Crash Course Socialism

Surplus Value
Socialism is an economic and social system defined by social ownership of the
means of production. (Workers democratically own and operate their
workplaces, as opposed to private control of production aka Capitalism).

The means of production are non-human inputs that help create economic

value, such as factories, industrial machinery, workplaces, large tracts of
land, stores of raw materials, etc. The means of production are the means of
life. Socialists refer to the means of production as capital, or private property, IE,
the things which give the people who own them power over those who don't.

Private property in the socialist context shouldn't be confused with personal

property, such as your home, car, computer, and other possessions, which
would be protected. Private property is in actuality another word for absentee
property, whose ownership is claimed through title only (and not use), for the
purpose of extracting rent from the actual users, occupants, or workers.

In a Capitalist society the means of production are owned and controlled

privately, by those that can afford them (the Capitalist, aka those with Capital).
Production is carried out to benefit the capitalist (production for profit).
Workers are paid a wage, and receive that amount regardless of how much
value they produce.

Socialists call this difference the surplus, profit, unpaid labor, exploitation,

or wage theft.

Wage Theft = Worker Value Added - Wage Paid

Unlike workers, Capitalists make their living, not by clocking in and being paid a
certain fixed wage per hour, but through absentee ownership. Their wealth is
earned while sleeping, playing golf, or visiting the mailbox to collect pieces
of this wage theft, often in the form of stock dividends. A worker's wealth is
dependent on the number of hours they can work; a Capitalist's wealth is based
on how much absentee property they can accumulate, and as such can multiply
indefinitely. Some Capitalists earn an average worker's yearly salary in a single
night's sleep.

For example, a Copper mine owner neither physically mines the copper, and
(living thousands of miles away) likely delegates day-to-day operations to a
hired manager. Yet, because they have a piece of paper that says they own
it, they get a large cut of everything that was mined: the ultimate free lunch.

A 1983 report by England national income and expenditures found that on

average, 26 minutes of every hour worked (or 43% of labor value added) by
English workers across a wide range of industries went to various exploiting or
unproductive groups, with workers receiving only 57% of their pre-tax
productive output as wages1. In other words, at least 40% of the work you do
every day is stolen by Capitalists.

Capitalists use the surplus to push out competitors and gain market share,
leading to the destruction of most small businesses, with just a few
companies controlling our food, media, energy, transportation, and finances.

In the table below, both capital and surplus value are controlled by a company's
owners, who usually appoint a board of directors. This owning class (called
Capitalists, or the Bourgeoisie) make up a tiny minority of the population.

Capitalist firm / Economy

Total Owners, Shareho

Other payments
Value Managers, Clerk

Capital
 
Accumulation
Surplus Value /
Worker value Profit Armed
Police, Military
added Enforcement

Political Bribery  

Advertising  

Wages    

Capital Physical assets    

 Intellectual assets    

Money / Finance
   
capital

Wage workers are completely dependent on selling their labor power to those

in control of production in order to gain access to the necessities of life (money
for food, shelter, clothing, etc). Its similarities to chattel slavery has lead many to
term wage work as wage slavery, with voluntary employment being simply a
false choice between one exploiter or another.

Technological advancements, instead of benefiting workers, result in decreased

or stagnant wages, worsening bargaining power, or mass layoffs. For example,
a machine that replaces 10 workers leads to their firing, resulting in a benefit for
the machine owner, and an economic hardship to the fired workers.

Increase in profits due primarily to automation

The difference between these two lines is a measure of the surplus.

History, and Human Nature
Capitalism has nothing to do with human nature. People can be greedy, or
cooperative, depending on the incentive structure and ideology of the
socioeconomic system they live in, which is usually out of their control. For the
vast majority of human history, small groups of people survived by foraging,
growing, or hunting for food as a community, in a mode of life
termed primitive communism. Communal sharing was essential to the survival
of the group.

Markets likewise were rare, since communities tended to be self-sufficient.

Rituals, harvest festivals, a group of elders deciding fair distribution, or
communal decision-making accomplished what markets do today. Private
property (and male-dominated societies) came into existence with the growth of
large-scale agriculture and animal domestication (A historically male-dominated
activity). These tended to be passed on to male descendants (which in turn
required strict female sexual control, isolation, and increasing objectification),
aggregating into fewer and fewer land-owners, and creating class antagonisms
between an owning, and a working class.

In the modern day, there is the communism of the family, in which family

members share freely with one another. There are community welfare
organizations, food banks, as well as thousands of undocumented and
unpublicized acts of kindness which show that cooperation endures even in
spite of the individualism of the current dominant economic system. Popular
phrases like, "Money is the root of all evil", hint at our societal dislike of
selfishness, and persist alongside the capitalist myths of the "self-made man",
and, "pulling yourself up by the bootstraps" (which shows the power of
capitalist indoctrination: in a nonsensical world, the impossible becomes
possible).

Capitalism evolved historically out of feudalism and slave societies, all three

being dependent on a dominant ruling class receiving the surplus of a
subordinate class.

Socialism as a diverse philosophy arose out of a criticism after the French

revolution, in which a capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) seemed to merely
replace feudal lords to become the new ruling class. At the same time, the
exploited serfs were moved off the land (enclosure) and forced into the cities to
become wage-workers.

Marxism is a socialist tradition, which places emphasis on the means of

production, your relation to them, and the inherent class struggles involved
between those who control the productive forces and those who don't, as
the primary force driving economic and social relations.

Value
Economic systems, such as Capitalism, don't invent, create or build anything.
Workers do (See Soviet Space Program). The "isms" just determine who gets
compensated. Nor does capitalism spur innovation; the pursuit of new ideas is
fundamental to humanity, and takes place regardless of the economic system in
place. Inventions like rocketry, the internet, space travel, GPS, mobile phones,
vaccines, were all developed under public funding.

The labor theory of value (LTV) recognizes that our most valuable resource is
time, specifically socially useful/necessary labor time. There is after all only
a finite number of hours of work humanity can perform in a given day; and
at least half of that value is going to a few absentee owners.

The labor theory was commonly accepted in the 19th century ( especially by
Smith and Ricardo ), but fell out of favor as capitalist states began to cement
economics as a discipline to justify the new status quo.

Most capitalist economists treat value like magic fairy dust: it can be created
and destroyed with a thought. Many modern economists and mainstream
economics professors serve a role akin to the priests during feudalism: treating
value and rewards in idealist terms, rather than as scientific concepts, justifying
capitalism's immense inequality ( whilst often getting paid to promote it ), and
demonizing other theories ( such as LTV ) as heresy.

Coming down to reality from idealist and subjective experience, value, like any
other scientific concept, such as energy, is preserved in a closed system.

The labor theory of value has been proven empirically correct in recent decades,
by comparing the amount of labor required in given industries, and the money
output of of those industries. For nearly every country with sufficient economic
data, the correlation is > 95%.

Under capitalism, the subjective theory of value is based almost entirely on

the supply and demand curve model which is unscientific, 2 since it presupposes
more unknowns than knowns, and as such is useless at making any predictions.
Capitalist value theories are based around utility, IE joy, which isn't quantifiable,
measurable, comparable, or falsifiable, and as such is useless as a scientific
concept. Its greatest use is to allow the mega-rich to justify owning thousands
of lifetimes of stolen labor.
The planned economies such as that of the USSR, while imperfect, often
provided better social outcomes than its Western equivalents. Its publicly
owned, planned economy brought it from feudalism to a world superpower,
with the fastest growing economy of the 20th century, despite starting out at
the same level of economic development as Brazil in 1920.

