In a country that declared the end of socialism, a major poll released in January 2016 revealed something unexpected. 43% of people under 30 in the US view socialism favorably compared to only 32% who view capitalism favorably. This shows that despite a concerted effort to smother the ideas of a man who died 133 years ago, the analysis put forward by Karl Marx remains extremely relevant today.

Marx is considered the most influential philosopher to ever live. With his co-thinker Friedrich Engels, he developed a way of understanding the world that has not only greatly contributed to the understanding of philosophy and economics but also history, anthropology, political science, biology and many other fields.

As a young man in the mid-19th century Marx embedded himself in the workers’ movement in his home country of Germany and in France from where he was exiled to London for his political activity. In addition to dedicating himself to the scientific study of capitalism and social change, Marx was also an organizer and he convened the very first international organization of socialists with the goal of overthrowing capitalism, known as the Communist League whose slogan was “Working men of all countries, unite.”

His work Capital is regarded as the premier dissection of the economic system we live under. His discovery of dialectical materialism redefined the world of philosophy and his rallying call the Communist Manifesto is considered the most influential political document in the world.

As the US Empire thrashes to survive the current global capitalist crisis, and with rejection of capitalism clearly growing among young people, I wanted to find out what it was about Marx’s work that has had such a profound impact, from peasants in Asia to miners in Africa, to workers in the US alike, so I talked to someone who has been teaching students and the public about Marxism for years, Dr. Richard Wolff, Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Marxism 101: How Capitalism is Killing Itself

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ABBY MARTIN: You’re a Marxist economist. Let’s start with the basics. What is Marxism? And what does it mean to have a Marxist lens with which to view the world?

RICHARD WOLFF: I think the best way to understand it is that the difference between Marxism and other things is that it wants to go to the root. It is radical in that sense. It wants to see these problems: homelessness, inequality, an economy that bounces around having a recession or depression every 3 to 7 years, a society that concentrates political power in the tiny number. These recurring problems of capitalism, Marxism says, are built into the system, and if you want to solve them you can’t do that within the framework of the system. You have to face the fact that this system itself is the problem, which is why Marxists tend to be people who abide by the idea that we can and we should do better than capitalism. We should reorganize society because that will be a better way to deal with all those problems than dealing with them individually as if you could solve homelessness or solve inequality by a quick fix, by a marginal adjustment. No, the problems are systemic, so you have to understand how capitalism as a system works in order to begin to work your way to a solution.

AM: Can you give a brief explanation of dialectical materialism?

RW: Marx was a philosopher, so being a rigorous and systematic thinker, he didn’t want to jump into economics, which is what he focused on, without grounding it in philosophy, so he begins as a student of Hagel, the great philosopher. When he begins his academic life—Marx began as a professor—he taught philosophy. His doctoral dissertation was on ancient Greek philosophy. He wasn’t an economist when he began. He ended up thinking he had to study economics because of how philosophy got him there. And to be quick in a way of an answer to your question, he comes out of a school of thought that believed that ideas were the supreme achievement of human beings. Ideas are what you get from the most refined reflection that the human brain can do. If you’re religiously oriented, ideas are what you get from God, from the spiritual realm, and so the world is really shaped by something prior to the world, namely ideas, so the notion is, sometimes called idealism, that the real world is the product of ideas, and if you want to really understand the real world, go to the ideas that make it what it is.

Religiously, in the beginning there was nothing. Then there was first God which is a non-material idea and that creates the world. In Genesis, in seven days God, a spirituality, creates the materiality of the world. Marx rejected that. For him the material is just as important as the ideal. If you want to see where the material comes from, it is shaped by ideas. But here comes his radicalism. It runs the other way too. The ideas don’t come from nowhere. They come out of the real world. The ideas we have as people have to do with the real material problems we have as human beings, and how we solve them. Where do we get our food? Where do we get our shelter? How do we get protection as little children from the elements from our parents? All of these real material matters of life and survival are shaping our ideas every bit as much as our ideas shape the reality. Dialectical materialism is the name for a point of view that says if you want to understand the world, you need to look at how ideas shape the material, but the other way too, and the two interact. That’s the way to see the world, and for that reason when it came to explaining the problems of capitalism, he never could and never did suggest it’s all because of the ideas of people about capitalism. It’s the real way human beings make their food, solve their clothing problems, their relationship problems, that shape their ideas as much, and he was going to analyze capitalism through that lens of the interaction of ideas and concrete material reality back and forth.

AM: Marxists take a particular view of history called historical materialism. How does the current era of capitalism fit into the long history? I think you’ve mentioned this before—how this is just the latest chapter in a long history of economic development.

