John Bellamy Foster & Brett Clark on The Rift of Éire

MONTHLY REVIEW

MONTHLY
REVIEW
VOL. 71
NO. 11

APRIL
2020
A N I N D E P E N D E N T S O C I A L I S T M A G A Z I N E

Neoliberalism and the

Climate Crisis
JULIUS ALEXANDER McGEE and PATRICK TRENT GREINER

Soviet Democracy,
Capitalist Planning,
Restoration Big Data
PAUL COCKSHOTT K E E S VA N D E R P I J L

T he L egacy of C linton J encks

A review by MICHAEL MYERSON

Sick Health Care Dead Labor

A review by DAV I D M AT T H E W S HANNAH OLSON CREIGHTON

70 YEARS OF SOCIALIST INSIGHT

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April 2020 MONTHLY REVIEW VOL. 71 NO. 11

An Independent Socialist Magazine Founded in 1949 by Leo Huberman & Paul M. Sweezy
John Bellamy Foster, Editor ◊ Brett Clark, Associate Editor ◊ Camila Valle,
Assistant Editor ◊ Martin Paddio, Business Manager ◊ Gordon Beeferman,
Circulation ◊ R. Jamil Jonna, Associate Editor for Communications & Production
Former Editors: Harry Magdoff (1969–2006) ◊
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New York, NY 10001 Circulation: [email protected]
212-691-2555 MR Online: [email protected]
REVIEW OF THE MONTH The Rift of Éire
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark 1
How Long Can Neoliberalism Withstand Climate Crisis?
Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick Trent Greiner 12
Crisis of Socialism and Effects of Capitalist Restoration
Paul Cockshott 20
Democracy, Planning, and Big Data: A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?
Kees van der Pijl 28
Dead Labor
Hannah Olson Creighton 42
REVIEWS The Legacy of Clinton Jencks
Michael Myerson 45
Health Care for Profit (Not Health): A Sick System
David Matthews 53

Notes from the Editors

Fifty years ago, Monthly Review commemorated the hundredth anniversary of V. I.
Lenin’s birth with a special April 1970 issue entitled “Lenin Today,” including contri-
butions by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs, Edu-
ardo Galeano, Eric Hobsbawm, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, Martin Nicolaus,
Walter Rodney, and George Thomson. Two of the articles in the issue, by Hobsbawm
and Nicolaus, dealt with Lenin’s well-known theory of the labor aristocracy, which
he had used to explain the split in the world socialist movement at the time of the
First World War. Both articles, however, began not with Lenin but with the earlier
analysis of the labor aristocracy introduced by Frederick Engels, which had strongly
influenced Lenin’s thinking. For Nicolaus, it was Engels, rather than Lenin, who had
developed the most profound theoretical perspective in this regard. Today, at the
bicentennial of Engels’s birth, it is worth taking a brief look at Engels’s treatment
of the labor aristocracy, its connection to Lenin’s thinking, and the significance of
these ideas in light of the current capitalist conjuncture.
The notion of a labor aristocracy was fairly prevalent in England by the late
1880s. However, widespread use of the term itself was almost certainly derived
from Engels. In March 1885, he wrote an article entitled “England in 1845 and in
1885” for the second number of the Socialist League’s publication Commonweal, ed-
ited by William Morris. Here, Engels reflected back on the historical situation that
existed in 1845, when his Condition of the Working Class in England was published, as
contrasted with that of 1885. (This article was to form the core of his prefaces to the
English-language editions of his book in 1886 and 1892, and to the second German
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_0 (continued on inside back cover)
monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_1 REVIEW OF THE MONTH

The Rift of Éire

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER and BRETT CLARK

A number of critics of Karl Marx’s metabolic rift analysis have argued that
despite his crucial ecological observations, his “views on nature are not ex-
actly systematic” and have little importance for his critique of capitalism as a
whole.1 Similarly, Marx’s analysis of Irish history has often been characterized
as overly empirical and episodic, lacking a “comprehensive treatment.”2 It is
significant therefore that the last decade has seen a revolution in ecological
studies of nineteenth-century Ireland highlighting the unity and complexity
of Marx’s historical analysis in this area, in which his theory of metabolic rift
has played the central role. Based in part on the recent pathbreaking work of
Irish scholars, including Eoin Flaherty, Terence McDonough, and Eamonn Slat-
er, we argue that Marx’s (and Frederick Engels’s) analysis of nineteenth-cen-
tury Irish history revealed what is referred to here as “the rift of Éire” in the
colonial period.3 Indeed, it is in relation to the analysis of the systematic dis-
ruption of the Irish environment that Marx’s ecological inquiries can be seen
as taking on a concrete and developed form, encompassing the ecological as
well as economic robbery that characterized the Irish colonial regime.
Marx and Engels were strong critics of English colonialism in Ireland and
supporters of Irish revolutionary movements throughout their adult lives.
Their writings on Ireland, including newspaper articles, speeches, letters, and
unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, come to around five hundred pag-
es in print.4 Marx’s most important analyses on the Irish question, however,
occurred in November and December 1867, shortly after he had completed the
first volume of Capital. On September 11, 1867, three days before the first thou-
sand copies of Capital were to be published in Hamburg, two Fenians, Irish
nationalists, were arrested in Manchester: Colonel Thomas Keely, who had or-
ganized an abortive Fenian uprising the preceding March, and Captain Thom-
as Deasy. A week later, on September 18, the prison van was ambushed by the
local Fenian organization, liberating both men. However, in the process a shot
was fired into the van, perhaps intended to break the lock, and a police ser-
geant, Charles Brett, was killed. Keely and Deasy escaped, making their way
eventually to the United States, but three Fenians were arrested on the spot

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the
University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor of Monthly Review and a professor
of sociology at the University of Utah.
This article is taken from chapter 2 of Foster and Clark’s latest book, The Robbery of
Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift (Monthly Review Press, 2020).

1
2 MONTHLY RE V IEW / A pril 2020

and many more men were arrested indiscriminately in Irish communities in

Manchester. Five men were charged with the murder of Sergeant Brett.5
Marx wrote to Engels on November 2, 1867, that he was seeking “in every
way” to back the English workers supporting Fenianism. On November 13, all
five men were found guilty and condemned to be executed. On November 19,
Marx called for a full discussion of the Fenian question at a meeting of the Gen-
eral Council of the International Working Men’s Association. The meeting was
held on November 26, three days after three of the convicted men were execut-
ed (one of the five was pardoned and the other had his sentence commuted).
Marx had prepared five-and-a-half pages of notes for a talk on the occasion,
but feeling that his broad historical analysis of the Irish question was inap-
propriate so soon after the executions, he yielded the floor to the Englishman
Peter Fox. Marx’s full address was given to the German Workers’ Educational
Association in London on December 16, when he presented a ninety-minute
talk based on a further set of thirteen-and-a-half pages of notes. Although he
did not write out his entire speech on that occasion, we have in addition to his
notes, a two-and-a-half-page summary of his talk, taken down in the meeting
by Johann Georg Eccarius. In addition, Marx wrote a detailed summary of his
analysis of the Irish situation in a letter to Engels on November 30.6
These four documents from November–December 1867, together with sup-
plementary material from Capital, his New York Tribune articles going back to
the 1850s, and other related writings, along with some of Engels’s correspon-
dence and unfinished History of Ireland, form the basis for the present analysis
of Marx’s systematic treatment of the Irish question, including what Slater
has called a “more severe form of the metabolic rift” than exists under cap-
italism per se—reflective of the colonialism that was imposed on Ireland by
the English, both before and after the Great Famine.7 Marx provided a long
historical perspective on the colonization of Ireland, though concentrating
on nineteenth-century conditions separated by the Great Famine: the Period
of Rack-Renting, 1801–46, and the Period of Extermination, 1846–66.8 The rift
of Éire, he was to argue, culminated in the expulsion of the population and
the destruction of the soil, presenting a choice between ruin and revolution.

The Pe r io d o f Ra c k- Ren t i n g ( 1 8 0 1 –4 6 )
For centuries, the British Crown waged a campaign of conquest on Ire-
land, which involved murder and expropriation. Throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the native population of Ireland was pushed onto
marginal lands, at best, particularly in the western region of the country.
Protestant Penal Laws ensured that Catholics were not allowed to hold office,
own land, or receive inheritance. The English, Marx pointed out, effectively
robbed the land and became the “land-owning aristocracy.”9 Westminster
R eview of the M onth 3

came to directly rule Ireland, which was formalized in 1801, when the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was established. In his historical analy-
sis of the rack-renting period, Marx devoted much attention to assessing how
the property, technical, and food-regime relations took distinct forms, which
created the foundation for the emerging colonial metabolic rift.
During the 1800s, the manufacturing industries of Ireland were dra-
matically diminished or eliminated, unable to compete with British op-
erations. As detailed by the famous Irish nationalist leader and lawyer
Isaac Butt (1813–79), in 1800 in Dublin, there were ninety-one wool man-
ufactures, with over 4,000 workers. By 1840, there were only twelve man-
ufactures, employing 682 people. The same trend was evident in indus-
tries associated with the production of silk, flannel, hosiery, and blankets
across the country. There were one thousand looms in County Wicklow
in 1800, however, by the 1860s there were none.10 As deindustrialization
advanced, Ireland was turned almost exclusively into an agrarian nation.11
As a result, during this period, the power of the landlords increased.
There were a few English and Anglo-Irish families, as part of the “ascendan-
cy class,” who controlled the only means of survival and wielded expansive
influence.12 The landlords, many of whom were absentees, often employed
“middlemen” as intermediaries who handled the subletting of holdings to
tenant farmers in the expanding “rack-renting” system.13 Named after the
instrument of torture, rack-renting stretched these farmers to the margins of
existence, as they paid excessive rents, as part of year-to-year contracts that
gave them access to agricultural lands. The tenant farmers, depending on the
size of the land they rented, would in turn lease out small plots of land to
cottiers (rural laborers living in cabins) in exchange for labor in the fields.14
Under this rack-renting arrangement, tenant farmers paid for the use of the
land and any improvements they made. In other words, if they invested in the
means to enhance the productivity of the crops, such as enriching the soil, their
rents increased, eliminating any additional earnings they generated. To make
matters worse, the owners regularly demanded “higher rents on the expiration
of the existing lease,” exacerbating the insecurity of tenants. Either tenant farm-
ers renewed leases under “less favourable conditions” or they were evicted. If
the latter situation arose, the new tenants paid higher rents, associated with im-
provements from the previous occupants. Marx explained that the consequenc-
es of “the system of rack-renting” were extremely clear, as “the people had now
before them the choice between the occupation of land, at any rent, or starvation.”
In this situation, he indicated, “middlemen accumulated fortunes that they
would not invest in the improvement of land, and could not, under the system
which prostrated manufactures, invest in machinery, etc. All their accumula-
tions [and those of the owners] were sent therefore to England for investment.”15
4 MONTHLY RE V IEW / A pril 2020

For the small farmers and cottiers as “tenants-at-will” of the owners, there
emerged a tendency to maintain the general conditions of the soil just enough
to support the production of desired crops, with little to no added investment in
drainage and irrigation, as this would have resulted in even higher rents and loss-
es for the farmers. These rack-renting conditions, Marx assessed, created a situa-
tion that “left the Irish, however ground to the dust, holder of their native soil.”16
The farms generally consisted of the tenants and cottiers. The latter lived in
modest cabins, generally with access to a few acres of land for tillage that the
tenant leased, which was known as the conacre system. The cottiers common-
ly did not receive wages, as they agreed to provide a specific number of days of
labor to the tenant farmers in exchange for housing and access to small parcels
on which they raised their food—potatoes. Marx noted: “the great mass of ag-
ricultural wages were paid in kind, only the smallest part in money.”17 Cottiers,
if possible, raised a few pigs, which were fed surplus potatoes, or spun linen in
their cottages to sell locally in order to make a small amount of cash to cover
any shortfalls related to the agreed-upon hours worked in relation to rents.18
Beginning in 1815, the Corn Laws in Britain generated high prices for
grains, encouraging an expansion of tillage in Ireland, in order to serve the
needs and interests of the English. Marx documented the increase through
the years—in the three years following passage, “300,000 qrs” (quarter of
a hundredweight) were exported to Britain, followed by over a million in
1820, and two and half million in 1834.19 In the early 1840s, the Irish were
producing grain yields per acre that were just below the English, and potato
yields twice that of the French.20 This situation intensified the plundering
of Ireland of its resources, in a colonial metabolic transfer that increased
the vulnerability of the country, its people, and the soil.
In The Rural Economy of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1855), Léonce de La-
vergne pointed out that it was widely recognized in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, in the writings of figures like Arthur Young, that
the soil of Ireland was far “superior to England,” given that it was richer in
nutrients.21 These conditions dramatically changed as a result of the colonial
relationship, the rack-renting system, and the practices on farms. Tenant
farmers in Ireland primarily practiced a rotation consisting of growing two
grains, such as wheat and oats, in succession, and then potatoes. The grains
served as cash crops for export to Britain and as the basis to cover the costs
of leasing the land. Potatoes provided a basis for subsistence. Farmers moved
through this rotation, without letting the fields lay fallow or growing clover
in order to rest the land and help restore fertility. In an attempt to replenish
the soil, farmers added much manure when it was time to plant potatoes.22
“The ridge system of cultivation,” Slater explains, was used to grow pota-
toes via a method of deep cultivation, whereby a spade was utilized to access
R eview of the M onth 5

the nutrients in the subsoil and mix them with the top soil. Earthing (hilling)
potatoes was a labor-intensive process. The cottiers “laid the manure directly
on the surface of the sod. The seed potato was then placed upon the surface
and covered with an inverted sod dug with the spade from the trench paral-
leling the seed row. This was repeated across the width of the field to create
a series of troughs and ridges.” As the potatoes grew, cottiers used spades to
dig up even more soil from the trench, in order to cover the stems of the
plants, which encourages tuber growth. Through this process, not only was
the subsoil mixed with the top soil, but minerals from the iron pan—the
hard layer that forms under soil due to the deposit of iron salts, which pre-
vents adequate drainage—were brought up, as it was broken up.23
In his discussion of how distinctions “in the chemical composition of the
soil” influenced variations in the “natural fertility” of land, Marx specifically
focused on how various techniques brought “different types of soil into culti-
vation,” which could enhance or diminish available nutrients. For example, he
explained, “artificially induced improvements in the composition of the soil or
of a mere change in the hierarchy of soil types” could take place “when various
subsoil conditions come into play, once the subsoil also begins to be tilled and
turned over into top layers,” as was the case in the spade production of potatoes
in Ireland. It “turn[ed] the subsoil into the top layer or mix[ed] the two together.”24
The practices associated with the ridge system of potato production in
Ireland helped increase the amount of nutrients available to support plant
growth. Nevertheless, further enrichment was needed, as potatoes re-
quired more nutrients than the other crops.25 Cottiers devoted much work
to gathering additional fertilizers, including dung, sand, seaweed, shells,
and ashes, in order to enrich exhausted soils. While manure from farm an-
imals was used, it was in short supply, as much of the land during this peri-
od was devoted to tillage, rather than pasture. Thus, some cottiers collect-
ed manure-soaked grasses where animals were concentrated to integrate
these nutrients into the soil to grow potatoes. In the winter, the animals
were sheltered and fed potatoes within the small family cabins, allowing
cottiers to collect 10 to 15 tons of manure in the spring. The sand, seaweed,
and shells were carted from the sea to markets in towns for sale. For ash
fertilizer, the top five inches of the land were dug up and dried before be-
ing burned. The resulting ash was then mixed with the soil. This was not
a sustainable practice, however, since it led to the loss of organic matter.26
Given that manuring by cottiers was reserved for the potato rotation, the
ridge system improved the drainage of the fields and brought up necessary
nutrients and minerals from the iron pan and subsoil. The incorporation
of additional fertilizers further enriched the soil. These practices supported
the potato crop as well as the rest of the grain portion of the rotation. The
6 MONTHLY RE V IEW / A pril 2020

metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle remained present, however, man-
ifesting in a number of socioecological challenges. After a full rotation of
crops, the soils were generally exhausted. Planting and manuring potatoes
played an important role in trying to help improve soil conditions.
Slater points out the differing roles of the potato. For tenant farmers, it was
necessary for helping restore soils to support cash crop production. For cot-
tiers, it provided them with food. Nevertheless, the crops were still taking up
more nutrients than were being incorporated into soil. Cottiers thus had the
demanding task to devote even more time and energy through the years to
restoring these depleted fields, given that under the conacre system the pota-
to crop was their responsibility. The mining of nutrients from the subsoil and
the gathering of additional fertilizers, by cottiers, helped temporarily support
this arrangement, but lands were often rendered unproductive for years.27
The property relations, the rack-renting arrangement, and the conacre system
created a “constant drain of rent,” which “was shown in the continual export of
agricultural produce” of grains to Britain. Lavergne indicated that this drain “cre-
ated a void which was not filled up by any return.”28 Irish families subsisted on
a diet consisting of potatoes, along with some milk and fish. During this period,
the average male, doing physically demanding work, reportedly consumed up to
twelve to fourteen pounds of potatoes per day.29 The lack of other nutrients, and
marginal existence, created according to Marx a “state of popular starvation.”30
Lavergne proposed that the potato was “one of the most valuable gifts…but only
on condition that it is not too greatly extended, as then it becomes a scourge, for
it exhausts without renewing the means of production.”31 For Marx, this situation
was bound to the larger colonial metabolic rift, associated with the conquest of
Ireland and the period of rack-renting. “The landowner,” Marx remarked, “who
does nothing at all here to improve the soil, expropriates from him [the tenant]
the small capital which he incorporates into the soil for the most part by his own
labour, just as a usurer would do in similar conditions. Only the usurer would
at least risk his own capital in the operation. It is this continuous robbery that
forms the object of the dispute over Irish land legislation.”32 During this period,
the intensification and expansion of the rack-renting and conacre systems creat-
ed a fragile agroecology, with an underlying metabolic rift in the nutrient cycle,
which was extremely vulnerable to the famine that followed.

The Pe r io d o f E x t ermi nat i o n ( 1 8 4 6 –6 6 )

In 1845, the potato blight caused by Phytopthora infestans, a fungus-like patho-
gen, which first appeared in the United States and the European Continent,
broke out in Ireland. By 1846, it generated a general famine, known in Ireland
as the Great Hunger or Great Famine, which lasted for three to four years,
with failures of the potato crop occurring partially in 1847 and then more
R eview of the M onth 7

generally in 1848–49. A million people died and more than a million peo-
ple emigrated. Ireland at the time was especially vulnerable to the effects of
the blight because of the destitute condition of the population, given that its
subsistence diet was based entirely on the potato and the reliance on a mono-
culture consisting of only one variety, the “lumper” potato. The British gov-
ernment, based in Westminster, responded to the famine inconsistently and
inadequately. Grain continued to be exported from Ireland to feed England.33
The actual cause of the blight was unknown at the time that it appeared.
Perhaps the most prominent theory then was offered by the respected scien-
tist John Lindley, editor of the Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette. He
argued that the blight was the result of a deluge whereby potatoes had sucked
up water through their roots and had become saturated, leading to their tis-
sues becoming swollen and rotting away. However, Miles J. Berkeley, a mycol-
ogist who worked closely with Charles Darwin, proposed in 1846 that it was
a fungus operating as a plant pathogen, calling the pathogen Botrytis infestans.
The pathogen was more definitively isolated by Anton DeBary in 1876, build-
ing on Berkeley’s work, and renamed Phytopthora infestans.34 Engels was aware
of the scientific debates and discoveries, indicating in a letter to Marx in 1858
that it was “single-celled fungi” that were “causing disease in potatoes.”35
Yet, for Marx, in seeking to explain the conditions in Ireland in 1867 and
why the Irish peasantry remained in a perilous state, the primary issue was
not the plant pathogen itself, viewed as a natural cause, but the social condi-
tions that had paved the way to the Great Famine, that is, the entire history
of the rack-renting system and the subsequent transformation in the socio-
ecological food regime beginning in 1846. As he wrote to Engels on Novem-
ber 30, 1867, “The system of 1801–46, with its rack-rents and middlemen, col-
lapsed in 1846.”36 Underlying it all, he explained in his talk the next month
to the German Workers’ Educational Association, was “the exhaustion of the
soil” due to a social structure that failed to replenish and improve the land.37
The “barren fields” resulting from the potato blight caused people to emi-
grate, resulting in the pooling of small holdings and the replacement of till-
age with pasturage. But what was at first a natural tendency soon “became
a conscious and deliberate system.” Chief here was the Repeal of the Corn
Laws as “one of the direct consequences of the Irish disaster.” As Ireland lost
its grain monopoly and cheap grain poured in from abroad, bread prices fell,
and tenant-farmer and cottier rents could not be paid. Meat and wool prices
had been rising for some time and the demand was great. “Wool and meat,”
Marx wrote, “became the slogan, hence conversion of tillage into pasture.”
In 1847–48, an Act of Parliament was passed that the Irish landlords had to
support their own paupers. As a result, the Irish landlord class, already deep
in debt, sought to clear their estates of the impoverished population. Wors-
8 MONTHLY RE V IEW / A pril 2020