This video by Paul Cockshott - Going beyond Money, illustrates how it is

currently possible to go beyond money, and to build a democratically planned,
labor-time based economy for human needs, rather than private profit.

Risk
A common argument is that Capitalists should be rewarded for their financial
risk. The only risk owners take is that of being forced to become a worker like
everyone else if the business fails.

Risk also isn't proportional to reward; Big Capitalists risk much less, and gain
much more than smaller ones, just as wage workers risk starvation and
homelessness if forces outside their control lead to their firing. The nearer the
bottom you are, the greater your risks.

Slavemasters took financial risk in buying slaves, but that risk doesn't negate the
harm done to their slaves, or entitle them to their slaves' labor output. Capitalist
risk likewise doesn't entitle them to a portion of their workers' output.

The socialist argument is not that individual passive investors should still bear all
the risk, it's that they never should have been in a position to bear that risk to
begin with, and only got there by exploiting workers. Society and workers
should bear the risk, make the decisions, and own the means of production
that their labor made possible.

Conformity
Socialism has nothing to do with conformity, restriction of artistic expression, or
equality in abilities. It instead proposes economic and political equality through
the abolition of classes, placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to
the means of production. It is Capitalism, with its inherent authoritarian
hierarchies, that imposes conformity on society through vapid consumerism,
and through the authoritarian nature of capitalist firms themselves. A chain of
command ensures that orders from capitalists drop like a rock, to dominate the
actions of every worker.
Democracy
Socialists view democracy under capitalism to be an unrealistic utopia, better
labeled as Bourgeois Democracy, or democracy for the rich, which socialists
contrast with proletarian democracy. Under capitalism, political parties,
representatives, infrastructure, and the media are controlled by capitalists,
who place restrictions on the choices given to workers, and limit the scope of
public debate to pro-capitalist views.

Bourgeois democracies are in reality Capitalist Dictatorships, resulting in

legislation favorable to the wealthy, regardless of the population's actual
preferences. The Princeton Study, conducted in the US in 2014, found that the
preferences of the average citizen exert a near-zero influence on legislation,
making the US system of elections and campaigning little more than political
theater.

Examples of restrictions include stacking the candidates before an election,

a media and news monopoly, the First Past the Post voting system (which
enforces capitalist two party domination), gerrymandering, long term limits with
no way to recall unpopular representatives, restrictions crafted to disenfranchise
poor and minority voters, bills directly crafted by lobbyists and bourgeois
lawmakers, voter suppression, electoral fraud, unverifiable closed source
electronic voting systems, capitalist campaign financing, low voter to
representative ratios, inconvenient voting locations and times, and most
pervasive, candidate stacking. Most elections are performed before we ever
get to the polling booth. In short, political democracy can't exist without
economic democracy.

The impossibility of Capitalist democracy to make a transition to working-class

democracy is best shown by the phrase: Capitalists will not allow you to vote
away their wealth. Pacifism, and elections have never been an effective means of
disenfranchising the ruling class. Multi-party, representative parliamentary
democracies, such as exist in Australia, the UK, South Korea, and the United
States, have proved to be the safest shell for Capitalist rule.

Communists propose building alternatives alongside of bourgeois democracy,

with the goal of to replacing it with Proletarian democracy. Measures might
include:

 Replacement of bourgeois parliamentary bodies with broadly inclusive

workers organizations, such as unions, councils, or syndicates.
 Seizing land, productive facilities, and housing and putting them under
democratic control.
  Elimination of all debts, suppression of all private banks and stock
markets.
 Direct democracy in as many decisions as possible, often called cyber
communism. A site called Simplevote, a direct democracy voting
platform.
 A democratically planned economy for human needs, with open
participation.
 Low-level workplace democracy.
 Elimination of the standing army, and the substitution for it of armed
workers.
 An emphasis on universal education, health-care, child-care, care for the
elderly, and human welfare, paid for socially.
 Increase in productive technology.
 Low levels of wealth and income inequality, often driven by a system of
labor vouchers for compensation.
 Experts (if any) elected by the working class through universal suffrage.
 All representatives and officials (including police) are revocable at any
time.
 Public officials are paid workmen’s wages.

Late Stage Capitalism

During Capitalism's growth period (early Capitalism), when there are new
markets and labor forces to expand to, capitalism can appear stable for the
richer consumers whose products are actually being produced by exploited,
poorer workforces. Likewise, in a labor shortage, as existed in the newly
industrializing US, capitalists have no choice but to keep wages high (and the
rate of exploitation low) in order to bring in workers from other countries, and
keep them from becoming subsistence farmers.

In the southern US, African slavery was used to solve the labor shortage, and
keep exploitation high (since no wages were paid), and consumer products such
as tobacco and cotton cheap. In order to take advantage of cheap labor,
capitalists usually build production far away from where those products are
actually bought and consumed, meaning that most consumer goods are
shipped by ocean-freight, wasting energy and polluting the environment.

Since the 1960s, there has been a labor surplus, due to a decreased demand for
workers due to computers and automation, and an increased supply of workers
(women, and low-paid manufacturing and agriculture in less-developed
countries). The extra, unemployed workers make up a reserve army of labor,
keeping wages low, and desperation high. Increased worker productivity (due to
computers and automation) mean that the surplus (the difference between
worker productivity and wage paid), is historically higher than ever. This trend
will only continue, and workers will naturally become more class conscious, as
they see their exploitation increase, and their livelihood decrease.

Since workers have less money to survive, let alone buy what their employers
are selling, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and capitalists fight
and wage wars over the decreasing surplus. Late stage capitalism refers to the
extreme polarization of the two classes, the increasingly absurd and cruel ways
our society copes and justifies such stark inequality, and the horrible things
capitalism forces people to do to survive.

As the supply of labor outstrips the demand, it becomes cheaper to employ

workers rather than to sink startup costs into innovative technology. Soon, the
technological growth rate grinds to a halt (as of 2018 technological growth in
Europe has slowed to ~1-2% per year), just as in ancient Rome, inexpensive
slave labor lead to stagnant technological progress.

In actuality, capitalism is highly unstable, made up of a series of crises,

economic bubbles, booms, and eventual busts, termed business cycles, that
occur every few years with varying intensity, but with most of the resulting
burden shifted to workers. The capitalist state often intervenes to prop up
failing businesses, and bail out members of its own class.

Both feudalism and slavery were thought to be highly stable systems, and even
they lasted hundreds of years until their eventual overthrow.

Defending the Status Quo

The reason why most people are reticent to read anti-capitalist literature, and
discouraged from participating in the class struggle through unionism and
political movements, is due to capitalist indoctrination, a capitalist monopoly
on media, and police repression. Six companies control 90% of all media in the
West.

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally

diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society
(the beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values, and mores) so that their imposed,
ruling-class world view becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally
valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status
quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for everyone, rather than
as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
The police in Western bourgeois democracies are the domestic enforcement
arm of the capitalists, much like the military is the external imperialist
enforcement arm. They are the hired goons of the elites of their given city,
protecting their factories and workplaces from unionization and worker control,
oppressing the poor and homeless, and keeping them separated from other
workers by intentional impoverishment via legal means. Cops have a long
history of killing workers and crushing unions.

