David P. Hamilton : Nationalization and French Socialism

Socialist Francois Mitterrand was the fourth President of France, elected under the Fifth Republic, serving from 1981 until 1995. Image from agen-demain.fr.
Letters from France V:
Nationalization and French socialism

It is in Western Europe where we see the most successful efforts to protect the commons while simultaneously nurturing a vibrant private sector in the context of political democracy.

By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / July 6, 2011

[This is the fifth in a series of dispatches from France by The Rag Blog's David P. Hamilton.]

PARIS -- Nationalization is the process of a government taking a private property into public ownership. The motives for nationalization may be both political and economic. It is a central socialist principle that the state should control the principal means of production and distribution so that they operate for the general welfare.

This allows for democratic control over the means whereby people earn their living, a fair allocation of output, consolidation of resources, rational planning of the economy, and potentially the enhancement of public finance.

Everyone from Alan Greenspan to Fidel Castro believes in a mixed economy with both a public and private sector. More than any other advanced industrialized country, the U.S. has historically favored the greatest degree of private ownership and the most meager public sector outside the military.

Practically nothing in the U.S. is nationalized. Everything possible, now including much of the military, is privatized.

At the other end of the spectrum, until recently Cuba nationalized almost everything. At the beginning of this year, 85% of the labor force worked for the government. Now belatedly Cuba has decided it needs a private sector and is in the process of dropping over half a million underutilized employees from the government payroll, encouraging them to start small businesses.

Like most European countries with a historically strong socialist movement, France is somewhere in the middle. Essential services are nationalized and the government owns significant if not controlling shares in otherwise private institutions in the commanding sectors of the economy.

The question is where to draw the line between public and private. What does government need to control in order to protect the interests of its citizens as a community? What should be the exclusive preserve of private enterprise and, recognizing capitalism’s imperative to grow and its inherently exploitive nature, to what level should that growth be allowed and how should it be regulated? What is the proper balance?

It is in Western Europe where we see the most successful efforts to protect the commons while simultaneously nurturing a vibrant private sector in the context of political democracy. Typically, this achievement is the result of many generations of socialist struggle. The economies that most characterize this achievement are the nucleus of the European Union, an economic unit equal in size to that of the U.S.

The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in the U.S. during the Great Depression. Image from National Archives, Southeast Region.
Nationalizations have been very uncommon in the U.S. During WWI, the nation’s railroads were temporarily nationalized. The Tennessee Valley Authority was created in the depths of the Great Depression in the most impoverished part of the country because the existing private electric utilities were doing little to promote electrification and development.

In 1971, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation was nationalized and became Amtrak to relieve the existing companies of their legal responsibility to provide inter-city passenger service, which they maintained could not be done profitably. Hampered by politicians who fear the success of public enterprises, it has languished in mediocrity ever since.

For the same reason, in 1973, six bankrupt railroads were nationalized to become Conrail in order to preserve freight rail service throughout the Northeast. Once reorganized and modernized, they were reprivatized in 1987. In the late 1980’s, hundreds of failed savings and loan associations were taken over, but quickly reprivatized.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the airport security industry was nationalized to become the Transportation Security Administration. In 2009, the government bought most of the stock in the bankrupt General Motors, but President Obama assured us it was only a temporary measure and new private stock in the company has since been put on the market.

It is clear that the U.S. government has been extremely reluctant to nationalize anything. It has only done so during wartime or when the private corporations providing essential public services were bankrupt, inept, or both.

France has experienced two great periods of nationalization. The first was immediately after World War II and initially took place under a government led by the conservative Charles de Gaulle.

These postwar nationalizations resulted from two principal factors. First, the need to rebuild basic infrastructure severely damaged during the war in the most expeditious and focused manner in a country long used to centralized decision making. Second, the relatively high degree of collaboration with Nazi occupation on the part of the capitalist class on the one hand, and relatively high degree of participation in the Resistance by communist and socialist elements on the other, gave the latter a dominant voice.

Renault was specifically nationalized because of its owner’s collaboration with the Nazis. The pre-war French public health care system that covered only workers, was expanded to cover everyone, essentially the nationalization of the health insurance industry. Also in 1945-46, many important banks, the Electricité de France, Gaz de France and Charbonnages de France (coal production) were nationalized.

Renault was specifically nationalized because of its owner’s collaboration with the Nazis.
These were added to the railroads, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais (SNCF), which had been nationalized in 1938 in preparation for war. In 1948, these were joined by the Règie Autonome des Transports Parisien (RATP), the public transportation network covering Paris and the surrounding area, now including regional trains, the metro, trolleys, buses, boat-buses and bicycles.

The second great wave of nationalizations in France took place with the election of the Socialist government of Francois Mitterrand in 1981, the first and only socialist-lead government during the Fifth Republic. Thirty-six banks and two finance companies, plus industries of strategic importance to the state were nationalized. These included seven of the largest 20 industrial companies in France.

Even without the Parti Socialiste’s nationalization program the French State held a substantial share of industry. Besides Renault, the public utilities, the postal service, the telecommunications service and public transportation, the state owned Air France and commanding interests in several other companies that would be entirely private in the U.S. The companies nationalized in 1981-2 were involved in iron and steel, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, fertilizers, computers, electric power construction, shipbuilding, telecommunications, mining and building materials.

In France, the public sector accounts for about 25% of industrial production and 30% of industrial exports. However, many of these companies nationalized in 1981-2 were wholly or partially reprivatized in 1986-87 during a period when Socialist president Mitterand “cohabitated” with a right wing majority in the National Assembly.

But in August 2009, the French government owned or held major interest in some 2,000 enterprises (if enterprises directly under state control and their subsidiaries or sub-subsidiaries are counted separately), employing close to 1.5 million employees.

Besides enterprises wholly owned by the government, there are many others in which it invests to a degree that gives it a powerful voice in their operations. Some prominent examples include:

• The European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company N.V. (EADS), a pan-European aerospace and defense corporation and a leading military contractor worldwide. It includes Airbus as the leading manufacturer of commercial aircraft and Airbus Military. As of July 2007, 27.38% of EADS was owned by SOGEADE (Société de gestion de l’aéronautique, de la defense et de l’espace), a holding company wholly owned by the French state.


• AREVA, a French public multinational industrial conglomerate mainly known for nuclear power generation that supplies nearly 80% of France’s electricity. Its main shareholder is the French public-sector holding company, the CEA, which owns 78.9%.


• BNP Paribas S.A., ranked in October 2010 by Bloomberg and Forbes as the largest bank and largest company in the world with assets of over $3.1 trillion. The French government is a 17% shareholder.


• Suez S.A., a leading French-based multinational corporation with operations primarily in water, electricity and natural gas supply and waste management. The French state holds more than 35% of shares.


• DCNS, a naval defense company based in France, one of Europe's leading shipbuilders. The group designs, builds and supports surface combatants, submarines, systems, and equipment. The French government owns 75%.


• Arianespace SA, the world's first commercial space transportation company. It undertakes the production, operation, and marketing of the Ariane 5 rocket launcher. As of 2004, Arianespace held more than 50% of the world market for boosting satellites to geostationary orbit. Thirty four percent is owned by the French government space agency and 30% by the French government dominated EADS, described above.

Sub-orbital hybrid spacejet developed by the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS), itself something of a hybrid with substantial investment from the French government.
This participation of the government in the private sector short of full nationalization is a feature of French and European socialism that is seldom discussed in the U.S., as if nationalization were an all or nothing affair. When the subject of socialism comes up in the U.S., the capitalist class wants only the image of the Soviet Union to be considered.

In 2012, there will be another presidential election in France. In 2007, the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, representing the center-right UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) ran on a platform that implied the Americanization of the French economy. He defeated the nominee of the Socialist Party, Sègoline Royal, who was increasingly seen as a caviar-socialist and lightweight.

