RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Economist Gar Alperovitz Asks, 'What Then Must We Do?'

Rag Radio podcast: 
Political economist Gar Alperovitz,
author of 'What Then Must We Do?'

“Like a picture slowly developing in a photographer's darkroom, the potential elements of a new system, of something meaningful and very American, are beginning to emerge." -- Gar Alperovitz

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / May 30, 2013

Political economist Gar Alperovitz, whose new book is What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, May 10, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Gar Alperovitz here:


On the show, Alperovtitz talks with host Thorne Dreyer and The Rag Blog's Roger Baker about issues raised in his new book, What Then Must We Do?.

In the book, Alperovitz speaks about “why the time is right to democratize the ownership of wealth to strengthen our communities and our nation, through local cooperatives, worker-owned companies, and independent business, as well as larger publicly-owned enterprises and reinvigorated institutions.”

Alperovitz told the Rag Radio audience that "we are living in a systemic crisis, not simply a political crisis... You see that the long, long trends -- for 30 years or more -- simply don’t much change if you elect this politician or that politician."

"Over the last 30 years," he said, "real wages for most people have simply not moved up or down more than a few pennies. The top one percent has increased its income share over that 30-year span, from 10 percent to more than 20 percent. Over 30 years the top 1 percent has taken just about all of the gains of the economic system."

And, he added, "That’s extraordinary."

The new book, he says, documents "trend after trend after trend where the big picture keeps getting worse -- or nothing gets better. Poverty increases, the incarceration rate has gone up dramatically... CO2 production has gone up 30 percent... On many many fronts, the trends don’t much change, and things get worse, and that tells you that something deeper in the system is at work."

"And," Alperovitz said, "I don’t think its going to change until we actually begin slowly but steadily evolving... and moving towards what can only be called a different system in the United States, something different from corporate capitalism. And certainly different from state socialism or communism. Something that has an American flavor and development."

"And," he added, "the book suggests that, partly because of the pain levels, and because things aren’t working for people, if you look closely there’s a lot of developments that are going in a new direction. And a lot that the press certainly doesn’t report on."

Alperovitz believes that many encouraging things are happening largely under the radar in this country, including the burgeoning workers' cooperative movement and other public experiments that are addressing democratization of the economy.

"Like a picture slowly developing in a photographer's darkroom, the potential elements of a new system, of something meaningful and very American, are beginning to emerge," he writes.

According to Daniel Ellsberg, "For decades, Gar Alperovitz has been at the forefront of attempts to understand what could lie beyond our increasingly broken system of corporate capitalism," and his new book "offers by far the most serious, intellectually grounded strategy for system-changing yet to appear."

University of Texas economist James Galbraith calls Alperovitz's book a "cooperative and democratic manifesto," and says, "May his ideas and ideals flourish."

And Bill Fletcher Jr. wrote in a review of What Then Must We Do?, published on The Rag Blog, that Alperovitz "proceeds to identify actual examples of different struggles and projects that have been undertaken by progressives that show that a different way of organizing life and the economy is not only a great idea, but living reality."

Fletcher writes that, "The reforms proposed are both clear and compelling and, in many cases, achievable."

But he also suggests that Alperovitz's strategy as incomplete: "The struggle for structural reforms and survival presented by Alperovitz is essential in cornering the political Right and changing the 'common sense' of the U.S. political arena. But it is not enough to wound the rabid beast; one must ultimately bring it down."

According to Fletcher, "Alperovitz’s platform is at best one component in a much more long-term socialist strategy."

Gar Alperovitz has had a distinguished career as a historian, political economist, activist, writer, and government official. He is currently the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland; was co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative; and is a former Fellow of Kings College, Cambridge University, Harvard’s Institute of Politics, and the Institute for Policy Studies; and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution.

He is the author of critically acclaimed books including America Beyond Capitalism and The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, The Nation, and the Atlantic, among other popular and academic publications.

Also see Roger Baker's review of Alperovitz's earlier book, America Beyond Capitalism, at The Rag Blog, and listen to the podcast of our February 3, 2012, Rag Radio interview with Gar Alperovitz.

Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, May 31, 2013: Philosophy scholar Bill Meacham, author of How to Be an Excellent Human.
Friday, June 7, 2013: Mother Jones correspondent Tom Philpott on agricultural sustainability and the "Politics of Food."

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Harry Targ : Celebrate the 'Historical Revisionists' / 2

Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran, shown photographed in Cuba, wrote about a new era of monopoly capitalism.  Image from Fotopages.

Celebrate the 'Historical Revisionists' / 2

Revisionists argued that while security, ideologies, personalities of elites, and even human nature had some role to play in shaping policy, all of these forces were influenced in the end by economics. And economic interest shaped how political power was used.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / February 19, 2013

Second of a two part series.

The writings of 1960s historians who became known as the “revisionists” challenged traditional interpretations of the interests, goals, and ideology underpinning United States foreign policy. Historians such as William Appleman Williams, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas Paterson, and others who were discussed in the first part of this series, offered a compelling explanation for sixties activists and those that followed them about why United States foreign policy was as it was.

First, the revisionists saw fundamental connections between economics and politics. Whether the theoretical starting point was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, these historian looked to the underlying dynamics, needs, and goals of the economic system as sources of policy. And, these writers began with the assumption that economic interest infused political systems and international relations.

Revisionists argued that while security, ideologies, personalities of elites, and even human nature had some role to play in shaping policy, all of these forces were influenced in the end by economics. And economic interest shaped how political power was used.

Second, the behavior of dominant nation-states, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, was propelled by trade, investment, financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or cheap labor, and access to vital natural resources. Economic gain, in the end, drove the system of international relations. Sometimes economic gain required cooperation; other times it necessitated war.

Third, since the use of the word “capitalism,” in the depth of the Cold War, signified that the user was some kind of Marxist, the reality that capitalism had been the dominant economic system from the fifteenth century on was ignored by most scholars.

As more and more historians and social scientists employed the political economy point of view developed by the revisionists, it became apparent that as the economic system of capitalism changed over time, international relations also changed. Capitalist enterprises and their supporting states accumulated more and more wealth, expanded at breakneck speed, consolidated both economic and political power, and from time to time built armies to facilitate further colonization and control on a global basis.

Analysts, borrowing from Marx, wrote about the evolution of capitalism using analyses about the accumulation of capital and newer forms of the organization of labor. Some theorists wrote about the rise of capitalism out of feudalism, highlighting how primitive accumulation was based on the enslavement of peoples, the conquest of territories, and the primacy of the use of brute force.

The slave system led to increased production and the rise of a global economy based on trade. Capitalists traversed the globe to sell the products produced by slave and wage labor. This era of commercial capitalism was followed by the emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques, particularly a factory system that brought workers together under one roof for mass production, increased pressure to promote the sale of products in domestic and global markets.

By the 1870s, in a number of capitalist countries the accumulation of capital, in products and profit created enormous surpluses. These required new outlets for sale, additional ways to put money capital to work, and ever expanding concentrations of capital in manufacturing and financial institutions.

Late-twentieth century theorists wrote about a new era of monopoly capitalism. Inspired by Lenin’s famous essay on imperialism, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy argued in Monopoly Capital that a global economic system had developed in which most economic activities were controlled by small numbers of actors, multinational corporation, and banks.

Subsequently some theorists made a compelling case for the view that the new capitalism of the twenty-first century had become truly global, leading to the declining salience of the nation-state system from which it was launched.

It was the research contributions of the historical revisionists of the 1960s that overcame the historical amnesia about the connections between economic interests and international relations. In addition to analyses of economic and political trends they uncovered concrete cases of links between economics and politics. These included the influence of huge U.S. and British oil companies on the U.S.-managed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and the coup in Guatemala in 1954 after President Arbenz threatened to nationalize lands owned by the U.S.-based United Fruit Company.

The revisionists found long-term patterns of economic domination and foreign policy. They also uncovered the aforementioned specific cases where particular economic elites influenced foreign policy towards countries like Iran and Guatemala. And revisionists saw that the globalization of capitalism was threatened by the spread of nationalism and forms of socialism as a world force.