The State, and Revolution

Private ownership of the means of production was established through force
and private tyranny, and is only upheld through force. The state is a special
organization of force used for the suppression of one class by
another which (in capitalist society) exercises a monopoly on violence to
forcibly maintain the right to private property. The modern state developed
alongside the emergent capitalist system as the bourgeoisie seized political and
economic control. It arises from the irreconcilable class antagonisms that exist in
society.

The State, under capitalist society, which protects private property and upholds
the capitalist mode of production, is an instrument wielded by the bourgeoisie
to suppress the proletariat. So long as there are classes in society, a State (or
any organization that uses force in the interests of a class) must exist.

Marxists aim to replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, with a

transitional dictatorship of the proletariet, smashing the presently existing
bourgeois state apparatus, and replacing it with a new state, constructed on the
basis of worker power, destroying all the elements which exist to oppress
workers, and safeguarding the ones that help workers. Once the proletarian
state possesses political power and controls the means of production, it
will wither away over time as it suppresses the bourgeoisie and moves toward a
classless, egalitarian society. Eventually, the use of force is no longer necessary to
suppress class antagonisms, because there are no classes, and the oppressive
elements of the proletarian state wither away.

Socialism as an economic system is distinct from neoliberalism, as well as social

democracy/Welfare state capitalism, which aims to band-aid the ills of
capitalism while leaving the exploitation inherent in wage slavery intact. Social
services provided by the capitalist-controlled state have nothing to do with
socialism.

The Communist Legacy

Some Marxists call the regimes typically called socialist, as more correctly
defined as State Capitalist, since production was controlled by state
bureaucracies who also distributed the surplus, rather than through the
democratic input of workers. Other Marxists call them siege socialist, contrasting
it with pure socialism, stating that siege socialism is a natural reaction to the
external pressures of capitalist encirclement, and that pure socialism is an ideal
which is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable. The US for example, has been involved
in militarily crushing nearly every socialist attempt for the last 80 years, and
installing right-wing fascist dictatorships (friendly to US interests) in their place.
Needless to say, capitalist encirclement has a profoundly distorting
affect on the building of socialism; very few attempts have survived US
interventionism. This talk by Micheal Parenti is a good reflection and criticism on
the soviet experiment.

The early stages of the 1917 Russian Revolution were far more progressive than
is typically portrayed; Divorce was legalized, Homosexuality was
decriminalized, land was distributed to the peasantry, banks were nationalized,
control of factories was given to worker's councils, the workday was
shortened, wages were fixed at a higher rate, all elected officials could now be
immediately recalled; it created mass literacy drives, free nurseries, communal
kitchens, and laundries. 14 Western nations (including the US) sent troops to
Russia to fight against the gains of the revolution.

Contrary to the popular phrase, Communism did work: within a few short years,
the Soviet Union doubled its life expectancy, became a world super-power,
and the second fastest growing economy of the 1900s. Other achievements
include: near-zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70+ years
(excluding WW2), near-zero homelessness, higher caloric intake than the US,
99% literacy, free education, free health-care (most doctors per capita in the
world), free childcare, low poverty, and low levels of sex and racial inequality,
not to mention the soviet space program's achievements. 1

These achievements were possible due to efficient use of resources resulting

from the lack of a parasitic capitalist class expropriating the majority of the
nation's wealth. Similar outcomes in other socialist countries prove
that socialism did indeed work, and provided an alternative to the private
property system. This is why it was intentionally and systematically attacked by
Western capitalist nations.

The famines and economic hardship typically associated with communism in

Russia and China, were partially a result of the painful process
of industrialization, and the transition from agriculture to industry. It would be
the case whether capitalists, communists, or enlightened rulers were in power.
During England's rapid industrialization, life expectancy in some cities was less
than 30 years. This is the case with every country in the process of
industrialization. Lysenkoism, and a period of droughts made the problem
worse. The scale of famines were also exaggerated by capitalist historians,
whose brinkmanship in quoting higher death counts is contradicted by
the massive population growth of those countries. Even in spite of this, a look
at a drastic increase in the life expectancy in the USSR should put to rest the
notion of socialism as contributing to starvation.

Exaggerated death counts blamed on communism and usually attributed to

Stalin or Mao are often due to Western historians attributing all deaths to the
economic system. This would be the equivalent of attributing deaths from
the Dust Bowl to FDR. Yet UNICEF, RESULTS, and Bread for the World estimate
that 15 million people die each year from preventable poverty, of whom 11
million are children under the age of five.

Even if we were to fully accept the Western propaganda that socialist regimes
have killed 100 million people, then within 10 years, capitalism kills more
children under the age of 5 than socialism did in 150 years.

The Communist Future

Communism is the highest developed stage of socialism wherein there is no
state, no money, no class system. The means of production are owned by all and
provide for everyone's needs. There are also presumably high levels of
automation so most do not have to work.

Many socialists point to directly democratic worker’s councils as an ideal way to

organize production, with gift economies for abundant goods, and labor
voucher economies for scarce/luxury goods. Here is an example of a moneyless,
Cyber-Communist system, video.

Past and present socialist/anarchist societies include - Revolutionary

Catalonia, Anarchist Aragon, Shinmin Province in Korea/Manchuria, The Bavarian
Soviet Republic, The Paris Commune, The Zapatista controlled areas of Chiapas
(current day), Magonista Baja California, Shanghai People's
Commune, Rojava (current day), Communist Marinaleda, Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, USSR, People's Republic of China, Socialist Republic of
Vietnam, Cuba.

Revolutionary vs Evolutionary (Reformist) socialism, Economic
planning with labor vouchers vs. Market socialism, are a few debated topics
within socialism.
FAQ

 Socialism FAQ
 Glossary of Socialist Terms
 Does Capitalism work?
 Marxist.space - A collection of resources

Media
Videos

 Introduction to Marxism by Professor Richard D. Wolff

 Socialism for Dummies by Professor Richard D. Wolff
 Michael Parenti - Reflections on the overthrow of the Soviet Union
 Paul Cockshott - Going beyond Money (how cyber communism can
work)
 Michael Parenti on US imperialism, and the overthrow of Yugoslavia
 Michael Parenti on anti-sovietism in the US media
 Michael Parenti on Imperialism and Film - Rambo and the Swarthy
Hordes
 Karl Marx and Marxism - BBC documentary by Stuart Hall
 Dr Gabor Maté - Why Capitalism Makes Us Sick
 Vijay Prashad - Military power, and the American Empire in decline.
 The Philosophy of Antifa (Philosophy Tube)
 3 minute intro to Marxism
 10 minute intro to Karl Marx
 10 minute intro to Capitalism by Professor Richard D. Wolff
 Introduction to Anarchism by Noam Chomsky, #1, #2
 Chomsky on american or right-libertarianism

Literature

Modern introductory books

 magnet:?
xt=urn:btih:6980fde654f217ec9c81b30eab1ca3a13bbbca1e&dn=Socialist+book
s+starter+pack&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org
 %3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fzer0day.ch%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F
%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk
%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969

 Paul D’Amatto - the meaning of Marxism. Youtube audiobook

o magnet:?
xt=urn:btih:24c9a942f97f99c1816a344292b7baff5f289986&dn=The+Mean
ing+of+Marxism+-+Paul+D%27Amato.epub&tr=udp%3A%2F
%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F
%2Fzer0day.ch%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com
%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A
%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969

 Danny Katch - Socialism…. Seriously

o magnet:?
xt=urn:btih:1565682421ff7082fdad461266ab9e403fb50cfc&dn=Socialis
m Seriously A Brief Guide to Human Liberation Danny Katch (2015)
epub&tr=http://tracker.opentrackr.org/announce&tr=http://tracker
.opentrackr.org:1337/announce&tr=udp://tracker.coppersurfer.tk:6
969/announce&tr=udp://tracker.leechers-
paradise.org:6969/announce&tr=udp://tracker.zer0day.to:1337/anno
unce

 Chris Harman - How Marxism Works

 Michael Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds. Youtube audiobook
 Peter Gelderloos - How Nonviolence Protects the State
 Socialist books starter pack (torrent)

Essays/Introductions

 Albert Einstein - Why Socialism?