Public opinion has largely thwarted Sarkozy’s efforts and his popularity has plummeted in the process. He currently has the lowest public approval ratings of any French president since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. These low ratings have remained constant for many months despite an eventful year in which Sarkozy took the lead in the NATO invasion of Libya and attempts to resolve the Greek debt crisis, and the leading Socialist Party candidate, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was being arrested on rape charges in New York City.

Opinion polls in late April prior to his arrest showed Strauss-Kahn defeating Sarkozy by the widest margin -- 61 to 39 in a head to head match up. But they also showed Sarkozy losing to either of the two other Socialist Party frontrunners, Martine Aubry and Francois Hollande, by 10 to 12% margins.

Despite the fact that charges against Strauss-Kahn will almost certainly be dropped, he is unlikely to return as a candidate. Still, it is likely we are on the cusp of another era of Socialist Party control of the French government, the first since Mitterand, the only Socialist president during the Fifth Republic, left office in 1995.

It will be interesting to see if a Socialist victory results in another trend toward further nationalizations in France as it did in 1981.

Meanwhile, nationalizations within the U.S. remain anathema. Early in his administration, Barack Obama could have bought the bankrupt General Motors for less than $10 billion. Once government-owned, he could have converted it to the production of high speed trains and their components, something the country needs much more than another brand of mediocre, fossil fuel burning cars.

Instead, he provided roughly a hundred billion in government guaranteed loans to resurrect this corporate corpse. A slimmed down GM has at least momentarily returned to profitability. That’s all that matters in the capitalist hegemony controlling the U.S.

Obama touts this as a great accomplishment. In reality, it is a symbol of his lack of vision or leadership and his commitment to the dominion of finance capital.

[David P. Hamilton has been a political activist in Austin since the late 1960s when he worked with SDS and wrote for The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper. Read more articles by David P. Hamilton on The Rag Blog.]

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Changing Climate : Denmark Becoming Police State?

Above, a Danish policeman arrests a demonstrator at Copenhagen climate change summit. Photo from AP. Below, detained demonstrators are seen lined up on a street during mass arrests. Photo by Thibault Camus / AP.
Changing winds in Denmark:
Preventive detention and the UN climate conference

By David Rovics / December 15, 2009

COPENHAGEN -- The signs up all over the airport and various places elsewhere in town are calling it Hopenhagen, but everybody I know is calling it Copenhagen, which seems far more appropriate. The international media has been giving this lots of coverage, and rightly so. Of course much of the media is unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, so other things, such as the reason the protests are happening in the first place, can get lost.

Inside the Bella Center lots of stuff is going on. Namely the U.S., Australia and others are leading the way in making sure nothing meaningful takes place there, while many other delegates and activists within try to make the best of it, or at least make the effort to thoroughly expose the bankruptcy of the position taken by the rich countries.

The center itself is divided into floors where the big decisions are being made, and then the rest of the place for the little people, the delegates from unimportant countries like Tuvalu, representatives of small NGOs and other riffraff. Many of the folks involved with the process inside are dividing their time between the meetings and events outside in the streets and at the alternative conference going on elsewhere in town.

Denmark: social democracy to police state?

Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture in the heart of the city is understated but exudes the wealth of a place that was once the capital of a fairly sizeable empire. Of course, though the Danish empire brought some riches home to Copenhagen, the wealth of modern Denmark is far greater, that being the product not so much of empire but of the Danish labor movement and Danish social democracy. It is this check on Danish capitalism that has allowed this wealth to be so impressively distributed, bringing Denmark a quality of life that is the envy of most anyone who knows about it.

Of course, as in any society, there are different forces at work in Denmark. Most Danes would identify much more with those peasants who rebelled in the 17th century and helped pave the way for modern Denmark, not with the soldiers who massacred them, but those soldiers were also Danes. Most Danes would prefer to remember the heroic stories of resistance during the occupation of Denmark in the 1940's, but there were also many enthusiastic collaborators.

At so many points in history there are pivotal moments when things can go different ways, and something pushes events in a certain direction. The direction of social democracy has been the ascendant one in Denmark for quite some time, but this was able to happen for a variety of reasons -- the strength and purpose of the Danish labor movement, the fear on the part of the rich of the specter of communism, the moral bankruptcy of the leaders of society who collaborated with the Nazis after the war, and so on.

If people know anything about this most southerly of the Scandinavian countries they know it's full of windmills. Germany actually has lots more windmills than Denmark, but many of them are made in Denmark anyway, at the Vespas factories in Jutland (where they recently laid off thousands of workers).

There's a reason Denmark has been a pioneer in windmill technology, and it is, to a large extent, the Danish environmental movement. In the early 70's the Danish government was thinking about building its first nuclear reactor, following the example of Sweden, which has one right across the water, upwind.

People inspired by ideas of communal living and experiential learning formed a community centered around a Free School near the little village of Ulfborg and began making plans to build the world's largest windmill. Over the course of three years, working with scientists, artisans and large numbers of hippies, they built the world's largest windmill. They refused to patent any of their ground-breaking technology, making it all available for anybody to use. Their windmill, still standing and providing power to the community 35 years later, is the prototype for the big windmills you'll see scattered around Denmark and the world.

This windmill provided more than just energy -- it and the movement that built it provided political capital. Those in parliament arguing for a nuclear reactor lost the fight, and Denmark became a nation of windmills.

For the past decade or so, however, Denmark has been run by a coalition led by the neoliberal, xenophobic Vestre party. They have been privatizing hospitals and passing some of the most restrictive immigration legislation in the world. They have had troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have been forcibly deporting refugees back to these war-torn countries.

Fueled by the changes to Danish society wrought by membership in the European Union (EU), this conservative coalition keeps winning elections. Along with a love of capitalism and a fear of foreigners, these people also can't stand hippies or punks or other dissenting elements, and they are on a quest to “normalize” the 900-person intentional community in the heart of Copenhagen known as Christiania. To that end they conducted a police raid early one morning in 2007 and destroyed a house they deemed to have been illegally constructed. (I got my first taste of Danish tear gas there a couple hours later.)

Thousands protest in Copenhagen May 3, 2007, in support of Ungdomshuset youth house. Photo from de.indymedia.
Shortly before this home demolition in Christiania, hundreds of Danish police had landed on the five-story squatted social center known as Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”) by helicopter early one morning. They fumigated the place with tear gas, arrested those inside, jailed them for several months, and proceeded to follow the new government policy of destruction of the house. Masked construction workers from Poland did the dirty work, since Danish unions forbid their members from doing work that requires police protection.

Over the course of the next year and a half, however, the government was forced to backtrack on their plan to "civilize" Denmark. The movement to support Ungdomshuset grew dramatically, involving a number of fairly significant riots and probably more important, a weekly drill of marches every Thursday for a year and a half, involving many hundreds and often thousands every week.

Eventually the chief of police and the mayor of Copenhagen had to admit that their policies had been a mistake and they gave the movement what it was demanding, a new house, bought and paid for by the city. (Left wing foundations had offered to buy a new building for the movement but these offers were refused on principle -- the line was that the government destroyed Ungdomshuset and they should replace it with something comparable.)

In the course of the riots and demonstrations around Ungdomshuset the police preemptively arrested hundreds of people on a few occasions. They weren't technically allowed to do this, but they came up with excuses. One eyewitness told me that the police started arresting people, claiming some of them were throwing rocks at them, although the rock-throwing had clearly started only after the police began arresting the assembled crowd.