RW: The basic idea is that every economic system has in it conflicting forces. The language in Marxism is internal contradictions. The system has in it problems it is constantly struggling with because they are built into the system, and for long periods of time it finds solutions, but in the end, historical materialism says, the internal contradictions become unmanageable, and then there’s a kind of explosion. The system dies, and a new one is born, so we had slavery, for example, in various parts of the world. It was born. It evolved. It had its contradictions. For example, there was the contradiction that the only way a slave system can continue is if you replace the slaves that reach old age and die. That became a big problem for many slaves societies, so eventually slavery couldn’t solve its problems and it died, replaced by feudalism in Europe which went through a parallel process, and then it blew up because it couldn’t solve its problems. So historical materialism begins to look at capitalism through the same lens. What are the internal contradictions? How do they bedevil the system? What solutions, for a while, had they found? When and where might we get to a level of internal contradiction that makes the system tremble, makes it vulnerable? And at that point, if revolutionaries can see and understand what’s going on, they can intervene to move to the next system, to get beyond this. Just like rebels overthrew slavery, rebels overthrew feudalism. The expectation of Marx was that capitalism would generate the contradictions, then the tensions, then the failed solutions that would then bring into being the rebels with the ideas of criticism, Marx himself being one of those, who would eventually move to the next system.

To illustrate it as concretely as I can, let me give you an example of the kind of contradiction Marx found in capitalism that has been crucial for everybody else. And I pick it because it’s so relevant right now in the United States and around the world. Every capitalist… I think most of the folks watching know this, just from their personal life… every capitalist is always trying to either make more money or survive competitively by saving on his labor costs. One capitalist does it by substituting machines for working people, automating, getting a computer to do what he used to have fifty people do etcetera. Another capitalist does it by trying to get cheaper workers in place of more expensive ones, hiring women, if they are less expensive, to do the job that they used to pay men more for, hiring immigrants rather than native folks, moving to another part of the world where wages are much lower. We all know that. So capitalists are always trying to save on labor costs because they can make a better profit if they do that, but here comes the contradiction. If all capitalists are reducing the number of workers they pay, or reducing the pay they give to their workers, what will result is that the working people have less and less money, and if they have less and less money they can’t buy what the capitalists are producing to sell. The capitalists therefore are destroying themselves, but they have no choice. They have to save on the labor outlay, and then that comes back and bites them in the rear end because there’s no demand. You’ve been so successful becoming rich as a capitalist, but you’ve killed yourself.

These kinds of contradictions for Marx are the beginning of the end of a system. It papers it over. For example, when people couldn’t buy in the 1970s, the capitalist system kept going anyway. How did it do that? How did it keep going when the people didn’t have enough money from their wages to buy? The solution was credit. We loaded the world up with house credit: your mortgage, car payment credit (nobody buys a car except by paying on credit), credit cards, which didn’t exist before the 1970s for anything but traveling businessmen, and a small number of them, and then when that was not enough, we loaded up for the first time in American history, an entire generation of students who can’t get a degree without loading up with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. We kept this system going. People could buy stuff even though their wages didn’t pay for it by borrowing, and in 2008 the predictable happened. It turned out your fix only lasts for a while. You really have to ask this, in a way that many of us as Marxists haven’t done for most of our lives: the problems of capitalism now are so severe, so systemic, so global, that we’re beginning to wonder whether this system is going to find a way out. The Marxists are not the only ones wondering whether this system is coming to an end. The people on the other side of the political fence are very worried too.

AM: You have billionaires writing op-eds: “The pitchforks are coming for the plutocrats!” because they know what’s coming. Let’s talk about the bubbles. You talk about the housing bubble, and I think this is a really interesting indication. The housing crisis, the crisis of overproduction, the fact that we have more [empty] houses than we do homeless people, but because you have this crisis of overproduction, too much of something was produced and people couldn’t utilize it. Talk about that concept and why this is an inescapable phenomenon under capitalism.

RW: Starting in the 1970s, American businesses began to have what I like to call a eureka moment. They realized that in the West, North America, Western Europe and Japan, a hundred, two hundred years of capitalism had built up impressive factories, offices and stores, but they were built up in the places where capitalism was born, Western Europe, North America and Japan. That’s where they had concentrated everything and that’s where they had drawn workers in off the countryside to become urban, industrialized working classes, and along the way the workers, noticing how productive capitalism was since they did the work, demanded for themselves a rising standard of living. So roughly from 1820 to 1970, particularly in the United States, but elsewhere, wages rose. That’s why over that time capitalists were doing so well that they could raise the wages of their workers and still make out like bandits, so it was a system in which people began to get the idea capitalism works. It delivers the goods because it raises wages. You have to not look at what was happening where most people in the world lived—Asia, Africa, Latin America—because for them the situation was horrible, but if you concentrated on where capitalism was born, you could fool yourself into thinking, “Wow, this is a system that works.” And capitalists, of course, and the people who like it, celebrated all of that.