ening the conditions of the old ascendancy class, the Encumbered Estates
Act was passed in 1853, forcing “the debt-ridden old Irish aristocrats to the
hammer of the auctioneer or bailiff, thus driving them from the land just
as starvation drove away their small tenants, subtenants and cottagers.” The
entire Irish situation in this period was thus summed up by the forcible
eviction en masse of the population, the consolidation of farms, and the dete-
rioration of the soil. Between 1851 and 1861, the total decrease of farms was
120,000, mainly affecting farms of less than fifteen acres.38
At the center of Marx’s argument was the dramatic decline in estimated yield
per acre of every major crop. In his December 1867 speech, he provided data in-
dicating that, in 1851–56, wheat had declined by 9.6 percent, potatoes by 43 per-
cent, and flax by 35 percent.39 Although Ireland had previously exported vast
quantities of wheat, it was now said by the ruling British colonial interests to
be good “only for cultivating oats.” Indeed, by 1866, Ireland was exporting only
an amount equivalent to a little more than a quarter of the wheat that it was
importing. Becoming a net importer of grain was of course partly a product of
the competition presented by cheap foreign grain following the Repeal of the
Corn Laws. But a more critical problem was the deterioration of the land itself,
which was only compounded by the expulsion of the cottiers. In the conacre/
rack-renting system, “the farmer,” Marx noted, had “in a great measure trusted
to his labourers to manure the land for him.”40 With the breakdown of that
system following the Great Famine, the clearing of the estates, and the consol-
idation of farms, the process of manuring, hitherto carried out by the peasants
with their spade agriculture and ridge system of cultivation, was undermined.
The law of replacement regarding soil nutrients, as identified by Justus von Li-
ebig, was violated, generating a new, hardly less extreme modality of the met-
abolic rift, attributable to the “new regime” of food production.41 “Since the
exodus,” Marx remarked, “the land has been underfed and overworked.” The
resulting decline in agricultural productivity, he hastened to add, was not nec-
essarily reflected in value terms, since under consolidation and the shift from
tillage to pasturage “rents and profits…may increase, although the produce
of the soil decreases. The total produce may diminish, and still [the] greater
part of it be converted into surplus produce, falling to the landlord and (great)
farmer. And the price of the surplus produce has risen.” None of this, however,
altered the fact that less food was being produced per acre. The upshot was the
“sterilisation (gradual) of the land, as in Sicily by the ancient Romans.”42
The rack-renting system in which the laborers were “ground to the dust”
was replaced by a “regime since 1846, [which] though less barbarian in form,
[was] in effect [hardly less] destructive, leaving no alternative but Ireland’s
voluntary emancipation by England or life-and-death struggle.” The most vis-
ible manifestation of the new agricultural regime, was, Marx pointed out,
R eview of the M onth 9

that “in 1855–56, 1,032,694 Irishmen were replaced by 999,877 head of live-
stock (cattle, sheep and pigs).”43 Marx wrote in Capital: “Having praised the
fruitfulness of the Irish soil between 1815 and 1846, and proclaimed it loudly
as destined for the cultivation of wheat by nature herself, English agrono-
mists, economists and politicians suddenly discovered that it was good for
nothing but the production of forage.”44 Or as Engels satirically put it, in 1812
England was at war with the whole of Europe and America, and it was much
more difficult to import corn—corn was the primary need. Now America, Ruma-
nia, Russia and Germany deliver sufficient corn, and the question now is rather
one of cheap meat. And because of this Ireland’s climate is no longer suited to till-
age.… Today England needs grain quickly and dependably—Ireland is just perfect
for wheat-growing. Tomorrow England needs meat—Ireland is only fit for cattle
pastures. The existence of five million Irish is in itself a smack in the eye to all
the laws of political economy, they have to get out but whereto is their worry!45

The solution that the English and the Anglo-Irish landlord class imposed
on colonial Ireland in the period after 1846 was what Marx called a “fiendish
war of extermination against the cott[i]ers.”46 In employing the term exter-
mination to describe the Irish condition, Marx and Engels, along with their
contemporaries, such as Butt and Lavergne, had in mind its twofold mean-
ing as both exclusion and annihilation of the Irish peasantry.47 The result of this
“quiet business-like extinction,” as Marx called it, was the forced emigra-
tion, death, pauperization, and “physical deterioration” of the great mass
of the Irish people. For the Irish, Marx observed in 1867, it is a question of a
“life-and-death struggle.” The “absolute increase in the number of deaf-mutes,
blind, insane, idiotic, and decrepit inhabitants,” what could be called a cor-
poreal rift, was a natural result of these conditions. In such circumstances,
the Irish were forced to choose between “ruin and revolution.”48 Hence, the
Fenian upsurge.49 Hence, the Land War that was to follow. Each generation
of Irish was forced in their own way to rise up against English rule.50

Co lo n ia l I re la nd a nd t he Met a bo l i c Rift
In discussing the absolute general law of accumulation in relation to Ire-
land in the first volume of Capital, Marx observed that the depopulation of
Ireland had reduced the amount of cultivated land and hence the production
of the soil, with a greater area given over to pasture. However, in referring
to the decreasing production of grain that resulted, he noted that this was
also accompanied by decreased production per acre, which could not be sep-
arated from the fact that “for a century and a half England has indirectly
exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means
for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.”51 The failure to main-
tain the soil metabolism was central to Marx’s understanding of the extreme
10 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

ecological degradation of colonial Ireland and was also emphasized in his De-
cember 1867 speech on Ireland, in which he indicated that the nutrients nec-
essary to fertilize the Irish soil “were exported with the produce and rent.”52
Marx’s analysis here coincided with what Jonathan Swift in Maxims Con-
trolled in Ireland and Thomas Prior in A List of the Absentees of Ireland had both in
1729 called the “drain” of wealth from Ireland to England.53 The full extent
of this drain was made clear in the 1804 treatise An Essay on the Principle of
Commercial Exchanges, written by John Leslie Foster (later appointed Baron of
the Exchequer of Ireland), which documented the enormous payments of
the Irish to the English in the form of rents to absentees. The great drain of
value to absentee landlords was financed by the export of grain to England
for which the Irish themselves received nothing in return. The loss of the pro-
duce Ireland exported to pay the rent of absentee landlords forced it to seek
increased imports. This, however, necessitated a vast borrowing of foreign
funds (primarily in England) to finance Irish imports, leaving the country
deeper and deeper in debt.54 As Foster said, “it is Ireland paid by Ireland to
work for England. It is the part of England to enjoy, and of Ireland to labour.”55
As Marx noted, referring to a later report, Ireland was “forced to contribute
cheap labour and cheap capital” to further the industrialization of England.56
But the drain, as Marx so astutely emphasized, was not simply a ques-
tion of economic values but of natural-material use values. In the case of
Ireland, an agrarian nation under colonial rule, what was being drained
away was the most important use value of all—the nutrients that were
vital to the replenishment of the soil. Ireland was thus the site of an ex-
treme metabolic rift, caught in the vice grip of economic and ecological
imperialism, from which arose the necessity of “ruin or revolution.”57
N ot e s
1. Philip Campanile and Michael Watts, Historical Geography 41 (2013): 39–79; McDonough, “Marx on Nineteenth-Cen-
“Nature and Ecology,” The Bloomsbury Eamonn Slater, “Marx on Colonial Ireland,” tury Colonial Ireland,” 158–59.
Companion to Marx, ed. Jeff Diamanti, History of Political Thought, 39/4 (Winter 7. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” 40.
Andrew Pendakis, and Imre Szeman (Lon- 2018): 719–48; Slater, “Marx on the Col-
8. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish
don: Bloomsbury, 2019), 358; Alan Rudy, onization of Irish Soil,” MUSSI Working Pa-
Question, 131–35, 210. Marx in his out-
“Marx’s Ecology and Rift Analysis,” Capital- per Series 3 (January 2018); Slater, “Engels
on Ireland’s Dialectics of Nature,” Capital- line for his December 1867 talk does not
ism Nature Socialism 12 (June 2001): 61.
ism Nature Socialism 29/4 (2018): 31–50. include a title/subtitle to designate the
2. Stephen Howe, “Historiography,” in 1801–46 period, but it is clear from his de-
Ireland and Empire, ed. Kevin Kenny (Ox- 4. Anthony Coughlan, “Ireland’s Marx- scription that the “Period of Rack-Renting,”
ford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 246. ist Historians,” in Interpreting Irish which we employ here, is appropriate. In
3. Key works include Eamonn Slater and History, ed. Ciaran Brady (Dublin: Irish relation to the new conditions in the 1846–
Terrence McDonough, “Marx on Nine- Academic Press, 1994), 291. 66 period, Marx refers to “The Clearing of
teenth-Century Colonial Ireland,” Irish 5. Slater and McDonough, “Marx on Nine- the Estate of Ireland” which conforms to
Historical Studies 36/142 (November teenth-Century Colonial Ireland,” 154; Hal what he and Engels, along with their con-
2008): 153–72; Eamonn Slater and Eoin Draper, ed., The Marx-Engels Chronicle temporaries, referred to as “extermination,”
Flaherty, “Marx on Primitive Communism,” (New York: Schocken, 1985), 138. encompassing both of its classical mean-
Irish Journal of Anthropology 12/2 (2009): 6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland ings as exclusion and annihilation, in the
5–34; Eoin Flaherty, “Geographies of Com- and Irish Question (New York: Internation- case of the cottiers. Indeed, Engels refers to
munality, Colonialism, and Capitalism,” al Publishers, 1972), 120–48; Slater and 1846–70 as “The Period of Extermination,”
R eview of the M onth 11

which we have followed here, based on the 29. James S. Donnelly, The Great Irish 1859), 175–70, 220, 230; Karl Marx, Dis-
entry for “extermination,” Compact Edition Potato Famine (Phoenix Mill, Glouces- patches for the New York Tribune (London:
of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: tershire: Sutton, 2001), 1. Penguin, 2007); Marx and Engels, Ireland
Oxford University Press, 1971), 938. Marx 30. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the and the Irish Question, 126, 133–34, 147–48.
utilized the term extermination in this Irish Question, 133. 42. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
sense in 1858 in an article for the New York 31. Lavergne, The Rural Economy, 355. Irish Question, 122, 136; Karl Marx, Cap-
Tribune. See Marx and Engels, Ireland and ital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 860.
the Irish Question, 90. 32. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 763.
43. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
9. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish 33. Donnelly, The Great Irish Potato Fam-
Irish Question, 123, 126, 138.
Question, 127, 140; Dean M. Braa, “The ine; Christine Kinealy, The Great Calamity
(Dublin: Gill and McMillan, 1994); Davis 44. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 870.
Great Potato Famine and the Transforma-
Ross, Ireland: History of a Nation (New 45. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
tion of the Irish Peasant Society,” Science
Lanark, Scotland: Geddes and Grosset, Irish Question, 188, 191.
and Society 61/2 (1997): 193–215.
2006), 223–28; Cecil Woodham-Smith, 46. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
10. Isaac Butt, The Irish People and The Great Hunger (London: Hamish Ham- Irish Question, 90.
the Irish Land (Dublin: John Falconer, ilton, 1962); Litton, The Irish Famine.
1867), 94–95. 47. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
34. Jean Beagle Ristaino and Donald H. Pfis- Irish Question, 190, 210: Butt, The Irish
11. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the ter, “‘What a Painfully Interesting Subject’,” People and the Irish Land, 172; Lavergne,
Irish Question, 61, 132. Bioscience 66/12 (December 2016): 1035– The Rural Economy, 367; “Extermina-
12. Helen Litton, The Irish Famine (Dub- 45; Sarah Maria Schmidt, “Anton de Bary,” tion,” Oxford English Dictionary, 938.
lin: Wolfhound, 1994), 9. Microbes Eat My Food, January 27, 2015.
48. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
13. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” 13–15. 35. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Col- Irish Question, 123, 126, 137–38, 142.
14. Litton, Irish Famine, 9–10; Ross, Ireland, lected Works, vol. 21 (New York: Interna-
49. Marx viewed Fenianism as reflect-
206–7; Slater and McDonough, “Marx on tional Publishers, 1975), 327.
ing a “socialist tendency (in a negative
Nineteenth Century Colonial Ireland,” 36. 36. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the sense directed against the appropria-
15. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
Irish Question, 147. tion of the soil).” See Marx and Engels,
Irish Question, 77, 132–3. 37. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Ireland and the Irish Question, 147.
Question, 141. Lavergne also referred to 50. We owe our understanding of these
16. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
the “short-sighted and hungry exhaustion longer-term developments to corre-
Irish Question, 59–60, 123–24.
of the productive powers of the soil” in spondence with Eamonn Slater.
17. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Ireland. See Lavergne, The Rural Economy,
Irish Question, 109. 51. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 860.
356. Based on contemporary ecological
18. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” 20. knowledge, we can amplify Marx’s analysis 52. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
by underscoring that by growing one variety Irish Question, 141.
19. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
Irish Question, 133. the narrow genetic base of the crop meant 53. Jonathan Swift, “Maxims Controlled in
that there was no resistance to the disease Ireland,” in Swift’s Irish Writings (London:
20. Cormac Ó Gráda, “Irish Agricultur- anywhere in the country. Inadequate rota- Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 118; Thomas
al History,” Agricultural History Review tions also contributed to disease prevalence. Prior, “Extracts from Thomas Prior, A List of
38/2 (1990): 165–73. The disease infects plants by airborne spores the Absentees of Ireland,” in The Great Irish
21. Léonce de Lavergne, The Rural and raindrop splash causing soil with spores Famine, ed. Karen Sonnelitter (Peterbor-
Economy of England, Scotland, and Ire- to get on the leaves. This is still a difficult ough, ONT: Broadview, 2018), 32: Marx
land (London: Blackwell, 1855), 343. problem for organic growers of both pota- and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 21, 222.
22. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” 21. toes and tomatoes, but using blight-resis- 54. John Leslie Foster, An Essay on the Prin-
tant varieties, good rotations, and mulching ciple of Commercial Exchanges (London: J.
23. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,”
the soil surface with straw helps consider- Hatchard Bookseller to Her Majesty, 1804),
21–23; Jonathan Bell and Mervyn Wat-
ably. (We would like to thank Fred Magdoff 22–44. There were similarities between the
son, Irish Farming, Implements and
for emphasizing these points.) “drain” of surplus from colonial Ireland as
Techniques, 1750–1900 (Edinburgh:
John Donald, 1986), 57–58. 38. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the depicted here and the British drain of sur-
Irish Question, 76, 134, 138, 147. plus from India. See Utsa Patnaik, “Revis-
24. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: iting the ‘Drain,’ or Transfers from India to
Penguin, 1981), 790. 39. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
Irish Question, 135–36. The value of Britain in the Context of Global Diffusion of
25. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” 24. output per “standard man days” in crop Capitalism,” in Agrarian and Other Histories,
26. T. Walsh, P. F. Ryan, and J. Kilroy, “A production dropped by around 17 per- ed. Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik
Half Century of Fertiliser and Lime Use in cent between 1851 and 1861. Michael (New Delhi; Tulika, 2017), 277–317.
Ireland,” Dublin (1956/1957): 104–36; Turner, After the Famine (Cambridge: 55. Foster, An Essay on the Principle of
Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” Cambridge University Press, 1996), 191. Commercial Exchanges, 27.
22–24; George Hill, Facts from Gweedore 40. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the 56. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
(Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1971). Irish Question, 122. Irish Question, 133.
27. Slater, “Marx on the Colonization,” 23–25. 41. Justus von Liebig, Letters on Modern 57. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the
28. Lavergne, The Rural Economy, 353–54. Agriculture (London: Walton and Maberly, Irish Question, 142.
 monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_2

How Long Can Neoliberalism

Withstand Climate Crisis?
JULIUS ALEXANDER MCGEE AND
PAT R I C K T R E N T G R E I N E R

The climate crisis is proving to be antithetical to the neoliberal ma-

chines that define current forms of social organization. On the one
hand, reducing fossil fuel consumption, the largest contributor to cli-
mate change, requires collaborative efforts. These efforts must take into
consideration the foundational role of fossil fuels in modern economies.
We must acknowledge, for instance, that most peoples’ livelihoods are
tethered to fossil fuels, which recent studies have demonstrated is not
the result of random historical development but deliberate policy.1 Fossil
fuels continue to be used as a form of social domination—a means to
expropriate productive and reproductive labor. In the meantime, renew-
able sources of energy have become a favored climate-conscious alter-
native to fossil fuels. Yet, renewables lack many of the characteristics
that have made fossil fuels so desirable in production processes, limit-
ing their ability to expropriate human labor. Renewables do not lend
themselves to centrally located reserves or the formalized distribution
patterns that allow firms to profit from the extraction, production, and
consumption of energy, as fossil fuels do. At the same time, climate ca-
tastrophes, such as wildfires and hurricanes, disrupt the infrastructural
momentum of fossil fuel economies, destabilizing the mechanisms of
capital accumulation that derive from the production and consumption
of these fuels. We see both of these problems coming to a head in the
recent crises unfolding in Chile and California.
In the context of the recent Chilean protests and electricity blackouts
across the state of California, it is worth reflecting on the ever-growing
and increasingly apparent connections between neoliberalism and cli-
mate crisis. The people in Chile protested the widespread inequality that
neoliberal climate mitigation policies threaten to exacerbate. Specifical-
ly, the recent move by the Chilean government to increase electricity
rates by 9.2 percent for over seven million households and raise fares
for public transit by 3.75 percent, due to expanded renewable energy

Julius Alexander McGee is assistant professor of sociology at Portland State Univer-

sity. Patrick Trent Greiner is assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University.

12
C limate C risis & N eoliberalism 13

consumption, was largely responsible for the protests. Meanwhile, in

California, residents braced themselves for yet another round of planned
blackouts implemented by private utility companies—a move intended
to prevent future fires. These blackouts affected around three million
people over the last few months of 2019 and led many Californians to
call for the deprivatization of utilities in the state.2
These crises have long and complex histories rooted in Chile’s U.S.-
backed coup d’état in 1973, which established a junta and ousted the
democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende. The coup
opened the door for a neoliberal experiment on electricity markets, the
results of which have taken hold in Chile, California, and around the
world, and are largely responsible for current electrical power-related
crises. It is precisely neoliberalism’s legacy that resulted in the propa-
gation of the wholesale energy market systems wreaking havoc in Cal-
ifornia and Chile. What is more, the social disruption borne from the
institution of these complex market structures has been made more
acute due to corporate and political reliance on similar approaches to
managing the fallout of climate change.
Wholesale energy trading began as an experiment in Chile during the
1980s. Prior to the coup, the Allende-led administration had nationalized
its copper industry and utilities as part of an organized effort to transition
peacefully to socialism. Following the coup, a new military dictatorship
headed by Augusto Pinochet began to reprivatize the recently national-
ized markets, an effort that included allowing ExxonMobil to buy copper
mines from the government.3 As is true for many of Chile’s social and
economic policy strategies during Pinochet’s seventeen years of brutal
dictatorship, the junta relied on the guidance of Chicago School econo-
mists when it came to reprivatizing energy. This meeting of the minds
ultimately led Chile to design a system of energy trading that allowed
electricity producers to speculate on future electricity demand and, there-
by, to profit from changes in electricity prices. The newly established
economic structure, an institution commonly referred to as a wholesale
energy trading market, was intended as a way to profit from electricity
distribution without increasing the retail price paid by consumers and
at first appeared to do so. After the introduction of wholesale trading in
Chile, the model quickly spread across the world.
According to its proponents, the wholesale energy market in Chile
had the benefit of separating the business of energy production from
the business of distributing energy to the public. It was believed that
this separation would benefit end users and improve the efficiency of
energy systems by inducing competition between firms. Despite this
14 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

tagline, the faults in Chile’s wholesale energy market are now visible
to all. One of the most glaring fissures is manifesting itself in the ongo-
ing struggle to introduce renewable sources of energy without increas-
ing the cost of electricity to households. Ironically, it was claimed that
wholesale energy markets were created to prevent this very situation
from arising. The people in Chile protested in response to this tension,
as costs of public transit and electricity, which have widened the al-
ready high levels of inequality, were in the works.4
In the eyes of energy producers around the world, Chile’s Atacama
Desert is one of the largest solar energy reserves available to human-
kind—a value derived from the region’s dry climate and extreme in-
solation. In early 2019, Spain’s Solarpack Corp. Tecnologica won the
auction to produce 123 megawatts of solar energy in Chile. The com-
pany has already started installing solar panels in the area and is now
positioned to generate the most cost-efficient electricity in the world.5
This massive spike in renewable energy production is set to increase
the percentage of renewable energy consumed in Chilean households
and to make Santiago’s subway system one of the first in the world
to source most of its power from renewables.6 To cover the cost of
these changes without cutting into profits, the Chilean government
intended to increase household electricity prices by 9.2 percent and the
cost of Santiago’s metro system (already one of the most expensive in
Latin America) by 3.75 percent by 2021. These two changes are widely
acknowledged as having sparked the resentment that resulted in mass
protest across the country. The protests were largely successful and in
late October the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, signed the Elec-
tricity Rates Stabilization Bill to overturn the energy price increases, as
well as a bill reversing the metro fare increases, to quell the unrest.7
The energy price increase was intended to protect the profitability of
the wholesale energy market, which was subject to price fluctuation
after the introduction of newer sources of renewable energy and a
stronger peso. That is, in classic neoliberal fashion, the state extracted
revenue from the people to help stabilize—even increase—the rate of
capital accumulation during the transition to renewables.
To its credit, Chile is on a path to have renewables make up 70 percent
of its energy by 2050. However, because storage systems for renewable en-
ergy are still lacking, banks are reluctant to invest. Concerns such as these
raise questions for investors about how well renewables can compete with
fossil fuels on the wholesale stage. Thus, to add more security to wholesale
energy trading, Chile sought to increase the cost of consumption. Over the
years, the austerity imposed on the subway system in Chile has sparked
C limate C risis & N eoliberalism 15

numerous protests as the government continues to rely on efficiency stan-

dards determined by economists while ignoring the needs of the people.
The system has continually served middle-class communities in an effort
to maintain economic efficiency while forcing lower-income earners to
rely on private busing systems. Although this has changed somewhat in
recent years, as Chile has transitioned to a democracy (in the 1990s, the
metro system merged with private buses), the bottom line has continued
to emphasize economic efficiency at the expense of the people.
In California, wholesale energy markets came through Assembly Bill
1890 in 1996. Among other things, the bill deregulated energy monop-
olies across the state to encourage competition, enforced a 10 percent
decrease in energy prices, and limited the ability of energy monopolies
to increase rates on customers. Assembly Bill 1890 also required publicly
traded utility companies in California, such as Pacific Gas and Electric
(PG&E), to sell the majority of their generating capacity to independent
producers, where it could be traded on the wholesale market.
The problem with deregulated energy markets is that they rely on
an assumption of endless cheap energy and historical data on weather
patterns to forecast demand. They are ill-equipped to handle changes in
weather patterns produced by climatic shifts.
For decades, California has obtained at least a quarter of its energy
from neighboring states despite the assumption of abundance in its
wholesale markets. A significant portion of this imported energy comes
from hydroelectric dams in Oregon and Washington. In 2000, the Pacific
Northwest was hit with a drought that limited the electrical capacity of
their hydroelectric dams, which, in addition to the profitable but highly
criminal activities of opportunistic companies such as Enron, resulted in
PG&E filing for bankruptcy in 2001.
The inability to increase rates on end users coupled with the loss of
surplus energy from the Pacific Northwest during a season of high en-
ergy demand resulted in large revenue losses. To emerge from bank-
ruptcy, PG&E turned to the state, which in turn backtracked on its pre-
vious policies protecting households from the wholesale energy market
and forced ratepayers to front the bill. A $2.50 surcharge was added to
bills to help pay for PG&E’s debt. This tactic of expropriation mirrors
those used by financial markets to stave off economic crisis and is a
hallmark of neoliberalism. With a new safety net in place, PG&E was
able to emerge from bankruptcy by 2004, but the surcharge used to bail
out PG&E remained intact nonetheless. This surcharge has now trans-
formed into a disaster fund that the state of California intends to use to
bail out its utilities in case they are liable for future fires.
16 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