Preemptive arrests at climate summit

A new law was passed in preparation for the climate summit which makes this kind of mass preemptive arrest perfectly legal -- all the police need to do is arbitrarily determine that an area is designated as a “riot zone” and then they can arrest whoever they want. Any non-Danes arrested can be held for 40 days (including people who were born in Denmark but are not citizens, a reality for many here that may seem surprising to those in the U.S. reading this). It went into effect a week before last Thursday, and since then the Danish police have carried out mass preemptive arrests that dwarf anything they've done before. They don't even need to pretend they have any justification for what is essentially collective punishment.

Those of you in the United States should be familiar with preemptive mass arrests. If you haven't had your head in the sand for the past few decades then you know this happens regularly at demonstrations throughout our great democracy. But it's new for Denmark, and it is a serious step in the direction of the Americanization, you could say, of the country.

Being an American, I can say first-hand that emulating U.S. policies in the areas of law enforcement or the privatization and outsourcing of industry is all a very bad idea, at least as far as the vast majority of people are concerned -- but the interests of a privileged minority are what moves people like the Danish Prime Minister, not the interests of society as a whole.

Protesters at climate summit. Photo from Monsters and Critics.
The policies and concerns of the new Danish government were represented eloquently by the kettling and mass arrest of a small march that was en route to commit acts of civil disobedience at the docks run by the Maersk corporation. Maersk owner A.P. Mø11er is one of the world's richest men and runs one of the world's biggest shipping companies (look for his name, it's everywhere).

Blockading docks is illegal, of course, and under the normal legal procedures in a democratic society people committing such acts would be told to stop and after a certain amount of time would be arrested, fined, brought to trial or whatever. Yesterday, however, as with the day before, hundreds of people were preemptively arrested, including many who had no intention of committing any illegal acts, such as one reporter for the Times of London.

I narrowly avoided being arrested two days ago. Of those arrested the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with the rock-throwing incident at the stock exchange that apparently set off the police action. The overwhelming majority didn't even know anything had happened at the stock exchange. All they knew was they were suddenly, randomly being arrested while taking part in a permitted march organized in part by the very mainstream Social Democratic Party. This was a family march involving tens of thousands of people with no civil disobedience or other illegal acts planned as part of it.

The new law may allow for mass preemptive arrests, but international treaties which Denmark has signed called the Geneva Conventions outline certain guidelines for the treatment of detainees which were clearly violated by the Danish police. People were handcuffed in uncomfortable positions for many hours on the frozen pavement, not allowed to move, not allowed to go to the toilet. Some fainted, many wet their pants, adding to the danger posed by the freezing temperatures.

Elderly people were arrested along with teenagers. Anne Feeney's husband Juli, a 66-year-old Swede who had been slowly walking beside a carriage, was handcuffed and made to sit on the frozen ground. Among the marchers from Tvind, the Free School movement with whom I was walking, those arrested include headmasters and teachers from throughout Europe and Africa. Every one of the Norwegians I had just been hanging out with the day before from Trondheim were arrested.

I participated in a march that was very quickly thrown together involving several hundred people, starting near the Valby train station and going to the prison to which most detainees had been brought. The police surrounded (escorted?) us and seemed to be thinking about arresting all of us, but apparently ultimately thought better of it. Instead they informed us as we were marching towards the prison that most of those detained had just been released, and that we were welcome to march to the prison but no further.

Outside the prison -- a temporary prison that used to be a brewery -- I heard more stories of how the Anarchist Black Cross representatives who had been attempting to provide soup and solace to people as they were being released were told to leave the premises. When they attempted to set up at the train station a kilometer away they were again told to leave. So as most people left the prison there wasn't even anyone to meet them and tell them where to find the train station. Most detainees were at no point given any food by the police. After six hours some had been given water.

Tonight after Naomi Klein, Lisa Fithian, and others from Climate Justice Action held a meeting at the Big Tent in Christiania, hundreds of police and dozens of police vehicles were involved in more or less laying siege to Christiania, which was defended, as in the past, by hundreds of masked, black-clad young people making burning barricades and throwing large numbers of bottles at the police, who then fired lots of tear gas. Tonight the police reportedly used a water cannon to extinguish the main burning barricade and arrested 200. Most of this happened while Anne Feeney and I were playing a concert in the Opera House, not far from the main entrance.

The future is not written. There was nothing inevitable about Denmark building a nuclear reactor, and because of the environmental movement it built windmills instead. Equally, there is nothing inevitable about Denmark becoming a neoliberal police state. The years ahead in Denmark -- and more broadly in the rest of Europe, run increasingly by pro-business and xenophobic governments -- will determine in which direction things will go. And perhaps the next few days will be a particularly important moment in that process.

[David Rovics is an indie singer-songwriter and political activist.]

Source / AfterDowningStreet

Thanks to David Swanson / The Rag Blog

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BOOKS / Caliban and the Witch : The Creation of Capitalism

Who Were the Witches?
Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism

By Alex Knight / The Rag Blog / November 6, 2009

This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici’s brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years.

In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare’s character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers.

Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

Who were the witches?

Parents putting a pointed hat on their young son or daughter before Trick-or-Treating might never pause to wonder this question, seeing witches as just another cartoonish Halloween icon like Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula. But deep within our ritual lies a hidden history that can tell us important truths about our world, as the legacy of past events continues to affect us 500 years later.

In this book, Silvia Federici takes us back in time to show how the mysterious figure of the witch is key to understanding the creation of capitalism, the profit-motivated economic system that now reigns over the entire planet.

During the 15th - 17th centuries the fear of witches was ever-present in Europe and Colonial America, so much so that if a woman was accused of witchcraft she could face the cruelest of torture until confession was given, or even be executed based on suspicion alone. There was often no evidence whatsoever.

The author recounts, “for more than two centuries, in several European countries, hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, burned alive or hanged, accused of having sold body and soul to the devil and, by magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbors, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms, and performed many other abominations” (169). In other words, just about anything bad that might or might not have happened was blamed on witches during that time. So where did this tidal wave of hysteria come from that took the lives so many poor women, most of whom had almost certainly never flown on broomsticks or stirred eye-of-newt into large black cauldrons?

Caliban underscores that the persecution of witches was not just some error of ignorant peasants, but in fact the deliberate policy of Church and State, the very ruling class of society. To put this in perspective, today witchcraft would be a far-fetched cause for alarm, but the fear of hidden terrorists who could strike at any moment because they “hate our freedom” is widespread. Not surprising, since politicians and the media have been drilling this frightening message into people’s heads for years, even though terrorism is a much less likely cause of death than, say, lack of health care.1

And just as the panic over terrorism has enabled today’s powers-that-be to attempt to remake the Middle East, this book makes the case that the powers-that-were of Medieval Europe exploited or invented the fear of witches to remake European society towards a social paradigm that met their interests.

Interestingly, a major component of both of these crusades was the use of so-called "shock and awe" tactics to astound the population with “spectacular displays of force,” which help to soften up resistance to drastic or unpopular reforms.2 In the case of the Witch Hunt, shock therapy was applied through the witch burnings -- spectacles of such stupefying violence that they apparently paralyzed whole villages and regions into accepting fundamental restructuring of medieval society.3

Federici describes a typical witch burning as, “an important public event, which all the members of the community had to attend, including the children of the witches, especially their daughters who, in some cases, would be whipped in front of the stake on which they could see their mother burning alive” (186).

The book argues that these gruesome executions not only punished “witches” but graphically demonstrated the repercussions for any kind of disobedience to the clergy or nobility. In particular, the witch burnings were meant to terrify women into accepting “a new patriarchal order where women’s bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources” (170).