Fourth, the political economy approach regarded class structure as central to the understanding of the foreign policy of any nation. Since every society has class divisions, some classes dominate the political system at the expense of others.

In capitalist societies, those who own or control the means of production dominate the political life of the country. Therefore, while conventional analysts prioritize states as the most important actors in world affairs, political economists saw states and classes as inextricably connected. Most international relations scholars saw states as important to world affairs but it was political economists/historical revisionists who demonstrated the connection between states and classes.

Finally, revisionist historians who wrote from the lens of classes controlling the foreign policy process tended to take a “hegemonic” view of that control. Their analysis of the concentration of economic and political power was a critical contribution to theory and practice. However, they often did not factor resistance into their theoretical frame. The end result was a perspective implied by many that the United States was omniscient, all powerful, unbeatable, and unchangeable in its conduct.

After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War some analysts began to write particularly about the challenges that the hegemonic power the United States faced in the world, even from the Global South. But, in the main the historical revisionists developed a way of understanding international relations that was top down.

Many theorists and activists, therefore, remained intellectually ill-equipped to identify forces that resisted and constrained the drive for economic, political, and military hegemony throughout modern history. Lacking the more nuanced view of the drives for dominance and the resistance to it, activism sometimes shifted from radical enthusiasm to despair.

But in the end, contemporary analysts and activists owe a special debt of gratitude to those “historical revisionists” who offered a political economy explanation of why the United States role in the world (and before it other imperial powers) has been the way it was.

Those of us who analyze the United States and the international system should add to the important theoretical contribution of the revisionists recognition of patterns of resistance as they occur on a global basis and constitute an integral component of the way international relations works.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Celebrate the 'Historical Revisionists' / 1

Historian William Appleman Wiliams circa 1986. Image from Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections / Daily Barameter / The Nation.
Celebrate the 'Historical Revisionists' / 1

William Appleman Williams’ classic text, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, broke new ground in the early 1960s as opponents of the Cold War and the escalating Vietnam War policy began to challenge reigning orthodoxy.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog/ February 12, 2013

First of a two-part series.

The first modern organized opposition to U.S. global expansion began with the war on the Philippines in 1898. The Anti-Imperialist League, with such distinguished spokespersons as Mark Twain, decried United States expansion to Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. Later, critics of U.S. foreign policy, such as Eugene V. Debs, opposed President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter World War I in 1917. In the 1930s journalists and activists raised concerns about the United States role in world affairs, particularly its seeming indifference to the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany.

After World War II, skeptics about a U.S. policy that was leading to Cold War with the Soviet Union arose, coalescing around the third party presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. After President Truman won election in 1948, opposition to the direction the United States was taking in the world was steadily silenced. A virulent anti-communist repressive environment in academia, the media, and electoral politics ensued. By the 1950s analyses of United States foreign policy that focused on the U.S. as an imperial power virtually disappeared.

The Wallace candidacy which was soundly defeated was followed by the 1949 purge of 11 unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for their left-wing politics and during the 1950s anti-communist purges in radio, television, the movies and educational institutions. Labor organizers, cultural performers, educators, government employees and others tarnished with the charge of being “communists” lost jobs, livelihoods, and access to broad publics.

Academic fields were transformed to provide training grounds and ideological support for America’s mission in the world. In history and social science new scholarly works emphasized consensus versus class struggle, pluralist democracy rather than political elitism, and groups and political activity rather than class and class interests. Few remaining critical analysts of United States foreign policy highlighted economic interest, the pursuit of empire, or over-reaction to a Soviet threat.

However, some academic programs, such as the Department of History, University of Wisconsin, began to educate young scholars to examine the economic taproots of United States foreign policy. William Appleman Williams’ classic text, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, broke new ground in the early 1960s as opponents of the Cold War and the escalating Vietnam War policy began to challenge reigning orthodoxy.

Williams, for many budding anti-war activists, provided information about an American empire that had grown ever since the end of the civil war. He and his students connected U.S. empire building with the conquest of the North American continent, the slaughter of millions of Native people, the taking of large amounts of the land mass from Mexico, and global expansion from the Philippines to the Caribbean and Central America.