This brings us to the present, when PG&E has yet again filed for bankrupt-
cy due to climatic shifts. In 2017 and 2018, PG&E power lines sparked both
the Wine Fire and the Camp Fire in Northern California due to abnormally
dry weather and the lasting impacts of a historic drought. The Camp Fire
alone was the largest and deadliest wildfire in many generations; nineteen
thousand homes were destroyed, over two thousand acres were burned,
and eighty-five people died. Each of these fires could have been prevented
had PG&E updated its power lines (some of which are one hundred years
old) to be safer in dry weather. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal de-
tails that PG&E had been aware of the risk of its outdated power lines for de-
cades, yet the company found it more financially viable to postpone safety
updates. The secret of the neoliberal scam of a profitable wholesale market
for energy supposedly without higher retail rates was exposed; necessary
maintenance for safety was abandoned in the interest of profit.
In addition to destroying the livelihoods of thousands, these fires
have become a nightmare for one of neoliberalism’s most coveted mar-
kets—insurance. The recent wildfires in California have cost insurance
companies an estimated $24 billion.8 In response to escalating concerns,
insurance companies have raised premiums and, in some instances, re-
fused to renew customers. Insurers are also holding PG&E responsible
for their large payouts to customers, forcing PG&E into bankruptcy. This
has become a financial opportunity for hedge funds, which have bought
insurance claims in an effort to profit from PG&E’s mounting debt. Hedge
funds such as Elliott Corp. and Baupost are now vying for an opportunity
to restructure PG&E under chapter 11 bankruptcy laws.
In an effort to stave off further debt, PG&E and other utility companies
in California have resorted to shutting off power to over three million
people during periods of abnormally high winds and dry weather. This
type of weather is predicted to continue into the future due to climate cri-
sis, alternating between heavy precipitation (a problem that will put wa-
ter utilities in a bind) and droughts.9 Of course, PG&E has shut off custom-
ers’ electricity with little regard for vulnerable populations. People with
disabilities and the elderly are especially vulnerable to blackouts, and
blackouts in general have been associated with increased death rates.10
An outcome of this expropriation is the increasing social and political
disposability of those who have been expropriated. The people who rely
on energy to survive are being hurt at no fault of their own—they are
simply living their lives at the mercy of energy providers who see them
as a source of capital rather than as human beings.
Energy systems in capitalist markets are predicated on ongoing pro-
cesses of profit upon expropriation. In general, expropriation refers to
C limate C risis & N eoliberalism 17

forms of social, economic, and political domination unmediated by a

wage contract and that function to support the exploitation of labor.11 To
understand this, we can look to how the majority of electricity consumed
by individuals, even in wealthy nations, is used to reproduce basic needs.
Heating, cooling, food storage, cleaning, and travel account for the ma-
jority of individuals’ energy use. Most people rely on external sources of
energy to meet these needs and lack the knowledge to reproduce these
amenities without energy available on demand. This creates a power im-
balance between energy consumers and energy providers that helps sub-
ordinate the interests of labor to the needs of capital.
Originally, fossil fuel-based energy was a form of resource expropria-
tion that supported the exploitation of labor. This form of expropriation
expedited the exploitation of workers by increasing the efficiency of
both reproductive and productive labor. Electricity allowed laborers to
produce goods more cheaply and to do it for longer periods of time than
could have ever been imagined before fossil fuels were incorporated into
the production chain. It also cut down the amount of time needed to per-
form reproductive labor, not least by increasing the efficiency of cooking
and cleaning. As if that were not enough, electrification provided a new
way for energy producers to profit from reproductive labor. Namely, the
introduction of electricity made reproductive labor more dependent on
electronic household appliances. Wholesale energy trading expands on
the original model of energy expropriation by turning the individual’s
basic needs (such as the demand for energy) into a speculative market.
With all this in mind, it seems pertinent to ask: How long can neolib-
eralism withstand climate crisis and what are the consequences of con-
tinually supporting the neoliberal model? Let us start with the latter part
of this question by noting three such consequences. First, the attempt to
combat climate change through the wholesale energy market in Chile
threatened to exacerbate preexisting inequality. Secondly, renewable
energy consumption worldwide has fared better at mitigating emissions
when it expands inequality.12 Lastly, it is clear that the people of Chile have
had enough with widening inequality and took to the streets in protest, as
have others around the globe, such as the Yellow Vests in France.
The energy cost hike was intended to protect the market from the vol-
atility of renewable electricity systems. Through this volatility, renew-
able sources of energy such as wind and solar threaten the viability of
the wholesale-energy-for-profit model. To put it differently, these energy
sources are subject to ecology, not the market. The large fluctuation in
energy supply, characteristic of highly intermittent sources (for exam-
ple, renewables), make it difficult to profit from demand. Recall that this
18 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

was what the wholesale market system was largely crafted to do. Never-
theless, this is a market problem, not a practical issue. Fossil fuels can
easily become a backstop energy source for consumption during periods
of low renewable supply or moments of peak usage when demand out-
strips supply (while this is done to some degree now, it still occurs under
the wholesale model). However, this would require the transformation
of an energy system predicated on expropriation into one predicated on
appropriation. By appropriation we mean energy production that is free
from the alienation embedded in commodities. As a commodity, energy’s
value derives from unequal exchange, specifically, individuals pay more
for energy than it costs to produce it. This form of unequal exchange
is maintained through private ownership of distribution infrastructures,
which limits the agency of households by creating an intermediary be-
tween the production and appropriation (that is, consumption) of energy.
In this case, the intermediary is the wholesale energy market, which sets
prices and determines what type of energy is used and when. To appro-
priate energy is to use it when it is useful to the individual, unmediated
by unequal exchange, embedded in and limited by ecological cycles and
thus free from alienation that derives from market pricing.
If peoples’ agency were constrained by ecology and not the market,
they could easily choose to perform energy-intensive tasks—such as trav-
eling, cooking, cleaning, and charging batteries—during the peak hours
of renewable energy supply and reduce their energy consumption during
hours of low renewable supply. Under this model, individuals would re-
spond to changes in weather patterns to reduce their impact on the cli-
mate without a market determining costs to generate greater profits.
While giving people the choice to live within the parameters of the
earth’s ecology seems like a fantasy, this is exactly what PG&E is forcing
people to do during fire season in California. The only difference is that
PG&E is making this decision for people. And they are doing it to reduce
the likelihood that they will be implicated in and financially responsible
for any future fires. Dry weather poses a danger for PG&E because it has
continually refused to adapt its infrastructure to the changing climate.
Even without weather patterns altering due to anthropogenic climate
change, dry weather is a possibility—and an inevitability—that should
be addressed when building energy infrastructures. Failing to do so poses
a danger to life and the greater social good. In truth, we are rather lucky
it has only recently become a problem. Ultimately though, the increas-
ing frequency of dry weather brought about by climate crisis has forced
the issue by posing a threat to PG&E’s profits, and in doing so climate
change has brought the financial solvency of the largest private utility
C limate C risis & N eoliberalism 19

firm in the nation into question. To protect the future of PG&E, the state
of California has created a fund that will insulate the behemoth from the
insurance claims of the public. This is the neoliberal model of energy pro-
duction: externalize costs and internalize surplus. It is a model that turns
human beings into disposable objects; objects whose energy needs are
determined by what is profitable and not what is hospitable or necessary
to survival. Subjecting these energy sources to the faulty logic of an ex-
propriative market rather than building systems that reflect the ecology
is what people protested in Chile and are enduring in California. So, how
long can neoliberalism withstand climate crisis? As long as we accept ourselves as
disposable and firms like PG&E as essential, and not a moment more.
No t e s
1. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (New 6. “Chile’s Largest Metro Network to Be Twenty-First-Century California,” Nature
York: Verso, 2016); Simon Pirani, Burn- Powered by Solar and Wind,” CIimate Climate Change 8 (2018): 427–33.
ing Up (Chicago: University of Chicago Action, June 21, 2017. 10. G. Brooke Anderson and Michelle L.
Press, 2018). 7. “Chile’s President Inks Bill to Cut Bell, “Lights Out: Impact of the August
2. Alexander Sammon, “Could Califor- Electricity Costs Amid Unrest,” Xinhua, 2003 Power Outage on Mortality in
nia Take Public Ownership of PG&E?,” October 26, 2019; Rachelle Krygier, New York, NY,” Epidemiology 23, no. 2
Pacific Standard, February 7, 2019. “Chile’s Protesters Got a Subway Fare (2012): 189–93.
3. Lewis H. Divguid, “Exxon Buys Mine Hike Reversed. Now They Want a New 11. John Bellamy Foster and Brett
in Chile,” Washington Post, January 25, Political System,” Washington Post, Oc- Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature,”
1978. tober 30, 2019. Monthly Review 69, no. 10 (March
4. John Authers, “Chile’s Violence Has 8. Matt Wirz and Juliet Chung, “PG&E 2018): 1–27.
a Worrisome Message for the World,” Trade Punishes Hedge Funds as Califor- 12. Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick
Bloomberg, October 23, 2019. nia Burns,” Wall Street Journal, October Trent Greiner, “Renewable Energy Injus-
30, 2019. tice: The Socio-Environmental Implica-
5. Felicia Jackson, “Chile’s Cheap Pow-
er—Sign of a Solar Future?,” Forbes, June 9. Daniel L. Swain, Baird Langenbrun- tions of Renewable Energy Consump-
5, 2019. ner, J. David Neelin, and Alex Hall, tion,” Energy Research & Social Science
“Increasing Precipitation Volatility in 56 (2019).
 monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_3

Crisis of Socialism and Effects of

Capitalist Restoration
PAU L CO C K S H OT T

The main criticism leveled at the socialist economies was that a planned
economy was inherently less efficient than a market one, due to the sheer
scale of the bureaucratic task involved with planning a major economy. If
there are hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of distinct products,
no central planning authority could hope to keep track of them all. Instead
they were forced to set gross targets for the outputs of different industries.
For some industries like gas or electric power, this was not a problem. Elec-
tricity and gas are undifferentiated, a kilowatt is a kilowatt—no argument.
But even for another bulk industry like steel, there was a wide variety of
different rolled plates and bars, different grades of steel with different ten-
sile strength, etc. If the planners could not keep track of all these different
varieties and just set rolling mills targets in tons, the mills would maximize
their tonnage of whatever variety was easiest to produce.
The steel example is a little forced, since this degree of differentiation
was still fairly readily handled by conventional administrative means. Ton-
nage targets could still be set in terms of distinct types of steel. But when
you turn to consumer goods—clothes, crockery, etc.—the range of prod-
ucts was too big and targets were set in terms of monetary output.
The plan would specify a growth in the value of output of clothing,
furniture, etc. What this translated to then depended on the price struc-
ture. In order to prevent other forms of gaming the plan by enterprises,
it was important that the prices were economically realistic. If the price
for chairs is set too high compared to tables, it becomes rational for fac-
tories to concentrate on chair production.
By resorting to monetary targets, the socialist economies were already
conceding part of Ludwig von Mises’s argument. They were resorting to
the monetary calculation that he had declared to be vital to any economic

Paul Cockshott is a computer engineer working on computer design and teaching

computer science at universities in Scotland. Named on fifty-two patents, his research
covers robotics, computer parallelism, 3D TV, foundations of computability, and data
compression. His books include Classical Econophysics (Routledge, 2009) and Computation
and Its Limits (Oxford University Press, 2012).
This article is an excerpt from Cockshott’s latest book, How the World Works (Monthly
Review Press, 2020).

20
E ffects of C apitalist R estoration 21

rationality. Liberal economists argue that it was impossible for planners

to come up with a rational set of prices, as only the competitive market
could do so. Planning required aggregation. Aggregation implied mon-
etary targets. Monetary targets required rational prices. Rational prices
required the market. But if you had the market you could dispense with
planning. Planning dialectically implied the supersession of planning.
It is worth noting that this is a largely theoretical argument. It was, in
late Soviet days, backed up with lots of anecdotal evidence, but empirical
evidence for the greater macroeconomic efficiency of markets even when
compared to classical Soviet planning is on much thinner ground. As Robert
C. Allen shows, the only capitalist economy whose long-term growth rate
exceeded that of the USSR was Japan, whose own model was distant from
unplanned capitalism. Compared to other countries starting out at the same
economic level in the 1920s, the USSR grew considerably faster. One could
argue that this was due to macroeconomic advantages of planning, that
is, by removing uncertainty about future market demand it encouraged a
higher level of investment. It is possible that this macroeconomic advantage
outweighed any microeconomic inefficiency associated with plans.
The strongest evidence that markets may perform better than plans
would come from China, and that certainly is the orthodox Chinese
view. Their claim is that a socialist market economy avoids the macro-
economic instability of capitalism while harnessing the microeconomic
efficiency of the market. As evidence, they cite a higher rate of growth
after Deng Xiaoping’s restructuring. But China since Deng has followed
a mercantilist road. It has the effect of beggaring the workers of China
whose products are exported to the United States in return for U.S. paper.
The latter is of no benefit for the Chinese workers, though it does enable
private Chinese companies to buy up assets in the United States. From the
standpoint of the Chinese state, it is a more nuanced issue. Chinese state
companies can buy up overseas firms, but whether this is a long-term
advantage is a moot point since real goods that could have been used to
improve the Chinese economy and living standards have been sacrificed.
Historically, the process of having an export-led economy allowed Chi-
na to avoid the technology bans that the West imposed on the USSR,
allowing rapid catch-up in manufacturing techniques. Now that China is
overtaking the United States in some areas of mass production, that ad-
vantage is less clear, and a shift toward higher domestic consumption and
higher wages makes sense, and is indeed being followed in China, unlike
Germany. It could be that the growth advantage that China experienced
post-Deng owed a lot to a new ability to import the latest productive tech-
niques instead of microeconomic efficiency. But what is abundantly clear
22 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

is that the pro-market restructuring had the effect of drastically widening

economic inequalities and giving rise to a new domestic billionaire class.
This, in turn, produces political pressure to extend private ownership and
undermine the still-dominant position of state industry.
So the question arises, could a planning system work in a modern econ-
omy with a highly diversified product range, and how would it overcome
the socialist calculation argument of Mises? I and others have since the
late 1980s been arguing that the answer is yes.
The Mises critique of socialism focused on the need to compare the costs of
alternative ways of making things. Unless you can do that you cannot choose
the most efficient. Our response has been not only that labor time in princi-
ple is an alternative, which Mises conceded, but that with modern computer
technology it is perfectly possible to maintain up-to-date figures for the labor
cost of each input to the production process. Using these, workplaces will
have data that are as good as prices for choosing between techniques.
There are limitations to labor values as there are to any scalar measure
like price, since the constraints on production are multifactorial. Not only
labor power, but also natural resources and ecological considerations con-
strain what we can make. No single scalar measure can handle this. But
the problem of how to deal with multiple constraints like this was already
solved by socialist economics way back in the 1930s. L. V. Kantorovich came
up with a completely general technique for how to meet a socialist plan
subject to constraints additional to labor time.1 His method is a form of in-
kind calculation, that is, non-monetary. It was not practical to use it at the
level of the whole Soviet economy during his lifetime, as the computing
resources were too poor, but by the 1990s computers were up to the job.2
So the basic problem of socialist economic calculation without money had
been solved since Mises wrote. It was impractical in the USSR for two rea-
sons: (1) the computer technology was not there; (2) it would have involved
replacing money calculation and payment with nontransferable labor ac-
counts. This would have been a radical step toward greater social equality.
The collapse of the Soviet and later the Russian economy under Mikhail
Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin was an economic disaster that was other-
wise unprecedented during times of peace. The world’s second superpower
was reduced to the status of a minor bankrupt economy with a huge decline
in industrial production and in living standards. Nothing brings out the scale
of the catastrophe better than the demographic data pointing to the huge
rise in the mortality rate, associated with the increased poverty, hunger,
homelessness, and alcoholism resulting from the catastrophe itself (Table 1).
In determining what caused this, one has to look at long-term, medi-
um-term, and short-term factors that led to relative stagnation, crisis, and
E ffects of C apitalist R estoration 23

Ta b le 1 . E xc e s s Deat hs a s a Co ns eq u e nce of the I ntroduction

o f Ca p it a lis m i n Ru s s i a

Year Thousands Deaths Excess Relative to 1986

1986 1,498 0
1987 1,531 33
1988 1,569 71
1989 1,583 85
1990 1,656 158
1991 1,690 192
1992 1,807 309
1993 2,129 631
1994 2,301 803
1995 2,203 705
1996 2,082 584
1997 2,105 607
1998 1,988 490
1999 2,144 646
2000 2,225 727
2001 2,251 753
2002 2,332 834
2003 2,365 867
2004 2,295 797
2005 2,303 805
2006 2,166 668
2007 2,080 582
2008 2,075 577
2009 2,010 512
Total 48,388 12,436
Notes: Figures amount to some 12 million deaths over twenty years. Source: “Death Rate, Crude (per
1,000 people) - Russian Federation,” compared with total population, 1986–2009, World Bank, available
at http://data.worldbank.org.

then collapse. The long-term factors were structural problems in the So-
viet economy and required reforms to address them. The actual policies
introduced by the Gorbachev and Yeltsin governments, far from dealing
with these problems, actually made the situation catastrophically worse.

Lo n g Te r m
During the period from 1930 to 1970, and excluding the war years, the
USSR experienced rapid economic growth. There is considerable dispute
about just how fast the economy grew, but it is generally agreed to have
24 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

grown significantly faster than the United Kingdom between 1928 and
1975, with the growth rate slowing down to the UK level after that. This
growth took the USSR from a peasant country, whose level of develop-
ment had been comparable to Brazil in 1922, to becoming the world’s
second industrial, technological, and military power by the mid–1960s.
A number of reasons contributed to this relative slowdown in growth
in the latter period. It is easier for an economy to grow rapidly during
the initial phase of industrialization when labor is being switched from
agriculture to industry. Afterward, growth has to rely on improvements
in labor productivity in an already industrialized economy, which are
typically less than the difference in productivity between agriculture
and industry.
A relatively large portion of Soviet industrial output was devoted to
defense, particularly in the latter stages of the Cold War, when they
were in competition with Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” programs. The
skilled labor used up for defense restricted the number of scientists
and engineers who could be allocated to inventing new and more pro-
ductive industrial equipment.
The United States and other capitalist countries imposed embargoes
on the supply of advanced technological equipment to the USSR. This
meant that the USSR had to rely to an unusually high degree on do-
mestic designs of equipment. In the West, there were no comparable
barriers to the export of technology so the industrial development of
the Western capitalist countries was synergistic.
Although Soviet industrial growth in the 1980s slowed down to U.S. lev-
els, this by itself was not a disaster; after all, the United States had expe-
rienced this sort of growth rate (2.5 percent a year) for decades without
crisis. Indeed, while working-class incomes in the United States actually
stagnated over the 1980s, in the USSR they continued to rise. The differ-
ence was in the position of the intelligentsia and the managerial strata
in the two countries. In the United States, income differentials became
progressively greater, so the rise in national income nearly all went to
the top 10 percent of the population. The bulk of the working class in the
United States has seen its income stagnate for half a century. In the USSR,
income differentials were relatively narrow, and while all groups contin-
ued to experience a rise in incomes, this was much smaller than had been
the case in the 1950s and ’60s. This 2.5 percent growth was experienced
by some of the Soviet intelligentsia as intolerable stagnation—perhaps be-
cause they compared themselves with managers and professionals in the
United States and Germany. A perception thus took root among this class
that the socialist system was failing when compared to the United States.
E ffects of C apitalist R estoration 25

Again, this would not have been critical to the future survival of the
system were it not for the fact that these strata were disproportionately
influential within the USSR. Although the ruling Communist Party was
notionally a workers’ party, a disproportionately high proportion of its
members were drawn from the most skilled technical and professional
employees, and manual workers were proportionally underrepresented.
The slowdown in Soviet growth was in large measure the inevitable
result of economic maturity, a movement toward the rate of growth
typical of mature industrial countries. A modest program of measures
to improve the efficiency of economic management would probably
have produced some recovery in the growth rate, but it would have
been unrealistic to expect the rapid growth of the 1950s and ’60s to
return. What the USSR got, however, was not a modest program of
reform, but a radical demolition job on its basic economic structures.
This demolition job was motivated by neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal
economists, both within the USSR and visiting from the United States,
promised that once the planning system was removed and once enter-
prises were left free to compete in the market, then economic efficien-
cy would be radically improved.

