and skinheads, the rival urban street gangs all receive constant infusions of cash and free publicity from the ruling class. To the extent that terror can be generated from within the working class, it saves the police from complete exposure as the primary hit squad for the ruling class.
How did racism get its start?
Racism is a system of both practices and ideas, each of which reinforces and gives rise to the other. It began in the U.S. over 300 years ago, in the 1660s. Southern plantation owners, who controlled the local governments through their overriding economic power, passed laws and developed institutions to extend their control to their work forces. They passed laws to divide the three groups of workers: white, Indian, and black. These laws primarily controlled the movements, meetings, dress, conduct, and education of black workers, and defined a black person as someone with one black grandparent.
While European servants were indentured for only seven years, servitude became a life sentence for black slaves. Eventually the planters ceased to use Indian and white workers altogether and turned completely to the largest and cheapest source of workers: Africa. The number of black slaves grew into the millions, far outnumbering the few thousand slave-owners. This posed a major political problem for the planters—terrified about the potential threat of a unified working class.
To further discourage unity of black and white workers, the plantation owners’ governments passed severe laws to punish white people who married or had sex with black people. As a warning to the many white people who refused at first to abide by these dehumanizing laws, more white people were hung in the early years of slavery than black people. After all, black slaves were too valuable to the slave owners to hang. As a further warning and ever-present reminder, decapitated white heads were placed on poles along the roadways like billboards, advertising that the slave owners meant business.
The ruling class kept all the groups fighting one another. Indians were offered bounties for betraying black runaway slaves; black people were given small rewards for helping to fight Indians; poor white people were used as cannon fodder against both. Racism was pushed as an ideology by press, professor, and pulpit to reinforce and justify this segregation.
How is racist ideology kept alive?
To this day, racism is still used to enable a small ruling class (now the capitalists) to maintain political control over a vastly larger, exploited working class. And to this day, racism continues to be developed as though it were a "scientific" theory based on a natural biological classification of humanity.
But the concept of "race" remains a complete fiction. A growing scientific literature today debunks the very concept of "race." The bottom line is that all humans are far more alike than different. Invented by the slave owners to divide and rule the working class and to deaden class consciousness, racism is the mortal enemy of all workers, and the prime target of communists.
With several hundred years of history burning racist ideology into the minds and institutions of U.S. society, racism has attained a tremendous momentum of its own. Capitalists no longer need to plant severed heads along the highways. Today the capitalists use less strenuous yet nonetheless effective means to maintain racism—primarily through their news media, their entertainment industry, and in their schools and universities.
In the universities thee are basically three groups of intellectuals. First are professors and researchers so imbued with racism that they don’t notice the false conclusions in their teachings and writings, no more than a fish can realize that it’s wet. They constitute the vast majority. Second is a group of anti-racists, a distinct minority at present, who oppose and expose these racist conclusions in their own teaching and writing. And third is a still smaller minority, who are willing and conscious racists for hire.
When certain forms of racist ideas have been discredited, and a precarious economic or political situation calls for it, the capitalists look to the conscious racists to design a new assault, backing them with the full support and advertising of the media, the publishing houses, and various capitalist-supported think-tanks and professional organizations.
In the 1960, during the war in Vietnam, the anti-war movement was growing and anti-racist rebellions, primarily by black workers, were sweeping major U.S. cities. In response, the prestigious Harvard Education Review called upon a professor at Berkeley, Arthur Jensen, to submit a paper asserting that black people are born with less mental capability than white people, based on genetic inheritance.
As crude as this sounds, Jensen’s 100-page paper appeared in the Harvard journal, whose editorial board is run by conscious servants of the capitalists. Jensen’s "research" became the magnet and basis for numerous other spin-off papers and speeches by other willing racist professors. Many other college teachers, oblivious to the way they were being manipulated, incorporated Jensen’s work into their curricula.
Led primarily by the PLP, militant anti-racist organizing on college campuses fought this racism throughout the country. The spewers of this racist filth were shouted down, tossed off the podium, and generally shown to be no better than the Nazi propagandists in Germany, 30 years earlier. Out of that struggle came a PLP pamphlet entitled Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class, which, among other things, outlined the entire history of intelligence tests as a racist weapon in the hands of the capitalists.
The mass struggle of students and the more militant anti-racist professors, some of them PLP members, encouraged an outpouring of books and articles in established academic journals by less militant, but no less anti-racist, professors. Once again, for the umpty-umpth time, they were called upon to refute in the scientific literature the age-old lie of black inferiority.
An idea which is useful to the capitalist class can never be killed by simply proving it is false. With each successive attack, it must be proved false once again. Like Dracula, it will be revived and reappear, and reappear again whenever the capitalists need to call on it. Racist ideology will survive as long as capitalism survives. It will die a permanent death only when workers smash its basis, the profit system, and drive the stake of communist revolution into its heart.
How is racism used by the ruling class?
The capitalists’ primary purpose in enforcing racist discrimination is to retain political power. But racism also nets the capitalists billions in additional profits each year—through the direct lowering of the wages of black workers, and through the indirect lowering of the wages of white workers, who are weakened in their resistance by divisions within the working class. The more intense the local racism, the lower the wages for all workers in that area, white as well as black.
These lower wages mean super-profits for the capitalists. By multiplying the difference between the average income of white and non-white workers by the number of non-white workers in the U.S. private sector, we find that capitalist reap a total of $200 billion in super-profits. Slightly more than half of that total comes from the underpayment of black workers alone. The balance comes from Latin, Asian and Native American workers. This does not include the superprofits that result from the downward pressure of racist divisions on the wages of white U.S. workers.
Union bosses in the U.S. today are constantly accepting concessions of lower wages—not for themselves, of course, but for their members—to keep companies from moving abroad, as capitalists play off one group of workers against another. The 1998 General Motors strike was over just this issue. Faced with GM’s threat that it would go out of business and lay off all its workers if it could not lower wage costs, the workers were handed the choice between lower wages and no wages at all.
It was impossible for the GM workers to prevent these concessions. Their union bosses have accepted lower wage rates to keep the company from going under, using the racist rationale that workers in other countries can subsist on lower wages.
It is indeed true that if a company like GM cannot lower its costs and prices enough to compete with its rivals, it will be forced out of business. But there is an alternative to sellout, class-collaborationist unionism. Only an international communist party, with an anti-racist outlook and a base among workers world-wide, can play a true leadership role.
Clearly, this role cannot be confined to simply demanding equality of wages and hours internationally, which would put the company out of business. Capitalism’s inherent competition forces the working class to respond with a communist-led fight to end capitalism altogether. Racist ideas among the working class stand in the way of this international outlook and help preserve capitalism, with all of its inequalities and instability.
The role of racism in war
Racism is also a lynchpin in the capitalists’ attempts to win support for their military assaults on workers and competing capitalists elsewhere in the world. From the World War II battles against the Japanese ruling class, through the war in Korea in the ‘50s and in Vietnam in the ‘60s and ‘70s, to the more recent U.S. invasions of Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Haiti, racist images of the people under attack pervaded the media.
In the early years of the Vietnam war, for example, despite TV and newspaper images of children aflame with napalm, racism checked the U.S. working class from ripping the throats out of the murderous capitalists.
When George Bush ordered the 1991 bombing of Iraq, which killed 300,000 men, women, and children, the U.S. working class again failed to oppose it, because to a large degree workers had bought the relentless capitalist campaign painting all Arabs as mindless bombers—people who would as soon kill you as look at you.
With the slaying of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda and Bosnia, once again it is racism that keeps the U.S. working class rising against it.
This must and will change! With each failure to act, the noose tightens around our throats. The PLP won’t allow the working class to sit by and watch genocidal attacks by the capitalists as though they were a spectator sport.
How was the German working class rewarded for allowing (and even helping) the Nazis to kill scores of millions of Eastern Europeans and Soviets on the battlefields and in the death camps of World War II? With 9 million German working-class soldiers dead and several large cities in ruins. The reward to the Japanese working class for supporting the rape and pillage of most of Asia by the Emperor’s imperial troops? Millions of battle deaths; one city destroyed by firebombs; two others leveled by atom bombs.
If the international working class allows our respective ruling classes to drive us into a third world war, it will make World War II look like a tea party, because almost every ruling class now possesses nuclear weapons. Only the resolve to fight racism and to join and build the PLP can blunt this monumental destruction (though it is unlikely that we can prevent it entirely), by finally destroying its source: capitalism.
What are the faces of racism in the U.S. today?
The main arenas of U.S. racism today are in Workfare, crime, prison labor, and anti-immigrant terror.
By falsely implying that virtually all people receiving welfare are black or Latin immigrants, the capitalists undermine the resistance against ending welfare payments and forcing recipients to work at below the legal minimum wage—or starve to death. In fact, the largest single section of welfare recipients are white workers, since white people constitute a much larger segment of the U.S. population. The white welfare recipients suffer right along with black and Latin recipients. But their plight is kept from the public eye by those accomplished liars, the journalists and politicians.
Racism gives cover to the reign of police terror that is called a "war on crime." The police murders of black and Latin youth, almost daily occurrences, are portrayed as protecting all workers—black, Latin, and white. They thereby gain a measure of support from the very victims of the terror.
The outrageously unequal treatment of black and Latin workers by the criminal "justice" system is illustrated by the following examples:
Two-thirds of all black and Latin men in California are arrested at least once between the ages of 18 and 30.
Black people are arrested simply for using (not selling) drugs at five times the rate of white people. This racist police work is sanctioned by the "war on drugs," though the rates of drug use among black and white people are approximately equal. (In some categories, such as pregnant women, usage is even greater among whites.)
For those black people who are arrested, sentencing laws for minor drug crimes are much harsher, with the penalty for crack use (primarily pushed in the black communities) up to 100 times more severe than for powder cocaine (primarily pushed in the white communities).
With arrest and charge rates for black people 13 times that of white people in San Francisco and 17 times as high in Los Angeles, California passed a three-strike law to make the third sentence for any offense, no matter how petty, life imprisonment.
One of every four black men between the ages of 18 and 34 is now either in jail, on parole, or on probation. In many cities, the rate is one of every three.
The net result is a U.S. prison population of nearly 1.5 million, more than double that of 1980. Black people are imprisoned at a rate six times that of white people—and five times that of black South Africans, even under Apartheid! In the "Land of the Free," where slavery was officially made "illegal" more than 130 years ago, this wholesale imprisonment creates a potential slave labor force.
Anti-immigrant terror is also an attack on all workers, even if it doesn’t appear so at first glance. Firstly, it’s imperialist exploitation abroad that drives workers to emigrate. Then the capitalists label workers who cross from the super-exploited countries into the dominant imperialist countries as "illegal." In the process, they lump together workers who are victims of imperialism, and seek nothing more than to keep themselves and their families alive, with murderers, rapists, drug king-pins, and all other sorts of parasites.
Who are the real criminals—the innocent workers, or the corps of press and politicians who label them?
A class of undocumented workers within the various capitalist borders has been created in all major capitalist countries--from Latin American workers in the U.S., to Turkish workers in Germany, to North African workers in France and Spain. By turning these immigrants into objects of hatred, and by segregating them from large sections of the native working class, the capitalists shield themselves from the united wrath of the workers. They give themselves space to super-exploit immigrant workers in the fields and sweatshops, even as they use them to drag down the wages of all workers. Brutal immigration raids, mass deportations, and the militarization of the Mexican-U.S. border keep immigrant workers in a constant state of terror, willing to accept the lowest wages and most atrocious conditions.
How can we put an end to racism?
Marx called racism the "Achilles heel" (the most vulnerable point) of capitalism. As capitalism creates its own grave-diggers by forging a working class, racism creates a more oppressed and potentially more militant sector of that working class—one that can have a key strategic role in leading our whole class.