 Engels - Principles of Communism (A great glossary of socialist terms)
 Lenin - The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
 Lenin - A liberal professor on Equality
 Eugene Debs - Capitalism and Socialism
 Stephen Gowans - Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies
Work? audiobook
 Why do many socialist attempts end up in an one-party state? Watch
this brilliant talk by Micheal Parenti, or read his article, Left
anticommunism, the unkindest cut, audiobook
 Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy's job for
them., audiobook

Marxist literature

 Engels - Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, audiobook

  Marx/Engels - The Communist Manifesto
 Marx - Wage Labour and Capital
 Rosa Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution . Audiobook
 Lenin - State and Revolution. Audiobook
 Lenin - “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder . Audiobook
 Lenin - Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
 Trotsky - Fascism: What it is and how to Fight it
 Trotsky - In Defense of October

Marxian economics

 Cockshott and Cottrell - Towards a New Socialism (pdf) epub audiobook

History books

 Howard Zinn - A Peoples History of the United States

 CLR James - The Black Jacobins
 J. Sakai - Settlers: the Mythology of the White Proletariat , audiobook
 John Reid - The Ten Days that Shook the World
 Huey P. Newton - Revolutionary Suicide
 Eduardo Galeano - Open Veins of Latin America
 Fidel Castro - My Life
 Trotsky - History of the Russian Revolution
 Joshua Bloom - Black Against Empire
 Parenti - Blackshirts and Reds

Psychology

 Robert Cialdini - The Psychology of persuasion (not explicitly Marxist, but

a great breakdown of the main psychological tactics used by exploiters to
manipulate us)

Fiction

 Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars / Mars Trilogy

 Ursula K LeGuin - The Dispossessed

Audiobooks
  Dessalines List of Audiobooks (Many of the books and articles above are
here)
 Dessalines Youtube Channel w/ Audiobooks

Films

 Pride (2014)
 Reds (1981)
 Salt of the Earth (1954)
 Matewan (1987)
 Snowpiercer (2013)
 Libertarias (1996)
 The Trotsky (2009)
 The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006)
 Battleship Potemkin (1925)
 Land and Freedom (1995)
 The Spook who sat by the door (1973)
 I, Daniel Blake (2016)
 The Proud Valley (1940)
 The Young Karl Marx (2017)
 Network (1976)
 The Hospital (1971)
 Burn! (1969)
 Trumbo (2015)
 Walter defends Sarajevo (1972)
 Rosa Luxemburg (1986)
 Joe Hill (1971)
 The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
 Viva Zapata! (1952)
 The Organizer (1963)
 Lulu the tool (1971)
 Rebellion in Patagonia (1974)

Documentaries

 Seeing Red
 Tsar to Lenin
  Fidel - The untold story (Cuban Revolution)
 How Yukong moved the mountains (Chinese Revolution)
 Malcolm X - Make it Plain
 The Upright Man (Thomas Sankara)
 Grenada - Future coming Towards Us
 Paul Robeson - Here I Stand
 Black gods with guns - Robert F Williams and Black Power
 The Act of Killing - Communist purging in Indonesia
 Lenin - old British Documentary
 Oliver Stone - Untold History of the US
 Soviet Storm - WW2 in the East
 Red ant dream
 The Murder of Fred Hampton
 The Revolution will not be televised (Chavez and Venezuela)
 A place called Chiapas (EZLN)
 Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul (서울의 평양 시민들)
 The Haircut - A North Korean Adventure
 Weight of Chains - The overthrow of Yugoslavia.

Podcasts

 Proles of the round table

 Eyes Left
 Revolutionary Left Radio
 Red Menace
 Citations needed
 David Harvey's anti-capitalist chronicles
 Economic Update with Richard Wolff

Channels

 Anticonqustia
 Empire Files
 Paul Cockshott
 Richard Wolff - Democracy at Work
 Comrade Hakim
 Vijay Prashad
  Micheal Parenti

Organizations
Parties / Groups

 List of Anticapitalist Organizations

Online Communities

 Marxist.space - A collection of resources

 /r/capitalism_in_decay
 /r/socialism
 /r/communism
 /r/anarchism
 /r/socialistRA
 /r/redneckrevolt
 /r/socialistprogrammers
 /r/militant
 101s
o /r/communism101
o /r/socialism_101
 Memes
o /r/FULLCOMMUNISM
o /r/ShitLiberalsSay