M e d iu m Te r m
The medium-term causes of Soviet economic collapse lay in the poli-
cies on which the Gorbachev government embarked in its attempts to
improve the economy. The combined effect of these policies was to bank-
rupt the state and debauch the currency.
One has to realize that the financial basis of the Soviet state lay mainly
in the taxes that it levied on turnover by enterprises and on sales taxes.
In an effort to stamp out the heavy drinking that led to absenteeism
from work and to poor health, the Gorbachev government banned al-
cohol. This and the general tightening up of work discipline led, in the
first couple of years of his government, to some improvement in eco-
nomic growth. It had, however, unforeseen side effects. Since sales of
vodka could no longer take place in government shops, a black market
of illegally distilled vodka sprang up, controlled by the criminal under-
world. The criminal class that gained money and strength from this later
turned out to be a most dangerous enemy.
While money from the illegal drinks trade went into the hands of crim-
inals, the state lost a significant source of tax revenue, which, because it
was not made up by other taxes, touched off an inflationary process.
Were the loss of the taxes on drinks the only problem for state finance,
it could have been solved by raising the prices of some other commodities
26 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

to compensate. But the situation was made worse when, influenced by

the arguments of neoliberal economists, Gorbachev allowed enterprises
to keep a large part of the turnover tax revenue that they owed the state.
The neoliberals argued that if managers were allowed to keep this reve-
nue, they would make more efficient use of it than the government.
What actually ensued was a catastrophic revenue crisis for the state,
which was forced to rely on the issue of credit by the central bank to finance
their current expenditure. The expansion of the money stock led to rapid
inflation and the erosion of public confidence in the economy. Meanwhile,
the additional unaudited funds in the hands of enterprise managers opened
up huge opportunities for corruption. The Gorbachev government had re-
cently legalized worker cooperatives, allowing them to trade independent-
ly. This legal form was then used by a new stratum of corrupt officials, gang-
sters, and petty businessmen to launder corruptly obtained funds.

Res u lt s
Liberal theory held that once enterprises were free from the state,
the “magic of the market” would ensure that they would interact pro-
ductively and efficiently for the public good. But this vision of the
economy greatly overstated the role of markets. Even in so-called mar-
ket economies, markets of the sort described in economics textbooks
are the exception restricted to specialist areas like the world oil and
currency markets. The main industrial structure of an economy de-
pends on a complex interlinked system of regular producer-consumer
relationships in which the same suppliers make regular deliveries to
the same customers week in, week out.
In the USSR, this interlinked system stretched across two continents
and drew into its network other economies: Eastern Europe, Cuba,
North Vietnam. Enterprises depended on regular state orders, the con-
tents of which might be dispatched to other enterprises thousands of
miles away. Whole towns and communities across the wilds of Siberia
relied on these regular orders for their economic survival. Once the
state was too bankrupt to continue making these orders, once it could
no longer afford to pay wages, and once the planning network that
had coordinated these orders was removed, what occurred was not the
spontaneous self-organization of the economy promised by liberal the-
ory, but a domino process of collapse.
Without any orders, factories engaged in primary industries closed
down. Without deliveries of components and supplies, secondary in-
dustries could no longer continue production, so they too closed. In a
rapid and destructive cascade, industry after industry closed down. The
E ffects of C apitalist R estoration 27

process was made far worse by the way the USSR split into a dozen dif-
ferent countries each with their own separate economy. The industrial
system had been designed to work as an integrated whole; split up by
national barriers it lay in ruins.
The figures in Table 2 show how far the economy had regressed in 2003.
These figures show how little recovery there had been, even after thirteen
years of operation of the free market. If the economy had continued to
grow even at the modest rate of the later Leonid Brezhnev years, say 2.5
percent, then industrial production would, on this scale, have stood at 140
percent of 1990 levels. The net effect of thirteen years of capitalism was
to leave Russia with half the industrial capacity that could have been ex-
pected even from the poorest performing years of the socialist economy.

Ta b le 2 . O u t pu t o f Sel ec t ed Bra n c hes of I ndustry in Russia in

2 0 0 3 Co m p a red t o 1 9 9 0 ( 1 9 9 0 =1 0 0 )

Industry Output
Total Industry 66
Electric Power 77
Gas 97
Oil Extraction 94
Oil Refining 70
Ferrous Metallurgy 79
Non-Ferrous Metallurgy 80
Chemicals and Petrochemicals 67
Machine Building 54
Wood and Paper 48
Building Materials 42
Light Industry 15
Food 67

Source: Table 14.3, “Indices of Production Output by Branches of Industry (1990=100),” in Russia in
Figures (Moscow: Russian Federal State Statistic Service, 2004), available at http://eng.gks.ru.

No t e s
1. The original paper was L. V. Kantorovich, “Mathematical Methods of Organizing and Planning Production,” Management
Science 6, no. 4 (1960): 366–422. I explain for a modern readership how his technique worked in “Von Mises, Kantorovich and
In-Natura Calculation,” European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention 7, no. 1 (2006): 167–99.
2. For a good lay person’s introduction to the use of computers in Soviet planning, see the novel: Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
(London: Faber and Faber, 2010).
 monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_4

Democracy, Planning, and Big Data

A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?
KEES VAN DER PIJL

After the financial crash of 2008, the ability of the ruling classes in the
West to maintain a level of social compromise on the home front has
been largely exhausted. As Wolfgang Streeck has argued, after the onset
of the postwar crisis in the late 1960s, governments were still able to use
inflation and debt to postpone the unraveling of the domestic social con-
tract.1 Since 2008, these escape hatches have been closed. The scions of
speculative finance, who paradoxically consolidated their directive role
after the crash, no longer have anything to offer most of the population.
Everywhere, governments are drifting toward authoritarianism and pol-
itics of fear, whether or not in response to actual revolt (as in the French
Yellow Vest movement). This has become the political formula, or con-
cept of control, of what is best labeled predatory neoliberal capitalism.2
The Soviet bloc also showed the first signs of crisis in the late 1960s. By
resorting to repression in response to the attempts in Czechoslovakia to
adjust state socialism to a more advanced level of productive forces, it re-
vealed that the system had exhausted its potential for modernization with-
out backsliding into the market and capitalism (which had been one of the
options in Czechoslovakia too, but not the only one). Even so, the USSR
and its bloc did not collapse until the late 1980s, so the idea of socialism, its
problems and possibilities, continued to be associated with Soviet state so-
cialism for another twenty years. For at least a generation, the notion that
we live in the era of the transition from capitalism to socialism went down
with the lowering of the hammer and sickle flag on the Kremlin in 1991.
However, the development of productive forces and the constraints on
the possible social control over the forces of nature in fact entered a new,
revolutionary stage from around the time of the original crisis of the late
1960s. This stage can be called the Information Revolution—an era fo-
cused on the application of information theories such as cybernetics com-

Kees van der Pijl is a retired professor. He used to teach international relations at the
University of Sussex. He lives in Amsterdam and can be reached at keesvanderpijl@
protonmail.com.
This article is based on talks given by the author in May 2018 in Moscow, October
2018 in Cambridge, and in December 2019 at Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, and
China University of Politics and Law, Beijing.

28
P lanning & B ig D ata 29

bined with advances in computer technology and digital communication

networks, culminating in the Internet.3 Under capitalist conditions, this
has already resulted in a knowledge economy, or noönomy, but the social,
auto-regulatory possibilities it opens up are bound to be incompatible
with the private appropriation characteristic of capitalism.4

Pr ivat e v e r s u s So c i a l
In the Grundrisse, the rough notes for Capital, Karl Marx speculated
how machines, fixed capital, would ultimately evolve into an automatic
system. “The means of labour passes through different metamorphoses,
whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machin-
ery…set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.
This automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual or-
gans, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious link-
ages.”5 Automated machinery represents social knowledge transformed
into assets controlled by capital: “The accumulation of knowledge and of
skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into
capital, as opposed to labour.… In so far as machinery develops with the
accumulation of society’s science, of productive force generally, general
social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital.”6
This sums up the contradiction we are experiencing today: the so-
cial brain (roughly, the Internet) is collective, combined, social, but it is
controlled by capital—that is, a handful of large corporations such as
Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. These also serve as
the eyes and ears of U.S. and allied Anglophone intelligence, the Five
Eyes, and are themselves interlocked with financial institutions such as
BlackRock and the interests they serve.7
The Information Revolution accelerated after the Richard Nixon admin-
istration uncoupled the dollar from its gold cover, freeing itself from the
need to balance the books as long as the world’s propertied classes were
willing to bank on U.S. economic and military might, and the U.S. curren-
cy remained the preferred means of payment in the world economy.8 This
helped the information technology (IT) sector establish itself in the 1980s and
’90s as a U.S. phenomenon: Silicon Valley.9 Early on, data gathering for the
intelligence agencies commissioning the research from which the big IT mo-
nopolies would emerge created problems of storage, not unlike those of the
quickly rising financial sector. Even the largest mainframe computers could
not handle the amount of data generated by innovations such as derivatives,
securitization, and super-leveraging. In 1986, a company developing parallel
database systems based on a cluster architecture, Teradata, delivered the first
such system to the discount-store-turned-shadow-bank Kmart.10
30 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

Today, even Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the rest of the big monopo-
lies, along with the surveillance state with which they are closely aligned,
find it difficult to control the exponentially expanding amount of data.
Stored in several thousands of commercial servers, Big Data are analyzed
through dedicated systems such as the Google File System, an expandable,
distributed file system that supports large-scale, data-intensive applica-
tions.11 Even so, the IT system owners do not have the Internet to them-
selves. Today, most people are connected in one way or another, with even
electricity-starved regions catching up fast.12 This highlights the democrat-
ic potential of the Information Revolution, for while Internet and related
technology “creates new capacities…these new capacities may be more im-
portant for those that did not have them, than for those who already did.”13
Information, knowledge, is immediately social (one can, in principle, pos-
sess an item of information without somebody else being deprived of it), and
only the capitalist regime, by attaching intellectual property rights to, say,
new medicines, bars such information from universal use.14 Technically, the
new productive forces should enable the world to move toward a more hu-
mane society, but all kinds of stratagems are being developed to force them
back into the capitalist straitjacket. The 2009 World Economic Forum’s an-
nual gathering at Davos presented a New Deal on Data meant to turn those
providing their information into active property owners. However, the al-
lure of emancipation characteristic of so many aspects of the digital universe
hides its exploitative thrust. Ubiquitous electronic networking dissolves the
remaining barriers separating private life from work. Alongside flexible and
freelance jobs, the sharing economy in which every aspect of personality and
possessions (bicycle, car, home, and so on) is forcibly monetized, places all
human existence, at all times, under the discipline of capital.15
Yet the notion that only the market can regulate a modern economy
given its overwhelming complexity, ruling out planning (the thesis of
neoliberal capitalism’s paramount ideologue, Friedrich Hayek), is begin-
ning to wear thin in the age of Big Data.16 The choice between planning
and freedom was always an ideological construct, floated by Hayek and
other organic intellectuals of the financial asset-owning strata. Monocen-
tric efficiency and humanistic polycentrism can be mutually accommo-
dated by democracy in a range of ways, as the Polish Marxist Wlodzimierz
Brus already established in the early 1970s.17
A flexible, cybernetic system of central planning connected to digi-
talized individual preferences fed into the larger framework, in the way
supermarkets respond to customer demand, is one way of such a mutual
accommodation. Or, in the words of Silicon Valley guru Tim O’Reilly: “We
are at a unique time when new technologies make it possible to reduce
P lanning & B ig D ata 31

the amount of regulation while actually increasing the amount of over-

sight and production of desirable outcomes.”18
How, then, can we ensure that, in the current authoritarian conjunc-
ture, such regulation is democratized?

Th e I n f o r m at i o n Revo l ut i o n i n Hi s t o ri cal Pe rspe ctiv e

The Information Revolution, conceived as the process ultimately leading
to the universal, real-time interconnectedness of the entire population of
Earth, can be understood as the third great space-time compression in hu-
man history, comparable to the Industrial Revolution and, further back,
the Neolithic Revolution that brought us the domestication of plants and
animals. One common element of the three qualitative leaps in how hu-
man communities utilize the sun’s energy was, for obvious reasons, that
the initial advantages arising from them bolstered the existing ruling
classes first. Yet, both exchange advantages and war-making capacities
in the sphere of foreign relations, and opportunities for exploitation in
the sphere of production and reproduction, inevitably generated possibil-
ities, mental and material, for subaltern forces as well. If we confine our-
selves to the Industrial and the Information Revolutions, we can identify
the key differences between the two socialisms I distinguish: what I call
industrial labor socialism and digital, Big Data ecosocialism.
The Industrial Revolution had its epicenter in Britain, mobilizing the
human and material resources of its empire. Arising from this mutation,
in the Atlantic West, capitalism was consolidated as the new mode of
production and sovereign equality as the ascendant mode of foreign re-
lations. This allowed contender states resisting Anglophone supremacy,
beginning with absolutist France, then Prussia-Germany, Japan, and so
on to catch up industrially, exposing the remaining land empires (China,
Persia, the Ottoman empire) to the rule of the West.19
In the course of the century following the Industrial Revolution, labor
socialism emerged as the internal subaltern force resisting it. The workers’
movement inspired by Marx, Frederick Engels, and the First International
they founded was eventually destroyed in the First World War, but Sovi-
et-style state socialism, forced back into an external contender posture
facing the liberal capitalist heartland, replicated, successfully at first, the
Industrial Revolution, as other contenders had done before.
Today, we are in the midst of another world-historic transformation, the
Information Revolution. Externally, it pits the declining West, led by the
United States, against a loose, largely involuntary contender bloc. In coun-
tries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, capitalist resto-
ration or neoliberal restructuring was followed by the discovery that they
32 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

were no longer supposed to defend their sovereignty and instead had to

submit to Western global governance. So, in the foreign relations domain,
the new possibilities empower the West first, which occupies the com-
manding heights of the geopolitical economy militarily, intelligence-wise,
financially, and culturally, retaining the ability to strike whenever its he-
gemony is endangered. Systems not accessible to Five Eyes spying, such as
those run by the Chinese IT giant Huawei, are attacked by all means avail-
able, from boycotts to hostage-taking, to keep this preeminence intact.20
Internally, the achievements of the Information Revolution are put to use
for class oppression and heightened exploitation. Facial recognition coupled
with round-the-clock observation of people gives rise to potentially totali-
tarian control; in every segment of the wealth scale, “impersonal systems
of discipline and control produce certain knowledge of human behaviour
independent of consent.”21 A Swiss specialist in neuroengineering, Marcello
Ienca, reviewing the new departures into brain and identity manipulation
by the large IT corporations, warns that the time in which they will be able
to actually direct people’s preferences is not too far away any more. He ar-
gues for a “right to psychological continuity” to prevent personality-changing
interventions already being experimented with in the military.22
The new IT applications are not confined to the West, except that here
they play out in the context of a spiritual crisis arising from the erosion of
life chances for most people. Austerity to combat irredeemable indebted-
ness and financial irresponsibility, and festering wars and mass migration
fuel new superstitions and a rise of superficiality and vulgarity in popu-
lar culture. The Internet, Marx’s social brain, like any biological brain, is
also the repository of much that we would not normally see fit to express
openly. Yet, under cover of anonymity, users like DonaldDuck2 and his
virtual friends have no qualms creating a downward spiral in which a new
generation of populist politicians cater to their instincts, further changing
the signposts, and so on. Can this be the social material with which a new,
democratic, and ecologically friendly socialism will be erected?
The former socialist states forced back into a contender role in spite of
their conversion to capitalism, such as China or Russia, have so far not been
able to develop alternative, cohesive worldviews and ways of life sufficiently
attractive to claim hegemonic status. While maintaining a measure of state
direction and protection, they also remain exposed to both neoliberal doc-
trine and Western popular culture undermining their defense of sovereignty.
The Information Revolution, then, has created a situation in which, once
again, the new possibilities in principle empower the Western ruling class-
es first—but both on the foreign relations and the relations of production
dimensions, their ability to really impose the neoliberal regime are compro-
P lanning & B ig D ata 33

mised. To steer humanity clear of a full-scale central war and irreversible

destruction of the biosphere, it is therefore urgent that the IT infrastructure
is made transparent and placed under some form of democratic control. So
far all attempts to transfer governance of the Internet and World Wide Web
to multilateral bodies, even after the Edward Snowden revelations on glob-
al surveillance by the Five Eyes, were effectively sabotaged by the United
States, European Union, and private body assigning domain names, ICANN,
domiciled in California.23 The fact that the capitalist noönomy has become
entirely dependent on IT—through the Internet of Things, intelligent ma-
chines linked to the social brain, or otherwise—rules out that it would be
switched off for political reasons other than temporarily and locally. So, in
a way, the accessibility of the Internet is guaranteed by the fact that it has
meanwhile become indispensable for the operation of the economy as well.
How can we expect progressive forces to be able to disentangle them-
selves from this mutual embrace and obtain democratic transparency?
This, in my view, depends on the economic prospects of speculative cap-
ital, the social force guiding the West. Barring a resort to all-out war, a
new collapse of the 2008 type would accelerate the transition toward a
new, associated mode of production that has matured within the old one,
which itself has been brought to ruin by predatory finance.24 It is a crucial,
although not entirely new, factor that the IT infrastructure for a twen-
ty-first-century socialism is largely in place. In the Russian Revolution too
there were structures that could be taken over intact, but they did not go
beyond state control (of the war economy).25 This state degenerated into
the party-police state under Joseph Stalin, but eventually was able to res-
urrect its socialist antecedents and, among many other legacies, left us
the experiments with digital planning that continue to be relevant today.

S o vie t P la n n in g : Co mma n d E c o no my and D igital D e parture s

Soviet (state) socialism crystallized in the wake of the failed world revo-
lutions of 1917–24. In hindsight, this marks the moment when the internal
challenge arising from the Industrial Revolution, labor socialism, became
secondary to the external one, a contender state resisting Western impe-
rialism. The command economy that was instituted under the Five-Year
Plans in the late 1920s relied on (initially extreme) coercion to compen-
sate for Russia’s economic underdevelopment and ultimately allowed the
USSR to defeat the Nazi invaders. In the 1960s, when growth began to
slow down after the initial breakneck industrialization, a digital transfor-
mation was considered a way out. Some of the USSR’s achievements were
far ahead of their time and heralded our current epoch, even though
their revolutionary potential was ultimately blocked.
34 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

Computer design began at the Academy of Sciences in Kiev in the 1940s.