Federici puts forward that up until the 16th century, though living in a sexist society, European women retained significant economic independence from men that they typically do not under capitalism, where gender roles are more distinguished. She goes on, “If we also take into account that in medieval society collective relations prevailed over familial ones, and most of the tasks that female serfs performed (washing, spinning, harvesting, and tending to animals on the commons) were done in cooperation with other women, we then realize… [this] was a source of power and protection for women. It was the basis for an intense female sociality and solidarity that enabled women to stand up to men.” But the Witch Hunt initiated a period where women were forced to become what she calls “servants of the male work force” (115) -- excluded from receiving a wage, they were confined to the unpaid labor of raising children, caring for the elderly and sick, nurturing their husbands or partners, and maintaining the home. In Federici’s words, this was the “housewifization of women,” the reduction to a second-class status where women became totally dependent on the income of men (27).

Federici goes on to show how female sexuality, which was seen as a source of women’s potential power over men, became an object of suspicion and came under sharp attack by the authorities. The assault manifested in new laws that took away women’s control over the reproductive process, such as the banning of birth control measures, the replacement of midwives with male doctors, and the outlawing of abortion and infanticide.4 Federici calls this an attempt to turn the female body into “a machine for the reproduction of labor,” such that women’s only purpose in life was supposedly to produce children (144).

But we also learn that this was just one component of a broader move by Church and State to ban all forms of sexuality that were considered “non-productive.” For example, “homosexuality, sex between young and old, sex between people of different classes, anal coitus, coitus from behind, nudity, and dances. Also proscribed was the public, collective sexuality that had prevailed in the Middle Ages, as in the Spring festivals of pagan origins that, in the 16th-century, were still celebrated all over Europe” (194). To this end, the Witch Hunt targeted not only female sexuality but homosexuality and gender non-conformity as well, helping to craft the patriarchal sexual boundaries that define our society to this day.


Capitalism: Born in flames

What separates Caliban from other works exploring the “witch” phenomenon is that this book puts the persecution of witches into the context of the development of capitalism. For Silvia Federici, it’s no accident that “the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, [or] the beginning of the slave trade” (164).

She instructs that all of these seemingly unrelated tragedies were initiated by the same European ruling elite at the very moment that capitalism was in formation, the late 15th through 17th centuries. Contrary to “laissez-faire” orthodoxy which holds that capitalism functions best without state intervention, Federici posits that it was precisely the state violence of these campaigns that laid the foundation for capitalist economics.

Thankfully for the reader, who may not be very familiar with the history of this era, Federici outlines these events in clear and accessible language. She focuses on the Land Enclosures in particular because their significance has been largely lost in time. Many of us will not remember that during Europe’s Middle Ages even the lowliest of serfs had their own plot of land with which they could use for just about any purpose. Federici adds, “With the use of land also came the use of the ‘commons’ -- meadows, forests, lakes, wild pastures – that provided crucial resources for the peasant economy (wood for fuel, timber for building, fishponds, grazing grounds for animals) and fostered community cohesion and cooperation” (24).

This access to land acted as a buffer, providing security for peasants who otherwise were mostly subject to the whim of their “Lord.” Not only could they grow their own food, or hunt in the relatively plentiful forests which were still standing in that era, but connection to the commons also gave peasants territory with which to organize resistance movements and alternative economies outside the control of their masters.

The Enclosures were a process by which this land was taken away -- closed off by the State and typically handed over to entrepreneurs to pursue a profit in sheep or cow herding, or large-scale agriculture. Instead of being used for subsistence as it had been, the land’s bounty was sold off to fledgling national and international markets. A new class of profit-motivated landowners emerged, known as “gentry,” but the underside of this development was the trauma experienced by the evicted peasants.

In the author’s words, “As soon as they lost access to land, all workers were plunged into a dependence unknown in medieval times, as their landless condition gave employers the power to cut their pay and lengthen the working-day” (72). For Federici, then, the chief creation of the Enclosures was a property-less, landless working class, a “proletariat” who were left with little option but to work for a wage in order to survive; wage labor being one of the defining features of capitalism.

Cut off from their traditional soil, many communities scattered across the countryside to find new homesteads. But the State countered with the so-called “Bloody Laws”, which made it legal to capture wandering “vagabonds” and force them to work for a wage, or put them to death. Federici tells the result: “What followed was the absolute impoverishment of the European working class… Evidence is the change that occurred in the workers’ diets. Meat disappeared from their tables, except for a few scraps of lard, and so did beer and wine, salt and olive oil” (77).

Although European workers typically labored for longer hours under their new capitalist employers, living standards were reduced sharply throughout the 16th century, and it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that earnings returned to the level they had been before the Enclosures.5

According to Federici, the witch hunts played a key role in facilitating this process by driving a sexist wedge into the working class that “undermined class solidarity,” making it more difficult for communities to resist displacement (48). And while women were faced with the threat of horrific torture and death if they did not conform to new submissive gender roles, men were in effect bribed with the promise of obedient wives and new access to women’s bodies.

The author cites that “Another aspect of the divisive sexual politics to diffuse workers’ protest was the institutionalization of prostitution, implemented through the opening of municipal brothels soon proliferating throughout Europe” (49). And in addition to prostitution, a legalization of sexual violence provided further sanction for the exploitation of women’s bodies. She explains, “In France, the municipal authorities practically decriminalized rape, provided the victims were women of the lower class” (47). This initiated what Federici calls a “virtual rape movement,” making it unsafe for women to even leave their homes.

The witch trials were the final assault, which all but obliterated the integrity of peasant communities by fostering mutual suspicion and fear. Amidst deteriorating conditions, neighbors were encouraged to turn against one another, so that any insult or annoyance became grounds for an accusation of witchcraft. As the terror spread, a new era was forged in the flames of the witch burnings. Surveying the damage, Silvia Federici concludes that “the persecution of the witches, in Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were for the development of capitalism” (12).

A forgotten revolution

Federici maintains that it didn’t have to turn out this way. “Capitalism was not the only possible response to the crisis of feudal power. Throughout Europe, vast communalistic social movements and rebellions against feudalism had offered the promise of a new egalitarian society built on social equality and cooperation” (61).

Caliban’s most inspiring chapters make visible an enormous continent-wide series of poor people’s movements that nearly toppled Church and State at the end of the Middle Ages. These peasant movements of the 13th - 16th centuries were often labeled “heretical” for challenging the religious power of the Vatican, but as the book details they aimed for a much broader transformation of feudal society.

The so-called “heretics” often “denounced social hierarchies, private property and the accumulation of wealth, and disseminated among the people a new, revolutionary conception of society that, for the first time in the Middle Ages, redefined every aspect of daily life (work, property, sexual reproduction, and the position of women), posing the question of emancipation in truly universal terms” (33).

Silvia Federici shows us how the heretical movements took many forms, from the vegetarian and anti-war Cathars of southern France to the communistic and anti-nobility Taborites of Bohemia, but were united in the call for the elimination of social inequality. Many put forth the argument that it was anti-Christian for the clergy and nobility to live in opulence while so many suffered from lack of adequate food, housing or medical attention.

The vegetarian and anti-war Cathars were rounded up by the Crusaders.
Another common thread weaving the European peasant movements together was the leadership of women. Federici describes that, “[Heretical women] had the same rights as men, and could enjoy a social life and mobility that nowhere else was available to them in the Middle Ages… Not surprisingly, women are present in the history of heresy as in no other aspect of medieval life.” (38). Some heretical sects, like the Cathars, discouraged marriage and emphasized birth control – advocating a sexual liberation which directly challenged the Church’s moral authority.

The gender politics of peasant movements proved to be a strength, and they attracted a wide following that undercut the power of a feudal system which was already in crisis. Federici explains how the movements became increasingly revolutionary as they grew in size.

In the course of this process, the political horizon and the organizational dimensions of the peasant and artisan struggle broadened. Entire regions revolted, forming assemblies and recruiting armies. At times, the peasants organized in bands, attacking the castles of the lords, and destroying the archives where the written marks of their servitude were kept” (45).