Credit to  /u/gab91,  /r/socialism,  /r/socialism_101,  /r/communism101

Capitalism is, fundamentally, about the underlying property relations at the base of society.
Claims on ownership granting special rules. So kind of like how in feudalism - the King got
a bunch of special rules that only applied to him (sometimes from God), and later some of
those would extend to the nobility and aristocracy, but not to the serfs and peasants - or
how in ancient Rome, masters got one set of rules and slaves got a different set of rules -
well Marxists make the argument that we've still got a two-tiered ruleset in place today -
where one group of people (or CLASS of people) have to live and play by a basic set of
rules, but another, smaller group (or CLASS) of people get some bonus special rules that
help them out extra and give them bonus power and authority that members of the much
larger group don't have the same access to or ability to wield. Even moreso, Marxists make
the argument that these bonus rules are actually detrimental and damaging to the larger
group, in order to amplify the benefit provided to the smaller group.
So let's talk about these two groups. The first group is probably the one that you and I are a
part of, as is the overwhelming majority of humanity. This group is a CLASS of people that
acquire and grow their wealth - that is to say, make their money, earn their income, etc -
primarily through doing work -ie/ labour. This can be a lot of different things: flipping
burgers, writing code, building houses, transporting goods, etc. Lots of different things. But
how they all get paid is largely the same. They perform this task, over a certain amount of
time, and they receive money from the person or people who owns the business at a fixed
rate of pay, multiplied by the amount of time that they spent working. So you make X
dollars per hour (called a wage), or you make Y dollars per month or per year (called a
salary), or you get paid Z dollars for doing a specific job that will take a specific amount of
time.
Now there's a lot of interesting characteristics to talk about with this relationship - but one of
the obvious ones is the mathematical limit to wealth growth through labour. Karl Marx calls
this group the PROLETARIAT.
If you are getting paid at X dollars an hour, then there's only so many hours in a day that
you can work, (and lets face it, you need to sleep to some extent, and there's likely transit
and other life obligations involved in there too) and there is a clear upper limit to how
quickly you can grow your wealth. Yes, if you have the fortune of being born into a very
privileged position, you might be able to negotiate a higher X dollars per hour rate, but it is
still a fixed rate, and it still is capped off by how many hours you can physically perform
work over the course of a day (or a week, or a year). So even if you are a super skilled,
super hard worker who negotiated a good contract, you can still only grow your wealth
arithmetically - in direct proportion to the time you put in. But overwhelmingly, that's not
how fortunes are made.
Now let's talk about that other group in society - the much smaller and much more powerful
one - the one with all the fortunes - the one that really gets to make use of those bonus
rules I mentioned. So remember, the PROLETARIAT primarily makes their money from
doing work - that's the defining characteristic of that class. Well this group, who Marx calls
the BOURGEOISIE, grows their wealth, makes their money in a very different way. Their
wealth does not primarily come from doing work - their money comes primarily from
ownership claims. They make their money simply by owning things.
Rich people sell you a story about working hard for their money - for the most part, that's a
myth - most of their money is made via ownership. In the old days is was the certificate
they had that said 'this factory belongs to me (or me and my business partner), and in more
modern times, it's divvied up a little differently with things like stocks and bonds - people
with differing amounts of equity and portions of the total ownership claim. But the money
they make from the ownership claim - that money is made while they sleep and play golf.
That money is the money made by the workers, that they only pay a fractional portion back
to the people who did the labour to make the money in the first place (salaries, wages, etc).
The owners pocket the rest, and the mechanics of how this system works is not the
standard of history, but something that has come into place only in the past few hundred
years.
Think of a coal mine for example. The owner doesn't physically go into the mine and dig up
the coal. He doesn't run the local office and organize the labour. The owner lives thousands
of miles away. Yet, because he has a little sheet of paper that say he owns it, every three
months he can expect a substantial cheque in the mail paid out to him. He gets a (very
large, rather significant) cut of everything that mine produced this quarter. But he didn't
mine any coal. Capitalists love to say that "There's no free lunch" - except that there is - as
long as you have enough wealth to belong to the ownership class - you can extract free
lunches from actual working men and women for as long as you own property. It's not the
poor and powerless who are leeches - it's the wealthy who are the parasites.
Surprised JK Rowling Is A Monster? Then
You Didn’t Pay Attention to Harry Potter
Posted byJames J JacksonDecember 23, 2019Posted
inActivism, capitalism, commentary, Culture, democratic
socialism, feminism, journalism, literature, Politics, Revolution, socialismTags:harry
potter, harry potter propoganda, jk rowling, jk rowling lib dem, jk rowling neoliberal, jk rowling
tweet, neoliberalism, radical feminism, socialism, TERF, TERFS jk rowling terf, transphobia

Are you shocked, absolutely shocked, that JK Rowling would out

herself so blatantly as a transphobic bigot?

Don’t be. Rowling has never been on the side of the oppressed.

She was one of the agents of smear against the integral Jeremy
Corbyn, which helped the Tories sweep the latest general election, and
she insisted that the U.K. “welcome” Donald Trump when he makes his
state visits.

How could someone who inspired the imaginations of so many be so

closed minded?

Well, if we had been paying attention to her work, we could have seen
that she has been a class traitor this whole time.
Let us review the overall plot of her magnum opus, the Harry Potter
Series:

The series is about an entire class of people (wizards), who are

segregated from the general population (they have their own schools,
shopping centers, they even have their own trains!) In order to be a
part of this class YOU HAVE TO BE BORN INTO IT (eugenics,
much?). This wizard class, that is apparently too good to mix with the
muggle masses, has total control over a single commodity (magic).

Here is where it starts to get good: to be a wizard you must be born

into this class, and theoretically this class COULD cure all of the worlds
ills with the commodity at their control. I always found it infuriating that
wizards could be curing disease and ending world hunger, but for
some reason they just choose not to.

The most infuriating part however is that NO ONE IN THE BOOKS

QUESTIONS THIS! Everyone just accepts that it is okay to not use
magic to help muggles, in fact the wizards ARE FORBIDDEN to use
their magic in the muggle realm for any reason! Much like how the
capitalists will make excuses and laws forbidding the redistribution of
wealth or the feeding of the homeless on the street.

The books are one giant justification of the existence of billionaires.

Billionaires sit on the majority of the worlds wealth while we suffer and
toil. Most end up in the ranks of this class through inheritance, as
wizards inherit their magic.

So to review, you have the eugenic idea of birth essentialism in how

wizards inherit their magic. You have a justification for a small class of
people controlling a world benefiting commodity, while they live in a
segregated community.

Yeah… I’m really glad I grew up as a Star Wars nerd.

 Book One of The Harry Potter Series

Politics Is Not Harry Potter

BY

RJ QUINN
Liberals love Harry Potter because it presents a world they
desperately wish was a reality — one where the magic of
facts and reason and elite education were enough to
vanquish the ills of society.
A view of props used on the set of Harry Potter at the Warner Bros Studio Tour
London, at Leavesden Studios on March 30, 2012 in Watford, England. Gareth
Cattermole / Getty
Our spring issue, “Pandemic Politics,” is out now. It features over 120
pages of beautiful illustrations and quality writing and analysis. Get a
discounted subscription today!
Mike Davis: Reopening the Economy Will Send Us to Hell
Mike Davis
Are You Reading Propaganda Right Now?
Liza Featherstone
Four Futures
Peter Frase
The Red and the Black
Seth Ackerman

There is no getting around middle-class liberals’ love of Harry Potter as

political theory. It is equal parts embarrassing and depressing to see grown
adults filter their experience of our moment of tumult, with its attendant
dangers and possibilities, into the question of whether someone called
“Dumbledore” might approve. But this peculiar affection for Harry Potter is
deeper than a mere fandom, because Harry Potter — with the concept of
magic and the Wizarding World as its starting point — provides the blueprint
for the ultimate liberal ontology of politics.

“What does magic mean in the context of these shared worlds?” Laurie
Penny asks in a 2016 Baffler article investigating liberals’ infatuation with
Harry Potter. “Magic means power, and it means privilege,” Penny writes, and
she positions Harry Potter as fulfilling an anti-authoritarian fantasy for young
adults disillusioned with reaction.

In one sense she is right, but there is also a

particularly neoliberal authoritarian fantasy to Potterworld. “Magic,” as it is
discussed in the Harry Potter universe, is a force that allows its wielder to
have a profound and measurable impact without organizing, sacrificing, or
indeed doing much of anything. JK Rowling presents her reader a fantasy
world in which “being really good at homework” makes you a literal
superhero.
Contrast this with Victorian England’s gothic fascination with blood magic,
sacrifice, and the alienation of the soul for mortal power. Rowling’s
neoliberal magic world is not a dark and dangerous place, but a comfortable
retreat, where long-held myths — meritocracy, the assured benefits of elite
education, the decisive power of facts and rightness — are not myths at all,
but the very organizing forces of reality itself. In the world of Harry Potter,
there is a linear relationship between how much of a nerd you are and how
much real, worldly power you have.

For a generation that was promised the world in exchange for a high GPA,
this is indeed a tasty bit of lotus. But what does some people’s fascination
with these otherworldly powers mean for our planet?

Marx is full of magic — look no further than commodity fetishism. We see a

table as having some intrinsic value related to its table-ness, and that intrinsic
value sets the baseline conditions for production (how much the workers are
paid, for example). But what intrinsic value does a table have as a tradable
commodity? When we take away the labor that has gone into making the
table, what remains is a block of wood … so where’s the value beyond the
labor? Fetishism — magical thinking — squares the circle, making us believe
the intrinsic exchange value of the table itself, rather than social domination,
is the basis of the relationship between the table-maker and the capitalist.