Military applications were a priority and the Soviet leadership wanted to
respond to the computerized air-defense system being developed in the
United States with a comparable system of their own. The first book in
Russian dealing with computers, Electronic Digital Machines, was written by
Anatoliy I. Kitov, a colonel engineer in the USSR armed forces.26
Ideological barriers to theories such as cybernetics, needed for the ef-
fective use of electronic devices, were only lifted after Stalin’s death. In
his speech at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the So-
viet Union in 1956, party leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism
and advocated factory automation. Kitov then proposed making the en-
visaged air-defense network available for civilian use in peacetime, but he
bypassed the military hierarchy to address Khrushchev directly and was
stripped of his rank and expelled from the party. The idea of digitaliz-
ing the command economy remained alive, although a school advocating
profitability as the lever for efficiency also emerged, led by E. Liberman.27
At the Twenty-Second Party Congress of 1961, Khrushchev again declared
it imperative to accelerate the application of digital technologies to the
planned economy.28 In this period, following the Sputnik space successes,
the enthusiasm about the USSR overtaking the West was at its height and cy-
bernetic economic management was a key component of the fervor. A report
for the Council of Foreign Relations in the United States noted that Soviet
planners saw cybernetics as the most effective instrument for “the rational-
ization of human activity in a complex industrial society.”29 The Soviet press
began popularizing the idea of computers as the “machines of communism,”
causing U.S. observers to consider that “if any country were to achieve a com-
pletely integrated and controlled economy in which ‘cybernetic’ principles
were applied to achieve various goals, the Soviet Union would be ahead of
the United States in reaching such a state.”30 The CIA published a series of
reports in which the agency expanded on this theme, warning in particular
that the USSR might be on its way to building a “unified information net”
that in the eyes of some of president John F. Kennedy’s advisers would, if
successful, “bury the United States” as Khrushchev had promised.31
At this point, Viktor M. Glushkov, a mathematician and the director
of the Computing Center of the Academy of Sciences of Soviet Ukraine,
envisioned the National Automated System for Computation and Infor-
mation Processing, hiring the disgraced Kitov as his assistant.32 Alexei
Kosygin, then deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, encouraged
Glushkov to elaborate his ideas on digitalizing the planning system. How-
ever, in 1964, when a comprehensive digital blueprint was finally submit-
ted, Khrushchev was sidelined by the combined forces of conservatism
P lanning & B ig D ata 35

and caution. The new leadership under Leonid Brezhnev (and with Alexei
Kosygin as prime minister) opted for greater enterprise autonomy along
the lines of Liberman, accepting that the last thing local bosses wanted
was to have all their assets and activities digitally recorded by the center.33
At the same time, Kosygin was engaged in striking large-scale deals with
Western European companies in order to modernize the Soviet economy.
His son-in-law, Dzhermen Gvishiani, would fashion the Soviet response
to the U.S. plan to launch a joint think tank to deal with problems of
advanced industrial society. Out of this would emerge the International
Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, in
which Gvishiani held the top Soviet position until 1986.34
From the West, IIASA was perceived as a means of subverting Soviet
state socialism and—since that did not eventuate—Anglo-U.S. support for
the institute was terminated after the neoliberal turn under Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. As we can now see, this also interrupted a
transnational process of class formation of a forward-looking managerial
cadre—that is, specialists typically inclined to systems thinking and in-
terested in problems transcending the East-West divide.35 The mathemat-
ical global modeling developed at IIASA, the United Nations, and for the
Club of Rome (in which Gvishiani was involved since his first meetings
with the heads of Olivetti, FIAT, and other pioneers of East-West trade,
who set the Club up) was used to address issues such as raw-material use
and atmospheric and oceanic pollution.36
The work of Glushkov, Nikita Moiseev, and others on environmental
systems struck deep roots in the USSR. In close collaboration with U.S.
scientists such as Carl Sagan, who were concerned about the cavalier at-
titude of the Reagan administration toward nuclear war, this culminated
in a joint U.S.-Soviet report on the danger of nuclear winter.37 By applying
complexity theory to the biosphere, it was found that the extinction of
life on the planet by a full-scale nuclear exchange might equally come
about by systemic changes in Earth’s biosphere, and not even slowly, but
potentially by a comparable, sudden catastrophe.38
The sort of planning that emerged from this experience is qualitative-
ly different than planning the command economy by which a contend-
er state pursues a catch-up industrialization. Indeed, digital planning is
not just planning with the aid of computers, but feeding vast amounts
of, eventually, Big Data into computer systems and discovering rather
than dictating outcomes, as we are witnessing today with climate pre-
dictions—including the uncertainties that come with them. The Mikhail
Gorbachev leadership was guided by these notions, but it arrived too late
to transform the social structures of the command economy to a digital
36 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

planning format and went under with the USSR and the Soviet bloc. Thus,
the visionary departures in the direction of digital planning were buried
in the one type of society that had the social structures for it to succeed.39
A second experiment with digital planning occurred in Chile under
Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government. In this case, the element
of cybernetic adjustment, including responsiveness to supply issues and
strikes, was explicitly accounted for, but it was cut short by Augusto Pino-
chet’s coup in 1973. Stafford Beer, who had been brought in to head Chile’s
Cybersyn project, shared the progressive managerialism of the IIASA/UN/
Club of Rome cadre, but he was kept out of IIASA to protect the institute’s
nonpolitical format. His Chilean deputy, Raúl Espejo, narrowly escaped
the clutches of the U.S.-backed terror regime.40 This takes us to the issue of
the subject of a resumption of the project of digital planning today.

Wh o W ill B r in g A bo ut Reg i me C ha n g e?
The process of the class formation of a progressive managerial cad-
re, pushed to the left by working-class militancy in the 1960s and ’70s,
was interrupted by the neoliberal counterrevolution. Closing the era of
postwar, broad class compromise, the resurgent capitalist class instead
struck a more restricted deal with the upper layers of management and
asset-owning middle classes while attacking the working class and pro-
gressive forces across the globe.41 Certainly, one cohort of the IT cadre in
Silicon Valley still shared the idea of Apple’s Steve Jobs that the personal
computer was an instrument of emancipation, but this 1960s outlook was
soon channeled into a libertarian, right-wing direction “using cybernetic
ideals of the counterculture to sell corporate politics as a revolutionary
act.”42 Whether the privileged cadre will be inclined to follow the lead
of the mass insurrections currently taking place in France, Chile, and
elsewhere, may depend on the mobilization of those educated for a cadre
role but un- or underemployed in the current crisis, and sharing the fate
of the lower classes finding themselves excluded.43
As Nikolai Bukharin already wrote at the time of the Russian Revolution,
for the cadre to give up their privileged position will be a tortuous process
because their position is dependent on capitalism.44 So how would their
orientation once again converge with the outlook of the popular masses?
In this regard, the French Situationist philosopher Guy Debord provided
important clues in the late 1960s. A key organic intellectual of progressive
class formation of that period, Debord, in his manifesto The Society of the
Spectacle, argued that unlike the bourgeoisie, which came to power as the
“class of the economy” (against the low-productivity, stagnant manorial
economy of late feudalism), the proletariat, as the class with no enduring
P lanning & B ig D ata 37

stake in existing society, stood little chance to out-compete the rapacious

dynamism of capital. Labor socialism, and state socialism as its ultimate
historic embodiment, found this out the hard way.
According to Debord, then, the progressive forces can only be superior
to the bourgeoisie on the basis of their ability to look beyond the capital-
ist horizon, as a “class of consciousness.”45 This consciousness will crucial-
ly include concern for the maintenance, indeed recovery, of the biosphere,
something largely absent from labor socialism, since in the spirit of the
Industrial Revolution its overriding idea was that progress was based on
the conquest and expropriation of nature.
As far as actual production goes, already today the IT infrastructure
in principle “enables people to depart from immediate involvement in
material production while remaining its ‘controllers and regulators.’”46
This confirms Marx’s assessment of a future economy as “an automaton,
a moving power that moves itself,” in which workers are merely the con-
scious linkages. Under Big Data socialism, we must expect this “collective
worker” of engineers-controllers to take the place of the capitalist oligar-
chy and reorient strategic decisions from private profit to the survival
concerns of humanity. Labor will be about performing the remaining cre-
ative tasks, while repetitive tasks that we associate with the automaton
will be left to algorithmic regulation.47
Now, the consciousness disseminated through the Internet is a far cry
from, say, the Marxism embraced by the industrial proletariat of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century. Far from being a corrective to
ideological distortion, the Web itself is a key channel for the spread of
misanthropic racism, climate change denial, and other abominations.
However, the real movement is always the determinant of the flow of
ideas, not the other way around. The epochal revelations of Chelsea
Manning, Julian Assange, and Snowden, who have no equivalent in the
opposite camp, resonate in the many quality websites and remaining left
print publications that share the spirit of these persecuted champions of
transparency. One may also put it this way: if what progressive channels
publicize was not superior to fake news and hatred (in the sense that
revolutionary Marxism was intellectually superior to the chauvinist mil-
itarism that led Europe into the First World War), a revolution would de-
serve to fail—just as the Stalinist regression to mechanical materialism
was a major factor in the demise of Soviet state socialism.
How a transition toward a situation in which society governs the econ-
omy, rather than the other way around, is not a matter that can be pre-
dicted in detail. The geopolitical divide between the capitalist Atlantic
heartland and the contender sphere outside it would again be a major
38 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

modifying factor, as in all modern revolutions.48 It is enough to establish

that all elements for a world-historical transformation are in place; the
transition hinges on how states will respond to pressures to ensure the
security (job, food, energy security, and the like) of the population under
conditions of extreme financial volatility. Inevitably, the state will then
take precedence over the IT monopolies. “Just as companies like Google,
Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon build regulatory mechanisms to manage
their platforms, government exists as a platform to ensure the success
of our society, and that platform needs to be well regulated.”49 Whether
that will take the form of enlightened despotism or democracy, and what
form democracy will take in turn, will be decided in real struggles.
For one, it will be essential that movements making demands on capital
and the state also demand that control facilities embedded in data sys-
tems are publicly accessible. The (anonymous) metadata now in the hands
of the large IT monopolies and dedicated companies like Palantir, Airb-
nb, Uber, hospitals, insurance companies, and countless others should be
made available to citizens, city and national government, and science, as
part of a shift to democratic self-regulation.50 The Open Data movement,
of which Aaron Swartz was an iconic figure (he took his own life when
faced with a draconian sentence in the United States for making privately
copyrighted academic materials publicly accessible), seeks to create a data
universe parallel to the Big Data available to the corporate sector, civic
data. Indeed, it has been argued that the ubiquity of data itself already
works to generate a culture moving away from bourgeois possessive in-
dividualism, or any other individualism irresponsible for the larger ques-
tions of human survival. The availability of this data creates expectations
and habits that help build a civic culture resistant to corporate control.51
This new political culture would then interact with the shift in the
operation of representative organs, from the United Nations and its
functional and regional organizations down to national and subnation-
al parliaments and councils. As more and more issues concerning the
organization of the economy and the safeguarding of the biosphere in-
cluding human health are reclaimed for democratic decision-making,
these bodies will again begin to attract quality memberships. After all,
the decline of representative organs has everything to do with the fact
that, under neoliberal capitalism, the strategic decisions are made by
the oligarchies organized in (trans-) national planning bodies closely
aligned with major banks and corporations.52 IT infrastructure, which,
for example, provides accessible tax data, data on politicians’ records,
and data on representatives’ secondary occupations, will surely play a
role in the transition to a more democratic society.
P lanning & B ig D ata 39

What distinguishes a twenty-first-century Big Data socialism from state

socialism grafted on the industrial labor movement of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is that it would not be a willed utopia. Only when a
majority wants change will a revolution be democratic. “A determinate
class undertakes from its particular situation the universal emancipation of
society,” Marx wrote in 1844. “This class emancipates the whole society,
but only on the condition that the whole society shares its situation [emphasis add-
ed].”53 The original labor movement never faced the situation in which this
would have applied; hence the need for a tightly organized party to lead
the masses, impose and consolidate socialism by coercion, and so on. In
the Information Revolution it is different: no otherworldly, exotic exper-
iment is necessary, because everybody is connected or will be soon and
issues concerning the refashioning of the political order can be discussed
with reference to a reality for all to see. Certainly, it would at some point
require the expropriation of large private concerns, ideally beginning
with the media, in order to make meaningful public discussion possible.
In this way, the aforementioned structures of public representation,
subject to digital transparency, may be expected to begin to set social-
ist targets beyond the day-to-day management of current affairs. These
would ideally include:

(1) A general rise in the cultural level and living standards, focused espe-
cially on the working class and other disadvantaged groups;
(2) A long-term resource-constrained pattern of development respecting
the biosphere;
(3) Real economic gender equality;
(4) The disappearance of all forms of distinctions of class, including the
one between town and country.54

Within these broad parameters of a reorientation of society as a whole,

specific digital regulation would require four further steps: 1) an understand-
ing of the desired outcome; 2) “real-time measurement whether that out-
come is being achieved”; 3) algorithms (ordering rules meant to allow adjust-
ment on the basis of new data), and 4) “periodic, deeper analysis of whether
the algorithms themselves are correct and performing as expected.”55
Summing up, a comprehensive, democratically controlled, ecologically
secured, and digital planned economy is no longer a utopian ideology
that requires imposition by a vanguard of trained revolutionaries, as in
the case of labor socialism (certainly in countries such as preindustrial
Russia or China). The digital infrastructure is a democracy waiting to be
turned into a functioning social order. It lays the foundation for an ap-
propriate political superstructure and practice that is not experienced
40 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

as being led by ideological conviction. Instead, it will rely primarily on

hegemony, consensual rule as a permanent condition.
The idea that hegemony is about education, one of Antonio Gramsci’s key
tenets, comes into play here. Education is not a matter of representation of
an existing state of affairs waiting out there, which education informs us
about, but a route to a reality in the making. Given that, in the digital econo-
my, algorithmic regulation reduces the burden of compulsory toil ever-fast-
er, people’s time will increasingly be available for cultural enrichment and
technological retraining. Thus, education becomes the primary reproduc-
tive structure of society, instead of the economy, which is largely automated
and no longer provides the satisfaction of the original work experience.56
Democracy, then, is contemporary to the transition itself, rather than post-
poned as a matter to be solved later, as was the case with labor socialism. It
will inevitably take on new and unforeseen implications and associations, in
the way soviets emerged in 1905. Whether there will be coercive aspects of
the transformation, given its regionally and internationally uneven progress,
is something that cannot be excluded. However, digital transparency will
help prevent consolidation of the power of those entrusted with these tasks.
To repeat: the key aspect of a transition to a Big Data socialism is that IT
infrastructure and the ability of people to think in terms of its possibilities
(something that a new financial crash will only make more acute) are al-
ready in place. They are coming more into conflict with the oligarchic trend
of contemporary capitalism and state repression with every passing day. A
digital socialism will build on much that is already familiar and will also un-
derline the old reformist tenet that socialism is not the negation of liberal
capitalism, but transcendence in the sense of negation and continuation,
the further development of tendencies already working within capitalism.
There is no point in further detailing the wish list of an imaginary dig-
ital socialism beyond the above. It suffices to establish that if capitalism,
which is exhausting society and nature alike, is left unchecked, it will
inevitably develop into fascism again, since it can no longer bring forth a
broad social consensus or accept compromise in foreign relations. Finan-
cial predation, the round-the-clock assault on nature and the threat of
war do not leave us any choice but to engage in an urgent debate on how
a different society might be achieved.
N ot e s
1. Wolfgang Streeck, Gekaufte Zeit: Die Transnational Capital and Class Fractions, 4. Sergey Bodrunov, “Noönomy,”
vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kap- ed. Bob Jessop and Henk Overbeek (English version presented at the Cam-
italismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013). (London: Routledge, 2019). bridge-St. Petersburg colloquium Marx in
2. See Kees van der Pijl, “A Transnation- 3. Evgeny Morozov, “Socialize the Data a High Technology Era: Globalisation, Cap-
al Class Analysis of the Current Crisis,” in Centres!,” New Left Review 91 (2015): 57. ital and Class, Cambridge, October 2018).
P lanning & B ig D ata 41

5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmond- Works, vol. 25 (1917; repr., Moscow: 41. Gérard Duménil and Dominique
sworth: Penguin, 1973), 692. Progress Publishers, 1972). Lévy, “Neo-Liberal Dynamics—Towards a
6. Marx, Grundrisse, 694; emphasis added. 26. Benjamin Peters, “Normalizing So- New Phase?,” in Global Regulation, ed.
viet Cybernetics,” Information & Culture: Kees van der Pijl, L. Assassi, and D. Wigan
7. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (Lon-
A Journal of History 47, no. 2 (2012): (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
don: Hamish Hamilton, 2014); Peter Phil-
154, 169–70. 30; Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy,
lips, Giants (New York: Seven Stories, 2018).
Au-Delà du Capitalisme? (Paris: Presses
8. Duccio Bassosi, Il Governo del Dolla- 27. Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the
Universitaires de France, 1998).
ro (Florence: Polistampa, 2006), 34. Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide
Computer Network,” History and Tech- 42. Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley
9. Paul Boccara, Transformations et (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), 136.
nology 24, no. 4 (2008): 338–40; Evsej
Crise du Capitalisme Mondialisé (Pan-
G. Liberman, Methoden der Wirtschafts- 43. Jean-Claude Paye, “The Yellow
tin: Le Temps des Cérises, 2008), 80, 88.
lenkung im Sozialismus, trans. E. Werfel Vests in France: People or Proletari-
10. James Jorgensen, Money Shock (New (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1974), 11. at?,” Monthly Review 71, no. 2 (June
York: American Management Association, 2019); Christophe Guilluy, La France
28. Peters, “Normalizing Soviet Cyber-
1986), 95–96; Chen Min, Mao Shiwen, and Périphérique (Paris: Flammarion, 2015).
netics,” 164.
Liu Yunhao, “Big Data: A Survey,” Mobile
29. Quoted in Alexander Vucinich, “Sci- 44. Nikolai Bukharin, Économique de
Network Applications 19, no. 2 (2014): 174.
ence,” in Prospects for Soviet Society, ed. la Période de Transition, trans. E. Zarzyc-
11. Chen, Mao, and Liu, “Big Data: A ka-Berard and J.-M. Brohm (1920; repr.,
Allen Kassof (New York: Praeger, Council
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on Foreign Relations, 1968), 319–20.
12. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Prole- tionales, 1976), 104.
30. Gerovitch, “InterNyet,” 335–36.
tariat (London: Pluto, 2015), 103. 45. Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle
31. Gerovitch, “InterNyet,” 335–36; Peters,
13. Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and (1967; repr., Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 82.
“Normalizing Soviet Cybernetics,” 165.
Alex Pazaitis, Peer to Peer (London: Univer- 46. Bodrunov, “Noönomy,” 158–59.
sity of Westminster Press, 2019), 33–34. 32. “Academician Glushkov’s ‘Life
Work,’” History of Computing in Ukraine. 47. Alan Freeman, “Twilight of the Machi-
14. Christopher May, Global Political nocrats,” in Handbook of the International
Economy of Intellectual Property Rights 33. Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contra-
Political Economy of Production, ed. Kees
(London: Routledge, 2000). dictions of Real Socialism (New York:
van der Pijl (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,
Monthly Review Press, 2012), 118–19;
15. Timo Daum, Das Kapital Sind Wir: 2015); Daum, Das Kapital Sind Wir, 60–
Gerovitch, “InterNyet,” 343.
Zur Kritik der Digitalen Ökonomie (Ham- 66. The notion of the collective worker was
burg: Nautilus, 2017), 183–84. 34. Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of developed by Marx in the unpublished
Systems (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University sixth chapter of Capital, cited here as Un
16. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other,” Journal
Press, 2016) 44, 48, 69. Chapitre Inédit du Capital, trans. R. Dan-
of Information Technology 30 (2015): 78.
35. Kees van der Pijl, “Cadres and the geville (Paris: Ed. Générales 10/18, 1971).
17. Wlodzimierz Brus, Sozialisierung
Classless Society,” chap. 5 in Transnation- 48. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of
und Politisches System, trans. E. Werfel
al Classes and International Relations. Revolution (1938; repr., Providence:
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1975), 192–93.
36. Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Sys- Berg, 1993).
18. Tim O’Reilly, “Open Data and Algorith-
tems, 161, 178. 49. O’Reilly, “Open Data and Algorith-
mic Regulation,” in Beyond Transparency,
ed. Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson (San 37. Robert Scheer, With Enough Shov- mic Regulation,” 292.
Francisco: Code for America, 2013), 293. els (New York: Random House, 1982); 50. Daum, Das Kapital Sind Wir, 149.
John Bellamy Foster, “Late Soviet Ecol-
19. See Kees van der Pijl, Transnational 51. Eric Gordon and Jessica Baldwin-Philip-
ogy and the Planetary Crisis,” Monthly
Classes and International Relations (Lon- pi, “Making a Habit Out of Engagement,” in
Review 67, no. 2 (June 2015): 9–11.
don: Routledge, 1998). Beyond Transparency, 139–40.
38. William Rees, “Scale, Complexity
20. “Five Eyes Against Huawei,” Voltaire 52. William K. Carroll, The Making of a
and the Conundrum of Sustainability,”
Network, December 7, 2018. Transnational Capitalist Class (London:
in Planning Sustainability, ed. M. Kenny
21. Zuboff, “Big Other,” 81. Zed, 2010).
and J. Meadowcroft (London: Routledge,
22. Marcello Ienca, “Do We Have a Right 1999), 109–10; Georgi Golitsyn and 53. Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Phi-
to Mental Privacy and Cognitive Liber- Aleksandr Ginzburg, “Natural Analogs losophy of Right: Introduction,” in Early
ty?,” Scientific American, May 3, 2017. of a Nuclear Catastrophe,” in The Night Political Writings, ed. and trans. Joseph
After…, ed. Y. Velikhov, trans. A. Rosenz- O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
23. Prabir Purkayashta and Rishab
weig and Y. Taube (Moscow: Mir, 1985). versity Press, 1994), 67.
Bailey, “U.S. Control of the Internet,”
Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 39. Manuel Castells, End of Millennium 54. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell,
2014): 114, 118–19. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 47–56. Towards a New Socialism (Nottingham:
Spokesman, 1993), 57–58.
24. Karl Marx, “The Role of Credit in 40. Katharina Loeber, “Big Data, Algo-
Capitalist Production,” chap. 27 in Cap- rithmic Regulation, and the History of the 55. O’Reilly, “Open Data and Algorith-
ital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1991), Cybersyn Project in Chile, 1971–1973,” mic Regulation,” 289–90.
566–73. Social Sciences 7, no. 65 (2018): 1–15; 56. See Boccara, Transformations et Crise
25. V. I. Lenin, The Impending Catastro- Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Systems, 71–72. du Capitalisme Mondialisé; Paul Boccara,
phe and How to Combat It, in Collected Espejo is currently president of the World Une Sécurité d’Emploi ou de Formation
Organization of Systems and Cybernetics. (Pantin: Le Temps des Cérises, 2002).
 monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_5

Dead Labor
HANNAH OLSON CREIGHTON

“I’ll hold the nail, toots, you hit it with the hammer. Don’t hurt yourself.”
“I can do it, papa. Let me do it.”
Everyone’s favorite picture of me and my father was taken when he
came back from his last trip to sea, when I was about 3. My pop has a long,
very full beard, which he says he shaved within days because “beards itch
when you’re on land.” He’d been gone many months, so he must have be-
come a stranger to me, but I’m on his lap leaning back into his arm with
one hand possessively curled around his thumb. We both stare straight at
the camera, not trying at all to please.
He worked as a carpenter when I was a kid. But he had been many
things and been to many places. I loved to hang around with him and lis-
ten to his stories. The only way to talk to him and not have an argument
was to ask him questions and then listen to the stories that came out.
He was born in 1902 in Virginia, Minnesota—that’s in the Mesabi Range,
where the iron ore is, or was. Northern Minnesota is some of the sweetest
country anywhere—rolling hills with a lake around every bend. Small
lakes you could easily swim across, with maybe six houses or shacks, each
with a pier. Every lake surrounded by forests of small birch—straight, ele-
gant, white birch. And then there is the shock as you come to the mines—
great pits the size of a whole town, scars of red earth. At the bottom, you
can just barely see the train tracks and roads, the trucks and equipment,
scattered around, like some boys had suddenly left to go to supper.
Pop was never allowed to go into the mines—his people ran a boarding
house and a bakery, and they were proud that their sons never worked in
the mines. The pay was too high, too quick, and young men got hooked
on the good wages and then got married, got old fast, and died young.
“That’s no life,” his folks said.
My father was the fourth son, out of ten children. During the sum-
mers, his parents apprenticed him out to lots of trades. He was a bar-
Hannah Olson Creighton (1942–98) was a fearless social and environmental activist.
She worked for Communities for a Better Environment and later for Urban Habitat, as
well as serving as editor of Race, Poverty & the Environment, the two organizations’ joint
publication. She studied sociology at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s, where her time as a
single mom and waitress informed her oral history of the San Francisco Hotel Restau-
rant Workers Local 2 (now United Here 2). Creighton was active in the Marin County
peace, antinuclear, environmental, and transit activist movements in the 1980s and ’90s.
This piece was submitted to Monthly Review by her family.