Then in the 1970s capitalists had this eureka moment. They said to themselves, “Wait a minute. We are in North America, Western Europe and Japan where the wages are now very high. Workers are now very happy, but why are we here?” In the rest of the world which has been savaged by the growth of capitalism in those privileged areas, wages are very low. So in this eureka moment capitalists said, “What are we doing here in Western Europe, North America and Japan? It’s much more profitable if we produce in China, India and Brazil.” And there begins what we’re still in the middle of: the exodus, the abandonment of the places of origin of capitalism by the capitalists, so there’s a massive move to China, India, Brazil and all those places, producing what? Well, what every capitalist wants, which is to make a bundle, so they build big factories imagining that they can sell all of this stuff like they used to, but they forgot something. If you go from high wages in the United States to low wages in China, the bottom line is that the people earning wages are earning a lot less than they used to. It’s not just that they’re not Americans; they’re Chinese, but they can’t buy back what you’re building. They can’t manage to consume what you have the capacity to produce. Right now China is slowing down. It’s scaring the whole world, but it’s not China that’s slowing down. It’s the inability of China to sell to the world because the wages of the world’s workers have been depressed now for years as we move out of Western Europe, North America and Japan into these lower… and the system totters as it encounters a very old contradiction in its current form for which they have no solution. And right now when it’s happening on a global scale… Europe is having it. North America is having it… Japan. These are the centers of capitalism. They’re in the most trouble right now and they don’t see a way out, and I don’t either, which makes it possible for the first time in my life to begin to see a capitalism that is in fundamental, shaking difficulty, and if I were to explain to someone why you get bizarre politics unlike what we’ve had for a century, I’d say it’s because of this.

And here in the United States you see the kind of theatrical buffoonery, but there’s more to it. Why is Trump such a character in the Republican Party? Why is that party literally tearing itself apart? Because it can’t cope. And even the Democratic Party [can’t cope], suddenly confronted with a socialist who isn’t marginalized simply because he gives himself the name “socialist.” In fact, it makes him attractive. What Bernie Sanders is proving is that the interest in socialism has captured millions of Americans.

AM: So I think a lot of people are aware of socialism, now especially since you have a self-proclaimed democratic socialist running for president, but they don’t actually understand what it means. I think they’re taking little bits and pieces—free health care, free education… Talk about the means of production and how a socialist economy would actually be structured.

RW: They came up with the following idea: that the problem of capitalism is two fundamental things. One, that private individuals own the means of production. They own the land. They own the factories. They own the stores, the machinery, and the people, the owners, are really a very small part of the population, 1%, 2%, 5%, maybe even 10%, although rarely did it get that high. But that means the vast majority of people are never part of the owners, and the basic socialist idea was if you allow a small number of people to control the means of producing all the goods and services we all need to survive, they’re going to use that control to make the system work for them, and they’re not going to worry about the rest of us. In other words, it’s a recipe for a society that produces wealth for the top 5 to 10%, but not for everybody else. It gives power, political and other power, to those at the top, and not to everybody else, so the socialist idea was this is fundamentally unjust, fundamentally undemocratic. This is what’s wrong with capitalism, and how do you solve it? You make collective ownership, not private. The society as a whole should own the means of production—the factories, the offices, the stores, so that they are good for everybody, so that what they produce is distributed roughly equally, so that the influence on the decisions are made social. It’s why it’s called socialism. It’s the society that should own. It focuses on the workplace. Its idea is that the way you make sure that the government never again becomes an institution over the people, but rather simply an instrument of the people, is by making sure that at the base of society, where people live and work, the wealth, the productive capability, is in their hands.

If you want the slogan of 21st century socialism, it’s this: democratize the enterprise. End this process where there is a handful of people who make the decisions. In most American corporations… and corporations do the bulk of the business in modern capitalism… a tiny group of what are called major shareholders, the people who have big blocks of shares, select the board of directors. 1% of Americans own 3/4 of the shares. It’s highly concentrated. A tiny number of people, the 1%, own the bulk of the shares. How do you run a corporation? At the top is something called a board of directors, usually 15 to 20 people. How do you get on the board of directors? There’s an election every year to get on that board, and the way the election works is if you own a share of stock in the company, you get one vote. If you have 10 shares, you get 10 votes. If you own a million shares, you get a million votes. If you have no shares, that’s how many votes you get. There is no pretense of democracy, so if a handful of people own the bulk of the shares, they control everything. They select the 15 or 20 people on the board of directors. The board of directors decides what the company produces, how the company does it, where the company is located, and what’s done with the profits. Everybody helps produce the profits. The employees have to live with the decision, but have no influence on it. It is the opposite of democracy, and if you don’t have democracy at the workplace, you can’t ever have it real in politics, either, because those at the top will buy the political system, something which we see in the United States so starkly every day that everyone knows.