What started as a religious movement became increasingly revolutionary. For example, in the 1420s and 30s, the Taborites fought to liberate all of Bohemia, beating back several Crusades of 100,000+ men organized by the Vatican (54-55). The uprisings became contagious, so much so that in the crucial period of 1350-1500, unprecedented concessions were made including the doubling of wages, reduction in prices and rents, and a shorter working day. In the words of Silvia Federici, “the feudal economy was doomed” (62).

The author documents that the initial reaction by elites was to institute the “Holy Inquisition,” a brutal campaign of state repression that included torturing and even burning heretics to death. But as time went on, ruling class strategy shifted from targeting heretics in general to specifically targeting female community leaders. The Inquisition morphed into the Witch Hunt.

Soon, simple meetings of peasant women were stigmatized as possible “Sabbats,” where women were supposedly seduced by the devil to become witches, but as Federici clarifies, it was the rebellious politics and non-conforming gender relations of such gatherings which were demonized (177). Strong, defiant women were murdered by the tens of thousands, and along with them the Witch Hunt also destroyed “a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism” (103).

For elite European nobles and clergy, the Witch Hunt succeeded in stifling a working class revolution that had increasingly threatened their rule. Even more, Silvia Federici puts forward that the Witch Hunt facilitated the rise of a new, capitalist social paradigm -- based on large-scale economic production for profit and the displacement of peasants from their lands into the burgeoning urban workforce. In time, this capitalist system would dominate all of Europe and be dispersed through conquistadors’ “guns, germs and steel” to every corner of the globe, destroying countless ancient civilizations and cultures in the process.6

Federici’s analysis is that, “Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle -- possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide” (22). How might things be different if the forgotten revolution had won?

Conclusion: Rediscovering the magic of truth-telling

“Day by day, it’s worse for my people, especially for the women. And that’s why, because of all of these main reasons, we say this is the mockery of democracy and mockery of War on Terror.” – Malalai Joya, Afghan democracy activist, 2009

Caliban and the Witch is a book that challenges many important myths about the world we live in. First and foremost among these is the widely-held belief that capitalism, though perhaps flawed in its current form, started out as a “progressive” development that liberated workers and improved the conditions of women, people of color and other oppressed groups.

Silvia Federici has done impressive work to take us back to the very foundations of the capitalist system in late-medieval Europe to uncover a secret history of land dispossession and impoverishment, gender and sexual terror, and brutal colonization of non-Europeans. This terrible legacy leads her to the profound conclusion that the system is “necessarily committed to racism and sexism,” and most strongly, “It is impossible to associate capitalism with any form of liberation or attribute the longevity of the system to its capacity to satisfy human needs. If capitalism has been able to reproduce itself it is only because of the web of inequalities that it has built into the body of the world proletariat, and because of its capacity to globalize exploitation. This process is still unfolding under our eyes, as it has for the last 500 years” (17).

It’s been said that we can measure a society by how it treats its women. This book provides compelling documentation to suggest that capitalism is and has always been a male dominated system, which reduces opportunities and security for women as well as marginalizing those who don’t fit within narrow gender boundaries. In particular, it uses the story of the Witch Hunt to illuminate the inner workings of capitalism to show the restraining, silencing, and demonizing of female sexual power built into it.7

Responding to our question that started this essay, Silvia Federici writes, “The witch was not only the midwife, the woman who avoided maternity, or the beggar who eked out a living by stealing some wood or butter from her neighbors. She was also the loose, promiscuous woman -- the prostitute or adulteress, and generally, the woman who exercised her sexuality outside the bonds of marriage and procreation… The witch was also the rebel woman who talked back, argued, swore, and did not cry under torture” (184).

In other words, the witches were those women who in one way or another resisted the establishment of an unjust social order -- the mechanical exploitation of capitalism. The witches represented a whole world that Europe’s new masters were anxious to destroy: a world with strong female leadership, a world rooted in local communities and knowledge, a world alive with magical possibilities, a world in revolt.

We need not despair for the world that has been lost. Indeed, it is still with us today in the struggles of people everywhere organizing for justice. Today from Afghanistan we can hear the clarion voice of Malalai Joya, a courageous woman who was expelled from the Afghan parliament in 2007 for speaking out against the U.S.-installed warlords who now rule her country. She appeared recently on Democracy Now! saying, “Now my people are sandwiched between two powerful enemies: from the sky, occupation forces bombing and killing innocent civilians… [and] on the ground, Taliban and these warlords together continue to deliver fascism against our people.”8

Joya risks her life to make these comments, but her words carry the sparkling truth that is so necessary to end the insanity of war and occupation in the Middle East. Those who are summoned to action by her call do so in the immortal spirit of the “heretics” and “witches” who resisted capitalism and feudalism before it, carrying forward a movement that is wide as the Earth and old as time.

Notes

1. Harvard University researchers released a study on Sept. 17, 2009, showing that approximately 45,000 Americans die unnecessarily from lack of medical coverage every year, unfortunately many times more than the number killed on September 11, 2001. See this article for more on the Harvard study.
2. “Shock and Awe”, Wikipedia. Accessed Nov. 2, 2009.
3. This “shock therapy” strategy is examined in detailed case studies by Naomi Klein in the excellent The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books 2007. For example she offers that the US-led devastation of Iraq’s social infrastructure, including destruction of hospitals, food and water systems traumatized the Iraqi people such that they could not prevent the highly unpopular privatization of the country’s oil wealth.
4. for more on the Witch Hunt’s effect on the male domination of reproduction and medicine, see Barbara Ehrenreich’s Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, The Feminist Press at CUNY 1972, pamphlet.
5. “The high point of wages was immediately preceding the ‘long’ sixteenth century [roughly 1450], and the low point was at its end [roughly 1650]. The drop during the sixteenth century was immense.” Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press, 1974. pg. 80.
6. see Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton Press 2005. Jared Diamond’s study of the rise of Europe focuses more on ecology than patriarchy, but is nonetheless useful for exposing the carnage of the colonization process.
7. for a brilliant collection of insights into the many ways female sexuality is still under attack, see Friedman, Jaclyn & Jessica Valenti. Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape. Seal Press 2008. My review of this book can also be found here.
8. Democracy Now! October 28, 2009 broadcast. “A Woman Among Warlords: Afghan Democracy Activist Malalai Joya Defies Threats to Challenge US Occupation, Local Warlords.” Online here.

[Alex Knight is an organizer and writer in Philadelphia. He is currently organizing with Philly Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the People's Caravan, which recently completed a story-listening and action trip to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh. He also maintains the website endofcapitalism.com and is in the process of writing a book called The End of Capitalism. He can be reached at activistalex@gmail.com.]

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Even (Gasp) Pravda Agrees : Health Care a Hole in the 'American Dream'

'Somehow, the Europeans see health care as they see food and housing, as a normal human right. Any European population would be demonstrating in the streets if universal care were rescinded.'
By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / December 22, 2008

See 'The mother of all paradoxes, the American social model' by Gaither Stewart, Below.

This, I feel, is a great article, especially the detailed exposition on health care in Italy. However, I am fearful of quoting Pravda, as the average boobus Americanus (Thanks to HLM) will think that it is a Communist plot. [Think we care? Fearless eds.]

A point should be made regarding European health care. It is not a Liberal/Conservative thing. The British enacted universal care under Churchill's Tory Government and the German model began to evolve in the 1890s under Otto von Bismark. The French model began evolving in the 1880s and has survived any number of Conservative governments.

Somehow, the Europeans see health care as they see food and housing, as a normal human right. Any European population would be demonstrating in the streets if universal care were rescinded. What the Hell is wrong with the American people? We need HR 676, but the insurance industry and PhARMA, with the help of prostituted politicians, will hoodwink the gullible American public into thinking that health care, managed by a public insurance agency, is "socialism."