Wherever you find magic in actually-existing society, you don’t have to look
much further to find obfuscation, denial, and exploitation. After all, what is
the signing of an employment contract but a ritual that lets us imagine the
employer-employee relationship as one of free and equal exchange that results
in some “thing” called “the labor market?” Relationships of dominance are
obscured by the fetish of the contract into relationships of exchange. We all
know the laborer and the capitalist have unequal power, so why bother with a
nonsense ritual contract? Contra Laurie Penny, magic doesn’t
just mean power — magic obscures existing power.

So, what is being obfuscated by the devotion to Potterland? Its fans are not
necessarily stupid (they have high GPAs!), and presumably they do not
believe that somewhere in the world a functioning wand exists. But Harry
Potter presents these readers with the world as they want it, with the right and
proper hierarchies back in place. It is the ultimate “Revenge of the Nerds,”
where the liberal priesthood of experts, technocrats, and wonks — who have
found themselves hated and resented by the democratic elements of their
societies — can retreat into a twee cosseted fantasy world. It is a place where
their Harvard and Oxbridge pedigrees provide the foundations of the very
laws of physics.

The Harry Potter universe is one in which the entire world is reducible to a set
of problems just waiting to be solved. Hunger is only an issue until a
sufficiently studious person figures out how to create food out of thin air.
Homelessness is a social ill only until the remedy is found, following reasoned
discussion and deep thinking, sitting somewhere “out there.” In the Harry
Potter world of technocracy, a sufficiently engaged electorate moderated by
experts can work out the exact benefit taper to deliver a lower benefits bill
while ensuring no one goes without food, or replace surgeries with a clever
health care app without worsening health outcomes, or subsidize Elon
Musk’s terrible cars to solve global warming without attacking Shell.

The obvious truth, however, is that our societies face problems that will
require the most powerful to make sacrifices that they will not easily be talked
into. Liberal technocrats propose civil discourse as a kind of fetish or magic
spell, obscuring power as consensus.

Magical thinking is not limited to a reverence for technocracy. What is

“triggering the libs,” for example, but an attempt by a powerless, alienated
reactionary to have a real effect on the world? When Paul Joseph Watson and
his followers dip sushi in milk or lie down in a dumpster, they are presumably
doing so imagining that it will cause liberals with rarefied taste in food or
concerns about the environment to be sent into conniptions of fury. What is
this, other than a modern-day curse practiced by extremely online wannabe
warlocks?
Every grandfather with a brain like melted raclette who takes a golf club to a
coffee maker is trying to translate white hot fury into something measurable
and material. Without a means to do so in a meaningful way, he turns to a
ritual. The turn to representation is the core of fetishism: the substitution of a
symbol of a thing, for the real thing. Eating a bull’s heart to gain its strength is
just the archaic version of burning an effigy of Kathy Griffin because she
was mean about the president. Magical thinking obscures and channels the
need for atavism into something representational, harmless, and in our modern
case, frankly, quite amusing.

Ultimately, the offer of magic — and it was as true of Marx’s time as ours —
is a trade-off. Your complicated problems are made uncomplicated, and all it
costs is your ability to have any material impact on them. You lose, but at
least you get a good story.

The threats liberal democracies face from the forces of reaction are complex,
self-inflicted, and difficult to cure. They will not go away with a witty protest
sign, a charismatic politician, or a magic spell. It is simple to imagine Donald
Trump and his voters as a collective social Voldemort, an immanent evil that
can be defeated only if the right hero steps in. On the flip side, it is easy to
imagine that your house was repossessed because the Democratic Party and
George Soros made a deal with Satan, and they must be combated with a
return to American volk power. Both are simple stories, conjured up to avoid
both dealing with the complex mess of reality, and in no small part, blaming
the elite liberal technocrats who abracadabrad us into this mess.

How do you accept that everything you thought you knew about the housing
market was a lie and that now you live in a car? How do you respond to
permanent crisis that leaves more and more people behind, when permanent
crisis is baked into our economy? The fantasy stories we tell ourselves are
seductively simple, and the more time we spend grasping for fake power, the
safer the powerful are.

So, why cling to the symbols of Harry Potter in particular? JK Rowling has

crafted a fantasy world that takes a liberal harmonious fantasy we find so
 comforting and extends it into a world where rarefied elite talk is a law of
nature

How finance capital wrecked the

world economy
Review by Guy Miller
Issue #112: Reviews

 Share

Crashed:
How a Decade ofFinancial Crises Changed the World
By Adam Tooze
Viking, 2018 · 720 pages · $35.00

In November 2009, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, told the New York Times that he
was just a banker, “doing God’s work.” If true, then the financial crisis of 2008 proves that God
does indeed work in mysterious ways.
The extent of the damage done by that financial crisis is mind-numbing in its scale. In 2009 the
International Monetary Fund put the loss of household wealth in the United States at $11 trillion,
three years later the Treasury raised the figure to $19.2 trillion, and some independent
estimates put the amount even higher at $22 trillion. But numbers alone do not tell the story of
the millions of lost jobs, the millions of lost houses, and the millions of lives torn apart by the
crash of 2008.

Adam Tooze does a masterful job in explaining how the catastrophe happened and how the
contagion eventually spread across the globe. With the benefit of ten years perspective and a
hefty 700-plus-pages canvass, Tooze has written an essential book about the Great Recession
and its consequences. What he hasn’t done is to write a thorough critique of

the underlying cause of the disaster: capitalism. For this analysis the reader must look
elsewhere.

Crises, big and small, are the sine qua non of capitalist history. The solution to one crisis often
becomes the harbinger of the next. The end of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971, the
Volcker Shock of the late 1970s, and the failure of one-third of the savings and loan
associations in the late 1980s all would play their role in the 2008 meltdown. More recent
examples include the Alan Greenspan sponsored cuts to the Federal Reserve discount rate.
Eventually the cuts settled at a near-historic low of 1 percent. Lasting between 2000 and 2004,
this rate became the accelerant that fueled the out-of-control housing boom that reached its
peak in 2008.
While that firestorm was growing to biblical proportions, the “custodians” of the US economy
were looking elsewhere for the inevitable downturn. Tooze recounts the early history of the
Robert Rubin inspired Hamilton Project, an offshoot of the Brookings Foundation, and its impact
on economic doctrine and on how the economic future should be predicted.

The Hamilton Project is important primarily because of the people it involved, notably future
President Barack Obama and the man he made his budget director, Peter Orszag. The
Hamilton Project predicted that the coming crisis would be centered on public debt, and the
solution must include drastic cuts to entitlement programs. Although the analysis was proven
wrong, (the coming smash-up was entirely the doing of private debt), the principal lesson
learned by the coming Obama administration remained the same: austerity was the answer to
all economic problems. This worldview contributed to his administration’s failure to aid the
victims of the Great Recession.

For a lay person following the fast-moving crisis of 2008 and its immediate aftermath is like
jumping into a sophisticated video game. The first thing you would notice in the game is the
constantly moving dollars––not yuan, and rarely euros, but dollars. Dollars moving in all
directions at near the speed of light. This money goes by the initials of manufactured derivatives
and money transfer mechanisms: CDS, CDOs, Repos, SIVs, ABCPs, and my favorite CDOs-
Squared. 