If workers took over a factory that had a workers’ co-op instead of a top-down [management], and the workers together decided what to do with the profits, do you think they would give a few executives $25 million so they would have more money than they would know what to do with while everybody else has to borrow money to send their kids to college? It’ll never happen. Do you think a collection of workers, say 400 in a factory, considering that you could make more money if you moved production to China… Are they going to vote to get rid of their own jobs? They’re not going to destroy their community by having an empty factory. They’re not going to deprive their local government of the tax revenues to run the schools and the hospitals and they’re not going to deprive themselves of jobs. So what we’ve had in the last 40 years—all those jobs leaving—they would never have left if it had been the collective decision of the workers where this production is going to take place.

AM: And I wanted you to also just counter another argument that I hear constantly: “I earned it! We earned this money!”

RW: The best way to describe this is to go back to Karl Marx and his analysis of capitalism so that we all understand what earning is about. Let’s imagine you are a person looking for a job, and I’m the employer that you’re looking to get hired by, so you come in and you sit down. You fill out your application form and I look at you, and I describe to you the kind of work we’d like to have you do. You come, you do your 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, and you’ll sit over there and you’ll do this kind of work. And we get through all that. You’re OK with that, and then we get to that big question: how much are you going to get paid? And let’s say we go back and forth and we agree on $20 an hour, so I’m going to pay you $20 an hour, and at this point Marx enters with a smile on his face and says, “I’m now going to show you, the reader, that when that deal is done, something is going on that you actually know, but you don’t want to face, but I’m going to show it to you. When I hire you for 20 bucks an hour, I know that for every hour that you give me your work, your brains, your muscles, I’m going to have more stuff to sell at the end of the day because you were added to my work force. You’re going to help me produce more goods or more services, or better quality goods and services than I would have if I didn’t employ you, so I’m going to say to myself, “It costs me to get Abby $20 an hour. What do I get out of it?” I’m going to have the output that Abby adds by her labor. That has got to be more than 20 bucks, so the only way I’m going to hire you for $20 an hour is if you produce more in the hour than I give you. So when you feel in a vague way at the end of the day as you walk home that you’re being ripped off, you’re absolutely right. Or in Marx’s language you’re exploited, so what does the capitalists say? “I earned it.” No you didn’t. You just ripped people off.

The way most corporations work is 4 times a year they take the profits they’ve made in the preceding 3 months and they distribute a portion of them to their shareholders. These distributions are called dividends, so if you own a lot of shares because, say, you inherited them from your grandma, or you stole money and bought them on the stock market. There are lots of ways of getting them, but if you have them, 4 times a year you go to your mailbox in the morning and you get an envelope and you tear it open and inside is a check for your share of the profits that have been distributed to shareholders. For rich people this is millions of dollars. They have all that money. What did they do exactly to earn that money? Nothing. Those people are going to tell me they earned? Do they ever set foot in the factory? No. Do they have any idea what this company does? No. They don’t care! They are simply sitting there collecting. Well let’s now do a little logic. If there are people like shareholders who get a lot of goods and services they didn’t help produce, then there must be elsewhere in that system people who produce what they do not get, so that means if we allow that, we are saying to some people your job is to produce a lot more than you get so that these people can get a lot more than they produce. Marx stands up and says, “I rest my case. This system sucks.”

AM: Famous socialist Rosa Luxemburg once said that it’s either socialism or barbarism. Here we are 100 years later. In what ways have you seen that play out today?

RW: One: the 62 richest people in the world, most of whom are Americans… not all of them are, but most of whom are US citizens… the 62 richest people together have more wealth than the bottom half of the population of this planet—roughly 3.5 billion people. That’s beyond obscene. I don’t have an adjective that captures this, but I can describe what it means. If you look at all the statistics of the World Health Organization, the bottom half of our population are people who die way earlier than they need to. Why? Because their diets are no good, or they don’t have enough food in the first place. Or they can’t get to a clinic. They have little problems that are easily solved by modern medical methods. It’s unspeakable what happens to the lower half. If we took half the wealth of the richest, they would still be the richest, and if we made it available to the bottom half, it would transform their lives, literally. Now there is no moral or ethical justification for this situation.

Number 2: it is well known all over the world, despite a few deniers that are still around, that the way capitalism has evolved has compromised the ecology and environment of this planet, literally threatening us with 27 diseases and 57 losses of fundamental resources. This is crazy to permit this to go on. This is another way capitalism confronts us with barbarism.

And the third one is—and here the United States plays a particular role—is this notion that the Western world, the world that has the wealth and the military might, is in a war, an endless war against something as vague as terrorism, whatever exactly that is. And this is used to justify an endless use of resources not available for people’s needs but to combat one enemy, real or imagined, after another, so we literally confront an endless military warfare state, a cataclysmic destruction of our natural environment, and a level of inequality that has no justification.