Black workers, given their concentration in basic industry and in the military, and their more intense experience with oppression, are a key to revolution. The current crisis, like every U.S. crisis, hits black workers hardest, with factories closing and black industrial workers losing their jobs. (A large number are even beginning to return to the South.) The Midwest ratio of black to white median family income fell from 73% in 1970 to 51% in 1993. Although the official data for 1992 showed 7% of white men and 15% of black men unemployed, the real unemployment rates (including prisoners) were far grimmer: 29% of white men, 39% of black men.
Black workers have long been central to the leadership of the struggles of the working class. They took the lead in the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s, in the 1967 Newport News Shipyard strike and the auto wildcats in 1968, in the 1970 postal workers’ strike. Their hatred of racism can translate into a hatred of the system that creates racism.
Their natural class hatred can lead black workers to become a leading revolutionary force.
While black Americans constitute just over 12% of the population of the U.S. as a whole, they are 33% of the U.S. Army. In the U.S. today, black workers are being given the opportunity to die in greater numbers to defend the profits of the same bosses who have enslaved, jailed, murdered, and fired more black workers than any other ruling class in history.
Many soldiers have been the victims of police terror and racism in general. They are winnable to turning the guns on the racist war-makers! Many of these black and Latin workers and soldiers, all too familiar with the boot of the racists, are potential communists. Their hatred of the capitalist system makes them more open to becoming communist leaders of the whole working class.
So racism serves two purposes for the ruling class: first to maintain its political power, including its ability to go to war, and second to give these bosses the ability to make super-profits.
As a PLP song puts it, racist ideology is a dagger thrust deep into the heart of the working class. That is why PLP has always made the fight against racism a primary focus of absolutely every struggle in which we are involved. We will pull that dagger out of the heart of the working class and turn it on the capitalists. But the bottom line is that militant anti-racism within capitalism is not enough. Just as you cannot stop weeds from growing back by simply cutting them off at ground level, racism cannot possibly die until capitalism itself is pulled up by the roots.
Nationalism
Because the existence of racism, if not its underlying causes and mechanisms, is immediately apparent to its most direct victims, the capitalists need to generate a shield for themselves against the wrath of black, Latin, and Native American workers. As a safety valve, they foster a nationalist reaction among the oppressed.
Nationalism is a term used in two senses. In the literal sense, it is an idea which is intended to bind workers of one nation to the capitalists of the same nation, by holding that "my" nation (or group) is all that counts, or is superior to all others. It has repeatedly served the capitalists’ need to win working class support to go to war against other capitalists (and kills their workers), in order to increase their holdings at the expense of their competitors.
In its other form, nationalism is intended to bind workers of an ethnic or cultural group to the capitalist representatives of that same ethnic group. When the capitalists found that their nationalism was being mimicked by various leaders of sections of the working class, they found it expedient to fund these nationalist leaders, a down-payment to sustain segregation and sow distrust and hostility among different ethnic groups. The Nation of Islam, La Raza, the American Indian Movement—these nationalist organizations are happily funded by the rulers in exchange for blinding their members to their class interests, and diverting them into alliances with the capitalist segments of their respective ethnic groups.
In trying to carve out their own piece of the profit pie, small capitalists from the various ethnic groups do the dirty work of the dominant capitalists. They spin fables on the need for each ethnic group to reject alliances and unity with workers of the other groups.
Meanwhile, the dominant capitalists cover their sponsorship of these nationalist movements by parading a movement to celebrate "diversity" and "multi-culturalism." Diversity, while pretending to bring everyone together in a show of respect for various cultures, is nothing but a sugar-coated form of segregation and nationalism. Multi-culturalism magnifies differences, buries likenesses, and ties the workers of each ethnic group to the interests of the dominant capitalist class.
By encouraging workers to identify with members of their separate ethnic groupings, nationalism enables this hoax to succeed. And a hoax it is, no more and no less. After all, how does it improve my situation that another person with approximately my skin color is appointed to Clinton’s cabinet, or elected mayor, or promoted to four-star general?
Stripped of its public relations, nationalism works hand in glove with racism. Both serve to divide and weaken the working class. In fact, nationalism is a deadly error. Time after time, it has misled workers by the millions into lethal traps. One recent example is the African National Congress in South Africa, under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. Millions of black South Africans looked to the ANC to deliver them from Apartheid and exploitation, adopting the nationalist concept that black leadership was tantamount to freedom. The result? While the outward trappings of Apartheid were dismantled, South Africa remains under capitalist rule, with Mandela soliciting investments by various imperialists around the world. And the black working class remains super-exploited, only now under a black president.
Similarly, in Haiti, the support of the black working class for President Aristide is a completely misguided attempt to free the Haitian working class from super-exploitation and oppression.
The point is that nationalism kills. All capitalist ideology in the minds of the working class kills. Only communism can liberate the working class anywhere in the world.
(The history and workings of racism and nationalism are described in detail in the PLP pamphlet, Smash Racism with Communist Revolution.)
Sexism
There are several terms for the set of ideas called sexism, including "male chauvinism," and "special oppression of women." As none of them tells the whole story, and as none of them is free of some misleading aspects, we choose to use the term "sexism" and explain what we mean.
Sexism, in a similar fashion to racism, drives a wedge between workers, in this case dividing men from women. While discrimination against women is far older than capitalism, it has been adapted as a weapon by the capitalist class.
The degradation of women and the labor they perform goes to justify their super-exploitation. Class consciousness is erased by an endless stream of movies, songs, and novels that enforce stereotyped behavior and create antagonisms between the genders where none would otherwise exist.
Sexism also differs from racism in some important respects. For one thing, it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the capitalists to institute segregation of the genders. Second, while women are often the special target of invading armies, sexism does not so easily lend itself to stereotyping and splitting the workers in order to win the support of a part of the working class of the invading country.
Nevertheless, the oppression of women throughout the world often exceeds the most brutal fantasies of Hollywood filmmakers. The mutilation of genitalia, the selling into teenage and pre-teen prostitution, the denial of the most basic forms of human dignity—even down to the ability to show one’s face in public—are merely the most extreme illustrations of the lot of women everywhere. All these are justified by the claim that women are biologically inferior to men, and in turn further justify the assignment to women of greater labor for smaller wages, or, in the home, for no wages.
In the 19th century, the more blatantly unfair aspects of sexist discrimination, such as denial of the right to vote or to enter the professions, gave rise to the ideology of feminism, primarily among professional women. Just as nationalism was adapted as a reaction to racism, the ideology of feminism arose as a reaction against sexism. But just as nationalism binds workers of one subgroup to the capitalists of the same group, feminism serves the same function for the capitalists. That’s why the likes of Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore pretend to be the saviors of even the most oppressed women everywhere.
But neither nationalism nor feminism identifies the root cause of racism and sexism: the capitalist drive for profit, and the need of the capitalists to maintain political power over the working class. These movements therefore seek solutions within capitalism. Working class men who fall for and practice sexism, whether they realize it or not, do the capitalists’ dirty work. But militant women—who may honestly desire full equality for their gender—also help capitalism divide the working class if they enroll in organized feminism instead of joining communism.
Individualism (selfishness) and the myth of freedom
The concept of individualism, or selfishness, arose naturally out of the competition among capitalists. The capitalists had merely to adapt individualism as a device to further divide the working class against itself.
Individualism promotes the notion that we are each personally responsible for our fate and that we can all "make something of ourselves" (become rich capitalists, that is) if only we work hard enough and put our selfish needs ahead of those of the rest of the working class. For capitalists, who thrive on beating out the competition, this concept serves as their evening prayer.
For workers, on the other hand, individualism is a false consciousness with devastating effects. Far from being free and independent individuals, workers under capitalism are wage slaves. "Looking out for number one" keeps the whole class down.
Anti-communism
Absolutely crucial for the capitalists is the ideology of anti-communism. Since the ruling class has difficulty convincing the vast majority of the world’s working class that capitalism serves our needs, they tell the workers, "If you think capitalism is bad for you, you haven’t seen bad till you see communism." It is therefore vital for workers to understand just what went wrong in the Soviet Union and China, and, even more important, what went right. (This will be covered in Section VIII.)
Racism, sexism, nationalism, feminism, individualism, and anti-communism are all ideologies designed to divide workers from each other, and to tie workers to a particular segment of the capitalist class. At the same time, they are designed to convince the working class that capitalism’s main features--the profit motive and competition--are actually good for us, as well as for them.
Capitalists sing the praises of the profit motive and competition, but what are their real consequences?
Capitalists like to tell us that the profit motive guarantees the production of what people want and need, and that it does so in the most efficient manner possible. But the exact opposite is true. Want and need don’t drive the market; only money can do that. Consider the effects of the present crisis. The Wall Street Journal (March 9, 1989) described overproduction in the U.S. market in the following industries: auto, steel, computers, semi-conductors, heavy equipment, farm equipment, textiles and oil. It also listed others that were close to overproduction. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers were laid off as a result.
Meanwhile, in Africa alone, close to 20 million people faced starvation in 1989. So it wasn't true that too much farm equipment was being produced. It was simply that more equipment was produced than could be sold at a profit. Overproduction coupled with mass starvation is a hallmark of capitalism, and a direct consequence of the profit motive and competition.
The profit motive does not automatically result in the production of the things that people need. For example, working people today have a desperate need for good, reasonably priced medical care and decent low-cost housing. But the profits to be made in the production or supply of these things are too low for modern capitalist investors. Consequently, they are not produced or supplied at anywhere near sufficient levels.
Only those things which produce sufficient profit for the capitalists are produced under capitalism. The profit motive guarantees only that a few people will hold all the wealth that the masses produce, and that they will do anything to keep things as they are.
As different national groups of bosses struggle to escape a crisis, they start "local" wars to determine which segments of the ruling class will control certain markets and sources of labor and raw materials. To get workers to fight these wars for them, the capitalists promote a surge of nationalism and racism. Any of the "local" wars could spark another world war, which will ultimately be necessary to decide which imperialist power will emerge as top dog.
War, nationalism, racism, sexism, exploitation, and poverty are the only things guaranteed by the profit motive--in the short and long run!
Capitalists also like to tell us that competition is healthy, from the economy to the playing fields. Local wars, robbery, assault, and murder are the everyday results of capitalist competition. All of these take both legal and illegal forms, but the more destructive by far are the legal forms: the 300,000 Iraqis killed by U.S. bombs and bullets in 1991; the jailing of hundreds of thousands of unemployed, mainly black and Latin workers; the tens of thousands of daily deaths from poverty, racism, and malnutrition.
Again, all of these are legal—including the continual robbery of the working class through the private appropriation of surplus value!
Capitalists enlist the working class to fight their battles for them. The result is millions upon millions of deaths and mutilations, with no lives left untouched. Such are the benefits of competition.
If the state, and other institutions, are controlled by the capitalists and constitute their main weapons against the workers in the class struggle; if control over these institutions enables the capitalists to gain ideological control through racism and sexism, nationalism and feminism, individualism and anti-communism, then what weapons do the workers have against this apparently overwhelming power?
We have our collective strength and overwhelming numbers, our key role in production, and, above all, the Progressive Labor Party to organize the working class into a conscious force to overthrow capitalism and the state. Marx correctly said, "When an idea grips the masses, it becomes a material force." It's the job of communists in the PLP to win the working class to defeat capitalist ideology, and to expose the system’s inner workings. In the process, we will forge a revolutionary class unity among the workers. Our understanding of exploitation, surplus value, and the slavery of the wage system are key tools in that struggle. (More on this in Section VIII on Communism.)
CAPITALIST ECONOMIC CRISIS: THE ILLUSION OF ACCIDENT, THE REALITY OF INEVITABILITY
The highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with depreciation of capital, degradation of the laborer, and a most strained exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises, in which by momentous suspension of labor and annihilation of a great portion of capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can go on.....Yet these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale, and finally its violent overthrow.