42
D ead L abor 43

ber’s apprentice, a steeplejack, a house painter, a lumberjack. When he

was seventeen, he “ran away to sea”—really to the Great Lakes. He was
a sailor for much of his life, a merchant seaman. This changed when he
met my mother and “came ashore.” He was 41 when I was born. He was
a carpenter when I knew him.
I realize now that he wasn’t suited to it—good carpenters have a lot
of patience and concentration, like dentists and watchmakers. He didn’t
have much patience at all. He swore so much when he was working that
until I went to school, I thought there was Jesus Christ and he had a fa-
ther named “God Damn!” My pop was always working on our house, a
shack that was all my parents could afford in the great hunger for home-
ownership that came after the Second World War. But nothing ever quite
got finished, either for lack of funds or motivation, so there would be
places where you had to walk around tools and lumber scraps and saw-
dust. It drove my mother crazy. One time he had the house up on jacks
for a new foundation and he dropped one corner and broke all the dishes.
But if he wasn’t quite a craftsman himself, he admired craft. He was
moved by the effort and intricacy of how things were made. He was al-
ways finding old things, picking up things to save. It was a religious feel-
ing for him, and he passed it on to me.
“Honey, look at this old wooden chest with these lovely silver handles.
Think of all the work that was done to this thing by someone’s hands.
The wood was chopped down by some guy, some slave on a plantation
probably, maybe in South America or the Philippines because this is red
mahogany. Then it was milled by some poor working stiff at a primitive
mill or maybe by hand. Then sailors loaded it on a ship. And that ship was
made by lots of men too, probably in Liverpool, England. The trip took
weeks and weeks and they stopped and picked up other cargo. It was un-
loaded by dockers at some port, back east most likely.”
He continued: “Then the wood was driven by Teamsters to another
mill where it was finished and planed some more. More truckers took
it to a furniture maker; probably not a factory, it’s too nice, maybe a
family shop. Then that guy made it. He cut the pieces so exactly, fitted
it, glued it, sanded it, stained it, and put on this finish. He polished and
waxed it. Think of all those guys, think of their wives and children. Are
you thinking of it, toots?”
“Yeah, I’m imagining them in my mind. Go on, don’t stop.”
“The metal for the handles took a whole different route. The silver
was mined, maybe in Mexico by some more poor slaves. It was milled,
worked. Someone designed these handles, all the work that went into
that, sculpture really. Then the silver was poured into a mold. After the
44 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

new handles cooled, they were sanded and polished. Then they were fas-
tened to the chest. Someone carried it to market, loaded it, drove it, un-
loaded it. Think of them all, toots, all those men.”
And then a small event my father never wanted to think about—some-
one sold it. There was no respect for retailers or salesmen in my family.
“I still think of it, pop, all the time.”
Later, like my father, I would think of workers and add in the women.
Like the woman who learned the many steps it takes to leach the poison
out of acorns and make Indian bread. Did somebody have to get sick or
even die for her to learn this? The Pomo women who wove baskets so
dense that you could carry water in them, cook in them. I think of all those
women inventing agriculture and all the cooking sciences, midwifery,
nursing. I think of them and their children, their men waiting for supper.
I think of Pueblo women inventing each step that goes into a rug. The
washing of the wool, carding, dyeing, spinning, stretching, then the
weaving itself. The tools they designed and made, the threading hook,
heddles, treadles, the shuttle and the beater to comb it down tight, and
the various looms. The traditional designs, that even today each wom-
an modifies, are a route back to the women before them. The women
now dead, the “dead labor.”
Karl Marx called it “dead labor.” He didn’t just mean that the workers
were dead. Like my father, he was talking about the unacknowledged
contribution of producers to what we call civilization. If you take away
the hustle and bustle of owners, managers, and salesmen, you can see
that every object contains the knowledge, the experimentation, the skill
that workers developed over time. And new objects are made with tools
that contain dead labor, so it goes back and back. It’s like when you were
a kid and held a mirror up to a mirror and saw yourself inside the mirror,
inside another mirror, until you couldn’t think about it anymore.
I try to remember that even the most stupid, wasteful, plastic junk
contains dead labor and to respect it and think of the producers. Some-
thing so small as a plastic fork at the office picnic, where we could have
brought our own from home or eaten with our hands and broken down
the formality. It hurts that someone has to give their sweat and knowl-
edge, and their life, to making ugly, useless things that will be thrown
away. I think about how these days most things are made on deafening
machines, that set a killing pace of work, when workers used to set the
pace themselves and could sing and talk while they worked. And they
are made out of finite materials, petroleum and chemicals that spoil our
land, and make the workers and us all sick.
“I think of it, pop.”
monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_6 REVIEWS

The Legacy of Clinton Jencks

MICHAEL MYERSON

Raymond Caballero, McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks (Norman, OK: Uni-

versity of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 320 pages, $29.95, paperback.

As the child of a blacklisted set designer during the Cold War years, I
was as familiar with the names of the Hollywood Ten and other leftists
in the movie industry as I was with stars like Danny Kaye, Gary Cooper,
and Ava Gardner.
So when news came that some blacklistees, including two of the Ten, were
making a movie about a strike of Mexican miners, I eagerly awaited its re-
lease. I could not know that the movie, Salt of the Earth, would itself be black-
listed by the Hollywood studios that had a near-monopoly on distribution.
Only a single theater in Los Angeles, where virtually the entire film
industry was based, risked showing it. The independently owned Vista—
the oldest movie house in southern California—in the Los Feliz neigh-
borhood, was near my junior high school. While most of the country, if
they even knew of it, was unable to view Salt of the Earth, it was easily
accessible to me. Lucky me.
Salt of the Earth eventually became a cult favorite, required viewing for
any film buff. The movie tells the story, barely fictionalized (only the
names are changed) of the 1950–51 strike against Empire Zinc (EZ) in south-
ern New Mexico by the mainly Mexican and Mexican-American members
of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local 890.
When beatings by company thugs and the jailing of union leaders by
the local sheriff fail to break the strike, EZ gets a court injunction to stop
the miners from picketing and inhibiting scabs from entering the mines.
So the miners’ wives take over the picketing. This is the 1950s, remem-
ber, when patriarchy ruled most U.S. families, no more so than in heavily
Catholic Latino communities. Thus, the strike (and the movie) became a
movement not only for workers’ rights on the job, but for women’s em-
powerment in the home and community life.
Nearly the entire cast was made up of Local 890 members. The movie’s
male lead was played by 890 president Juan Chacón, a militant leftist.
Mexican movie star Rosaura Revueltas was hired as the female lead, play`-
film’s cast was nearly all Mexican and Mexican-American. Two exceptions

Michael Myerson is an author and lifelong activist for civil rights, peace, and labor
rights. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

45
46 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

were the film and stage character actor (and blacklistee) Will Geer, play-
ing the strike-busting sheriff, and a handsome blonde man who might
have been confused for a Hollywood star but was actually Mine Mill or-
ganizer Clinton Jencks. It was striking (no pun intended) to see this fair-
haired pale-skinned man in meetings and jail alongside the other union
members who were without exception dark-skinned and brunette.

The A n glo f ro m Cen t ra l Ca s t i ng

Jencks was easy to remember. Good thing, because, several years lat-
er when I was an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley, I
immediately recognized Jencks, who, twenty-two years my senior, had
just entered Berkeley as a doctoral candidate in economics. I introduced
myself and struck up a friendship. Turns out that Michael Tigar did also.
Tigar, one of my closest co-conspirators in the Berkeley student move-
ment, has since become a renowned international human rights attor-
ney. He has also written the foreword to Raymond Caballero’s study,
McCarthyism vs. Clinton Jencks, which exhaustively details how the federal
government brought the entire weight of its repressive apparatus down
on the heads of Jencks, his family, and his union sisters and brothers. To
boot, Caballero tells the story of the making of Salt of the Earth.
I am grateful to Caballero—as will be any reader—for telling the Clin-
ton Jencks story. Clint, modest as he was, was reluctant to talk about
himself. Born in 1918 in Colorado Springs, he could count his antecedents
back to colonial Massachusetts, with a long line of Christian missionaries
on the family tree. Raised as a devout Christian in a mining community,
these two influences pretty much dictated his life’s journey.
In early adulthood, however, he had trouble reconciling the church’s
preaching about “all God’s children” when their pews were strictly seg-
regated. A good student, Jencks’s reading progressed from mining his-
tory to socialism and Eugene V. Debs. At the University of Colorado, he
became chair of the campus chapter of the American Student Union and
soon joined the Young Communist League.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Clint enlisted in the air force, serving as
lead navigator on a B-24 crew in the Pacific. He was tasked with dropping
mines in Japanese-held harbors from Guam to Okinawa, doing so at alti-
tudes as low as one hundred feet, making the planes vulnerable to ground
and aircraft fire. Their commanding officer warned that they would likely
not survive their mission. In 1945, having flown forty missions as lead
navigator, Clint was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and six air
medals, the highest decoration short of a Congressional Medal of Honor.
T he L egacy of C linton J encks 47

After the war, he and Virginia, his wife and closest comrade, moved
to Denver. Clint hoped to get a job as an airline pilot but there were few
jobs. After unsatisfactory work as a baggage handler and then a flight
controller, he left for work in a smelting company. He loved being among
working people and joined the Mine Mill union, quickly becoming a shop
steward. He had severed his Communist Party membership when he
joined the armed forces, but now rejoined the party.
Mine Mill was founded in 1893 as the Western Federation of Miners. It
affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1911, but was
expelled twenty-five years later when it helped create the Congress of In-
dustrial Organizations (CIO). In 1947, Mine Mill had 100,000 members. The
union knew they had a prize in Clint Jencks and they asked him and Vir-
ginia to relocate to Grant County, New Mexico, home to several large gold
and lead mining operations. He would become lead organizer for several
Mine Mill locals, whose membership was nearly all Mexican-American.
Grant County was strictly segregated—a Jim Crow structure of sepa-
rate schools, theaters, and restaurants but aimed at Mexican Americans.
On work sites, changing rooms and restrooms were segregated. Pay
lines were segregated and, of course, Mexican Americans who worked
the most difficult jobs received lower pay. The companies’ racism was
not simply a ploy to keep white workers divided against Mexican Amer-
icans but, by enforcing separate pay scales, it created additional profits.
Oppressed not only as workers but as Mexicans, the workers viewed
their economic and civil rights as indivisible. A number of local leaders
were also Communist Party members, because they saw the party as a
militant fighter against racism.
Mexican labor in the southwest had a long history of militancy from
the Cripple Creek strike at the turn of the century to the infamous 1914
Ludlow, Colorado, coal miners’ strike where mine owner John D. Rocke-
feller sent in gun thugs and National Guardsmen to shoot down striking
workers, their wives, and their children. Nearly half of the twenty-one
victims of the massacre were Mexican-American.
In the postwar period, with the Cold War intensifying, U.S. corpora-
tions were able to use anti-communist hysteria to attack the labor move-
ment. It was no secret that communists and other leftists played leading
roles in building industrial unionism in the 1930s. When United Mine-
workers Union president John L. Lewis, himself an anti-communist, set
out to build the CIO, he asked the Communist Party for help, knowing
their cadres were among the most militant and self-sacrificing organizers
he could find. Ten years later, the corporations would use the Red Scare
to tame the newly powerful postwar labor movement.
48 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

In this regard, the corporations had help not just from the anti-com-
munist leadership of the AFL but also from anti-communist CIO leaders
who were happy to essentially broker a labor peace over the “corpses” of
many of its best fighters. The CIO abandoned Operation Dixie, which was
to organize Southern workers, black and white, spearheaded by those
same militant cadres who organized the autoworkers in Michigan and
the steelworkers in Ohio. To this day, those decisions have taken a heavy
toll on not only the labor movement but the entirety of U.S. politics.
When Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, it largely eviscerat-
ed the Wagner Act of 1935 that had given workers the right to strike and
bargain collectively, and had established the National Labor Relations
Act. Taft-Hartley placed restrictions on the right to strike, gave the presi-
dent the right to enjoin strikes in cases of “national emergency,” allowed
states to enact right-to-work laws, and, not incidentally, made it illegal for
communists to hold office in unions.
At its convention following the passage of Taft-Hartley, the CIO launched
a purge of so-called communist-dominated unions. Ten such unions were
charged, representing hundreds of thousands of communications, tobacco,
agricultural, fishing, leather, longshore, mine, maritime, furniture, office,
and public workers. By the time the bloodbath was over, all but two of the
unions were either destroyed or forced to merge with other CIO unions under
anti-communist leadership. Among the latter was Mine Mill, which eventual-
ly became part of the United Steelworkers of America. The two unions that
survived by leaving the CIO and remain intact today (but much smaller) are
the United Electrical Workers and the west coast International Longshore-
men and Warehousemen’s Union. Other left-led unions across the country
also suffered serious losses, from the Hollywood craft unions, devastated by
the combined might of the studio bosses and their mob-run union allies, to
the New York teachers, thousands of whom were blacklisted by loyalty oaths.
In 1950, the Cold War abroad had turned hot. In Korea, U.S. soldiers
now fought North Korean regulars and South Korean guerrillas, with the
Chinese about to enter the war. A year earlier, a lynch mob encouraged
by state police attacked an outdoor concert in Peekskill, New York, with
the aim of killing Paul Robeson, who headlined the concert together with
Pete Seeger. The Red Scare at home reached a fever pitch with the arrests
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as so-called atomic spies. Untold thousands
of communist and other leftist workers were fired and blacklisted from
their professions, some were deported, and two faced the death penalty.
That same year, with Mine Mill expelled from the CIO, the government
declared open season on its leaders. This was when Clint and Virginia Jencks
returned to Grant County. The EZ contract was about to expire. Negotiations
T he L egacy of C linton J encks 49

with the union broke down when the company walked out after having re-
fused to bargain with Local 890. The miners were asking for a raise of fifteen
cents per hour and six paid holidays. EZ offered a five-cent raise but only if
the workers agreed to a forty-eight-hour work week in place of their current
forty hours. The members voted overwhelmingly to strike.
This was the labor battle portrayed in Salt of the Earth, with its lockouts;
beatings of members (including Clint and Virginia) by hired thugs, local
vigilantes, and sheriff’s deputies; mass jailings; and the miners’ wives
taking over the picket lines to fight the scabs, tear gas, and injunctions.
As Caballero writes, “Grant County’s establishment had special scorn for
Jencks, the outside Anglo agitator. The Anglo power structure claimed that
Jencks was upsetting Mexicans who, they implied, had been previously con-
tent with their lot as second-class citizens.” The nearly identical language
was used a few years later against the southern civil rights movement.
While in the Grant County Jail, Clint was subpoenaed to appear in Salt
Lake City before a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Securi-
ty, the subject of which was “Communist Domination of Union Officials in
a Vital Defense Industry.” The committee was chaired by Nevada Senator
Pat McCarran, who had authored a bill setting up the Subversive Activities
Control Board requiring the Communist Party, several dozen “Communist
action groups,” and their members to register with the Attorney General,
and making them subject to expulsion from the country (in case of immi-
grants) and even potential imprisonment in detention camps. (The bill was
declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court fifteen years later.)
The Mexican mineworkers and Clinton Jencks were apparently threaten-
ing national security and endangering our troops in Korea. A year earlier, in
the interests of protecting Mine Mill from the CIO purge and government
repression, Clint again ended his membership in the Communist Party.
At the hearing, Clint declined to answer any questions about his polit-
ical associations or beliefs, but the Senate subcommittee had its friendly
witness, Harvey Matusow. Matusow was one of a half-dozen professional
witnesses employed by the Senate committee and House Un-American
Activities Committee, their clones established in a number of states,
and the Justice Department in its trials of communists and others under
the Smith and McCarren Acts. Matusow and his cohort were on perma-
nent standby to fly around the country, visiting hearing rooms and court
houses to testify that this or that person was indeed a Communist Party
member. Not only was the person named thereby labeled a traitor in the
news media and the Congressional Record, but they could be subject to
imprisonment under the McCarran Act. Matusow testified that Clint was
a Communist Party member and had told Matusow as much.
50 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

In March 1953, Richard Berresford, EZ’s personnel director, testified before

Congress that the Taft-Hartley anti-communist provisions were not strong
enough. He said that the Salt of the Earth crew, Mine Mill, and Clint Jencks
were inciting “racial hatred” whereas previously relations between Anglos
and Mexicans had been good. He urged that any union officer refusing to
testify before a congressional committee or “hiding behind the Fifth Amend-
ment,” which Jencks had called on, should be barred from the union. More-
over, companies should be prohibited from dealing with “communist-domi-
nated” unions and any contracts between them should be nullified.
A month later, on April 30, 1953, Clint was playing with his son in the
yard of their public housing home when FBI agents emerged, arrest-
ed him, and brought him before a judge in EZ-dominated Silver City,
charging him with two counts of filing a false affidavit saying he was not
a member of the Communist Party. He had left the party when he signed
the affidavit, an inconvenient fact the government chose to ignore in its
prosecution (and persecution) of Clint and Virginia.
It will surprise no reader familiar with the 1950s to learn that the trial
in El Paso, Texas, included a jury—and even a jury pool—that virtually
excluded women, Mexican Americans, other minorities, and workers;
that the judge was a pro-business bigot; and that the news media had
already convicted Clint before jury selection even began. Nor that the
prosecution’s “evidence” consisted entirely of testimony from folks on
the payroll of the mining industry, including law enforcement officers
and professional informers, most notably Matusow.
In the pretrial hearings, the Jencks’ defense team needed to know the
facts on which the prosecution intended to prove guilt—the testimo-
ny and exhibits the government intended to use. The judge denied the
motion for a Bill of Particulars, leaving Clint and his attorneys with no
idea how to defend him from the government’s charges. When the trial
opened, Jencks’s attorneys asked to see Matusow’s FBI reports as they
related to the defendant, convinced the informer was a fabulist whose
reports differed from his testimony. The judge denied these requests in
what became the single most important moment in the trial. Even though
the trial went on for weeks—the longest trial in El Paso of a single defen-
dant up to that time-- the jury, charged with electing a foreman, reading
the indictment, reviewing the testimony and exhibits, deliberating, and
taking a vote, took all of twenty minutes to return with a guilty verdict.
Clint was sentenced to two five-year terms to be served concurrently.
As Jencks’s attorneys began their appeal of the conviction, Matusow’s
credibility began to collapse. In an earlier, unrelated hearing, he claimed
he had lists of Communist Party members at the New York Times and Time
T he L egacy of C linton J encks 51

magazine. Now under oath, the object of a lawsuit, he acknowledged that

he had no knowledge of Communists at the two publications. He had re-
cently gotten divorced and his personal life was falling apart. Undergoing
something of a religious conversion, Matusow arranged to publish a full
confession, False Witness, in which he admitted to being a serial perjurer,
encouraged to do so by Senator Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn.
Jencks—like other victims of Matusow’s lies—appealed for a new trial.
At the hearing on the motion, also in El Paso, Clint’s attorneys called
Matusow as their first witness. On the stand, he testified that prior to
Jencks’s trial he had told the FBI he no longer wished to testify on com-
munist matters, that he had never told the FBI that Clint was a commu-
nist, and that his testimony at the trial was a lie.
Repeating the defense request at trial, Clint’s attorneys again demand-
ed the government produce all reports and materials given by Matusow
to the FBI. The court rejected the request and the judge (who had pre-
sided at the original trial) again refused to review the files for himself.
Instead, the judge held Matusow in contempt for obstruction of justice
and unsurprisingly denied Jencks a new trial.
The defense next went to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to ask for a
new trial both on the grounds of the prosecution witnesses’ perjured tes-
timony and the trial court’s refusal to produce the witnesses’ statements
to the FBI to determine inconsistencies that could be brought out during
cross-examination. The appellate court denied the motion, leaving the
U.S. Supreme Court as Clint’s last chance.
This was now 1956, three years after Jencks was arrested. Times were
changing. Salt of Earth was a thing for the film archives. The Korean War
was long over. McCarthy had been humiliated in his confrontation with
the U.S. Army. Most importantly, the Supreme Court was now led by Earl
Warren. When President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Warren, it was
seen as a conventional choice. Warren had been a law-and-order District
Attorney of California’s Alameda County (Oakland), then governor of the
state and GOP vice-presidential running mate of Thomas Dewey in the
1948 elections. But in his first term as Chief Justice, Warren led the court
in ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that public-school segregation was
unconstitutional, that “separate but equal” was oxymoronic. (Eisenhow-
er, a Republican, had also reportedly appointed William Brennan, a New
Jersey Democrat, because he wanted a Catholic on the Court.)
The Supreme Court shredded the case against Jencks. Justice Hugo
Black’s concerns were typical: “You can’t retain evidence and send a
man to jail on it because it’s too confidential. If the government wants
to keep the evidence confidential, they should try the case without the
52 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