Our entire economic situation would have been completely different the last 30 years if we had had a movement, if we had had organizations to make these demands because I haven’t the slightest doubt that the majority of Americans will support all of them.

It used to be at this point in an interview I would have to look at a skeptical interviewer saying, “Ah, Americans support this kind of socialistic stuff?” I don’t have that problem anymore because Mr. Bernie Sanders has done me a favor. By throwing his hat in the ring in the democratic primary and running around the country, as he’s been doing as a socialist, he has proven for all Americans to see that the support for something other than capitalism has now captured millions of Americans, and we don’t know how many millions because that still has to be shown. And the argument that was heard when Occupy Wall Street emerged in 2011: this is a tiny group of people who don’t represent anything—all that’s gone because Mr. Sanders has said, “Well, let’s see.” Let’s see how many people are critical of the 1% vs 99. How many people will support a candidate who says that every day and even accepts the label “socialist”? And the answer is millions.

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Transcript by Dennis Riches

(A quick note to US readers: left and right in this piece do not refer to the American liberal-conservative spectrum – both of which are considered neoliberal – but to the broader left-right spectrum as traditionally conceived, ranging from far-left communism/socialism to far-right fascism.)

It’s been an eventful few weeks for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), also known as the Zapatistas, midway through their 20th anniversary year.

First, Jose Luis Solís López, also known as “Compañero Galeano”, was murdered by a paramilitary group with ties to the Mexican government, which also injured fifteen other Zapatistas and destroyed a school, clinic and water system in the same attack. The attack then prompted the Zapatistas to change strategies, with well-known spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos stepping down.

These developments serve to remind us of the EZLN’s status as, in the words of Chris Hedges, “the most important resistance movement of the last two decades” – important enough to warrant the rather violent attention of the Mexican government and its paramilitary associates.

The EZLN, a group based in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, launched an armed rebellion against the Mexican government on January 1, 1994 as an act of protest against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which entered into effect on the same day. However, instead of attacking the Mexican state and society and causing endless bloodshed, the Zapatistas set up a system of self-governance in the territory it controlled, creating autonomous communities each with its own health clinic and schools to fill the void that the Mexican government had actively sought to widen in the interests of US and Canadian multinational corporations.

What the Zapatistas demonstrate is a vision of the notion articulated in the motto of the World Social Forum: another world is possible. They provide evidence that contradicts the belief that the status quo under neoliberal capitalism, in which the haves have it all and the have-nots are left to fend for themselves, is not only the best system but indeed the only viable system. The Zapatistas represent a victory for the oppressed peoples of the world over the powerful political and economic interests that rule over them. But more importantly, they represent a victory for the values of egalitarianism, compassion and solidarity – what I call the left-wing ethos. A victory over the idea that those who rule have the divine right to further their own interests, regardless of the consequences for the rest of humanity – an attitude that epitomizes what it means to be “right-wing”.

Marko Attila Hoare boils down the left-right spectrum to a simple distinction: that “the left supports the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor while the right opposes it”. But we can remove the entire spectrum from politics entirely to expose the values that underlie them: lefties value social equality, whereas righties value social hierarchy. Why, though? The answer lies in our individual worldview. As a self-identified lefty, I consider it more than possible for all of us to peacefully coexist in the world and have all of our common needs met, if (and only if) that’s the goal that we all work together to try to achieve. In a left-wing worldview, it’s therefore neither necessary nor ethical for us to undermine others in order to benefit ourselves. In other words: compassion, not competition. Without claiming complete objectivity, a right-wing worldview revolves around the idea that we live in a dog-eat-dog world in which the best we can do is fend for ourselves and get our share before someone else takes it.

Human history has been almost entirely dominated by the right-wing worldview. It’s been an endless cycle in which privileged groups have taken turns dominating each other in a seemingly eternal battle between the powerful and the powerless. From the imperial conquests of the ancient world through European colonialism, the two World Wars and Soviet communism to modern neoliberal capitalism, it’s always been the same story, flowing through different chapters but reaching the same inevitable conclusion: Oligarchy. It’s a story familiar to the Zapatistas as well as countless other sites of confrontation between the haves and the have-nots in recent years. The hierarchical, conflict-ridden relationship today between those who rule the world and those who are ruled, between corporate bosses and workers, between autocrats and their citizens, between the rich and the poor, is a continuation of this cycle of domination.