--Karl Marx, Grundrisse
The Crisis lays bare all the contradictions of capitalism, sharpening class contradictions . . . [and] compels workers who were indifferent to capitalism to become active in the struggle against it.
--Lenin
Since the 1970s, the economy of the world as a whole has been mired in a deep economic crisis, a general crisis of capitalism, which continues to generate agonies for the international working class. Besides an explosion of wars, like the oil war in Chechnya or the wars in the former Yugoslavia, there is mass starvation, homelessness and unemployment. Over one billion workers around the world are either jobless or underemployed.
There has also been a vicious upsurge in the exploitation of workers. In 1992, the International Labor Organization reported: "In Asia child labor reaches up to 11% of the total labor force in some countries. In India figures are estimated at 40 million." This hyper-intense exploitation takes various forms. By moving factories to poor nations, the big multinationals temporarily keep profits up—on the backs of the world’s poorest workers. Meanwhile, in the United States, within a week of laying off 74,000 auto workers, GM moved to nonstop assembly with three shifts operating around the clock.
Poverty, starvation, and even outright slavery haunt growing armies of workers, but the rich get richer and richer. Between 1993 and 1994, the 13 richest billionaires in Mexico increased their wealth by 40%, and 11 new billionaires were created. Meanwhile, the buying power of the workers (some 80 million of them) was cut in half, with many farmers teetering on the brink of destruction.
Capitalism Breeds Overproduction
Capitalism and crisis are inseparable, because desperate competition among capitalists naturally leads to overproduction, and overproduction is the heart of every capitalist crisis.
For capitalist commodity production, the conversion of the product into money (the sale) is an absolute condition of production. Without the sale, no profit can be realized. If, for any reason, there is no sale, the system is thrown into a crisis of overproduction—even though people may still be starving.
Systems of credit associated with commodity production frequently result in delays of payment, which complicate the problem even further. All in all, capitalist commodity production creates the conditions that make crises of overproduction inevitable.
When a crisis occurs, the capitalist market place suddenly reveals that capitalist individuals and groupings have produced more commodities than can be profitably sold under market conditions. The result is a glut of unsold commodities.
In a crisis of overproduction, the entire system jams up. The stock market may collapse. Factories are shut down. Masses of workers are laid off. Production drops dramatically. Unsold products pile up.
In many cases, the goods needed by the working class are not necessarily the ones being overproduced. But even when the overproduced goods are ones which the workers need, the goods cannot be sold because of the poverty of the working class. In capitalism, overproduction is only "over" relative to what we can afford—not relative to what we need.
Under communism, overproduction would occur only if something were produced in greater quantity than was needed by the world’s working class. Once it became clear that any particular item was being overproduced, production of that item could be cut back, with productive forces shifted to something that was underproduced.
Under capitalism, a crisis of overproduction has different effects on the capitalist class and the working class. To the bosses, crisis primarily means falling profits and gigantic losses of capital and power as plants must be closed. To workers, crisis means unemployment, starvation, and general misery—an immeasurable sharpening of the everyday misery that capitalism spells for the vast majority of the world’s working class.
If the problems of capitalism could be eliminated through reformist changes that "fix" capitalism and "make it work better," then workers might not need a revolution to win decent lives for themselves and their families.
But once we understand that capitalist crises and exploitation are in the nature of capitalism, and so cannot be reformed away, our path becomes clear. Once we realize that capitalism will not fall of its own weight, even when in crisis, we see that revolutionary change is the only way to put an end to this system. Our understanding of capitalist surplus value and overproduction therefore stands at the center of our line of "Revolution, not reform." In fact, the ability of Marxist Political Economy to reveal the nature of capitalist crisis has been perhaps its crowning achievement.
The dynamics of overproduction
When a number of companies drive hard to increase market share, the result is massive overproduction. The weaker companies go bankrupt and massive layoffs result.
When similar scenarios are repeated in industry after industry, unemployment grows, and markets shrink even further. One industry affects another, and workers, on drastically dwindling budgets, are no longer able to buy goods as before. For example, workers can no longer afford airline tickets, so airlines order fewer planes and engines. And so a vicious cycle begins, until the crisis of overproduction is in full swing.
Crises are marked by several features:
Concentration of capital: In a typical example, only a few companies survive the crisis. Furthermore, as borrowing takes place in industry after industry to install automation, banks become more central to the economy. The richest get richer. One capitalist kills many capitalists.
Mass unemployment: As the crisis sharpens, workers cease to be a resource (the source of future profits) and become a threat. Capitalist society now imprisons rather than educates workers, expels rather than attracts immigrants, evicts rather than provides affordable housing, lets people die rather than treat them. The working class gets poorer. But their understanding that the capitalist system must be smashed begins to grow. A revolutionary PLP can go on the attack. Capitalism becomes more vulnerable.
Destruction of productive forces: Capitalism in crisis also destroys excess plant and machinery, first by economic means (closing down plants), then by war.
Increased exploitation: The huge growth in the numbers of the unemployed is used as a direct threat to the employed. Work faster, longer and harder, or be gone! Under capitalism, workers are things to be used. It will take communist revolution for us to become people whose needs must be met.
Sharpening inter-imperialist competition: Consider the U.S. aircraft industry. Clinton traveled to Seattle and told Boeing workers that Airbus was unfairly subsidized by European governments. U.S. workers were encouraged to blame European workers, and vice versa, for the capitalist crisis of overproduction. This underlines the urgency of building a revolutionary party under the PLP slogan of "One class, one flag, one Party!"
6. Idle capital: A shrinking market means fewer opportunities for profitable investments in industry. A growing army of investors then turns to speculation in real estate, foreign exchange rates, the bond market, derivatives, and other investments that do not lead to production. These nonproductive investments turn the stock market into a giant gambling casino, dangerously escalating economic instability.
7. World war: As the accumulation of capital through exploitation falters, the capitalists are forced to make gains through primitive accumulation in war—or be wiped out.
The falling rate of profit
In Volume III of Capital, Marx demonstrated that as capitalism matures, its rate of profit inevitably decreases. The rate of profit is how much profit the capitalists get per "buck invested." The decline was well known to bourgeois economists, who had observed it for years but failed to understand its cause. Table 4.2 illustrates the average decline of the rate of profit in the United States.
TABLE 4.2: Rate of Profit in Manufacturing (U.S.)
| 1899 | 24% |
| 1904 | 19.9% |
| 1909 | 18.7% |
| 1914 | 16.5% |
The Marxist labor theory of value (discussed in Section II) solves the mystery. The bosses' profits come out of the surplus value created by workers in the course of their labor. Only labor adds surplus value. But as capitalism matures, a growing proportion of investment is devoted to the purchase of machinery: bigger and more complex lathes and presses, computers, even robots. The short-term gain of automation (smaller outlays per product in wages) for one company leads to a long-term decline in the rate of profit for all companies, as more and more capital has to be laid out for each productive worker who is put into action. Capitalist competition, meanwhile, makes it impossible to reverse the process of automation; maturing capitalism is doomed to a constantly falling rate of profit. More and more jobs are shifted to "service" industries, which do not add to the profits of the system as a whole.
The problem for the capitalists is that in order to produce a commodity today, they have to buy more and more machinery and raw materials relative to living labor power than they did previously. But the machinery and raw materials, which are dead labor time do not produce profit for them; only living labor time can do that.
Of course, the machinery and raw materials produce profits for those capitalists whose factories, farms, and mines make the machinery and raw materials, and whose workers put living labor time into them. But on average, as a net result, it now costs the entire capitalist class more to make the same amount of profit than it did 10 or 20 or 50 years ago. For each dollar spent in capital, they make less profit. This is the falling rate of profit.
So why do capitalists automate if the net result is to decrease their profit rate? The answer lies in competition, an essential element of the anarchy of capitalist production. Competition reflects the lack of an overall plan for the economy. When the first company in a particular industry (say, auto) invests in a new automation process, it gets the jump on its competitors. For a time it can make cars at a lower cost (with less living labor) while matching its competitors’ price, or charging a little less.
But the end result of this cycle of automation is that all of the auto companies will make a lower rate of profit than they did before the automation began. The reason? Living labor time, the companies’ only source of profit, is now a smaller proportion of the total labor time in the car. This is the essence of the falling rate of profit.
Since capitalism naturally shifts investments from industries with lower profit rates to others with higher profit rates, eventually all industries gravitate toward the same average profit rate throughout the capitalist economy—a rate in steady decline.
To the extent that trade and investment barriers are knocked down, worldwide competition also produces a common average profit rate over time. This is the goal of the free trade agreements the U.S. government is seeking on behalf of U.S. capitalists. They want access to lower-wage areas of the world, where the rate of profit has not yet sunk as low as it has in the U.S.
Unfortunately for the capitalists, freer trade can only temporarily reverse the overall decline in their profit rate. Lower wages abroad bring higher profits—at first. But this globalization costs jobs and sparks revolutionary development among U.S. workers. At the same time, it creates a new industrial working class to foster revolution abroad. Globalization looks good in today’s company report, but it is a gravedigger for capitalism—if communists take advantage of its possibilities.
The present crisis
Below is an excerpt from The Economist (May 10, 1998), a British business magazine. It concerns the leading industry in today’s world, the auto industry, which accounts for 13% of the average Gross Domestic Product in the auto-producing nations, China and Russia excluded.
THE COMING CAR CRASH
Global Pile-up
The world’s biggest manufacturing industry is in a panic about over-capacity. So it should be.
Of the top 50 manufacturers, no fewer than 13 are motor companies, employing 2.5m people. Three times as many are employed in garages and in the industries that supply the car assemblers with parts.
Bumper to bumper
If all the car firms in the world ran flat out [full production], they could produce 68m cars a year (including other light vehicles such as pick ups and sports utility vehicles). In 1996, they actually made 50m--73% of capacity.
Old-fashioned unrealistic expectations have also played a role. With markets stagnant in Europe and Japan and growing slowly in America, car makers have been expanding capacity in emerging markets faster than those markets can bear. The Asia-Pacific region is a good example. Already the world’s biggest producer of cars, making half a million more than North America’s 15m last year, it is seeing new plants being built that will add 6m cars a year in the next five years. Autofacts, an American consultancy firm, reckons that capacity in the region (including Japan) will soon outstrip sales by 9m vehicles.
Expectations can become unrealistic because companies tend to double their bets when things get tough......Firms are reluctant to be the first to close a factory lest it should lead to lower market share, or the first to forgo an investment in a growing market....
The tendency of car firms to think the problems are everyone else’s fault is likely to mean that things will get worse before they get better.........By 2000, overcapacity will have risen from 18m to 22m units--equivalent to 80 of the world’s 630 car assembly factories standing idle. Looked at another way every factory in North America could close--and there would still be excess capacity.....
First, we should understand the scale of this imminent destruction. It is doubtful that World War II, with all of its bombing, destroyed more than 40 auto plants. Yet the projections here are for 80 plants to be effectively wiped out in the next three years. This doesn’t count the dozens that have already been eliminated.
Overproduction or underconsumption?
There are those who propose that the primary cause of economic crises is that the working class is kept too poor to consume the goods that they produce. According to this outlook, the solution would be for the capitalists to raise the wages of the working class. Then workers could buy back all the consumer goods that they produce; production could then maintain itself at its previous levels and possibly resume its rise; capitalists could buy more machinery and other means of production; and both capitalists and workers would benefit.
A variation on this theme is that since the capitalists will not do this voluntarily, trade unions must enable workers to force the capitalists to do it. The capitalists would still benefit, even if against their will.
This is the essence of a variety of theories of underconsumption. Their essential conclusion is that, if properly managed, capitalism can work for both capitalists and the working class. It needs only to be reformed, even if the government has to force the capitalists to do something against their will.