I highly recommend that everyone go to the Physicians for a National Health Program website.

The mother of all paradoxes, the American social model
By Gaither Stewart / December 17, 2008

The dismal demise of the American Dream (if it ever really existed), the dream not of what we believe it was but of what we wanted to believe it was.

"It seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably will always exist to get people to love their servitude."

Aldous Huxley, in a 1962 speech at Berkeley.

ROME -- It’s undeniable that the American social model is a paradox in the world. All you have to do is look around at other nations and the difference is clear as the Rome sky in July. Even though today at the nadir of its profound social crisis because of its flagrant, outright failure, America continues unabashedly to hammer away at its people how fortunate they are, while simultaneously proposing itself to the world as the paradigm, the quintessence, the very epitome of western civilization. But is history not carrying America into a faded American Dream?

Ah, the American Dream! To the degree the model appears to the rest of the world as honeycombed and as full of holes as Swiss cheese, the more America’s ideological operation morphs into a contest between good (the US model) and evil (the rest). America’s private struggle between good and evil becomes in turn the ideological platform and the inspiration-justification of puritanical, individualistic and greedy America’s age-old universal crusade against the rest of the world. Moreover, lest one forgets or believes the crap, the American social system is all the more insidious for human society today because it has become the social model for the world of capitalist globalization.

How did it come about that the ballyhooed “American Dream” is based on nothing less than social injustice? The self-righteous social trajectory described in the glowing terms of “freedoms” in the Bill of Rights (e.g. the right to have arms) is undermined by a social philosophy of niggardly, tight-fisted individualism implying the right to individualistically shoot down fellow students or foreigners called terrorists who resist. Thus the poisonous combination of that individualism and the glaring absence of an incisive workers’ movement is the original sin that has led the nation and the world at large under its sway into the blind alley of entire unprotected social classes, irrational environmental hostility, and pre-emptive, perpetual war.

The great paradox is that the list of declared, claimed and proclaimed—but not guaranteed—fictitious rights for Americans have deflated and become non-rights for others.

We see it all around us. In places the world shrinks. In others it expands. Things change and shift around. But America Land of the Free, part of the shrunken world, tries not to see its shattered dream. Dazzle their minds with impossible dreams. Implant in their mindsets visions of triumph. Then, mask the inevitable loss of hope by the masses. Feebly old dreams try to resurface and again vanish. The glamorous glitter of once-upon-a-time has been reduced to a tacky faint flicker of the lonely used car lot or the mottled colors of empty Burger Kings blinking in the night. Begrudgingly, cars get smaller. Houses run down. Legions of Walmarts experience a sense of abandonment while beautiful celebrities look out of TV screens soothingly and travel around the world and buy villas on Lake Como.

Meanwhile, Europe’s one hundred year old social state based on a spirit of solidarity is weakening and ceding ground to the selfish American capitalist-individualistic-everyman-for-himself society and its neo-liberal allies of the European Union. Yet the European Idea of the social state hangs on and resists. There is still a veritable abyss between the American market model based on individualism (that is the hosanna-ed American Dream), with a high rate of mobility at the cost of a low level of protection of its people, and the European system based on the social state, which is the European Idea.

The absence of a solid and stable workers movement in the USA which should be this nation’s third party is responsible for America’s anti-social answer to what is in essence a social issue. Once-upon-a-time workers movements and trade unions in America chalked up some important achievements. That was a long time ago. On the east side of the ocean the workers movements had a close relationship with the rise of the nation states and the effects of the industrial revolution and the eventual emergence of the social state.

America ’s dissonant voice is instead the anti-social divergence of the model projected by the USA. Therefore the pernicious halo surrounding propagandistic Americanism. Therefore, the transformation of the American Dream into nightmare. That impossible dream, that at the very most dream-gone-wrong, that incubus, has in turn provided the foundations for an enduring Corporatism-Fascism, in America stubbornly referred to as individualism.

It should be clear that at the root of America’s social evil lies the truancy of an organized, stable workingman’s movement that would provide the framework for a workingman’s political party and a representative trade union to serve as a genuine balance of power in a one-sided, non-representative, criminal political system. Who for example represents working people today? Who? Millionaire congressmen? Billionaire presidents? Or perhaps the political parties-fundraisers necessary to elect non-representatives?

The workers’ movement in the USA never matured. It was never powerful enough to mark a permanent direction of the social organization of civil society. It never succeeded in creating permanent low cost cooperatives and mutualities, social clubs and educational societies and other forms of political-social expression to confront the Corporatist system of a nation that today hardly “makes” anything.

In fact, the word “social” in the title of this essay is misleading and illusory. It is a travesty to use the word “social” in reference to the form of American society under a government that as Gore Vidal once said does nothing for its people. We should label this individualistic, lift-yourself-up-by- your-bootstraps society “anti-social” and rebel against it.

UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE - One Aspect of a Just Society

Recently I went to my local Universal Health Plan doctor in Rome for a health problem. I called the nearby office for an appointment, fixed for the next afternoon. When I arrived there was one patient ahead of me already in the doctor’s office. I was admitted after a five-minute wait. My wife and I had chosen this doctor rather than another as our primary doctor because she is young, dynamic and scrupulous and besides will also make home visits. I keep home visits by doctors in mind because when my father in North Carolina was paralyzed for years after a stroke, each time he had some new problem such as influenza he had to hire an ambulance to carry him the few blocks of the one-half mile to the office of this “good Christian man” who had been his doctor for many years. The Rome universal health care doctor examined me, asked the right questions about my medical history and sent me to a nearby radiological center for x-rays. Two days later I picked up the analysis, took them back to my primary doctor, who after looking over the x-rays, prescribed the appropriate medication which I picked up at the pharmacy. Within a period of four days, including two medical visits, the x-rays and analysis and medicine, my problem was resolved: Total costs to me: ZERO.

That is Italy’s universal health care at work, which despite cuts by today’s extreme rightwing, neo-liberal government still offers its people (both citizens and residents) universal health care. The Italian social state—by far not the best in Europe—guarantees most workers one-month vacations, retirement at between 57 and 60 years, months-long maternity leave for both mother and father, unemployment pay, national category contracts, pensions, housing, food and other “social” benefits. That is a social system!

In Europe, no political party, no candidate for public office, no politician at any level, would even dare run on an anti-social program. Budgetary cuts, savings, reforms, yes, but never the adoption of the American anti-social system. The American system is not even imaginable to most other peoples. Not in Europe. Not in Latin America or Canada or Iran or in any industrialized nation of the world. ONLY in the United States of America. That lack is reason for revolution. That is just reason to refuse one’s vote for anyone less than a defender of social justice.

A universal health service for the USA would cost only a minimal part of conducting perpetual wars or building a space shield against Russia or financing vassal states around the world or a fraction of the advertising costs for junk foods and products that make us obese and ignorant. In any case the point is not the cost. It is not an economic problem of the nation. We have to keep that in mind. The problem is the power of the greedy vested interests of medical associations, the pharmaceutical industry, hospitals and related medical care organizations. The problem is the power of money!

Above all it is a problem of the a priori negation of anything smacking of a social state in opposition to the concept of the capitalistic market economy of America which does less for its people than do Canada in the north or Mexico to the south, or France or Italy or Russia or Bulgaria. The creation of a receptive atmosphere for the “social idea” should/would be the major role of a nationwide, organized workers movement. That lack is methodically destroying the health of our nation.

The USA with its individualistic everyman-for-himself society today ranks poorly to other industrialized countries in health care, 23rd in infant mortality, 20th and 21st in life expectancy for women and men respectively. Yet the USA spends more per capita for health care than other countries. Where does that money go? We all know the answer: it goes to a greedy health care system of doctors, hospitals, private health insurance and pharmaceutical giants and to their related inflated and inefficient bureaucracies, to their powerful respective lobbyists and into the hands of our “democratically” elected representatives.