The right-wingers among us will assert that history simply reflects human nature, that it is in our nature to be maliciously selfish rather than compassionate, that this is the best we can do, or even that there’s nothing wrong with the world we’ve created. But their argument fails to acknowledge that the dominant worldview of the past has created the world we know today. As an example, the domination of the indigenous populations of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania by European invaders and colonizers was not an inevitable result of human nature, but rather a product of widespread extreme right-wing beliefs such as Manifest Destiny and the white man’s burden. Similarly, the dominant worldview of the present will determine the world of tomorrow. A child raised in a society that values getting ahead at all costs is encouraged is far more likely to act accordingly than one raised in a society that values empathy and compassion. The dominant worldview in a society is therefore not inherent in human nature but in fact reinforces itself.

Right-wing theorists have a crucial role to play in promoting their worldview, too. “Realist” international relations scholars, capitalist economists, or simply those at the top of the social hierarchy love to tell us how it’s in our nature to always act in self-interest. They tell us that “greed is good” and that we all collectively benefit from constantly undermining each other, as ludicrous as that may sound. Yet, for the most part, even despite their contempt for those below them in the social hierarchy, even right-wingers behave in an incredibly left-wing manner towards those closest to them. And that’s because humans organized themselves into what we nowadays call “societies” precisely so that we could all benefit from being interdependent. That interdependence required us to develop compassion to allow us to survive in a society. The “savage” who undermines and betrays everyone he or she comes into contact with doesn’t survive for very long and, sociopaths aside, doesn’t find much happiness either. Surely we as a species are capable of applying that same logic to our everyday actions in today’s world so that we can all thrive at the same time instead of striving to be the “last man standing”?

Roman Krznaric couldn’t have put it any better: we need an empathy revolution. We need to turn the right-wing world that we live in into a left-wing one in which we recognize our fellow human beings as worthy of a livelihood and worthy of happiness and, in return, receive the same recognition. As the economic crisis in Greece goes to show, humans are capable of compassion even in the most desperate of situations: rather than stealing from each other, many Greeks are stepping in to provide the services that their government has failed to deliver and those that some of their compatriots can no longer afford, from food to medical services to street lighting – all for free. Similar systems have been devised in Serbia as well as in Macedonia, where numerous bakeries have introduced “solidarity baskets” to allow customers to buy an extra bun or piece of bread to leave to those who can’t afford to eat. And many customers indeed comply.

But showing empathy on our part only does half the job. While it spares those around us from our own potential malice, what it doesn’t do is liberate ourselves from those who have their hands around our necks. That involves critically examining and rethinking the false ideologies and pseudo-theories invoked by the powerful for the sole purposes of justifying their own dominating behaviour. After all, ideologies are all too often used as pretenses to mask the hidden agendas of those who assert them rather than a reflection of the values that they truly believe – in other words, purposeful bullshit. We mustn’t forget how the left-wing idea of communism was employed by self-described revolutionaries to justify right-wing oligarchic tyranny. Similarly, we can’t afford to look away when libertarians cite the dogma of enriching big businesses at the cost of everyone else, or when rich countries proclaim free trade to justify infiltrating the economies of developing countries. We’ve been raised to regard Soviet-style communism as tyranny and Western capitalism as freedom, but we need to recognize both for what they are: systems of oppression backed up by pseudo-theories that have no empirical basis and only serve those who preach them.

The empathy revolution needs a theoretical and social component. Neither pacifism nor confrontation can do the job alone. We need to channel our discontent into action by adopting the autonomist ethos of the Zapatistas to build the society we want. We need to form cooperatives and make use of cryptocurrencies, local currencies, open source, open knowledge, peer-to-peer practices, the sharing economy and countless other methods of grassroots social and economic organization the mainstream media doesn’t want us to hear a word about. What these methods all have in common is that they’re all built on the basis of cooperation and collaboration rather than malice and treachery – exactly what society needs and what the oligarchs don’t want.

Modern society is diseased and needs treatment. It’s only when we renounce one-upmanship in favour of cooperation and collaboration that we’ll be able to construct a society not for the few at the top, but for all of us. After all, isn’t fulfilling our mutual needs the whole point of even living in a society? It’ll require a good deal of empathy and creativity, as well as plenty of critical thinking to distinguish truth from pseudo-theory and other purposeful bullshit. Left-wing and right-wing are no longer a question of politics, but a question of social values and social justice. The right-wing worldview has failed us, and as the Zapatistas have shown, another world is certainly possible. It’s time to recognize that, for the purposes of redeeming ourselves from perpetual oligarchy, left is right.

Written by Ming Chun Tang, photo by flickr user aeneastudio

http://clearingtherubble.wordpress.com/

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Jacobin Magazine’s Bhaskar Sunkara on Breaking the Set

How the Zapatistas’ Success Threatens Global Status Quo

Ask a group of people what form of government the United States has and you’ll be met with varied replies. Some insist it’s a democracy, others maintain it’s a republic, democratic republic, or constitutional republic.