These theories have several gaping holes. For starters, capitalists control the government, and so prevent it from forcing them to do things against their will. But the essential flaw in the theories of underconsumption is that they put forward a one-sided solution of the problem, one that fails to take into account either the main cause of the economic crises or the consequences of their proposed solution.
Underconsumption is certainly an aspect of overproduction. Indeed, in the immediate sense, it is just a different way of saying the same thing. If one thing is larger (production) than another (consumption), it follows that the second is smaller than the first. Overproduction and underconsumption are two sides of the same coin.
But now let’s examine the contradiction that the underconsumptionists fail to consider. As we have seen, capitalist economic crises are caused by overproduction—relative not to the needs of the working class, but to workers’ ability to buy the whole of consumer goods production. Overproduction, in turn, is the result of capitalist competition—the unplanned and unstable anarchy of capitalist production for profit, as each company strives for a bigger market share than its worldwide competitors in order to survive.
Each time a company strives for more market share, it must assume that its competitors will end up with less. But they all make that same assumption, and so too much is produced for profitability. Some of them must go bust.
If a lot of this busting happens in a given short time—it’s a crash! Jobs disappear. To distribute all of its products, the capitalists would then have to give much of them away free to the unemployed and underpaid portions of the working class. But this is precisely what the goal of profit prevents!
In the face of a crisis of overproduction, there is only one step the capitalists can take to try to maintain their profit, or at least slow its decline. If they cannot increase, or even maintain their sales, they must cut their expenses. This is, in fact, exactly what they do—by cutting back production and laying off more workers. They keep cutting expenses until their excess, stockpiled inventory is either slowly consumed or until it is destroyed, typically through war.
The capitalists have no choice but to cut back production under these circumstances. Maintaining profits is not merely the goal of capitalist production; it is a life-and-death necessity for them.
So it’s not that a smaller portion of the working class cannot produce for the needs of the entire working class. It’s that capitalists cannot distribute this amount of product to the entire working class without violating their profit needs. Profit, with its falling rate, is one of two big demons in capitalism. (The anarchy of production, where each capitalist sees the market as expandable, and therefore causes overproduction, is the other.) In the long term, only an exorcism will suffice—but then, by definition, the result will cease to be capitalism.
In a communist society, on the other hand, the entire production of a smaller portion of the working class could be distributed (free) to the entire working class. Under communism, the goal of production is precisely that: satisfying the needs of the entire working class.
The underconsumptionist solution to save the working class under capitalism is one-sided and doomed to failure. To repeat, the capitalists can never provide enough wages to enable the entire working class to buy what they produce. Full consumption would require that the capitalists give up their yardstick of pursuing profit—which is exactly what makes the system work at all.
Communism alone, by eliminating profit and the capitalist class, can resolve this conflict for the working class. No reform scheme can save the working class at the same time as it saves the capitalists.
For communist organizers, this overview of the crisis of overproduction raises a key question concerning revolution and reform. Let us suppose that we have one comrade working in Daihatsu in Asia, a second one in Volkswagen in Europe, and a third at GM in the North America. For all three comrades, forced overtime and constant speed-ups are linked to relatively high wages. But anxiety is high, too, with frequent rumors about plant closings.
Suddenly, layoffs are announced. Co-workers propose to fight against them with a ban on overtime. Our comrades agree, but insist on the slogans, " No layoffs! To hell with capitalism and its instability, fascism, and wars! Workers of the World, Unite! Fight for Communism!" Our friends argue, why not make it simple? Why not just say, "Fight for Jobs"?
But "Fight for Jobs" is too narrow a slogan. In fact, we argue, it could wind up pitting workers of one country against those of another, a prescription for nationalism. When we stop at saying "Fight for Jobs," we are actually tying ourselves to "our" bosses.
Given the worldwide crisis of overproduction described in the Economist, the international working class needs a broader outlook. Volkswagen plans to survive the imminent destruction of 80 auto plants, as do GM and Daihatsu. But survive at whose expense? The "Fight for Jobs" slogan sidesteps one of the main contradictions of capitalism itself: the crisis of overproduction. Under capitalism, a successful fight to keep my job will throw someone else out of work. In a capitalist crisis, the world total of jobs must go down.
Clearly, we cannot build a revolutionary communist party by sidestepping these main contradictions. Crisis and war are inevitable under capitalism. At the same time, they provide the best opportunity for a successful communist revolution.
In the past, we have made the mistake of using local issues at work to demonstrate the need for communist revolution. Our study of the crisis of overproduction shows us that we need to operate in exactly the opposite way. We must consistently expose the main contradictions of capitalism by organizing against their every manifestation, and by showing the workers’ need for a mass Party. Only then can we hope to achieve our goal--to guide the working class through these challenging times and lead a communist revolution!
IMPERIALISM, CRISIS, AND WORLD WAR: THE ILLUSION OF A BYGONE ERA, THE REALITY OF THE WORLD TODAY
The issue of the coming war will never be put to the "free" electors of this country. . . . War is prepared in secret on top, and, when the moment comes, will be let loose without warning. The last general election before the World War of 1914 was the general election of 1910. What was the issue of that election? The nominal issue was "the Lords versus the People." The reality behind that screen was the coming war. All the inner councils of the ruling class knew since 1905 that it was approaching, and were preparing for it to the last detail, as their records and memoirs have since shown.
--British Communist Party pamphlet of 1929, warning of World War II
Imperialism is a necessary stage in capitalism’s development
In this section, we will define imperialism, explain its laws of motion, and show how imperialist war became inevitable once capitalism engulfed the entire earth.
Capitalists try to obscure the essential imperialist nature of their system by asserting that modern wars are caused by anything other than their drive for profits. They blame wars on everything from religion to human nature to insane foreign dictators.
But the truth is that the capitalists’ drive for ever-expanding profit lurks behind every twist and turn of capitalist foreign policy. In the modern era all capitalist nations are necessarily imperialist. Expand or die, once the motto for individual capitalist enterprises, is now the necessity for entire nations of capitalists.
In the era of imperialism, capitalists must start wars (using workers as cannon fodder) to preserve and expand their profits; they are driven to secure control of raw materials, markets, and cheaper labor power, and to annihilate their foreign competitors. Today’s inter-imperialist struggle over control of Middle East oil supplies, along with other arenas of conflict, are all leading rapidly toward another world war among the capitalist powers.
Imperialism and the capitalist laws of motion
Again, to summarize three of capitalism’s four laws of motion, as defined by Marx:
- an insatiable drive to accumulate ever-larger sums of capital—expand or die—leading to anarchy of production, with each capitalist treating the market as expandable;
- periodic economic crises, caused by a falling rate of profit (continual) and overproduction (cyclical);
- deepening misery (and potential militancy)for the world's working class, as capitalists strive for ever higher profits.
The fourth law of motion, an outgrowth of the other three, is:
- a growing concentration and centralization of capital within each nation.
This centralized control of capital in the various imperialist countries gives rise to more titanic clashes of competing national interests. At the same time, the centralized control of state power grants the dominant sections of each national ruling class the flexibility to go to war whenever their interests dictate.
A crisis of overproduction only eases when weaker and smaller capitalists are forced out of business, allowing the larger capitalists to inherit the entire market. This enables the larger capitalists, with a smaller number of competitors, to begin another round of expansion of production, rehiring some of the previously laid-off workers in the process. As the dust from the previous crisis settles, the main portion of capital is now held in larger, more concentrated chunks, by fewer capitalists. The biggest firms can benefit from crises!
The U.S. economy today consists of 2 million corporations, but they are hardly created equal. The bottom 56% control a mere 0.4% of the assets, while the top 0.2%, about 5,000 companies, control 82% of the assets, some $13 trillion.
This concentration is centered more and more in the hands of banks. The bankers become the most powerful capitalists, with the industrialists increasingly dependent on the bankers for capital.
In the mid-20th century, local banks were swallowed up by the J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller banks. In the late 20th century, further consolidation has given rise to huge, centralized organizations like NationsBank and Citibank.
Despite continued struggle among industrial and banking capitalists, and between different groups of bank capitalists as they jockey for internal power within the U.S. ruling class, the bank-industrial connection has created a financial oligarchy. This tiny section of the capitalist class, smaller by far than the 5,000 major companies mentioned above, has unified industrial and banking capital under its control. It is also capable of directing government policy as a result of its enormous financial power.
Concentration on a world scale and its toll on the working class
A look at the imperialist world as a whole today gives us a similar picture of concentration. Only 25 countries account for 80% of the manufactured goods in the world, and 70% of world trade. Such concentration of wealth brings economic privation on a similarly grand scale as well. According to a World Bank study in the 1980s, the world had become twenty times more unequal than it was a century earlier, at the height of British imperialism. The extremes of wealth and poverty have expanded tremendously.
In the first place, these extremes exist between the major imperialist nations and the so-called lesser-developed countries, or "Third World." (There is no good term for these countries, though "super-exploited countries" might be a more accurate one.) In the second place, these extremes exist within both the major imperialist nations and within the super-exploited countries. In the latter group, small local ruling classes serve as the handsomely rewarded slave masters for the dominant imperialists.
The effect of imperialism upon the workers of these countries has been cruel in the extreme, if not genocidal. In the 19th century, for example, British imperialists cut off the hands of thousands of Indian handloom weavers to prevent them from competing with British-made textiles in their home market.
In this century, the imperialists use "aid" programs as a cover to dominate the super-exploited countries as extensions of their own economies. Roads and railways are built, linking oil fields, mines, and processing plants to ports, so that raw materials can be transported back to the major imperialist industries. Whole agricultural economies are organized to meet the imperialists’ own raw material needs. In the process, more diversified native industry and balanced agriculture are destroyed, leaving famine and starvation in their wake.
During the 1960s, 530 million people lived in countries where living standards, while still vastly inferior to those in industrialized countries, were nevertheless gradually closing the gap. Another 60 million lived where the standard of living was falling absolutely.
By the 1980s, the number living in countries making progress had fallen to 167 million, while those living in absolute decline had skyrocketed to 774 million. In Latin America, UN specialists note that 46 million—more than 10% of Latin America’s population—are homeless. Another 85 million live in housing that is so bad by any standard that it should be demolished, while 100 million more live in housing that lacks water, electricity, or proper construction.
The general crisis of capitalism is reflected in the fact that worldwide annual economic growth rate averaged 2.6% in the 1960s, fell to 1.6% in the 1970s, and fell further to 1.3% in the 1980s. The uneven effect of this decline is plunging much of the world's working class into ever more desperate conditions. Workers' rebellions are often the response to these developments, but without communist leadership they tend to sputter out, and despair and cynicism settles in.
This is why we need to build the PLP all over the world, especially in the less-developed areas, to lead a workers' revolution to a communist victory.
In order to appreciate the terrible daily toll which imperialism takes on the world’s working class, even in so-called peacetime, let’s explore a few examples:
- Of the 500 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, 300 million live in absolute poverty.
- One thousand children die each day in Africa from poverty-caused disease and starvation. (For comparison, in the 13 years of the U.S. war on Vietnam, on average, 15 U.S. soldiers and 250 Vietnamese died on an average day.)
- Between 1989 and 1993, there were 800,000 excess deaths due to poverty in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland. This number exceeds the total number of U.S. and British soldiers who died in World War II (though the number of Soviet citizens who died in that war was 25 times greater!)
- In 1992, a World Bank study defined the poverty line as the minimum income needed to buy enough food to maintain normal body weight at an average level of activity. Even with that austere definition, which ignores clothing and shelter, 37% of the world population fell below the poverty line. If these other necessities were to be taken into account, more than half of the world’s population would likely fit the definition of wretched poverty. This is the "triumph of capitalism" they boast of!
- In Mexico, official unemployment is 39%. According to the L.A. Times, one town had so many stillbirths that people feared it was an epidemic of some new infectious disease. Investigation showed that the epidemic causing this devastation was malnutrition.