The dirty little secret is that none of this is money in the conventional sense, but rather it is all
credit and credit’s flip side, debt. If these things stop moving, the financial world stops with it.
One senior bank executive put it this way: “It was as if your entire life you turned on the spigot
and the water came out. And now there was no water.” Preventing that dry tap from happening
became the heart and soul of the “recovery” effort.

How this fictitious capital was tethered to the real world was through real estate. Tooze points to
the duel importance of real estate as “not only the largest single form of wealth, it is also the
most important form of collateral for borrowing.” By utilizing this collateral, and taking advantage
of the seemingly impermeable nature of real estate, there seemed to be no limit to the money to
be made through packaging mortgages into complicated derivatives, or as Warren Buffett called
them, weapons of mass (financial) destruction.  Start with this irrational faith in derivatives, add
the gold standard of inflated AAA bond ratings,  throw in sub-prime mortgages with adjustable
rates, and stir with a frantic competition for market share and you have the recipe for the
disaster of 2008.

When Crashed turns to the bailout the focus shifts from the purely financial to the political. Tooze
asks the million dollar question: “The great political ‘might-have-been’ of the early Obama
administration is, alongside TARP and the fiscal stimulus, the White House did not start by
pushing a comprehensive relief program for homeowners.”  Obama was elected largely
because voters expected Franklin Roosevelt redux, but what they got instead was a warmed-
over Bill Clinton.
Stacked with advisors and cabinet members trained and vetted by Robert Rubin and Goldman
Sachs, there was little chance the Obama administration would bailout the 9.3 million American
families who lost their homes to foreclosure. According to Tooze, Larry Summers, head of the
National Economic Council for Obama, “insisted that the question of home owner relief was a
constant debate within the administration.” I’m sure knowing this will be a great consolation to
people who lost their homes.

On March 27, 2009, the CEOs of the most powerful financial institutions in the world came to
the White House expecting to be taken to the woodshed for creating the mess they had
wrought. Instead Barack Obama reassured them, “My administration is the only thing between
you and the pitchforks.” It was at this moment that the Trump victory in 2016 became a done
deal.

Like a recessive gene that skips a generation, the sense of being betrayed by Obama laid
dormant in 2012 only to reappear in 2016. Tooze puts it this way: “Four years later Obama was
 out of the picture and the Republican field was wide open. As a result, the presidential race of
2016 turned out to be more about the financial crisis of 2008 than 2012 had been. The upshot
was explosive and unpredictable.”

Crashed makes the argument that the main axis of world finance in 2008 was not the expected
Sino-American one, but rather one between the US and Europe. I was surprised to learn just
how large European banks were, and just how exposed they were by overleveraging.   Using
the criterion of assets the three largest banks in the world were all European. RBS, Deutsche
Bank, and BNP had combined balance sheets in 2007 equal to 17 percent of global GDP.
Tooze remarks on the extent of European vulnerability, “By this standard every member of the
Eurozone was at least three times more ‘overbanked’ than the US. . . . Furthermore, European
banks were far more dependent on volatile wholesale market based funding than their US
counterparts.”
In the years following 2008, the countries of Europe fluctuated between going all in for a
collective solution or reverting to individual action to solve their financial problems. One of the
few things they seemed to agree on was the need to make an example of Greece. The people
of Greece had to pay for their banks’ overextension, primarily dating back to the 1980s and
1990s, no matter what the cost in human misery.

The one panacea the capitalist class had in Europe was to impose austerity on the people of
Greece. Expecting the Greek economy to climb out of massive debt while drastically cutting
back the standard of living of the Greek people is like putting a world-class weightlifter on a
yearlong 1,200 calories a day diet and then expecting him to perform well at the Olympics.

Six years into the recession the social crisis in Greece was all-pervasive. By 2014
unemployment stood at 27 percent and the figure was even worse for young people, spiraling
over 50 percent. Tooze captures the depth of the punishment meted out to the Greek people:
“By 2015 half the population was relying on the pension of a senior citizen to get by.” The
Troika’s (i.e., the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) tactic of extend-
and-pretend had gone on for a decade. All the while the solution, serious restructuring of the
Greek debt, was in its reach, but no one in authority had the political courage to even propose it.

Other countries on the periphery of Europe––Latvia, Ireland, and Iceland, for example––have
harrowing stories of their own to tell, but Greece is the proverbial canary in the mineshaft.
Greece, along with such cities in the American heartland as Detroit, where 36 percent of the
population lives below the far-from-generous Michigan poverty line, are examples of the
inevitable logic of late capitalism. Until and unless the working people of the world take their fate
into their own hands, the future points to barbarism

ASIA AND PACIFIC

China's rise as a world power

Loong Yu Au interviewed by Ashley Smith
Issue #112: Interviews
 Share
China’s rapid rise as a new center of capital accumulation has increasingly brought it into
conflict with the United States. The ISR’s Ashley Smith interviewed activist and scholar Au Loong
Yu about the nature of China’s emergence as a new imperial power and what it means for the
world system.
One of the most important developments in the world system over the last few decades has been the
rise of China as new power in the world system. How has this happened?
China’s rise is the result of a combination of factors since it reoriented on production within
global capitalism in the 1980s. First, in contrast to the Soviet bloc, China found a way to benefit
in a twist of historical irony from its colonial legacy. Britain controlled Hong Kong up until 1997,
Portugal controlled Macau up to 1999, and the US continues to use Taiwan as a protectorate.

These colonies and protectorates connected China to the world economy even before its full
entry into the world system. In Mao’s era, Hong Kong provided about one-third of China’s
foreign currency. Without

Hong Kong, China would not have been able to import as much technology. After the end of the
Cold War, during Deng Xiaoping’s rule, Hong Kong was very important for China’s
modernization. Deng used Hong Kong to gain even more access to foreign currency, to import
all sorts of things including high technology, and to take advantage of its skilled labor force, like
management professionals.

China used Macau first as an ideal place for smuggling goods into mainland China, taking
advantage of the island’s notoriously lax enforcement of law. And then China used the Casino
City as an ideal platform for capital import and export. Taiwan was very important not only in
terms of capital investments, but more importantly in the long run was its technology transfer,
first and foremost in the semiconductor industry. Hong Kong and Taiwanese investors were also
one of the key reasons for rapid growth of the Chinese provinces of Jiangsu, Fujian,
Guangdong.

Secondly, China possessed what Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky called the “privilege of
historical backwardness.” Mao’s Communist Party took advantage of the country’s precapitalist
past. It inherited a strong absolutist state that it would retool and use for its project of national
economic development. It also took advantage of an atomized precapitalist peasantry, which
had been accustomed to absolutism for two thousand years, to squeeze labor out of them for
so-called primitive accumulation from 1949 through the 1970s.

Later, from the 1980s on, the Chinese state drafted this labor force from the countryside into the
big cities to work as cheap labor in export processing zones. They made nearly 300 million rural
migrants work like slaves in sweatshops. Thus, the backwardness of China’s absolutist state
and class relations offered the Chinese ruling class advantages to develop both state and
private capitalism.

China’s backwardness also made it possible for it to leap over stages of development by
replacing archaic means and methods of development with advanced capitalist ones. A good
example of this is China’s adoption of high technology in telecommunications. Instead of
following every step of more advanced capitalist societies, beginning first with using telephone
lines for online communication, it installed fiber optic cable throughout the country nearly all at
once.
The Chinese leadership was very keen to modernize its economy. On the one hand, for
defensive reasons, they wanted to make sure that the country was not invaded and colonized
as it was a hundred years ago. On the other hand, for offensive reasons, the Communist Party
wants to restore its status as a great power, resuming its so-called heavenly dynasty. As a
result of all these factors, China has accomplished capitalist modernization that took one
hundred years in other states.