evidence.” Brennan was clear. The defense was entitled to any statement
made by a witness that related to the testimony given.
Caballero summarizes the Jencks decision thus: “If the government re-
fused to produce a witness statement, the case would be dismissed. In so
ruling, the courts held that the privilege the government had in keeping
its records confidential gave way whenever it brought a prosecution. The
government could no longer prosecute and then withhold evidence that
was relevant and useful to the defense.”
The Jencks decision, issued at the end of the Court’s term in June 1957,
together with ten other decisions—all against the government, including
reversing the conviction of Communist Party leaders under the Smith
Act—“irreparably crippled the witch hunt,” wrote I. F. Stone.
Within months, Congress codified into law the results of the Supreme Court
decision. As Caballero notes, “statements by a witness that were reduced to
writing and that related to the witnesses’ testimony would be produced after
the defense made a demand,” under what came to be known as the Jencks
Act. “Any statements withheld by the government would be sealed and in-
cluded in the record. If the government elected not to comply, the court could
strike the witness’s testimony or declare a mistrial.” While the Jencks Act
pertained to federal prosecutions, most states adopted versions of it.
With the Court’s Jencks decision and with the Jencks Act now the law of
the land, the government chose the wiser option of dropping the pros-
ecution rather than going to a retrial. Clint and Virginia Jencks could
now breathe easier, the end of their years-long persecution accompany-
ing the rewriting of judicial and legislative history. Future generations
of readers of crime fiction and viewers of televised courtroom dramas
became familiar with “discovery” motions—at the core of cross-exam-
ination—based in large part on the Jencks Act.
Caballero has done a masterful, excellently researched job of conveying
this important piece of twentieth-century U.S. history and of telling the
story of Clint and Virginia Jencks, mostly unknown U.S. heroes.
Placing their story into a larger context would have fortified the book
beyond its already considerable strengths. Unfortunately, the persecution
of Clint Jencks and the devastation of the International Union of Mine, Mill
and Smelter Workers and its largely Mexican-American membership were
not stand-alone stories. The postwar Red Scare wrecked tens of thousands of
lives, forced thousands of U.S. progressives to leave the country, and pushed
others to suicide. The drive of the federal government in the service of cor-
porate America (aided in no small part by opportunist labor leadership) to
remove the most militant trade unionists from the labor movement essen-
tially defanged that movement for generations, down to the present day.
monthlyreviewarchives.org
DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-11-2020-04_7

Health Care for Profit (Not Health)

A Sick System
DAV I D M AT T H E W S

Howard Waitzkin and the Working Group on Health Beyond Capital-

ism, eds., Health Care Under the Knife: Moving Beyond Capitalism for our Health
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 336 pages, $27, paperback.

Zealously supporting the creation of such a system, Aneurin Bevan, dem-

ocratic socialist and Minister of Health in the British Labour Government
between 1945 and 1950, proclaimed: “A free health service is pure socialism
and as such it is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.”1 Assert-
ing the accomplishments of the British National Health Service (NHS), he
strenuously argued the incompatibility between the pursuance of health
care through the market and individuals achieving good health. For Bevan,
a commercially oriented health service discriminated against those unable
to afford market options and was socially divisive, segregating those who
could not afford health care from those who could. “The essence of a sat-
isfactory health service,” Bevan argued, “is that the rich and the poor are
treated alike, that poverty is not a disability, and wealth is not advantaged.”2
For Bevan, the collective provision of health care was by far the more su-
perior and principled method of arrangement—a position with which the
contributors to Health Care Under the Knife would agree. The volume, under the
editorship of Howard Waitzkin, presents a vigorous critique of health with-
in the context of capitalism, examining the extent to which the economy
and its relations of production determine how health is socially distributed,
the conditions of medical practice, and the structural organization of health
systems. Rather than considering health as primarily a biomedical phenom-
enon and health systems as autonomous institutions, the volume recognizes
the intricate fundamental relationship between health and the wider politi-
cal, economic, and sociological context. As Waitzkin has previously argued,
any attempt to understand the nature of health care provision must accept
that challenges to its effective delivery can rarely be separated from the so-
cial conditions within which it is situated.3 The essential motif of Health Care
Under the Knife is that no meaningful understanding of health can be achieved
without taking account of capitalism as the basis upon which society is orga-

David Matthews is a lecturer in sociology and social policy at Coleg Llandrillo, Wales,
and the leader of its degree program in health and social care.

53
54 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

nized. Grounding all analyses within this context, the issue of class conflict is
ever present, with health as an object of class struggle, shaped by the balance
of class forces. Health is conceived as intertwined with and an outcome of
the political and economic forces that both shape and oppose the accumula-
tion process. As such, Health Care Under the Knife has as central to its theoreti-
cal exposition the notion of health as a dialectical phenomenon.

A N e o lib e ra l H ea l t h Ca re A g en d a
Explicating the relationship between health and capitalism, the majority
of contributors situate their analyses within the context of neoliberalism.
Constituting a hegemonic force for nearly four decades, neoliberalism is a
ruling class “political ideological project.”4 Moreover, Marxist social epidemi-
ologist Vicente Navarro, who alongside Waitzkin has contributed significant-
ly to elucidating the links between health and capitalism, asserts that neolib-
eralism is nothing less than the ideology and practice of the global capitalist
class, governing how the class struggle has been fought in practice.5
The volume makes acutely clear that neoliberal influences on health
care benefit capital over labor. Identifying the Affordable Care Act (ACA),
or Obamacare, as the latest incarnation of how neoliberalism has shaped
health care in the United States, Waitzkin and Ida Hellander explain that
it has done little to strengthen the position of labor. Instead, it has fur-
ther enriched the insurance industry, transferring vast amounts of public
revenue to the private sector, increasing profits and dividends for share-
holders, while bolstering already excessive executive salaries.6 Capital’s
postwar attempt to impose itself on health, Waitzkin and Hellander illus-
trate, originated in the United States, influenced by methods of promot-
ing cost-effective military expenditure during the Cold War. Once adapted
to the sphere of health, these principles were incorporated within a mar-
ketized health care agenda that has risen to prominence with neoliberal-
ism’s global hegemonic dominance, having influenced the restructuring
of health systems over the last quarter of a century or more, particularly
within the advanced capitalist nations and Latin America.
Embracing the idea of market-driven health care, neoliberal health care re-
forms have been promoted globally by the United States, World Bank, Inter-
national Monetary Fund, and World Health Organization (WHO).7 Although
the impact on nation-states has been uneven, as Waitzkin and Hellander cor-
rectly proclaim, where neoliberalism has obtained influence, health care has
been redesigned in its image. Overwhelmingly, such restructuring is charac-
terized by a fragmented system of varying private sector actors. In the United
States and to an extent Latin America, Managed Care Organizations (MCOs)
and for-profit companies that are often subsidiaries of private health care
H ealth C are U nder the K nife 55

corporations have assumed growing responsibility for providing services

within a given locality or to a section of the population. Under Obamacare,
Waitzkin and Hellander explain, these new marketized health systems take
the form of Accountable Care Organizations. Moreover, MCOs operate in
close proximity with private-sector organizations that purchase health care
provisions from private insurers and then contract MCOs for its delivery.8
Agreeing with Waitzkin and Hellander, Adam Gaffney and Carlos
Muntaner succinctly illustrate how, in Europe, austerity, which was em-
braced as the means to restore economic growth after the Great Recession
of 2007–09, was seized on to force through neoliberal health policies. In
the cases of Spain, Greece, and Britain, health systems have been subject-
ed to neoliberal restructuring characterized by reduced public funding, a
retreat from universalism, an increase of copayments, and privatization.
Although building on previous policies, especially those of the English
NHS, Gaffney and Muntaner forcefully claim that the ultimate intention
of such restructuring was to attack the concept and existence of public
health care provision.9 Whether in the United States, Latin America, or
Europe, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler accurately assert
that health care has increasingly become reconceptualized as a commod-
ity, with market values penetrating its delivery.10
Crucially, Waitzkin, Hellander, Gaffney, and Muntaner recognize the state
as complicit within all neoliberal-influenced reforms. Neoliberalism advo-
cates the subsumption of government to the market. Hence, the state has
remained active but its relative autonomy is reduced. As Navarro argued over
a decade ago: the “neoliberal narrative about the declining role of the state…
is easily falsified by the facts.”11 Even if the state has withdrawn directly from
economic activity, the neoliberal state has become more interventionist in
its attempt to advance the ethic of the market throughout society in such
arenas as education, communications, the environment, and health care.12
Exemplifying this, Waitzkin and Hellander argue that Obamacare, as a sys-
tem that has overwhelmingly assisted the augmentation of profit for the in-
surance industry and pharmaceutical corporations at the expense of health
care for the majority, epitomizes the state’s efforts to promote the logic of
capital within the field of health. For all the contributors of Health Care Under
the Knife, there exists no doubt that neoliberal health care reforms have done
little to advance the interests of labor, and are instead a further example of
the extent to which capital has struggled against the working class.

Hea lt h Ca re and Mo no p o l y- Fi na nc e Capital

The impact of neoliberalism pervades Health Care Under the Knife, but as a
version of capitalism it has not simply emerged as a chosen paradigm by
56 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

capital that could be replaced easily by an alternative framework through

which to organize the accumulation process. Neoliberalism is a product of
late capitalism, inextricably associated with the emergence of monopoly-fi-
nance capital as stagnation in the productive base of the advanced capital-
ist nations has prevailed.13 In a welcome attempt, an explicit effort is made
in Health Care Under the Knife to relate the economic structure of the health
care industry to the current era of monopoly-finance capital. Drawing on
the Marxism of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Health Care Under the Knife posi-
tions its economic analysis firmly within the context of monopoly capital,
characterized by a tendency of surplus to rise and chronic problems of sur-
plus absorption, manifested in growing inequality, high unemployment,
underemployment, and excess productive capacity, as demand grows at a
lesser rate relative to production. As a consequence, stagnation prevails as
the incentive to invest is weakened in an environment of overaccumula-
tion. Subsequently, rising surplus requires methods of absorption.14 In re-
cent decades, financialization, in the form of the explosive growth of debt
and credit, and varying financial instruments have attempted to absorb
existing surplus and stimulate new investment opportunities.15
For Joel Lexchin, the stagnationist tendencies of monopoly capitalism are
visibly present within the health care sector, in particular the pharmaceu-
tical industry. Invoking notions of overaccumulation, Lexchin argues that
the industry is characterized by an exhaustion of markets for its output. In
response, he illustrates how product differentiation has been embraced by
pharmaceutical manufacturers, modifying existing products to stimulate de-
mand.16 Concurrently, Robb Burlage and Matthew Anderson maintain that
capital accumulation within the industry has come to rely less on production
and more on debt-fueled speculation.17 Burlage and Anderson show astutely
the extent to which monopolization has infiltrated the health care sector, as
well as how the industry has adopted methods of financialization to stimulate
economic growth. In the United States, hospitals, MCOs, and insurance com-
panies have merged in order to attain the unassailable position that comes
with being supposedly too big to fail. Furthermore, the pharmaceutical indus-
try has rapidly monopolized, facilitating a dramatic increase in drug prices.18
Aside from the benefits of monopoly price fixing, which allows for the
short-term expansion of profit that, however, exacerbates the crisis of sur-
plus absorption in the long term, the growth of mergers and acquisitions
has provided short-term investment outlets for surplus capital. These have
come from within the health care sector itself as well as the wider econo-
my, with the process also aided by large quantities of surplus in the form
of credit, fueling the growing levels of debt within the sector. This has al-
lowed for the immediate generation of new sources of income. As Burlage
H ealth C are U nder the K nife 57

and Anderson rightly claim, with opportunities for income-generation

from capital investment in production declining, the health care industry
has engaged in financial practices to generate profits, enthusiastically em-
bracing debt and the manipulation of financial instruments.

Im p e r ia lis t E x p a ns i o n
The insightful analyses of Waitzkin, Rebeca Jasso-Aguilar, Anne-Eman-
uelle Birn, and Judith Richter illustrate the extent to which the provision
of health care—though perhaps not immediately thought of as an obvi-
ous mechanism of imperialism—supports imperialist practices, while the
health care industry, like other capitalist enterprises, frequently asserts
itself in an imperialist manner.
Since the turn of the millennium, U.S. hegemony over the global health
care agenda has been solidified, not just through its influence upon WHO
and the World Bank, but in the form of philanthrocapitalism, a combination
of philanthropic principles and capitalist practices within low- and medi-
um-income countries. While not a new phenomenon—for example, the
Rockefeller Foundation intervened as a global health actor starting in the
early twentieth century—philanthrocapitalism has in recent years been
most influential through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.19 As a
consequence of having a budget for global health activities that surpasses
that of WHO, as well as having grown to rival and partner with institu-
tions such as UNICEF, the World Bank, and WHO, the Gates Foundation’s
ability to set the agenda is immense. Obscuring the consequences of
capitalism for health, the Gates Foundation’s prevailing model of public
health focuses on disease control through investment in technological
developments, in particular vaccinations.20 Correctly, Waitzkin and Jas-
so-Aguilar argue that philanthrocapitalist organizations are an expres-
sion of imperialism, because while they claim to be “investing in health,”
they facilitate the conditions for expanded accumulation, primarily for
monopoly corporations located in the advanced capitalist nations.21
In an era of stagnation, where new opportunities for investment are
relatively limited within domestic markets, monopoly-finance capital has
become a truly global phenomenon.22 Identifying a reduction in the costs
of variable capital as a means to increase profits, monopoly corporations
have frequently relocated production to regions of cheap labor in the
Global South. But, as Waitzkin and Jasso-Aguilar argue, this labor must
be efficient if it is to be exploited profitably. Public health initiatives such
as those promoted by philanthrocapitalists contribute to the creation of a
healthier and more productive labor force in the Global South, which in
turn makes those locations more attractive as sources of surplus capital
58 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

investment and sites of accumulation. In addition, with the health care

industry itself plagued by market saturation, countries in the periphery
represent new markets and investment outlets for the pharmaceutical
and medical equipment industries.23 For instance, operating in partner-
ship with philanthrocapitalist organizations, the enactment of global
public health initiatives commonly requires the participation of pharma-
ceutical corporations, as well private insurers and MCOs.

Pers o n a l a n d Pro fes s i o na l Co ns eq u en c e s

While detailing structural developments at the macro level, Health Care Un-
der the Knife is careful to clarify the relationship between structural organiza-
tion and the experiences of social groups. Exemplifying this, Muntaner and
Rob Wallace illustrate the need to recognize the societal distribution of health
as inextricably related to social determinants that emerge from and reflect
the organization of society’s social structures.24 The individual experience of
health is always an embodied one, but this experience is overwhelmingly re-
lated to an individual’s location within the social structure. Under capitalism,
this is exacerbated by the extent an individual’s location exposes them to
oppression and exploitation. Using contemporary examples, Muntaner and
Wallace forcefully argue that some of the most debilitating social determi-
nants of health derive from the operation of a social system organized around
the prerequisite of accumulation, with the distribution of positive and nega-
tive health experiences determined by an individual’s class position.
Much of Muntaner and Wallace’s understanding of society fits the con-
cept of pathological normalcy, around which Carl Ratner’s discussion is an-
chored.25 Associated with Marxist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, pathological
normalcy, Ratner argues, illustrates the extent to which so-called normal
taken-for-granted conditions of everyday life are conducive to pathological
developments, not just physically, but also in regard to mental health. What
tends to be accepted as mental illness under capitalism primarily emerges
from the pathological normality of society.26 Unemployment, low wages, and
polluted environments, among other phenomena, are largely accepted as in-
herent to the way society operates, yet they cause great distress. Little hope of
relief, Ratner proclaims, can emerge from sources of mainstream medicine,
in particular the psychological professions, which primarily intervene in an
individual’s life through medication and psychological practices and largely
aim to ensure individuals adapt to the pathological normal conditions that
have contributed to their distress, obscuring the social determinants.27
Related issues arise with respect to the provision of actual medical practice.
Reflecting on his own experience, Waitzkin argues that the infiltration of
market values within health care has resulted in professionals increasingly
H ealth C are U nder the K nife 59

losing their autonomy over the conditions of employment. The result is the
rapid proletarianization of the medical profession.28 A dominant factor is the
corporate attempt to standardize and regulate outcomes and behaviors by
imposing objective goals and targets on professionals under the guise of qual-
ity. Few would argue against ensuring and improving quality within health
care. But, as Gordon Schiff and Sarah Winch argue, a market-driven under-
standing of quality prevails.29 From the perspective of professionals, quality
health care is ultimately about establishing healing relationships, providing
the optimal care and support tailored to an individual’s specific needs in
an empathetic manner. But under a neoliberal-inspired health care system,
quality becomes objectified, with imposed targets, standards, and quantita-
tive goals against which professionals are measured. As a result, as Matthew
Anderson contends, an artificial distance is created between professional and
patient that acts as a barrier preventing medical professionals from exhibit-
ing effective interpersonal skills and that treats the patient as a statistic and
an object.30 In such an environment, alienation pervasively spreads among
professionals, making them lose meaningful connections to their work.31
Constituting a rich theoretical resource, Health Care Under the Knife pro-
vides a perceptive and penetrating clarification of the real-world condi-
tions of health care. The volume’s intentions, as laid out by Waitzkin, are
successfully achieved. The book provides a vital foundation to stimulate
movements for change, equipping activists with essential knowledge and
ensuring they have the correct tools to fight for a progressive health care
future. Yet, meaningful change cannot successfully occur within capital-
ism. To be sure, the existence of universal and largely public health care
systems in many of the advanced capitalist nations (except, notably, the
United States) demonstrates to activists, and the population at large, that
single-payer systems can be established within the context of advanced
capitalism. But as crucial as this is, a single-payer system is only one step
on the road to a society designed to care for all people. As Muntaner and
Wallace make abundantly clear, the injustices and inequalities that emerge
from the social determinants of health are explicitly evident within nations
with single-payer systems as well. Guaranteeing everyone optimal health
will only be achieved with the radical reorganization of society, with the
aim of putting people before profit and health before accumulation.
No t e s
1. Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (New 4. John Bellamy Foster, “Absolute Cap- 6. Howard Waitzkin and Ida Hellander,
York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 86. italism,” Monthly Review 71, no. 1 (May “Obamacare,” in Health Care Under the
2. Bevan, In Place of Fear, 81. 2019): 1. Knife, ed. Howard Waitzkin (New York:
5. Vicente Navarro, “Neoliberalism and Monthly Review Press, 2018), 99–100.
3. Howard Waitzkin, The Second Sickness
(Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 4. Class Ideology,” International Journal of 7. Waitzkin and Hellander, “Obamacare,”
Health Services 37, no. 1 (2007): 53. 102–4.
60 MONTHLY RE V I EW / A pril 2020

8. Waitzkin and Hellander, “Obamacare,” 17. Robb Burlage and Matthew Ander- mental Determinants of Health,” in
104–11. son, “The Medical-Industrial Complex in Health Care Under the Knife.
9. Adam Gaffney and Carles Muntaner the Age of Financialization,” in Health 25. Carl Ratner, “Overcoming Patholog-
“Austerity and Healthcare,” in Health Care Under the Knife, 81. ical Normalcy: Mental Health Challeng-
Care Under the Knife. 18. Burlage and Anderson, “The Med- es in the Coming Transformation,” in
10. David Himmelstein and Steffie Wool- ical-Industrial Complex in the Age of Health Care Under the Knife.
handler “The Political Economy of Health Financialization,” 77–79. 26. For an illustration of the extent mo-
Reform,” in Health Care Under the Knife, 57. 19. Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Judith nopoly-capitalist society impacts mental
11. Navarro, “Neoliberalism and Class Richter, “U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and health, see David Matthews, “Capitalism
Ideology,” 50. the Global Health Agenda,” in Health and Mental Health,” Monthly Review 70,
Care Under the Knife, 155. no. 8 (January 2019).
12. Foster, “Absolute Capitalism,” 6.
20. Birn and Richter, “U.S. Philanthro- 27. Ratner, “Overcoming Pathological
13. John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism
capitalism and the Global Health Agen- Normalcy,” 219.
Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Re-
da,” 164–65. 28. Howard Waitzkin, “Disobedience:
view 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 7.
21. Howard Waitzkin and Rebeca Jas- Doctor Workers, Unite!,” in Health Care
14. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy,
so-Aguilar, “Imperialism’s Health Com- Under the Knife, 26.
Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly
ponent,” in Health Care Under the Knife. 29. Gordon D. Schiff and Sarah Winch,
Review Press, 1966), 114.
22. John Bellamy Foster and Robert “The Degradation of Medical Labor and
15. John Bellamy Foster and Fred
W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New the Meaning of Quality in Health Care,”
Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New
York, Monthly Review Press, 2012). in Health Care Under the Knife, 44.
York: Monthly Review Press, 2009).
23. Waitzkin and Jasso-Aguilar, “Impe- 30. Matthew Anderson, “Becoming Em-
16. Joel Lexchin, “The Pharmaceutical
rialism’s Health Component,” 138–39. ployees,” in Health Care Under the Knife, 37.
Industry in the Context of Contemporary
Capitalism,” in Health Care Under the 24. Carles Muntaner and Rob Wallace, 31. Schiff and Winch, “The Degradation
Knife, 85. “Confronting the Social and Environ- of Medical Labor and the Meaning of
Quality in Health Care,” 45.