- In Brazil, there are more than 25 million deprived children, 8 million of whom live on the streets, where they are the regular victims of mass murder by the police. According to one writer, the situation in the cities "most closely parallels concentration camps . . . the frightening and often murderous end-point of starvation: 'hunger delirium' when mothers would hack their children to death."
- In the U.S., a black man living today in New York City will die younger, on average, than a man living in Bangladesh; a newborn baby is more likely to die within a year in Washington, D.C., than in Jamaica; and the population of homeless street residents in Los Angeles now tops 40,000.
These figures make clear that, as horrendous as military warfare may be, the daily toll of lives from capitalist poverty in "peacetime" can often exceed that of the bloodiest battle. Pacifists who argue that the world needs to be changed, but that violent revolution is the wrong course, fail completely to comprehend the violent nature of business-as-usual capitalism in the age of imperialism.
World war in the era of imperialism
But as if "peacetime" weren’t grotesque enough, the threat of world war is an ever-present shadow cast over the earth in the age of imperialism. In 1916, V. I. Lenin, one of the leading Russian pioneers of communism, first defined imperialism as the highest stage of capitalist development, marked by the complete division of the world among exploitative capitalist ruling classes.
Once the whole world was devoured by capitalists, the only way they could expand farther was to take from each other. This could only be done through vicious inter-imperialist wars to divide, and then repeatedly re-divide, the world among the great powers. At the same time, however, the untold horrors of the 20th century’s world wars also brought about the epoch of working class revolutions—with the goal of the total destruction of capitalism.
While World Wars I and II were largely inter-imperialist wars to re-divide the world’s markets and sources of cheaper labor power and raw materials, they also reflected the capitalists’ struggle to turn back working class revolution.
World War I began as inter-imperialist rivalry among U.S. and European nations. But it ended as a united (if unsuccessful) effort to eradicate the communist-led revolution of the Soviet working class. From 1917 to 1920, the major combatants in World War I, stopped fighting each other and invaded the Soviet Union. They were finally defeated and forced out by the Soviet workers, led by the Bolshevik Party. An all-out invasion was impossible, because most workers in the imperialist countries didn’t want to fight against the Russian revolution. Over 4.5 million died during that imperialist invasion by 25 capitalist countries.
World War II, on the other hand, began more with an eye toward a second attempt by the imperialists to militarily crush the Soviet Union. But it soon developed into inter-imperialist rivalry, as the German Nazis showed they had no intention of leaving the postwar world in the hands of the rest of their imperialist rivals.
The U.S. and Britain, who claim falsely to have been the main saviors of the world against Nazi barbarism, began by supporting the German/Italian axis effort to install the fascist Franco as dictator of Spain in 1936. They prevented supplies from reaching the loyalist troops who were fighting the fascists in Spain.
The U.S. sustained its support of the Nazi program through Roosevelt’s refusal to grant asylum to European Jews—other than those few scientists, like Einstein, who could aid the U.S. war effort. The "appeasement" of the Nazis by the British at the outset of World War II was nothing less than actual support for the expected German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The weakening of the Japanese imperialists in World War II was largely due to the resistance by the communist-led Chinese working class. Four years after the formal end of World War II, the Chinese workers seized power from the capitalists, marking the second time that imperialist war led to working class revolution. While World War II formally ended in 1945, the imperialists hardly put their guns aside. After Chinese workers seized power in 1949, they became the target of continued U.S. wars in Asia—in Korea, and later in Vietnam. Once again, inter-imperialist war had changed back into open capitalist war to crush working class revolution.
As we end the 20th century, we continue to see sharpening inter-imperialist rivalries. The inescapable outcomes remain the same: world war on the one hand, and communist revolution on the other. These will play themselves out as we enter the 21st century. The goal of the PLP is to make communist-led working class revolution against capitalism—sooner rather than later. But the primary contradiction in the current era is inter-imperialist rivalry, and this is the main determinant of all capitalist foreign and domestic policy today.
Inter-imperialist rivalry is over markets, raw materials, and cheaper labor power
Let’s review the main steps in capitalism’s development into the stage of imperialism.
The crisis of overproduction gives rise to competition for markets.
The falling rate of profit gives rise to competition for cheaper labor power.
The need for cheap raw materials gives rise to competition to control the ground itself, with its oil, metals, and agricultural products. But of all these, the hottest source of the coming World War III is the fight over oil, centered in the Middle East, site of the largest known cheaply available reserves.
For the major wing of the U.S. ruling class, domestic energy requirements are not the primary incentive to control Middle Eastern oil. Of the 18 million barrels consumed each day in the U.S., more than half come from domestic production in Alaska, Texas, and Oklahoma. If favorable tax laws and other legislation allowed domestic oil companies to develop these home resources to their fullest, the needs of U.S. homes, transportation, and industry might be satisfied entirely by these sources.
No, the reason the U.S. ruling class seeks to control Middle Eastern oil is Political Economics. Its major imperialist rivals, in particular Germany and Japan, are entirely dependent on foreign oil. Middle Eastern oil does more than generate phenomenal profits for U.S. capitalists; it also represents the life blood of their competitors’ industries. They will fight to the last drop of the blood of the U.S. working class to hold on to as much of this oil as they can. (Middle Eastern oil was one of the major prizes sought by the contenders in World Wars I and II.)
As other countries’ investments grow in the Middle East, the need of the Rockefeller wing to control the oil fields will become primary. The next time an air war will not suffice. Oil fields cannot be controlled from the air, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff have warned repeatedly. They are well aware that nothing short of a ground war will do the job. At that point, PLP’s base among U.S. soldiers, and our efforts to win them to turn the guns around on their officers, will take on even more vital importance.
An overview of inter-imperialist rivalry in the 1990s
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the main contradiction in the world shifted from U.S.-Soviet inter-imperialist rivalry to a polycentric conflict among U.S., German, and Japanese imperialists, with other rivals emerging and re-emerging, including Russia, China, and France. Japanese capitalists emerged in the 1970s as fledgling imperialists, with only a few billion dollars worth of international investments. But this leaped to $53 billion in 1983, to $106 billion five years later, to better than $350 billion in 1991—more than three-quarters of U.S. direct investment abroad that year.
The German capitalists have also lifted their levels of direct investment abroad, although not as spectacularly. For the last decade, the major imperialist countries have concentrated on securing their own "neighborhoods" to buttress their economies. German imperialism has funneled huge amounts of capital into Eastern Europe, with a sharp eye on investment opportunities in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. By early 1992, Germany had established 1,500 joint ventures in Poland and 1,000 in Czechoslovakia.
The Japanese capitalists, meanwhile, have rapidly expanded into Southeast Asia, previously a stronghold of U.S., British, and French investment. From 1986 to 1991, for instance, Japanese capitalists invested $27 billion in Southeast Asia, while American firms added only $7 billion to their existing investments there. These economic trends place added pressure on U.S. influence in these arenas.
Accompanying these rising investments by competing imperialists is the inevitable reappearance of military power to protect them. Though both countries have been relatively impotent militarily since WWII, Germany has recently begun sending its military abroad once again, while Japan now has the third largest military budget in the world. With the technical apparatus in place and the political groundwork laid, it would take either country only a few years to create a modern imperial army to protect their investments and extend their spheres of influence.
Today the U.S. finds itself the biggest debtor nation in the world ($1.3 trillion). Its international balance of trade, now a $300 billion deficit, steadily worsens. Its major rivals are growing and consolidating, with the Euro soon to challenge the dollar as the main currency of world capitalism. Threats abound to its hegemony over Middle Eastern oil.
World war is again in the air.
In addition, small aspiring imperialists are butting in, attempting to improve their positions at the expense of the major imperialists, further complicating the terrain. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein makes a play for greater oil revenue by seizing Kuwait. North Korea presses for greater international trade relations by rattling the nuclear saber. Haitian generals grasp for even greater spoils from the Haitian people, rather than ceding the lion’s share to the U.S. imperialists. Fascists of varying nationalities in the former Yugoslavia contend for domination at the expense of their neighbors.
These dominant imperialists may initially fight small wars with the restive smaller capitalist forces around the world. But before very long, such battles will inevitably become wars among the world's major imperialists. As the number of competing imperialist countries increases, the world becomes more and more unstable.
Inter-imperialist rivalry in Latin America
A preview of the titanic conflict to come can be found in what the U.S. paternalistically calls its own "backyard"--Latin America and the Caribbean.
The core fortress for U.S. imperialism remains the Western Hemisphere. By dint of history, proximity, and economic investments, this remains "the last best hope" for U.S. imperialists. But even here, rivals have begun challenging U.S. hegemony.
The U.S. imperialists have long thought of Latin America and the Caribbean as their permanent empire. As long ago as the early 1800s, in the doctrine bearing his name, U.S. President James Monroe declared that no other major power would ever be allowed to work its will in the Americas. The invasion and seizure of Cuba from Spain in 1898 consolidated this declaration. It also launched a century of U.S. wars and political intrigue to secure the interests of U.S. imperialism.
The bloody U.S. suppression of anti-imperialist uprisings is well-known, from invasions and occupations by the Marines to the CIA-engineered fascist coup by Pinochet against Allende in Chile in 1973.
The defeat of a U.S. invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 stands as the sole, long-term victory of any anti-U.S. movement. Even Cuba, however, is now rushing back into the U.S. fold in its efforts to convince the U.S. to lift its decades-old economic blockade. Cutting a deal with the Pope marks the end to any claim by Cuba to revolutionary independence.
But there are new players in the hemisphere. Japan and Germany have both signaled their intent to play a bigger role here, despite U.S. opposition. Japanese investment capital in Latin America has increased from $8 billion in the early 1980s (less than one-third of the U.S. level) to $44 billion in 1991 (well over half of the U.S. level). Japan is emerging as the number-two investor and trading partner in Latin America.
Meanwhile, German investment in Latin America has begun to increase, especially in Argentina and Brazil.
U.S. imperialists shed blood to stop rival imperialists
The response of the U.S. ruling class to these financial incursions has varied from partnership to intimidation. NAFTA, a program to lower trade and investment barriers among capitalists in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, was pushed through Congress despite the opposition of the U.S. labor movement and agricultural workers in Mexico.
In 1983, the U.S. invaded Grenada to demonstrate that not even the smallest economy would be allowed to dally with Castro or any other force independent of the U.S. financial oligarchy. To veil the true purpose of the invasion, Reagan portrayed a daring rescue of some American students from a "Marxist" government.
Perhaps the boldest U.S. reaction to the Japanese financial invasion of the Western Hemisphere was the 1990 invasion of Panama. To provide cover, Bush lied that the invasion was aimed at arresting Panamanian President Manuel Noriega, ostensibly for dealing drugs. But U.S. imperialism's main goal, as it incidentally slaughtered thousands of Panamanians by bombing residential neighborhoods, was to seize military control of Panama and its banks, thereby issuing a warning to the upstart Japanese imperialists.
The 1995 invasion and occupation of Haiti similarly warned foreign investors that any role they might play in the hemisphere would be at the pleasure of the U.S. imperialists. This time, Clinton was the front man, lying that U.S. troops were there to liberate the Haitian workers from a fascist police state.
Yet all of these U.S. saber-rattlings, with their concomitant murders of thousands of Panamanian, Haitian, and Grenadian workers, have failed to accomplish their goal. Japanese investments continue to flow into Latin America.
And with the German imperialists beginning to trickle into Latin America, pressure against the U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere will grow, heightening inter-imperialist tensions even in the U.S. "backyard."
Death to imperialism!
The imperialists, of course, do not limit themselves to a particular set of territories. They constantly probe—politically, militarily, and especially economically—to see where they can invest their capital and sell their commodities for the highest return. Sometimes they even penetrate each other's national borders. Japan, for example, has an ever-increasing number of automobile assembly and parts manufacturing plants in the U.S.