In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, The Contours of American History, and The Roots of the Modern American Empire, Williams elaborated on the rise of agricultural production and the need for the American economy to find markets overseas. In addition, domestic outlets for U.S. productivity had been capped with the end of the “frontier.” Drawing upon Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” U.S. leaders, he wrote, believed that a new global American empire was needed to sell products, secure natural resources, and find investment opportunities.

Williams claimed that the so-called “open door” policy toward China proclaimed in the 1890s signified what the U.S. imperial vision was to be. This policy resulted from the disintegration of and civil war in China which was used as an opportunity by European powers and Japan to establish their own spheres of influence on the Asian mainland.

In response to the nations that were carving up Chinese territory, the U.S. Secretary of State, John Hay, issued a warning to Europe demanding the right to have open access to markets in China. By implication the closing of such markets to U.S. goods might lead to confrontation.

For revisionists, such as Williams, the Open Door Notes illustrated the emerging U.S. global imperial vision. The demands that the world respect the U.S. right to penetrate economies everywhere would become the standard for the U.S. role in the world ever since.

Again, the driving force behind the image of the Open Door was economics. Some of Williams’ writings seemed to emphasize material reality, the needs of capitalism. Other of his writings implied that United States behavior was motivated by elite beliefs that markets were a necessity.

In the 1960s several newer scholars began publishing their research emphasizing the connections between the necessities of U.S. capitalism and expansion or the belief foreign policy elites had that such expansion was necessary for economic survival.

Gabriel Kolko who authored The Politics of War, and co-authored with Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: United States Foreign Policy From 1945 to 1954, presented in compelling, graphic, and precise terms the material underpinnings of United States Cold War policy. The Kolkos emphasized the threat to the West that international communism, particularly the example of the Soviet Union and popular Communist parties in Europe, represented to the reconstruction of a global capitalist empire after World War II.

According to the Kolkos and other revisionists, the expansion of socialism constituted a threat to capital accumulation. After World War II, wartime demand for U.S. products might decline, leaving in its wake economic stagnation and a return to the economic depression of the 1930s. The Marshall Plan, applauded as a humanitarian economic assistance program for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, was really a program to increase demand for U.S. products.

With an engineered international communist threat, military spending, another source of demand, would help maintain customers, including the government itself, for U.S. products. The idea of empire, stressed in Williams’ work, was underscored by the materiality of capitalist dynamics.

The Kolkos described the motivations of the Soviet Union and the United States. The former was not driven by a demonic ideology to dominate the world, they said. In addition, United States foreign policy was not driven by principle. As to the former: “The Soviets played an essentially opportunistic, non-ideological role in Eastern Europe’s initial postwar development. They cared little about the previous policies or the ideology of the men in power in the coalition governments so long as they were not anti-Soviet in the post war period.”

And the United States made "a sincere effort to secure the area for its framework of multilateral trade and an open door for American investment.” When this failed the Kolkos said, the United States “chose instead a policy of harassment and employed the image of an iron curtain to blur, for strictly political purposes, the variations in an area whose political experiences at the time ranged from pluralist Czechoslovakia to Bolshevik Yugoslavia.”

To expand the reach of post-war U.S. capitalism and oppose any resistance to it, the East-West conflict “became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“Celebrate the Historical Revisionists: Part 2” will discuss the enduring significance of their findings for understanding the United State' role in the world today.  

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Progressive Economist Robert Pollin, Author of 'Back to Full Employment'

Economist Robert Pollin. Image from Unionocity.
Rag Radio podcast:
Economist Robert Pollin discusss his
new book, 'Back to Full Employment'

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / January 31, 2013

Progressive economist, activist, and author Robert Pollin was Thorne Dreyer's guest Friday, January 25, 2013, on Rag Radio, a syndicated radio show produced at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas. The Rag Blog's Roger Baker joined us in the interview.

Pollin joined us to discuss issues raised in his provocative new book, Back to Full Employment, published by MIT Press. Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect writes that Pollin's "important new book... deserves a broad hearing. Today’s economy is so anemic that nothing less than a new commitment to full employment will get us out of the ditch dug by a generation of neo-liberalism.”