MONTHLY REVIEW Fifty Years Ago

More than half a century after [V. I.] Lenin wrote his book [Imperialism, the High-
est Stage of Capitalism] monopoly capitalism has shown that it has more than the
proverbial nine lives; and imperialism, its logical extension, has survived with
unsuspected vigor, centered now around a single great power. But the instru-
ments of this universal system of exploitation are no longer simply the ones Le-
nin described. Imperialism has evolved and has become more effective, both in
robbing as well as in killing. It has polished its methods, extended into new areas,
and constructed new models of domination that were unknown on the eve of the
Russian Revolution. In this era of electronic computers, the “multinational” cor-
porations do not count their profits on their fingers, to put it mildly.…
The new type of imperialism does not make its colonies more prosperous, even
though it enriches its “enclaves”; it does not alleviate social tensions, but on the
contrary sharpens them; it extends poverty and concentrates wealth; it takes over
the internal market and key parts of the productive apparatus; it appropriates
progress for itself, determines its direction, and fixes its limits; it absorbs credit
and directs foreign trade as it pleases; it does not provide capital for development
but instead removes it; it encourages waste by sending the greatest part of the
economic surplus abroad; it denationalizes our industry and also the profits that
our industry produces. Today in Latin America the system has our veins open as
it did in those distant times when our blood first served the needs of primary
accumulation for European capitalist development.
—Eduardo Galeano,
“Latin America and the Theory of Imperialism,” Monthly Review, April 1970.
 Werner Rügemer
The Capitalists of the Twenty-First Century
An Easy-to-Understand Outline on the Rise of the New Financial Players
307 pages, published and printed by Tredition, Hamburg, Germany, 2019
Hardcover: 308 pages, ISBN 987-3-7479-1162-8, €22
Paperback: 308 pages, ISBN 987-3-7479-1163-5, €14.99
e-book: ISBN 987-3-7479-116-2, €10
Translation of Die Kapitalisten des 21. Jahrhunderts. Gemeinverständlicher Abriss
zum Aufstieg der neuen Kapitalakteure (Cologne, Germany: PapyRossa Verlag, 2018)
Listed in the German National Library: http://dnb.d-nb.de

The Capitalists of the Twenty-First Century presents a study of the new cap-
italist players that became dominant after the deregulations of the 1990s
and the last financial crisis. Large capital organizers like BlackRock, private
equity funds like Blackstone and KKR, hedge funds like Elliott, venture
capital investors and elitist private investment banks like Macquarie and
Rothschild became much more influential than traditional banks. These
new financial players organize worldwide selling and buying, and restruc-
ture banks, stock exchanges, companies, and public enterprises. They hold
no regard for national economic situations and laws. By influencing gov-
ernments and international financial institutions, as well as through fi-
nancial havens, they lower labor incomes and increase private gains. They
act in collaboration with what Rügemer calls the civil private army of the
transnational capitalist class: rating and PR agencies, law firms, manage-
ment consultants, chartered accountants, and central banks. Rügemer also
outlines the relations between the European Union and the United States,
transatlantic capital, militaries, and secret services, such as in interlocking
and open conflicts involving Russia, Iran, and China. Furthermore, the book
analyzes how capitalism has developed in the People’s Republic of China
and how the capitalism imported from the United States, Western Europe,
Taiwan, and Japan is in the process of socialist transformation. Rügemer
concludes with a vision of society in which international laws and human
rights, including social and labor rights, are abided by and ensured.
Dr. Werner Rügemer was born in 1941 in Cologne, Germany. He is a doctor in phil-
osophical anthropology, an author, and a university lecturer who has been featured
on radio and television programs. He has been published in books on political cor-
ruption and corporate crime in Germany, Western capitalism, privatization of pub-
lic enterprises and the state, rating agencies, private consulting groups, and labor
relations under neoliberalism. He is cofounder of Gemeingut in BürgerInnenhand
(an initiative to ensure common property remains in citizens’ hands, gemeingut.
org) and aktion./.arbeitsunrecht (action against labor injustice, arbeitsunrecht.de).
Find out more at www.werner-ruegemer.de
INDEX TO VOLUME 71

Author, Title, Issue, First page Stedile, João Pedro, Contemporary Challeng- Manifesto,” 3, 117
es for the Working Class and Peasantry in Snitow, Ann, Christine Stansell, and Sharon
ARTICLES Brazil, 3, 104 Thompson, Sex and Socialism, 9, 40
Amin, Samir, The New Imperialist Structure, Suwandi, Intan, Labor-Value Commodity Stansell, Christine (See Snitow, Ann)
3, 32 Chains: The Hidden Abode of Global Thompson, Sharon (See Snitow, Ann)
___ & Firoze Manji, Toward the Formation Production, 3, 46 Wallerstein, Immanuel, U.S. Weakness and
of a Transnational Alliance of Working and Sweezy, Paul M. (See Baran, Paul A.) the Struggle for Hegemony, 6, 54
Oppressed Peoples, 3, 120 Trigui, Nada (See Mullin, Corinna)
Angus, Ian, The Trial of Thomas Hardy: A van der Pijl, Kees, Democracy, Planning, and REVIEWS
Forgotten Chapter in the Working-Class Fight Big Data: Can They Be Turned into a Socialism Akers Chacón, Justin, Revolutionary Mexico
for Democratic Rights, 6, 41 for the Twenty-First Century?, 11, 28 in Chicago, 8, 39
Antunes, Ricardo, The Preemptive Counter- Vogel, Lise, “She Was My Kind of Scientist”: Backiel, Linda, A Duel of Dreams, 5, 50
revolution and the Rise of the Far Right in Margaret Benston and the Political Economy Becker, Marc, The Life of José Carlos
Brazil, 3, 89 of Women’s Liberation, 4, 12 Mariátegui, 9, 57
Baran, Paul A. & Paul M. Sweezy, The Quality Winslow, Cal, The Origins of the Seattle Gen- Das Gupta, Chirashree, The Contemporary
of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Mental eral Strike of 1919: The Timber Beast, 10, 47 Contours of Imperialism, 2, 58
Health, 10, 37 Hall, Russell, Unionizing the World’s Largest
DOCUMENTS Slaughterhouse, 1, 58
Beal, Tim, The Angler and the Octopus: Kim
Jong-un’s Ongoing Peace Offensive, 6,18 Ilyenkov, Evald, On the Coincidence of Logic Matthews, David, Health Care Under Capital-
Borón, Atilio, Salvador Allende: “Not in My with Dialectics and the Theory of Knowledge ism: A Sick System, 11, 53
Name,” 1, 14 of Materialism, 8, 21 Muñoz Sosa, Nylca J., Healing the Hurricane
Clark, Brett (See Foster, John Bellamy) in Our Chest, 10, 57
EXCHANGES
Cockshott, Paul, Crisis of Socialism and Myerson, Michael, The Legacy of Clinton
Effects of Capitalist Restoration, 11, 20 Benton, Ted, Marx, Animals, and Humans: A Jencks, 11, 45
Creighton, Hannah Olson, Dead Labor, Reply to My Critics, 1, 40 Napoletano, Brian M., Interrogating the
11, 42 Clark, Brett (See Foster, John Bellamy) Cultural Production of Mexico, 8, 48
Federici, Silvia, On Margaret Benston: The Davidson, Neil, Socialist Internationalism Neuburger, Bruce, California’s Migrant
Against the European Union, 5, 12 Farmworkers: A Caste System Enforced by
Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,
Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, & Christian State Power, 1, 49
4, 35
Stache, Marx and the Critique of Alienated
Foster, John Bellamy, Hannah Holleman, & Powers, Nicholas, Race and Mystery in Cape
Speciesism: Replies to Benton, 1, 45
Brett Clark, Imperialism in the Anthropocene, Cod, 6, 62
Lapavitsas, Costas, Learning from Brexit: A
3, 70 Suwandi, Intan, The Case for Labor-Led
Socialist Stance Toward the European Union,
Gimenez, Martha E., Women, Class, and Development, 9, 50
5, 26
Identity Politics: Reflections on Feminism Targ, Harry R., The Wisdom of a Socialist
Stache, Christian (See Foster, John Bellamy)
and Its Future, 4, 23 Defector, 8, 58
Storey, Andy, Navigating the Brexit Strait,
Greiner, Patrick Trent (See McGee, Julius Theodra, Justin, Indonesia 1965, Half a
5, 19
Alexander) Century Later, 7, 55
Holleman, Hannah (See Foster, John INTERVIEWS Wallis, Victor, Free Public Transit, 7, 59
Bellamy) Augustin, Ron (See James, Selma)
Jay, Mark, From Mass Incarceration to Mass Chowdhury, Farooque (See Foster, John REVIEWS OF THE MONTH
Coercion, 7, 24 Angus, Ian, Superbugs in the Anthropocene:
Bellamy)
Kolasi, Erald, Energy, Economic Growth, and Foster, John Bellamy interviewed by Faroo- A Profit-Driven Plague, 2, 1
Ecological Crisis, 2, 29 Bellofiore, Riccardo, Hyman Minsky at 100:
que Chowdhury, The Rise of the Right, 5, 1
Machover, Moshé, Messianic Zionism: The James, Selma interviewed by Ron Augustin, Was Minsky a Communist?, 10, 1
Ass and the Red Heifer, 9, 20 Beyond Boundaries, 4, 51 Bhattacharya, Tithi, Liberating Women from
Manji, Firoze (See Amin, Samir) Konat, Grzegorz (See Szlajfer, Henryk) “Political Economy”: Margaret Benston’s
Matthews, David, A Theory of Mental Health Maidansky, Andrey interviewed by Vesa Marxism and a Social-Reproduction Approach
and Monopoly Capitalism, 10, 22 Oittinen, Evald Ilyenkov and Soviet Philos- to Gender Oppression, 8, 1
McGee, Julius Alexander & Patrick Trent ophy, 8, 15 Chowdhury, Farooque (See Foster, John
Greiner, How Long Can Neoliberalism Oittinen, Vesa (See Maidansky, Andrey) Bellamy)
Withstand Climate Crisis?, 11, 12 Szlajfer, Henryk interviewed by Grzegorz Clark, Brett (See Foster, John Bellamy)
Merrifield, Andy, Endgame Marxism (and Konat, Liberated Capitalism, 7, 37 Foster, John Bellamy, Absolute Capitalism,
Urbanism), 6, 47 1, 1
___, Mystified Consciousness, 10, 14 POETRY ___, Late Imperialism: Fifty Years After Harry
Mullin, Corinna, Nada Trigui, & Azadeh Piercy, Marge, Straggling onward, 4, 67 Magdoff’s The Age of Imperialism, 3, 1
Shahshahani, Decolonizing Justice in Tuni- ___, This is our legacy, 6, 61 ___, On Fire This Time, 6, 1
sia: From Transitional Justice to a People’s Salzmann, Kenneth, Another Gray Afternoon ___ interviewed by Farooque Chowdhury,
Tribunal, 1, 22 in Guernica, 10, 62 The Rise of the Right, 5, 1
Mullings, Leith, Mapping Gender in Afri- ___, Green Card, 5, 49 ___ & Brett Clark, The Rift of Éire, 11, 1
can-American Political Strategies, 4, 40 ___, Brett Clark, & Hannah Holleman,
Patnaik, Prabhat (See Patnaik, Utsa) REPRISES Capitalism and Robbery: The Expropriation of
Patnaik, Utsa & Prabhat Patnaik, Neoliberal Benston, Margaret, The Political Economy of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life, 7, 1
Capitalism at a Dead End, 3, 20 Women’s Liberation, 4, 1 ___, Brett Clark, & Hannah Holleman, Marx
Paye, Jean-Claude, The Yellow Vests in Harnecker, Marta, A New Revolutionary and the Indigenous, 9, 1
France: People or Proletariat?, 2, 47 Subject, 5, 58 Holleman, Hannah (See Foster, John
Shahshahani, Azadeh (See Mullin, Corinna) Magdoff, Harry, A Note on the “Communist Bellamy)
(continued from page 64)
of China, this privileged stratum of U.S. labor, which previously received some of
the benefits of empire, is now visibly waning. At the same time, the great mass of
the working class, faced with an economic landscape characterized by stagnation,
financialization, and neoliberalism, has been subject to increased exploitation, ex-
propriation, and an overall degradation of their conditions, leading to diminished
expectations. It is due to the historical class context arising from these epochal
shifts in material relations that we are now, at long last, witnessing the nascent
reemergence of a movement toward socialism in the United States.
~
Intan Suwandi, a member of the MR editorial committee and author of Value
Chains: The New Economic Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 2019), has accepted a
position as assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois. Congratulations, Intan!
~
Corrections
In the article “Marx and the Indigenous” by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and
Hannah Holleman in the February 2020 issue of Monthly Review, “part IV” on page
2, bottom paragraph, and on page 15, second paragraph of the conclusion, should
read “part VIII.” On page 16, paragraph 5, “behind him” should read “before him.”

Radical Seattle
new from MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS

The General Strike of 1919

by Cal Winslow
"With a writing style of vigor and virility,
this book is part of the experience of our
class, both bold and free, that we need now."
-PETER LINEBAUGH, author,
Red Round Globe Hot Burning

"This is a tale packed with the unexpected,

with a class consciousness that had been
years in the making and, despite the wave
of repression that followed, would never
be entirely wiped out."

-PRISCILLA MUROLO, coauthor,

From the Folks Who Brought You the
Weekend: An Illustrated History of
Labor in the United States

63
 64
(continued from inside back cover)
the industrial reserve army; those marginalized because of religion or culture; the
pauperized masses; the disabled; and so on. Engels pointed to the whole East End
of London mired in precariousness and destitution. As he put it, “the East-end of
London is an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation
when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. And so in
all other large towns—abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers;
and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural districts.”
Built into Engels’s position was the notion that England’s global economic monopo-
ly/hegemony provided spoils both from its domination of world industry and its colo-
nial supremacy. “Even the negroes of the Congo,” he explained, “are now being forced
into the civilization attendant upon Manchester calicoes, Staffordshire pottery, and
Birmingham hardware.” It was this that allowed certain large, monopolistic firms with
surplus profits to provide surplus wages to a portion of the working class, which ended
up being a privileged labor aristocracy and became attached to England’s rulers.
However, there were signs, Engels observed, that these conditions were rapidly
changing. Overproduction and overaccumulation were characteristics of concentrat-
ed English industry, which was heightened by the rapid industrialization of other
countries such as the United States and Germany, which were flooding the world
with wares, with the result that “new markets are getting scarcer every day.” Con-
sequently, “the manufacturing monopoly enjoyed by England for nearly a century
is irretrievably broken up.” The ramifications for England and European capitalism
generally were “a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry.
Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which
we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all
markets for all trades, that is what we have been living in for nearly ten years now.”
Due to the force of economic stagnation coupled with the breakdown of En-
gland’s hegemony in the world economy, socialism, Engels argued, would reemerge
in Britain as a force in its politics, thrust forward by the growing class struggle of
workers. “With the breakdown of that monopoly [world hegemony] the English
working class will lose that privileged position; it will find itself generally—the
privileged and leading minority not excepted—on a level with its fellow-workers
abroad. And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England.”
Lenin’s first forays into the labor aristocracy theory, as Hobsbawm explained in
his contribution to MR’s April 1970 issue, were very much in line with Engels. He
saw the labor aristocracy phenomenon as confined at first simply to England, the
internal conditions of which he knew very well, and rooted in England’s world eco-
nomic hegemony. It was this that allowed Lenin, based on his critical examination
of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial Democracy and other works, to point to the
merging of a privileged sector of the working class into the petty bourgeoisie. Later,
he was to argue that the development of monopoly capitalism allowed for the spread
of the labor aristocracy phenomenon, which had originally simply been a product of
British hegemony, to other countries, with the result that the split in labor’s ranks
weakened the world socialist movement that had grown up on the continent.
Today, these general class conditions, particularly those singled out by Engels
in his theory of the labor aristocracy, resemble in certain ways those of the early
twenty-first-century United States. U.S. hegemony over the world economy after
the Second World War produced a relatively small privileged white, male stra-
tum occupying an elevated occupational/class position within the working pop-
ulation, namely an aristocracy of labor. In the face of the relative decline of U.S.
production in the global economy, associated with the offshoring of production
by multinational corporations to subcontractors in the Global South (as well as
growth of more traditional foreign direct investment) and the closely related rise
(continued on page 63)
 Archive user name: mrapr | password: 7x4v
(continued from inside front cover)
edition of 1892.) The key questions for Engels in 1885 were: Why had an English
working class, which had seemed in the early 1840s with the rise of Chartism to
be ready to exert its full strength in a struggle for political power, succumbed so
swiftly and completely to the power of capital? And why had socialism, despite the
early influence of Owenism, not developed in England?
The main answer to both questions was clear. The triumph of the new regime of
free trade with the abolition of the Corn Laws (under the shock of the Great Irish
Famine) ushered in the period of “England’s industrial monopoly” in the world as a
whole. The English working class “to a certain extent shared the benefits of the mo-
nopoly. These benefits were very unequally parceled out amongst them; the priv-
ileged minority pocketed most, but even the great mass had at least a temporary
share now and then. And that is the reason why since the dying-out of Owenism
there has been no Socialism in England” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected
Works, vol. 26, 295–301—all subsequent quotations are from this work).
More concretely, England’s manufacturing (and imperial) hegemony had led to “a
permanent improvement…for two ‘protected’ sections only of the working class. First-
ly, the factory hands.” Due to an Act of Parliament, which fixed their working day
“within relatively rational limits,” factory workers found themselves in considerably
better conditions—an issue addressed in Karl Marx’s Capital. Overlapping with this but
going beyond it was a second, more privileged group: skilled workers belonging to

the great Trades’ Unions. They are the organizations of those trades in which
the labor of grown-up men predominates, or is alone applicable. Here the com-
petition neither of women and children nor of machinery has so far weak-
ened their organised strength. The engineers, the carpenters and joiners, the
bricklayers, are each of them a power, to the extent that, as in the case of
the bricklayers and bricklayers’ labourers, they can even successfully resist
the introduction of machinery. That their condition has remarkably improved
since 1848 there can be no doubt and the best proof of this is in the fact that
for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but
they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristoc-
racy among the working class; they have succeeded in forcing for themselves a
relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final.… But as to the great
mass of the working people, the state of misery and insecurity in which they
live now is as low as ever, if not lower.
As Nicolaus pointed out in his article in April 1970, Engels’s insistence that the
labor aristocracy mainly consisted of adult men, excluding women and minors as
well as immigrant groups (principally the Irish, not mentioned by Engels in the
quotation above but included elsewhere in the article and in his 1892 preface to
the English edition of his book) was enormously significant. Engels suggests that
a small fraction of the more privileged male workers, probably at most 20 percent
of the work force, were included in the labor aristocracy. This left out vast sections
of the working population, altogether excluding those who were not adult men;
the informal sectors of industry (as in Marx’s treatment of modern domestic in-
dustry, where women were the major workers); the more precarious sections of
(continued on page 64)
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 new from MON THLY R EVIE W PRE SS

The Robbery of Nature

Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
by John Bellamy Foster and
THE ROBBERY OF NATURE

Brett Clark
The Robbery
Foster and Clark here
e range of issues. The

“Long recognized as leading theorists

Capitalism and the Ecological Rift

bound up with the

acle to life on Earth as

of Nature
of ecomarxism, Foster and Clark here
al Research

all of us, flora and fauna

on. It will be widely
ed Senior Lecturer, extend their ‘metabolic rift’ paradigm to an
orical materialism to lay impressive range of issues. The result is a
powerful case that capitalism is inextricably
speciesism, and social
that does not artificially J OHN B ELL AMY F OSTER AND B RE T T C L ARK
”
pire: Imperialism,
italism bound up with the robbery of nature and
constitutes the paramount obstacle to life
on Earth as we know it.”
ed by the German
relation to its natural
g to an irreparable rift
In the twenty-first
egradation of the —NANCY FRASER, New School
|

for Social Research

ances in critical theory
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

cialism. Working
amine capitalism’s
and BRETT CLARK

“Demonstrates that capitalism is setting out

nd how it has led to
.

w and a professor of doom for all of us, flora and fauna alike,
and that a cooperative society is our only
is associate editor of
niversity of Utah.

salvation. It will be widely recognized as

a classic.”
MONTHLY
REVIEW
PRESS —PAUL BUHLE, retired Senior Lecturer,
1/9/2020 10:29:42 AM
Brown University

I n the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German

chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to
its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading
to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and
nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into
capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of
extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated
with contemporary ecosocialism. Working within this historical
tradition, Foster and Clark examine capitalism’s plundering of
nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the
current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System.

386 pp | $28 pbk

MONT H LY R E VI E W PRES S
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