The imperialists are highly sensitive to each other's probes. There is no "transnational ruling class." Instead, each ruling class bolsters its armed might to defend its own circle, wherever its money has gone. And so there is competition all over the globe, sometimes "peaceful" and sometimes violent, over who will call the shots in a particular part of the world. Overlaid upon this entire process are the chaotic laws of capitalist development, guaranteeing recurrent economic crises. Imperialist expansion is one way that capitalists seek to alleviate these problems. The bumping of heads is inevitable. Peace is unstable, since any capitalist nation that loses out financially may seek to recoup through war. These may be small local wars or big global wars. At the outset, they may be mere threats of war, punctuated by phony peace agreements and treaties. But when all is said and done, the imperialists are always jockeying for stronger positions in their great rivalry—and threatening the life of every worker on the globe.
Mass political campaigns are launched to confuse the working class about the imperialist process described here. As they prepared for World War II, for example, the imperialists held elaborate disarmament conferences and crafted ambitious peace plans. At the same time, each imperialist power promoted intensified patriotism at home.
Today, the diplomacy of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and others has similarly obscured the determination of the U.S. ruling class to fight for control over Middle Eastern oil. These diplomats help the U.S. rulers by demonizing Saddam Hussein. The real sharks, the U.S. capitalists and their government, pretend that the small-scale murderer in Iraq is the world’s main threat. They hide the fact that, up until 1990, the U.S. rulers used military aid and propaganda to strengthen Saddam in the position he holds today.
To overcome this imperialist deception, the working class needs desperately to have a clear understanding of Political Economy. Only then can workers appreciate both the true wellspring of modern wars and the preparations made by the capitalists for the next one.
Modern imperialist expansion is not driven by the ego or personality of a Caesar, but by the impersonal and inescapable requirements of the capitalist accumulation process. It is a system, not a dictator or a nation or even a group of nations, that requires the gross exploitation of the international working class.
Continually recurring world wars are the inevitable outcome of this mad race of capital accumulation. The danger increases immeasurably in times of major economic crisis. Inevitably, the declining imperialists must go to war to challenge the dominant power for market share, raw materials, and cheaper labor power.
Today’s inter-imperialist conflicts will inevitably lead to World War III, sooner rather than later. And that war will set the stage for massive worldwide communist revolution, just as World War I did in the Soviet Union, and World War II in China.
But capitalism will never collapse from its own internal contradictions. As with slavery and feudalism, its agent of destruction will be a class without a stake in the old system, a class that will physically overthrew the old and replace it with the new.
This time around, the revolutionary class will be the working class. Only the revolutionary destruction of capitalism by a multi-national working class can open the way for an international, rational, planned system of communist sharing and mutual aid. But working class communist revolution will succeed only if there is a mass Progressive Labor Party capable of leading it.
Today’s workers, students, and soldiers have the opportunity to build a movement that, led by PLP, will turn the catastrophe of capitalism into a revolution for communism—workers’ power—and a new epoch free of racism, exploitation, and class domination. Now is the time for millions of workers, soldiers, and students to join the Party, and make the coming world war the dying gasp of the world’s imperialists.
FASCISM: THE ILLUSION OF STRENGTH, THE REALITY OF WEAKNESS
Hitler and the Nazi Party ruled Germany for 12 years. For the first six years of that rule (1933-39), Germany was at "peace," merely laying the brutal foundations for the vicious, racist policies which later carried it into war.
By looking at "peacetime" Nazi Germany, we can learn something about present day "peacetime" U.S.
1934: Hitler started "Workfare" by assigning 400,000 unemployed workers to auxiliary works and paying them with only their unemployment allowance, plus a few commodities. The program was later expanded.
1996: Clinton and Congress sign Workfare into law. By 1998, the program is greatly expanded.
1933-39: Hitler built 10 concentration camps, housing 200,000 inmates. In 1939, a record 50,000 new prisoners came into the camps.
1990-95: The U.S. state and federal systems build 213 new prisons, adding more than 280,000 beds. For every 100,000 people, the U.S. has a record 519 in jail. South Africa is a distant second with 368 per 100,000. (Of the main industrial rivals, Germany imprisons 80 per 100,000, and Japan only 36!) In 1996, according to Justice Department figures, a record 5.5 million adults were either in jail, on parole, or on probation.
1941: After two years of world war, Hitler started to use prison labor at Daimler Aerospace to build aircraft.
1996: Activist workers discover that Boeing Aircraft is using prison labor to do skilled jobs in Seattle, Washington. The union (the IAM) helps mask this slave labor by calling it a "community service."
"Under Fascism, net real wage rates have declined by 13% during a period of rapidly increasing business activity--a unique departure from conditions and trends as observed throughout the whole history of capitalism!" (From Germany, Economic and Labor Conditions Under Fascism, by Jürgen Kuczynski.)
"One can argue about the exact percentages, but something on the order of 80% of the workforce is now experiencing falling real wages. This is failure on a monumental scale. At the same time, real per capita gross domestic product has risen by a third. All of this extra income has gone to the top 20% of the population, and most of it to the top 1%. Probably no country has ever had as large a shift in the distribution of earnings without having gone through a revolution or losing a major war." (From Reclaiming America, by Lester Thurow.)
1933: The Reichstag (German Parliament) was burnt to the ground. The Nazis immediately abolished all constitutional rights and declared a state of emergency.
1996: The Government Building in Oklahoma City is bombed. Clinton and Congress pass the "Terrorist" Bill, which allows for jailing and deportation of dissenters.
1931-33: The German capitalist class split into two broad factions. The Bruning Camp, which included companies like IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens, Weiss, textiles and high-tech companies; and the Harzburg Front, which operated out of its think-tank, the MWT, and represented steel, heavy industry, coal, and big landowners (the Junkers). Hitler and the Nazis built their political party, with financial backing from Krupp and Farben.
1998: The U.S. ruling class is split, with Koch Industries and various domestic oil firms leading one faction, and Rockefeller and international oil companies like Exxon leading the other, dominant faction. They each build a number of fascist movements (discussed below).
We could go on, but the picture should be clear. The U.S. today is increasingly similar to pre-World War II fascist Germany.
Fascism = force + deception
First of all, fascism is a capitalist response to severe economic crises, and to the need for the ruling class to prepare the population for inter-imperialist war. The crises arise from the very contradictions within capitalism itself; the need for war arises from the resulting inter-imperialist rivalry. Fascism is a deliberate policy of the capitalists, made necessary by the inevitable crises of capitalism in its imperialist stage.
Writing in the 1930s, the British communist R. Palme Dutt illustrated the difference between fascism and social democracy. In his book, Fascism and Social Revolution, Dutt showed that social democracy, like today’s British Labour Party, was a movement which paraded itself as a stalwart of the working class and the deadly enemy of fascism. But Dutt exposed the fact that both fascism and social democracy were related forms of capitalist rule, and that social democracy’s proclaimed opposition to fascism was mere pretense. He summarized the two movements as follows:
Social democracy = deception + force
Fascism = force + deception
This promotion of force from second place to first place is a strategic retreat, based on an estimate by the capitalists that their hold on the working class will weaken as they prepare for war. However, their increasingly naked use of force does not mean that capitalism in any way abandons its attempts to win the "hearts and minds" of workers. On the contrary, the capitalists’ experience tells them that naked force is a double-edged weapon. Force keeps many workers fearful and reluctant to resist worsening oppression. But at the same time, it often promotes rebellion. To blunt this growing resistance, the capitalists go all out to win large sections of the working class to their fascist agenda, through a relentless campaign of ever bigger lies.
The main preparations for war are political. The working class has to be won to seeing the capitalist state as their friend, as a vital source of their well-being. Certain politicians have to be groomed as apparent saviors of the working class against the greedy capitalists. The Gephardt forces perform that function in the U.S. today; Hitler played a similar role in the 1930s for the German ruling class. The full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a bald attempt to capture working class support against those very capitalists who were feeding Hitler millions of marks under the table.
Force
As a first step in the preparations for war, the dominant wing of the capitalist class moves to grab complete control of the state from the rest of the capitalists. It consolidates its hold upon the state’s apparatus: the army, the police, the central bank, the jails and courts, and so on.
As the crisis of overproduction and inter-imperialist rivalry becomes severe enough, capitalism develops fascism—to protect not merely its profits, but its very class domination over the working class. The fundamental problem of the day for the capitalists is no longer economic, but rather political.
As we have seen, their falling rate of profit forces the capitalists to rev up the exploitation of the working class with a vengeance. More and more surplus value must be extracted by making workers work harder, for longer hours. More production is squeezed out of workers by automation, leading to layoffs. Production is moved to low-wage countries. In many cases, wages are cut below the level of subsistence. All of this creates a smaller and smaller market and a deeper and deeper crisis.
By invoking fascism to help them prepare for war (by wiping out foreign competitors) and to gain windfall profits, the capitalists drive down wages as far as possible while still maintaining a working class with enough health and morale to churn out products at an accelerated rate. To accomplish these goals, which are unpopular in the extreme, and for which lies and deception alone would fall on deaf ears, fascism resorts to police state terror and mass imprisonment to break the resistance of the working class.
Force and violence against the working class are on a rapid rise in the U.S. today. Racist murders by cops are rampant in almost every major city, and have become national policy. In their book, Fixing Broken Windows, Kelling and Wilson spell out their plan to enlist the general public to the campaign to "restore order to cities" by attacking youth, especially black and Latin youth, harder and harder. Police departments are acting as death squads. Fast-track deportations and increased harassment of immigrant workers are all part of the fascist plan: an attack on all workers.
To divide the opposition to terror promulgated by the state, fascism also steps up behind-the-scenes efforts to promote mass terrorist groups within the population (like the Klan), which will primarily target other sections of the working class, in particular immigrant or black or Latin workers. This is intended to terrify and paralyze the working class, and to lead workers to blame one another rather than the capitalists.
In spite of its uses of violent power, fascism expresses not the strength of capitalism, but rather its extreme weakness. After all, if workers supported capitalism and its wars wholeheartedly, terror would not be necessary. This weakness, however, does not mean that communist revolution will replace fascism easily. It does mean that--given effective leadership--a phenomenal growth in the communist movement, up to and including revolution, is possible.
In Italy it was the Communist Party, two million strong, which captured, tried, and sentenced Mussolini, after almost a quarter century of the fascist form of capitalist rule. They left him hanging dead from a lamppost. On the other hand, the German Communist Party--the world’s largest outside of the Soviet Union--was crushed by the Nazis. It adopted an alarmingly casual and utterly benighted, slogan: "After Hitler, Thaelman!" After the electoral defeat of Hitler, they thought, the communist Thaelman would be Chancellor of Germany! They relied on the ballot box instead of preparing the German workers for revolution.
It is not the size, then, but the line and leadership of the communist party that is crucial to the defeat of fascism and the growth of revolution. PLP enters this fight with confidence that we can learn from both the errors and the triumphs of the old communist-led movement.
Deception
Just as it organizes first to out-compete and then destroy other capitalists through war, fascism sets out to cheapen all workers’ wages and to destroy sections of, the working class. Fascism sets itself, then, a contradictory task. It sets out to win as many workers as possible to new levels of brutality in defense of capitalism and against their own class interests. At its core, it aims to bury class consciousness and deny exploitation. Its main method is to develop an alternative sense of collectivity and social solidarity in nationalism (patriotism), in order to win workers to serve more or less willingly as cannon fodder.
Today the role of disarming the workers for the U.S. ruling class is played by liberal institutions like the Democratic Party, the unions, the churches, and revisionist (fake communist) movements. These institutions and organizations belittle class struggle, lower expectations, and lie about the causes and nature of the crisis. They reinforce illusions and sow confusion.