You can listen to the interview, here:

Robert Pollin is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and founding co-director of its Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). Polin has also worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, the International Labour Organization, and numerous nongovernmental groups on building high-employment green economies.

He is currently directing a project with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and has worked with the UN on employment creation and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, February 1, 2013: Writer and Musician Jesse Sublett, author of Gravedigger Blues, a post-apocalyptic detective eBook.

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Robert Jensen : There Are Marxists in India?

Prabhat Patnaik. Image from The Bruce Initiative on Rethinking Capitalism.
'There are Marxists in India?'
Economist Prabhat Patnaik on the global crisis

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / April 25, 2012

After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.

“There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.”

Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections.

Patnaik represents the best thinking and practice of those left traditions -- both the academic Marxism that provides a framework for critique of economics, and the political Marxism that proposes public policies -- which is why I was so excited to talk with him about lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis.

In the interview, conducted during a break in the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge’s “Futures of Finance” conference, I asked Patnaik two main questions: First, is there a “golden age” of capitalism to which we can return? Second, can we ever expect ethical practices from the financial sector of the global capitalist economy?

Before explaining why his answer to both questions is “no,” some background.

Prabhat Patnaik started his academic career in the UK, earning his doctoral degree at Oxford University and then teaching at the University of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1974 to teach at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi until his retirement in 2010.

He’s the author of several influential books, including The Value of Money, published in 2008. Patnaik-the-politician served as Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the state of Kerala from 2006-2011 and is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He regularly writes on economic issues in the Party’s journal and addresses trade union meetings.

In the United States, where people believe Marxism was buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall and communism can only mean Soviet-style totalitarianism, his political affiliations would guarantee a life on the margins. But India’s political spectrum is considerably wider, and left ideas have a place in the national political discourse there.

On the world stage, Patnaik brings an unusual perspective: An experienced economist with a history of political organizing; an Indian who is engaged in the political debates of the West; a leftist who is not afraid to critique the weaknesses of the left tradition.


The quixotic quest for a 'golden age'

Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, there’s been more and more nostalgia in the United States -- especially among liberals -- for the immediate post-WWII period, the so-called “golden age” of capitalism during which profits and wages rose, and unemployment was low.

This was the achievement of Keynesianism, the philosophy that unwanted market outcomes can be corrected through monetary and fiscal policy designed to stabilize an otherwise unstable business cycle. Primarily through “military Keynesianism” -- massive spending on wars and a permanent warfare state -- the U.S. government helped stimulate the economy when it went into inevitable periods of stagnation.

That worked until about the mid-1970s, when growth started to slow.

Whether or not that system was good for everyone (lots of people in the Third World, for example, were not particularly happy with it), the question remains: Can we go back to that strategy? Patnaik says that golden age was necessarily short-lived, as the pressure for global investment pushed nations to give up the ability to impose controls on capital. This globalization of finance made national Keynesian policies less relevant. At about the same time, steep increases in the price of petroleum generated even more capital in the oil states, which went looking for investment opportunities around the world.

Globalization -- this concentration of capital moving freely around the world -- meant that no single nation-state could go up against international finance. And with the global flow of goods, the large “reserve army of labor” (the unemployed and under-employed) in places like China and India meant that workers in the advanced industrial countries had less leverage. So, productivity continued to rise, but wages stagnated.

Patnaik said it’s important to see the contemporary crisis in that historical context.

“The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is certainly part of the problem but not the root cause of the problem today,” he said. “The immediate crisis it touched off helps make the underlying problem visible.”

If this financialization of the global economy, which has put so much power in so few hands, is at the heart of the problem, the question is clear: In the absence of a global state, who is going to control international finance capital?

If capital is going to be concentrated, can we at least make it behave?

If the power of finance capital can’t be diminished, is there a way to at least make it follow some sane rules to prevent the worst from happening again? Short answer: No.

“It’s important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled,” Patnaik said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are bound to fail.

“Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism escaped Keynesianism,” he said. New rules will suffer a similar fate, absent a force as strong as international finance capital to enforce the rules.