Technically, the US Government was founded as a constitutional republic where representatives are democratically elected. However, this definition only typifies the government at its inception. As history has shown in abundance, governments are dynamic—they rise, fall and transform with time. When this occurs gradually, it’s not always clear that a fundamental and often dangerous transition has taken place.

In recent years, the idea that the US government is now an oligarchy, or corporatocracy, has gained traction. An oligarchy is a government “in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique.” A corporatocracy, therefore, defines that dominant class as consisting of corporate interests.

It’s not hard to see why this term is increasingly being applied to the US, where corporate lobbying is used to buy political leverage, and Congress acts as the fulcrum to carry out this advantage with legislation. The incomes of the super wealthy have grown exponentially in relation to that of the average citizen, and their ability to displace the average voice has grown in tandem.

Even elite institutions are putting out research to back this claim. A recent study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University called “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” measured influence on policy by examining 1,779 policy issues occurring between 1981-2002. Four groups were considered in the analysis: average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest groups, and corporate interest groups, concluding (emphasis added):

“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The study alone doesn’t definitively prove corporate rule, and its authors admit their analytical test should be interpreted in a “tentative and preliminary” fashion. However, absence of “smoking-gun” proof does not suggest absence of oligarchic rule. The empirical data clearly shows that the US government has ceased to represent the people in favor of economic elites.

Examples of corporate hegemony abound:

*The Affordable Care Act was written and implemented by Elizabeth Fowler, former Vice President of Public Policy and External Affairs at WellPoint, the nation’s largest health insurance provider. No surprise, the legislation mandated that everyone purchase private health insurance, inking into law a huge advantage for the industry. One more trip through the revolving door returned her to the pharmaceutical industry to reap the rewards.

*State initiatives for mandatory labeling of GMO foods have been repeatedly stamped out by the propaganda boot of the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) lobbying group, headed by Monsanto and DuPont, despite 91% of public support for GMO labeling (see Initiative 522 in Washington, Prop 37 in California). In May, Vermont passed a GMO labeling bill, only to be immediately sued by the GMA in an attempt to block the law from being implemented. If this wasn’t enough, these giants, plus Koch Industries, are now attempting to preempt the chaos of people knowing what they’re eating with federal legislation to supersede state labeling laws.

*The government bailout of “too big to fail” banks after the housing collapse transferred massive wealth from the taxpayers to the banks, with no disclosure of where the money was going and no arrests for anyone involved in the lead-up to the crisis. In fact, the US Treasury approved executive bonuses for bailed-out bank CEOs, while millions of Americans foreclosed on their homes.

*Bills overtly written by corporate lobbyists constitute a staggering proportion of legislation passed, as exemplified by an analysis of California’s 2007-2008 legislative period. Furthermore, lobbyists are de-registering from the system, limiting the ability to keep track of the extent of corporate influence.

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders confronted Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen with statistics suggesting the US had shifted from a capitalist democracy (another misnomer) to an oligarchic form of government. Yellen replied that the statistics shared by the Senator greatly concern her. However, in a deluge of irony, her solution was that these concerns should be brought to the policymakers; the same policymakers seated at the crux of this problem. Because if Congress won’t listen, try asking Congress.

Face it—we live in a corporatocracy.

Consistently low approvals of Congress and the popularity of the Occupy Wall Street movement suggest the average person grasps the nature of the problem, but the magnitude of the corruption hasn’t yet seeped into the public consciousness. Only six corporations control 90% of what Americans see, hear and read, which adds to the disconnect between what the government is doing and what people perceive it as doing on their behalf. Many prefer to see each act of corruption as an isolated incident, rather than a series of interrelated and escalating incidents reflecting a severe systemic deficiency. This cognitive dissonance must be addressed head-on if we ever want to pry ourselves from the government’s corporate clutches.

Written by Marc Frey for Media Roots, Photo by Adbusters

The act of giving to charities has become synonymous with creating a better world. Yet charities have also infiltrated our society, soliciting donations with constant advertisements.

Of course, the act of giving, purportedly for selfless reasons, results in good feelings and perhaps does help build schools or hospitals in some communities. But what are the larger consequences of the charity industrial complex, particularly of international charities that operate in the developing world?

It is oftentimes Non-Governmental Organizations [NGOs] such as Save the Children or Ducere Foundation that serve as charities. The number of NGOs has risen drastically over the past few decades, and now span across various categories – BINGOs [Business-friendly or Big International NGOs], DONGO [Donor Organized NGO], QUANGO [Quasi-Autonomous NGO], INGO [International NGO], and so on. First coined in 1945 by the United Nations, NGO is defined as a “not-for-profit group, principally independent from government, which is organized on a local, national or international level to address issues in support of the public good.”