Workfare illustrates the way liberal institutions are helping the capitalists deceive the working class. Workfare actually lowers the wages of all workers, because it pits much lower-paid welfare recipients against other workers. At the same time, by forcing welfare recipients to accept low-paid work, the ruling class eliminates costs that sustain a part of the reserve army of labor. Yet large sections of the working class are neutral toward Workfare, or even support it—thanks to the role of the churches and unions.
Similar liberal propaganda is used to win the working class to accept prison labor and the explosion of the U.S. prison population. When activists at Boeing discovered that the Seattle plane maker was using skilled prison labor at very low pay to assemble its planes, they found that the union had not only gone along with the scheme, but had called it a service to the community!
In the most important capitalist campaign of all—to win workers to support a new world war against imperialist rivals—movies like Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan play a pivotal role. The film acknowledges that war is hell, with vivid scenes of blown-off limbs, blood-spurting wounds, ear-splitting machine gun fire, and brave men crying. But despite the horrors of war, Saving Private Ryan tells us, there are forces beyond our control that compel us to participate—whether to save an individual life (Private Ryan), or to help the "nation of freedom" defeat tyranny (as General Marshall quotes Lincoln).
Pick a level, any level; just don’t pick the working class. And don’t look for the causes of war in capitalism and imperialism. Target instead a power-mad dictator, about whom there is nothing you can do other than go to war for your "own" country—which really means your "own" capitalists.
The U.S. landing in Normandy (northern France), which occupies Ryan’s nerve-shattering first half hour, was delayed and delayed by the U.S. and Britain, despite the pleadings of the then-allied Soviet Union. The Allies hoped that the Nazis would crush Soviet socialism for them. Only when the Nazis were defeated by the Soviets, and into retreat across Europe, did the British and U.S. imperialists see the need to directly check the Soviets from spreading their communist influence among the working class of Europe. Then they were perfectly willing to throw away the lives of thousands of working class soldiers in a frontal assault on a well-fortified beachhead.
Lest anyone think that the U.S. ruling class differs from the debased and brutal Nazis of a half century ago, and would never carry out its attacks on workers to that extreme, consider the following: The U.S. rulers are the only ones ever to have used nuclear weapons to liquidate the populations of entire cities, more than 50 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The same ruling class used jellied gasoline (napalm) to set fire to tens of thousands of men, women, and children 30 years ago in Vietnam. And less than a decade ago, the U.S. rulers tested numerous new high-tech weapons on the Iraqi working class, annihilating some 300,000 men, women, and children.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats held a monopoly on these atrocities. Presidents and politicians of both parties shared in these unspeakable war crimes.
For our self-preservation, as individuals and as a class, we must shed all illusions that this ruling class will stop short of grand-scale torture and murder, if their economic and political needs so dictate. In each of the war crime cases just cited, winning U.S. workers to racism—first against Asian workers, then against Arab workers—played a key role.
In fact, it is racism—the major cultural "achievement" of U.S. imperialism—that always plays the key role in splitting and immobilizing the working class. Racism, then, is a key ingredient of fascism. It is the most successful and time-tested method to blur class consciousness and set the stage for nationalism and other forms of class collaboration. PLP accepts the historic responsibility for winning the working class to see all forms of racism as its deadly enemy. But it remains the responsibility of each and every worker around the world to resist, combat, and ultimately destroy racism and its genocidal results.
The split among U.S. capitalists produces two fascist movements
As the economic crisis and fascism grow, a secondary fight within the capitalist class breaks out, soon becoming the primary conflict of the moment. Control of the state apparatus becomes vitally important for each faction within the ruling class, though they obtain their profits in different ways.
As the crisis develops further, other capitalist classes fracture, adding volatility to an already dangerous situation. The winter of ‘97 crisis in the Asian stock markets led to the resignations of four Prime Ministers—not after electoral defeats, but because of deep splits within their ruling classes. New Zealand, Thailand, India, and the Czech republic all replaced their political heads of state. And Russia’s Yeltsin can’t last much longer.
In the U.S., as elsewhere, the fight against fascism is complicated. The split among the capitalists has produced two fascist movements, since they cannot agree on the way in which fascism should operate. One movement, represented by the Republican right, attacks affirmative action, unions, big government, NAFTA, and the coming land war to defend Rockefeller’s oil in the Middle East. It builds movements like the Promise Keepers, Farrakhan’s Muslims, the militias, the KKK, the anti-abortion forces, and the isolationist supporters of Pat Buchanan.
The other fascist movement, backed by the liberal wing of the Democrats, endorses affirmative action, unions (within limits), and big government (federal rights over state rights). It promotes NAFTA as well as a land war in the Mid-East. It builds movements like the unions, the NAACP, NOW, and the pro-abortion forces.
The two movements, one posing as the right wing and the other as the left, reflect the different needs of the two main capitalist groupings. The New Money capitalists derive their wealth and power mainly from the domestic economy, and are centered around domestic oil. The other grouping, the main Rockefeller wing, owns interests tied up with U.S. overseas investments and alliances, and particularly with Mid-East oil.
One wing, probably the Rockefeller wing, will emerge to be dominant, and will discipline its rivals. The fight between the two wings, however, can provide an opening for the working class, as long as we recognize that both factions are our deadly enemies.
Fascism demands the growth of the PLP
Fascism brings us face to face with the reality that power in class society rests on police state force and military might, welded together by a false and deceptive ideology. Up against this juggernaut, the working class can find itself in organizational and political disarray. That’s why we need a revolutionary communist party. The development of fascism cries out for it.
The pervasive brutality of fascism dictates certain strategic decisions. First, a party that does not organize among soldiers can not lead a revolution. Second, a party that does not understand the severe limits to legal revolutionary work, and fails to organize illegally, will be wiped out.
Those who think that fascism is primarily a response to working class resistance or rebellion are mistaken. It’s the other way around. Working class rebellion and the rapid rise of communist movements have been the response to fascism, and to war. It’s a mistake to argue that the PLP’s efforts to build a mass movement for communism will give the ruling class an excuse to increase repression. That argument fails to see that the capitalists around the world need no excuses to build fascism and prepare for war against their imperialist rivals. Given this historical fact, workers actually increase their risk of being jailed or killed by failing to build the PLP.
We in PLP must realize that by fighting fascism, we undermine capitalist preparations for World War III. More important, our base must realize that only a successful fight for communist revolution--workers’ power--can wipe out fascism. The fatally erroneous approach of the Communist International during World War II was to unite with the liberal wing of international fascism (represented by the U.S. and British ruling classes) to defeat the right wing of international fascism (represented by the German, Italian, and Japanese ruling classes). As a result, the Communist International gave the working class only short-lived relief from the naked fascism of the Axis powers.
Today we are paying the price for this error. While the communists of the 1930s and 1940s did not have the benefit of our historical experience, we do not intend to repeat their error. Sticking to reformist demands will lead straight to jail or death if the rulers face a working class not led by revolutionary communists.
It is a big challenge for us, but understanding fascism clarifies our strategies:
Organize youth-military work.
Organize illegally.
Expand the circulation of PLP’s newspaper, Challenge, an ideological offensive to take advantage of capitalism’s ideological retreat.
At every opportunity, raise with the working class the need for communist revolution.
A growing number of working class families have experienced the rulers’ fascist attacks first-hand. Many have tremendous hatred for the bosses. They and others are open to our line now. The capitalists’ fascist terror can be their own downfall, but only if we fight to build a mass communist party of millions in the face of it. It can and will be done.
COMMUNISM: THE ILLUSION THAT WORKING CLASS LIBERATION WILL NEVER HAPPEN, THE REALITY THAT IT ALREADY HAS--AND WILL AGAIN
In this final section we will examine:
- what went wrong in the Soviet Union and particularly in China, and why,
- how much has been achieved by the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, and
- the essence of what communism really is.
We began this booklet by looking at the beginnings of capitalism. We end it by looking at the beginnings of communism.
Revolutions put one class in power and kick another one out. But while communist revolution tilts the balance of power in favor of the working class, it doesn't end class struggle. After a defeat, the capitalists invariably try to grab back power through counter-revolution.
In 1917, the Bolsheviks took state power in Russia. For the next eight years, the Soviet working class fought a war on their own soil to defend socialism against invading capitalist armies from the U.S. and Europe.
In 1949, led by their Communist Party, Chinese workers and peasants took state power and kicked out the imperialists and their capitalist forces. For decades the Chinese fought to defend socialism against U.S. invasions in Korea and Vietnam, as well as political and economic attempts to isolate and drown the revolution.
But even though the external capitalists were unable to defeat socialism in the Soviet Union and China, in both countries capitalism gradually reestablished itself.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China
We must learn from history, and the history of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China during the 1960s and 70s is especially instructive. In fact, the job facing PLP is to complete the battle that the left-wing communists in China began, but lost, in that revolution.
Accounts of the Cultural Revolution by writers who support capitalism are generally negative and confusing. A study of Political Economy, however, helps clarify the issues. First of all, the Cultural Revolution amounted to far more than its name would imply. In fact, it was a bitter and often violent fight for political power and control of the state. It was in every sense a political revolution—and the most advanced the world has yet seen.
While it took a variety of forms, the battle was essentially over commodity production and wage slavery, neither of which had been eliminated in China under socialism. The main questions were:
Should production be driven by exchange value (sales and profits) or use value (communist planning for need)?
Will people only work for individual needs (wages), or will they work out of a feeling of responsibility to the whole working class (political/class consciousness)?
The line was drawn in this battle between socialists and "capitalist roaders" on one side, and communists on the other. The government was controlled by socialists and capitalist roaders, who both favored profits and wages, though with different justifications. The socialists justified profits and wages as a transitional stage to communism, necessary for the foreseeable future. The capitalists justified them as the best way to organize society now and forever.
The communists in this battle were represented by the Red Guard, which was made up primarily of students and workers. They favored the immediate replacement of commodity production and wages with communist planning and free distribution based on need, with no need for any transitional period.
In China in the 1960s, the capitalist roaders Liu Shao-chi and Deng Xiaoping were more or less discredited. They argued that "the drive to work is stimulated only by material incentives (wages)," and that "to work for money is only human." But they rallied little or no mass support around their slogans.
On the other side, the communists urged a revolutionary attitude toward labor. They quoted Lenin: "Communist labor . . . is labor performed gratis for the benefit of society . . . not for the purpose of obtaining a right to certain products, not according to previously established and fixed quotas, but voluntary labor, irrespective of quotas."
The communists held that there was no need for commodity production and its marketplace, where the "blind laws" of supply and demand would indiscriminately favor one group of workers at the expense of another. They quoted Engels: "The seizure of the means of production by society eliminates commodity production and with it the domination of the product over the producer. The anarchy within (capitalist) social production is replaced by consciously planned organization."
Even Mao, a socialist, admitted that millions wanted the abolition of the wage system. Millions of Chinese workers understood that working for wages reinforced individualism. When the purpose of work was degraded to the earning of a wage, the spirit of collectivity and responsibility within the working class was undermined.
During the Cultural Revolution, the very idea of capitalism was under siege in China. Humankind was on the verge of releasing unheard-of forces. China was about to organize production solely for use. Work was going to be direct—valued exactly for what it was. The responsibility of the whole society would rest on the collective will of the workers, who would hold all power. A revolutionary world was about to be born.
Unfortunately, the battle proved more complicated than that. Socialism—led by Mao and the "Gang of Four"—came to the rescue of commodity production. They said that direct social production (communism) and commodity production (capitalism) could exist side by side. They said that the "law of value" (by which they meant exchange value) could operate alongside direct, planned exchange. And they said that socialism—this mixture of capitalist and communist organization of production—would be a "long historical period," in which the transition to communism would be achieved step by step.
In this the socialists were only following Marx, but Marx had written a century earlier, and had lacked the political experience now possessed by the Chinese working class.