So deeply engrained is the anti-social nature in the “American republic” that the brainwashed people themselves have been conditioned to believe that universal health care is contrary to their best interests. It doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense to continue whacking our way through this jungle of the world’s most bizarre and costly medical care system. Some twenty years ago I covered the American presidential elections for a European newspaper in the state of North Carolina where I grew up. The first question I posed to a cross-section of the population of that one state concerned universal health care. Not one single person came out strong in favor of it. Most did not even know what universal health care meant.

Health costs continue to soar, care is compromised and quality is in free fall as obese Americans die of coronary disease. Health care for profit cannot work. It is not a solution. Profit and greed stand in the way. Health care will always be a right and a necessity, not merchandise like a Blackberry or an i-phone. It is estimated that a universal health care system would save 100-200 billion dollars a year, it would cover everyone and it would guarantee more medical visits and hospital days to all. Today polls show that 75% of Americans favor universal health care.

Many of our representatives say health care is not the domain of the state. HEALTH CARE IS NOT THE DOMAIN OF THE STATE! What can they mean? If health care is not the domain of the state, in what domain should health fall? It makes you wonder? Why can’t the USA treat its citizens at least as well as other countries do?

Part of the answer: a nation led by terrorists is not likely to care for its people, either.

Health care is just one of the great mysteries. But what about the other social issues our government holds prisoner in the shadows? What about month-long paid vacations? What about more job security and a tiny bit less mobility? What about more taxes for the super rich? What about a little less individualism and more social solidarity? What about a third and a fourth political party? What about a workingman’s movement?

The headlines in a recent edition of Italy’s major daily newspaper, La Repubblica, reflect the mood of the moment in one of Europe’s social states:

“Precarious workers (workers without contracts) in revolt”
“Trade Unions in revolt against raising the pension age to 62!”
“Create conditions for a general strike!” (an exhortation)
“Fear is an invention.” (to keep the Left under control)
“Farewell to the future” (of our children if capitalism continues unimpeded)
“The Left failed, we need a new start from a workers position”
“The Left has nothing to lose but its chains” (sic!)

[Gaither Stewart, Senior Contributing Editor for Cyrano’s Journal/tantmieux, is a novelist and journalist based in Italy, now on a three-month stay in Paris. His stories, essays and dispatches are read widely throughout the Internet on many leading venues. His recent novel, Asheville, is published by Wastelandrunes.]

Source / Pravda Ru

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Some Straight Talk on Socialism and Bullshit

The late great American socialist Norman Thomas. Photo courtesy of The Bancroft Library / University of California, Berkeley.
'The Republican vocabulary has always involved mindless terminology, word choices that cause apprehension and fear in the uninformed, such as “socialism.”'
By Dr. S. R. Keister / The Rag Blog / October 27, 2008

In listening to the McCain/Palin campaigns, within tolerance, I recall a most wonderful pocket sized book by Harry G. Frankfurt, professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. The title is aptly “On Bullshit”. The absurd dialectic of our Republic and friends regarding “Socialism” and “Spreading The Wealth” certainly requires further analysis of the terminology suggested by Dr. Frankfurt. For those of us who consider the term “bullshit” impolite one might consider a synonym such as humbug, balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, or quackery.

The Republican vocabulary has always involved mindless terminology, word choices that cause apprehension and fear in the uninformed, such as “death tax,” “partial birth abortion,” “terrorist,” “socialism.” The propagandist creates non-events, or non-persons, to control the thinking of the unsophisticated , undereducated, or the undeniably bigoted. “Mind control” or “brainwashing” might be the appropriate terms.

But to the subject of “socialism.” I was first introduced to a ”socialist” at the tender age of 11. My father, a Harvard Law School graduate, Unitarian, small town attorney, an admirer of Eugene Debs and Clarence Darrow, was in 1932 running for congress on the Socialist ticket. He of course did not win. Norman Thomas, perennial candidate for President on the Socialist ticket throughout the 20s and 30s was the guest speaker at a rally. Thomas was a soft spoken man, a Presbyterian minister, who believed that wealth should not be concentrated in the hands of a few, but should be distributed among those who were willing to work for same.

He was a pacifist who had opposed U.S. involvement in the first World War. He believed in cooperative endeavor such as was illustrated at one time by the Amana settlements in the American mid-west or the Israeli kibbutz. My memories of Mr. Thomas now are vague but I recall he was kindly, admired my mother’s rock-garden, and at the rally dumbfounded the audience by paraphrasing the Bible, i.e. “The world is the LANDLORDS and the fullness therein.”

One problem one faced throughout near all of the 20th century was ”Russian socialism.” Of course there was no such thing. Karl Marks, a political philosopher, in das Capital never promulgated a regime such as that in the Soviet Union. “Communist Russia” was the creation of Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky believed in a republic where the worker was represented in all affairs of state. Trotsky was assassinated as an exile in Mexico for his thinking. Instead Lenin, and later Stalin, created an autocracy, the antithesis of true socialism, with a dictator dominating the working class and reducing them to near medieval vassalage.

The term “National Socialist” appeared in Germany in 1932. Again this was a complete misnomer as the Nazis were Fascists. Fascism had no use for the worker, as it was a union of an autocratic, right wing regimen, with big business and the military. Sounds vaguely familiar?

Mr. McCain, and his vice-presidential candidate, a follower of The New Apostolic Reformation want the ill informed public to be confused regarding the meaning of socialism. As with all propaganda they endeavor to turn something functional into something evil. Where can we find “socialism” in the world today. The best current functional examples are in the Scandinavian nations, i.e. Denmark, Norway, Sweden. In general, though there are some variations from country to country, these folks have a good standard of living throughout the population. These are elected parliamentary governments. They have private enterprise, with mutually agreeable unionization between the employers and the employees.

The average person has a very nice, but not elaborate, house or apartment, a decent automobile, and first class public transportation. Taxes are a shade higher than the combined taxes of the American taxpayer (income tax, social security tax, sales taxes, transfer taxes, etc) but they receive first class free medical care, and free education through college and university when qualified, as well as first class unemployment and retirement benefits. The worker, as well as the executive, receives decent vacation time. They are not burdened with health insurance premiums, either as employer or individual, with the profits going to the CEOs and insurance company stockholders as in the United States.

The current Spanish government, though the titular ruler is the King, Juan Carlos, is run by a socialist prime minister and interestingly with the financial control of the Spanish banks the current USA/ European banking crises has not involved the Spanish banking system, thanks to its government oversight, to the extent we are experiencing in the United States. The Spanish Democracy has come far in the past half century from the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco with its militaristic, two class society. The Socialist government of Francois Mitterand made great progress in the French Republic after the De Gaulle years.

A few final thoughts regarding Norman Thomas. When FDR was elected President in 1932 he incorporated many of Thomas’s thoughts into The New Deal, such as Social Security (which McCain would privatize), public works programs, which Obama espouses at present, a modicum of control on the banks and stock exchange (done away with by the current neo-liberal economic thinkers starting with President Reagan), educational subsidies, and the idea of giving the working man the fruits of his labor (wealth redistribution) rather than 98% of the countries wealth going to three per cent of the population. Did the Lord create the USA just for three per cent of its citizens?

I realize that the readers of The Rag Blog are the better educated, more public spirited folks hereabouts, but in someway in the next week we must get the truth out to the general public. The real bigots, the true believers, will not be swayed; however, with luck, we will force a few folks to face the truth. The truth about socialism and no more bullshit.