There are polarizing views about the NGO industry – some regard it as groups of ‘do gooders’ that promote liberal democracy, while others see it as imperial spreaders of Eurocentric hegemony. NGOs have always been a continuation of imperial power, being created and staffed with colonial administrators in the wake of countries winning their independence. Today’s neoliberal economic modality ensures the global elite to safeguard their capital, and therefore, it’s pertinent to understand the role of the NGO industry within this terrain of power.

Neoliberalism is rooted in the perverse notion that the market and monetization are neutral and natural indicators of social needs, which has resulted in mass privatization of previously state-operated services such as health, education, and military intelligence, in addition to the deregulation of trade barriers in order to enhance the mobility of capital. This toxic ideology usurped the previous ideological hegemon of state-led economics after a series of events equated the ‘free market’ with ‘freedom’ – the 1973 oil crisis, the 1979 Volcker shock and the decline of the Soviet Union. It has since been egregiously applied as a ‘one recipe fits all’ economic model, oftentimes being imposed on developing countries in exchange for debt relief by international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

One component of neoliberalism is the restructuring of the state – deemed to be inherently corrupt – into a neoliberal one. The state’s previous role under the Keynesian (state-led) economic model was to serve as a developmental actor in providing social services. It was expected to provide electricity, healthcare, education, telecommunications, and other basic services. Neoliberalism’s assault on the state has shrunk its role into simply a managerial one, in order to ensure deregulation and advance privatization.

NGOs fit into the narrative by becoming the primary providers of social services like education and healthcare. Although it appears to be the solution to governments not sufficiently providing for their people, it’s a short-term remedy that doesn’t address long-term needs and how constituents ultimately need to advocate for themselves.

While it’s unfair to umbrella all NGOs with the same depiction, most international NGOs encompass a Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy. They are subjected to neoliberal-dictated confines which marginalize the poor, yet (innocently or not) seek to provide much needed services to the poor. The result is a de-radicalized populous, less likely to advocate for state solutions to long-standing geopolitical issues due to the ideological restructuring of the market, the naturalization of NGO services, and the normalization of geopolitical issues as being terminal and requiring the aid-industry to continue its band-aid solutions. This very complex construction of the NGO industry as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ apolitical third sector ultimately serves to negate any space for local alternatives to neoliberalism to grow.

In 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees [UNRWA] was established by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) to provide relief and work programs for Palestinian refugees. The organization was set up as a temporary solution to serve the Palestinians until UN Resolution 194, which facilitates the right to return, takes effect. Because Resolution 194 continues to fail to be implemented, the UNRWA is continuously rewarded, and now provides a variety of social services, including health and education.

NGOs have been ordained as ‘bottom up’ development actors and representatives of the people. Yet the UNRWA’s existence as a temporary provider for over fifty years serves to naturalize its own services while normalizing the geopolitical issue surrounding the occupied territories. Its assertion to be apolitical is contradictory, because the existence of an apolitical actor in a political sphere is ultimately politically influential. The perpetual renewal of the UNRWA’s mandate depoliticizes the necessity to legitimize Resolution 194, that is, the right to return.

Additionally, Israel continues to be exempt from international law as an occupying authority, as denoted by the 1907 Hague Regulations and the Fourth Geneva Convention. Nearly all of the responsibility that the occupier has to its occupied population are negated by Israel, including: the confiscation of private property, the condition to ensure public order and safely, and the the responsibility to ensure public health and food to the population under occupation. Palestinians remain disenfranchised in regards to land access and resources.

The UNRWA does provide services that help a lot of Palestinians, but the larger long-term notions of its presence is difficult to ignore. Additionally, the UNRWA provides services to Palestinians outside of the occupied territories, which only complicates the problem. The provision of these services may (temporarily or not) subdue the desire for the right to return, thereby disintegrating the ‘Palestine question.’ The depoliticization of the Palestine occupation serves as a way for Western parties to detach from the issue and fund relief organizations rather than reconsider the policy actions their governments undertake in continuing the brutal occupation.

This is just one example of how NGOs are often embedded with a contradictory, short-term framework in providing needs but ultimately being detrimental for the interests of local populations. Of course, there are many NGOs that are local and independently funded, with an ability to provide short-term needs while addressing long-term issues. These should not be discounted; however, neither should the imperial construct in which all NGOs ultimately exercise their bargaining power. As neoliberalism continues to undo the victories in social service gains over the past several decades, the material and ideological role of NGOs should be assessed within a changing power terrain that upholds the free market and dismantles the welfare state. Organic, and local alternatives to neoliberalism are desperately needed now, or seemingly benign NGOs’ Jekyll and Hyde nature will inevitably disintegrate the space in which these alternatives can ever be developed.

Written by Sabrina Nasir for Media Roots

Photo by Flickr user Free Grunge Textures