It’s not that the socialists didn’t want communism—they did. It’s not that they didn’t want to see direct social production, the transformation of the labor process, and a new share-and-share-alike psychology of labor—they did. It’s just that the socialists believed that society needed to retain some aspects of capitalism for an indefinite period. They stubbornly held to this position, against the Red Guard, because the socialists didn’t think that the working class was capable of organizing and running the whole of society. Besides, they argued, capitalism under socialism was a tamed capitalism, controlled by the working class state.
In addition, the Chinese socialists were convinced that an abrupt transition to communism would be disruptive, and would give the imperialists an opening to crush the revolution. We can expect to meet similar arguments after the working class, under PLP’s leadership, seizes state power. We will only be able to counter them by sharpening our understanding of capitalism and its wage system.
It is critical to understand that the eventual reversal of even socialism in China, and its recent reversion to open free-market capitalism, was not due at the start to corruption or dishonesty on the part of the socialists. The roots of the reversal lay in the socialists’ political line—in their mistaken beliefs, no matter how honestly held.
Over time, of course, the socialists’ line led to more and more inequality. Communist Party members who benefited from the inequality developed a stake in these ideas. The more they benefited, the more their interests diverged from those of the working class. At some point, this growing inequality gave rise to a qualitative transition, in which these former communist leaders became bitter class enemies of the working class—namely, capitalists.
(Though there were important differences in the way the working class lost power in the Soviet Union, the essence of the process was the same.)
The socialists in China, who started out by overthrowing capitalism, eventually developed divergent interests from the working class, and ended up stealing back the workers’ freshly achieved political power. Today’s trade union leaders (particularly in the U.S.), by contrast, never rejected capitalism. It is no surprise to find that they are unwilling to permit workers any power, even in running the union. Nor are they capable of leading workers to fight for even their defensive interests against the capitalists.
That is why the PLP fights within the unions to gain the political leadership of the rank and file, and to turn defensive fights (which cut losses, at best) into an offensive civil war for complete working class power: for communism.
Socialism versus communism
The Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions made tremendous historical advances. Indeed, without their advances, as well as their errors, we would be unable to understand the job we need to do today. These revolutions showed how industrial workers, and then peasants (agricultural workers), could politically and militarily organize revolution and seize state power from the capitalists. On the one hand, they showed the world how vulnerable the capitalist system actually was. On the other hand, they demonstrated that the strategy of socialism, first proposed by Marx and Engels, was incapable of permanently removing capitalism from the face of the earth.
The job facing PLP is to establish that an international working class can take and hold state power and organize production directly—that is, without wage labor, material incentives, or profits. In short, the Party’s historical task is to lead the working class to hold power permanently, through communism.
What are the main economic features of communism?
After taking state power, the working class will completely dismantle commodity production, and with it the wage system. The sole purpose of production will be use value. Under communism, with individual economic survival no longer in question, workers will confront work directly. They will employ the instruments of labor, rather than be employed by them. The pace and duration of work will vary with social need, but work will always be consistent with the health of the worker.
With production reserved exclusively for use, we will work because we, as a class, need or want the product. Human needs will be returned to their primacy in production, just as they were for thousands of years under primitive communist societies. In this revolutionary return to communism, however, human needs will prevail within a highly technological society.
The experiences of the Chinese workers, in the first years after their seizure of state power, can help overcome the capitalist-inspired cynicism among workers today that the working class is incapable of organizing production in the factories. A British doctor named Joshua Horn, who practiced medicine in China from the mid-1940s through the early years of the revolution, wrote a book called Away With All Pests. Horne described the way workers cooperated with each other in both factories and hospitals.
In the steel mills, for example, the workers would halt production for a couple of hours during the working day, and meet on a regular basis to discuss the production process. As a result, they developed a new way of cold-rolling steel that was then the most advanced in the world.
Workers in capitalist-run factories know that it is they who understand the production process the best, not the bosses. But if workers were to offer suggestions that would make the production process more efficient, it would benefit only the bosses. For the workers, efficiencies would produce only layoffs.
As a matter of fact, major consulting companies to the biggest capitalist firms are now trying to convince reluctant CEOs that they themselves know virtually nothing about the production process, and that the workers who actually perform the labor understand it best. They are encouraging these top bosses to avail themselves of this knowledge. Since the bosses already pay for the workers’ hands, the consultants point out, they could benefit from the workers’ brains for free.
Under communism, workers won't confront work as individuals, but rather as a collective. In place of wages and the indirect connection of workers within the marketplace, communism will connect workers directly to one another. This direct, open connection and interdependence will create a new psychology of work. Given conscious struggle, mutual respect and a share-and-share-alike mentality will develop.
In Away With All Pests, Joshua Horne also described the way hospital workers in China, from doctors to janitors, would collectively discuss the status of the patients and learn from each other the best plans of treatment. Doctors were inspired to admit their errors and share them as fully as possible with all other doctors, hospital workers, and patients, so as to help others learn from their mistakes.
Such openness is impossible in a capitalist atmosphere, where doctors practice defensive medicine. Fearful of malpractice suits, they are typically reluctant to admit error. Indeed, under managed care, a doctor who admits a mistake runs the risk of being fired, since it is the managed-care company who will have to pay for the malpractice suit.
Under communism, collective values, not dog-eat-dog capitalist values, will prevail. "From each according to commitment, to each according to need," will be the banner of this communist society.
What are the main political features of communism?
As we have shown, exploitation, poverty, and war are all made necessary by the capitalist organization of society. We have also shown that the ideologies of racism, sexism, and nationalism, as well as the practices on which they rest, are all made necessary by the life-and-death need of the capitalists to keep the working class weak and divided against itself.
While it is perhaps easy to see how exploitation, poverty, and war may disappear when the working class rules, it is less easy to see how the long traditions of racism, sexism, and nationalism will be wiped out of the minds of the working class.
First, the material basis of these ideologies will disappear, along with the class that required them. No one will be able to profit from racist wage differentials or any kind of discriminatory treatment. This fundamental fact will ensure long-term victory in these struggles.
But ideas, habits, and practices die hard. There is no question that the elimination of racism, sexism, and nationalism will require the most intense political struggle by PLP, and by all sections of the working class. In particular, even the mere expression of racist or sexist ideas will have to be made illegal and dealt with in ascending severity, with warnings, milder actions, and possibly—in cases of repeated refusal to learn—jailing and rehabilitation.
Here we can benefit from the experience of the Soviets. A black U.S. visitor to the Soviet Union in the early decades of the revolution reported the following incident: While riding a bus, another passenger insulted him with a racist phrase. The other passengers called on the bus driver to stop the bus. Over the protests of the U.S. visitor, they started to drag the maker of the racist comment off the bus to jail. The visitor tried to dismiss the incident, saying it did not mean that much to him. The Soviet workers replied that it meant a tremendous amount to all of them, not just the visitor, and that no racism would be tolerated in the Soviet workers’ state.
In a communist society, racism will be seen for what it is, the first step toward assault and murder, and will be dealt with accordingly. Throughout its more than three decades of existence, the PLP has fought racist ideas and practices vigorously within its ranks, in addition to being the leading anti-racist force within the greater society.
The same diligence and force will have to be applied to sexism after the seizure of state power. Here the Soviets were a good bit weaker. Only a small number of women were accepted into the leadership positions of the Bolshevik Party. While large numbers of women were given specialized training (as doctors, for example), there was a weakness in ridding the working class of sexist ideology, which matched the weak practice. PLP does not intend to repeat this error. Already, women play a prominent role in the leadership of the Party at all levels.
The main way that sexism will be fought, however, is through practice, in which women no longer suffer any inequalities in any economic or political positions. Inequality—political and economic—is the material basis for sexism, and both the basis and the ideology will be completely eliminated. Practices now assigned by capitalism mainly to women, from child rearing to housekeeping, will become the jobs of men and women alike, and will almost certainly be done in larger collective units than the nuclear family. Indeed, this sharing of responsibilities between men and women cannot await the working class seizure of power. Within the PLP, we fight hard to make these the practices of members today.
Wars are currently caused by one group of capitalists, or would-be capitalists, attempting to seize capital from other capitalists. There will be no need for war once all capitalists and would-be capitalists are history, though this could take decades to accomplish even after the working class finally seizes state power throughout the world.
Indeed, the remaining capitalists in a given country will surely increase their efforts to crush the early revolutions—just as they did in the Soviet Union and China in this century. The working class will need to organize massive military resistance. But eventually workers will triumph all over the world. Then the would-be capitalists will be the only remaining enemies, until their ideas are successfully swept away through continual political struggle by the whole working class.
Communism is almost a century and a half old. Why is it taking so long for communism to be established throughout the world? Learning to build a new social system is not like learning to build a house, particularly when there is not an abundance of teachers who already know how to do it. It is more like a scientific experiment to support a new theory. No experiment ever works the first time. Attempts are made; errors in thinking and practice are uncovered. The experiment can only then be corrected in accord with the laws of nature.
Long before people started flying planes or sending rockets to the moon, many a plane and many a rocket crashed. But now planes fly and rockets go to the moon. Communism will replace capitalism, sooner or later—and PLP has no doubt that it will be sooner than most people think.
Communism will be the first social system established by the vast majority of humanity. Learning to work cooperatively, after so many centuries of division by the capitalists, is not an easy task. But the study of Marxist Political Economy, along with the experiences of the Soviet and Chinese working class revolutions, gives us absolute confidence that we can identify past errors and avoid them in the future, just as we can emulate the many things which our great predecessors did correctly.
The Soviet and Chinese revolutions have already shown that none of this is fairyland. It is communist revolution. Winning the masses to fight for and develop communism will be a gigantic political struggle. From past experience, we can anticipate that each failure of the new system will be advertised by some as a reason to retreat. A modified socialism will be promoted as a realistic alternative; forces of sabotage and counter-revolution will emerge. As we have noted in our pamphlet, Road to Revolution 4, ideological struggle will be primary. But the fact that communist revolution will require struggle does not mean that a communist society is pie in the sky.
The main political struggle is for the abolition of the wage system
Given the inevitability of the political struggle that will follow a seizure of state power by the working class, it's logical that we prepare ourselves for it now—today. But the moment we start, we seem to run into a contradiction that stops us in our tracks. We want to smash the wage system, yet we want higher wages now. The capitalists themselves have a laundry list of schemes that cut wages—part-timing, privatizing, contracting out, prison labor, welfare labor, and so on. Workers are desperate for decent wages. Raising the idea of abolishing the wage system, particularly in the middle of a strike for higher wages, seems to many to be irrelevant, if not counterproductive. So, out of fear of isolation, we end up saying nothing revolutionary about wages.
In order to overcome this timidity, we need to be clear on the difference between lowering wages and abolishing the wage system. When the capitalists cut wages they are not abolishing the wage system. They are using it! They are simply cutting the cost of their most problematic "raw material"—our labor power.
Workers don't work for wages because we want to. We work for wages because we have been stripped of all other means of subsistence. And as long as we work for wages, we must resist wage cuts. But we should never forget that it is the wage system that makes us relatively powerless, despite our overwhelming numbers. It is the wage system that continually forces us to fight, time and time again, for the same small gains. Therefore, even as we resist such cuts, we must also organize to destroy the system that steals our power in the first place—the wage system.
Perhaps the main question confronting every worker, the question that most holds back our progress of building a communist party among the world’s working class, is this:
If we destroy the wage system and capitalism, will we, the working class, be able to organize a society that produces solely for need?
Now we are back grappling with the central issue raised in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And Progressive Labor Party's answer is clear. History has given us a resounding, "YES!" to this question. We can indeed smash capitalism! We can indeed smash wage slavery! And we can indeed build in their place a communist world for ourselves, for our children, and for all the children to come. Fight for Communism!