[S. R. Keister, a retired physician, is a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.}

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Heed H.R. Mencken : Economy Notwithstanding, This Election Not a Sure Thing

H.R. Mencken: Some wisdom worth heeding?
'We face an election currently as did the USA and Germany in 1932'
By S.R. Keister / The Rag Blog / September 21, 2008

H.L. Mencken once wrote, "The only way to success in American life lies in flattering and kow-towing to the mob."

It seems an axiom that the American public will support the Democratic Party in the Autumn if the economy is in tatters. Is this assumption valid looking at a historical precedent? I have been party to a discussion with several well trained academics in the fields of history, economics, anthropology, and sociology and we are not at all certain of that presumption. We have coined the term the "Weimar Syndrome.”

Let us begin to look at several features of this line of reasoning. The current American electorate is much less informed, less cultured, less interested, and less educated than the citizens of the Weimar Republic 1919-1932.

Germany after World War I was not devastated, though suffering thousands of casualties, as the actual fighting had been on French soil. The nation was humiliated by the Versailles Treaty; however, at the Treaty of Paris had received Allsaise-Lorraine from France. During the Weimar period the German intelligencia and artistic communities thrived. Physicians and engineers came from around the world to study in Germany. The culture of the cabaret, the avantguarde came into being; however, the culture produced more serious artists and thinkers such as Bertoit Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Arnold Schoenberg among others. Art, music, engineering, medicine, and psychology thrived.

Yet, there was a cultural undercurrent of respect for authority developed under the century long rein of the Hohenzollerns (The Empire). There was a respect for the history and mythology of a superior people and nation, reinforced by a pride in militarism and a strong religious influence. In spite of the daring-do there was a strong feeling of family and tradition. There was a feeling of pride in the industrial might of the capitalists such as Krupp and Farben.

The great depression enfolded Germany in 1929 as it did the remainder of the Western World and thinking was that the Social Democrat Party would be the logical institution to turn to in time of financial crises.

We face an election currently as did the USA and Germany in 1932. We currently have the choice of an elderly gentleman, with an obviously failing memory, but an expert in changing the topic, avoiding productive discussion, and an expert at throwing out well rehearsed one-liners. Aligned with him a woman, a cross between Lucrecia Borgia and Shakespeare’s Katerina, with great appeal to the NRA and Religious Right. Both are experts at jingoism and exhorting divine guidance. On the other hand we have two well educated, thinking, sophisticated gentlemen who try their best to present the nation’s problems in a well defined and learned way. Yet, one gentleman presents something "different.” In the mind of the unsophisticated.

Something "different" is perhaps something to be feared. The British newspaper The Guardian recently had an extensive article on American “anti-intellectualism.”

With the economic collapse in both the USA and Germany in 1932 the electorate in both nations looked for underlying reasons, the American people recognized unbridled capitalism as the probable cause, while the German's blamed other nations, as we now blame Islamic extremists, and people of a “different type” within their society. Remember the economy was similar in both nations. America elected FDR, but the Germans, fearing “something different” in the Social Democratic Party, the reasonable choice, made another choice which changed the history of the world.

Please let us not take anything for granted, as the future of the nation is at stake. As one whose ancestors arrived here in 1754, I live in fear that this may indeed be the end of our Republic as we have known it. Obama is not perfect but please, please, let this old curmudgeon take his last breath in a nation based on good will, trust, and respect for the better things in man’s nature. At least Obama has integrity, honor, a sense of reason, and feeling for those less fortunate.

Again, Mencken: "There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

[S.R. Keister posts to Progressives for Obama.]

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For American Workers : Lessons from the French Revolution

Victory of the "Front Populaire" in 1936. From left to right: Mme. Blum, Léon Blum (SFIO), Maurice Thorez (PCF), Roger Salengro (SFIO, minister of the Interior). In the second row, behind Blum and Thorez, (rolling a cigarette) is Edouard Dalladier (Parti Radical , defense minister).
No history to learn from: American working class consciousness is almost an oxymoron.
By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / September 19, 2008

Class-consciousness: a basic some have and some don’t.

The pinnacle triumph of French socialism was triggered when Stalin changed his international policy in 1934. From the Bolshevik Revolution onward, the leadership of the Soviet Union had insisted that all socialist parties follow their model. In France, conflict over this dictate came to a head at a Congress of the Socialist Party in December 1920. The decision was whether to join the Third International by endorsing Lenin’s “Twenty-one Points”, a statement of principles that was “a break with the wartime reformism [and] the adoption of methods similar to those of the Bolshevik Party”.

The result was a classic left sectarian split. The faction that dominated the congress became the French Communist Party. Leon Blum led the minority, which became the French Socialist Party. But strength at the congress did not accurately reflect strength on the ground. The Socialist Party soon proved it could win more votes in parliamentary elections and was stronger among union members. The split became rancorous with Communists commonly referring to Socialists as “social fascists” who didn’t understand “scientific socialism”. The Socialist believed Communists to be unpatriotic sycophants of Moscow.

Then fascism began its march across Europe. First, Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922 and initially earned widespread positive reviews. Then Hitler took over in Germany in 1933 and Franco initiated his right wing insurrection to overthrow the Spanish Republic in July 1936. It was mainly fear of a resurgent Germany that caused Stalin to change his mind. The new policy for the Third International directed member parties to form anti-fascist popular fronts that united all elements of the left under a common, reformist program, essentially the program of the Socialist Party, plus anti-fascism. The reunification of the socialists into "popular fronts" quickly led socialist led governments in Spain in 1935 and France in 1936, a first for both. For France, a country with a long history of vitriolic anti-Semitism, the Socialist leader, Leon Blum, was also the first Jewish Prime Minister. His ruling coalition was based on the legislative plurality of the combined Socialist and Communist Parties.

Immediately after Blum became prime minister, the country was swept by a huge wave of strikes, 12,000 of them, all in the private sector, 75% of which involved worker occupations of the workspace. Two million workers went out on strike in the middle of a depression regardless of the deep pool of unemployed. For the first time, the strikers knew that the government would not send in the troops.

On Sunday, June 7, 1936, the patronat, essentially the central committee of the capitalist class, met at Blum’s office with officials of the new government, plus Socialist Party, Communist Party and union leaders backed by the majority of the electorate and the strikers. It was not a fair fight. With the government on the side of an insurgent working class, the capitalist leaders felt largely helpless. In one afternoon, French workers won the right to organize unions, mandatory collective bargaining, union representation in the determination of workforce policy, a 15-17% wage increase, and amnesty for strike actions. The government also pledged to move instantly to pass legislation to establish the 40-hour week without loss of pay and two weeks paid annual vacations. Not surprisingly, membership in socialist parties and unions “rose by hundreds of thousands”. The French socialist movement probably won more in one Sunday afternoon as the US labor movement has won throughout its history.

This socialist victory has now been taught for generations by public school teachers, their union being a one of the most stalwartly socialist of French unions. A positive depiction of socialism’s achievements has been standard curriculum for French students since the end of WWII. Because of this general consensus, the great majority of French people are well aware of the benefits they, their parents and their grandparents have all received as a result of the actions of socialist movements; eventually including national healthcare, mass transportation, paid education, public housing, lengthy unemployment compensation, guaranteed pensions, the 35 hour week, a month’s paid vacation and self respect. Hence, the French have a relatively high degree of class-consciousness, an entrenched awareness of the very tangible benefits socialism has brought their society and them personally. Bourgeoisie and proletariat are, indeed, both French words.

In the United States, our basic problem is that this consciousness is negligible among American workers. They have never had their own socialist government. They have the only non-socialist labor movement in the world. Their unions, although weak, remain under continuous and unrelenting assault by the capitalist class, its media minions and government functionaries. Not surprisingly, American unions are today a shadow of their former limited selves, more a relic than a major force in American society. American capitalist hegemony has effectively fought the development of class-consciousness among American workers. That’s a lot to overcome.

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