Although Patnaik often talks in detail about the complex workings of the global economy, he also articulates simple truths when that kind of straightforward analysis is needed. In doing so, he often draws on aspects of Marx’s analysis that the world tends to forget.

To make the point about the futility of talking about ethical norms in capitalism, Patnaik pointed to Marx’s insight that a capitalist is “capital personified.” Here’s the relevant passage from the first volume of Marx’s Capital:

[T]he possessor of money becomes a capitalist. … [A]nd it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.

What Marx described as “the restless never-ending process of profit-making” and “boundless greed after riches” reminds us that as actors on the economic stage we are less moral agents and more “capital personified,” relentless in our restlessness and bound to believe in an illusory boundlessness.

Society might be able make some moral claims on people with wealth if they were merely working in capitalism, but it’s more difficult to find common moral ground with “capital personified.”


What should people fight for?

If we can’t go back to business as usual, and there’s no reason to expect that new rules will solve our problems, what kinds of solutions are possible? Patnaik said that neither of the two most obvious responses to the financial crisis -- creating a surrogate global state to impose controls on finance, or “delinking” a nation’s economy from the global finance system -- are in the cards now. Even though capitalism is in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to produce movements that could make that possible.

Given his intellectual roots and political affiliation, it may seem surprising that Patnaik argues for organizing to bring back the liberal welfare-state policies that developed in the advanced industrial countries during the postwar period when Keynesian economics ruled.

“That is not about going back, which is impossible,” Patnaik said. “We have to go forward with new ideas.” The call for a more robust social safety net (protecting workers’ rights, unemployment insurance, social security, health insurance, etc.) isn’t new, but such policies can be a step toward new ideas, a transitional measure, he explained.

Rather than making those policies the final goal, as part of a more-or-less permanent accommodation with capitalism, they should be seen as a stepping stone toward radical change.

“We can work toward a reassertion of welfare state policies, not as an end but as a vehicle toward greater justice, as a way of making visible the inherent limitations of capitalism,” he said.

In addition to the limitations of capitalism, there also are ecological limitations we can’t ignore, he said, which means the goal can’t be raising India and China to material standards of the United States. Patnaik recognizes the need to adjust older socialist goals to new realities.

“The world simply has to be refashioned,” both in the Third World and in advanced capitalist countries, and specifically in the United States, Patnaik said, which means experiments in alternative ways of living that are not based on material measures.

“This really is a spiritual/cultural question, about what it means to live a good life,” he said, which should not be seen as foreign to socialism. “Marxism shouldn’t be reduced to productionism. The goal of socialism has always been human freedom, which is about much more than material wealth.”

“Gandhi talked about the ethical demands of nature, but I don’t like that phrase, being a socialist and anthropocentric,” Patnaik said with the hint of a grin. “But we do have to live within the limits of nature.”


The role of Marxism

It is easy to misjudge Patnaik from first impressions. Unlike many intellectuals, Patnaik does not immediately thrust himself into a discussion, and he’s soft-spoken both in conversation and from the podium. But when he does speak, his passion for justice comes through loud and clear. And, while Patnaik identifies very much as a communist, he also is quick to poke at some of the tradition’s platitudes.

“I just came from the (Communist) Party Congress, and I keep reminding everyone that they have to give up notions of a one-party State, of democratic centralism (the Leninist notion that party members are free to debate policy but must support the final decision of the party),” Patnaik said. “Democratic centralism always leads to centralism.”

If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, Patnaik said it’s important to reject any suggestion that a single perspective or party should dominate.

“The hegemony of finance throttles democracy. The hegemony of finance beats you into shape,” he said. If the goal is to resist that kind of hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn’t relevant, Patnaik said, but socialist principles are more relevant than ever.

“Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up critical thinking to imagine those alternatives,” he said. “The only way to challenge that global regime is mass mobilization.”

Patnaik has no off-the-shelf solutions to offer, and it’s difficult to reduce his thinking to slogans. At the age of 66, when many people hold on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn’t hesitate to say, “It’s time to invent.”

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics -- and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His books include All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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