China is now the second largest economy in the world. But it is contradictory. On the one hand, lots
of multinationals are responsible for its growth either directly or through subcontracting to
Taiwanese and Chinese firms. On the other hand, China is rapidly developing its own industries as
national champions in the state and private sector. What are its strengths and weaknesses?
In my book China’s Rise, I argue that China has two dimensions of capitalist development. One
is what I call dependent accumulation. Advanced foreign capital has invested enormous sums of
money over the last thirty years initially in labor-intensive industries, and more recently in
capital-intensive ones. This developed China but kept it at the bottom of the global value chain,
even in high tech, as the world’s sweatshop. Chinese capital collects a smaller part of the profit,
most of which goes to the US, Europe, Japan, and other advanced capitalist powers and their
multinationals. The best example of this is Apple’s mobile phone. China merely assembles all
the parts which are mostly designed and made outside of the country.
But there is a second dimension, autonomous accumulation. From the very beginning the state
has been very consciously guiding the economy, funding research and development, and
maintaining indirect control over the private sector, which now accounts for more than 50
percent of the GDP. In the commanding heights of the economy, the state maintains control
through the State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). And the state is systematically conducting
reverse engineering to copy Western technology to develop its own industries.

China has other advantages that other countries do not have; it is huge, not just in size of
territory, but also in population. Since the 1990s, China has been able to have a division of labor
within three parts of the country. Guangdong has a labor-intensive export processing zone. The
Zhejiang delta is also export oriented, but it is much more capital extensive. Around Beijing,
China has developed its high tech, communication, and aviation industry. This diversification is
part of the state’s conscious strategy to develop itself as an economic power.

At the same time, China suffers from weaknesses as well. If you look at its GDP, China is the
second largest in the world. But if you measure GDP per capita, it is still a middle-income
country. You also see weaknesses even in areas where it is catching up to advanced capitalist
powers. For instance, Huawei mobile phone, which is now a world brand, was developed not
just by its own Chinese scientists, but more importantly, by hiring four hundred Japanese
scientists. This shows that China was and is still heavily reliant on foreign human resources for
research and development.

Another example of weakness was revealed when China’s ZTE telecom company was accused
by the Trump administration of violating its trade sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Trump
imposed a trade ban on the company, denying it access to American-designed software and
high-tech components, threatening the company with collapse overnight. Xi and Trump
eventually worked out a deal to save the company, but the crisis ZTE suffered demonstrates
China’s ongoing problem of dependent development.

This is the problem that China is trying to overcome. But even in high tech, where it is intent on
catching up, its semiconductor technology is two or three generations behind that of the United
States. It is trying to overcome that with dramatically increased investment in research and
development, but if you look closely at China’s huge number of patents, they are still mostly not
in high tech but other areas. So, it still suffers from indigenous technological weakness. Where it
is catching up very fast is in artificial intelligence, and this is an area that the US is very
concerned about, not only in terms of economic competition, but also military, where artificial
intelligence plays an increasingly central role.

On top of these economic weaknesses, China suffers from political ones. China does not have a
governmental system that ensures peaceful succession of power from one ruler to the next.
Deng Xiaoping had established a system of collective leadership term limits that began to
overcome this problem of succession. Xi has abolished this system and reinstituted one-man
rule with no term limits. This could set up more factional fights over succession, destabilizing the
regime, and potentially compromising its economic rise.

Xi has dramatically shifted China’s strategy in the world system away from the cautious one
pioneered by Deng Xiaoping and his successors. Why is Xi doing this and what is their program for
assertion of China as a great power?
The first thing to understand is the tension in the Communist Party over its project in the world.
The Chinese Communist Party is a big contradiction. On the one hand, it is a force for economic
modernization. On the other hand, it has inherited a very strong element of premodern political
culture. This has laid the ground work for conflicts between cliques within the regime.

Back in the early 1990s there was debate among the top echelons of the bureaucracy over
which clique of rulers should have power. One clique is the so-called blue bloods, the children of
the bureaucrats that ruled the state after 1949––the second red generation of bureaucrats. They
are fundamentally reactionary. Since Xi has come to power, the press talks about the return to
“our blood,” meaning that the old cadre’s blood has been reincarnated into the second
generation.

The other clique is the new mandarins. Their fathers and mothers were not revolutionary
cadres. They were intellectuals or people who did well in their education and moved up the
ladder. They usually climb up the ladder through the Young Communist League. It is not
accidental that Xi’s party leadership had repeatedly and publicly humiliated the League in recent
years. The conflict between blue-blood nobles and the mandarins is a new version of an old
pattern; these two cliques have had tension for two thousand years of absolutism and
bureaucratic rule.

Among the mandarins, there are some who came from more humble backgrounds like Wen
Jiabao, who ruled China from 2003 to 2013, that are a bit more “liberal.” At the end of his term,
Wen actually said that China should learn from Western representative democracy, arguing that
Western ideas like human rights possessed some kind of universalism. Of course, this was
mostly rhetoric, but it is very different than Xi, who treats democracy and so-called “Western
values” with contempt.

He won out in this struggle against the mandarins, consolidated his power, and now promises
that blue-blood nobles will rule forever. His program is to strengthen the autocratic nature of the
state at home, declare China a great power abroad, and assert its power in the world,
sometimes in defiance of the United States.

But after the crisis over ZTE, Xi conducted a bit of a tactical retreat because that crisis exposed
China’s persisting weaknesses and the danger of too quickly declaring itself a great power. In
fact, there was an outburst of criticism of one of Xi’s advisors, an economist named Hu Angang,
who had argued that China was already a rival to the US economically and militarily and could
therefore challenge Washington for leadership in the world. ZTE proved that it’s simply not true
that China is on par with the US. Since then, a lot of liberals came out to criticize Hu. Another
well-known liberal scholar, Zhang Weiying, whose writings were banned last year, was allowed
to have his speech officially posted on line.

There was already hot debate among diplomacy scholars. The hard-liners argued for a tougher
stand in relation to the US. The liberals, however, argued that the international order is a
“temple” and as long as it can accommodate China’s rise, Beijing should help build this temple
rather than demolish it and build a new one. This diplomatic wing was marginalized when Xi
chose to be more hard-line, but recently their voice has reemerged. Since the conflict over ZTE
and the trade war, Xi has made some tactical adjustments and retreated slightly from his
previously brazen proclamation of China’s great power status.
How much of this is just a temporary retreat? Also, how does China 2025 and One Belt One Road
factor into Xi’s longer-term project of achieving great-power status?
Let me say clearly that Xi is a reactionary blue blood. He and the rest of his clique are
determined to restore the hegemony of China’s imperial past and rebuild that so-called heavenly
dynasty. Xi’s state, the Chinese academy, and the media have churned out a huge number of
essays, dissertations, and articles that glorify this imperial past as part of justifying their project
of becoming a great power. Their long-term strategy will not be deterred easily.

Xi’s clique is also aware that before China can achieve its imperial ambition it has to eliminate
its burden of colonial legacy, i.e., take over Taiwan and accomplish the CCP’s historic task of
national unification first. But this will necessarily bring it into conflict with the US sooner or later.
Hence, the Taiwan issue simultaneously carries both China’s self-defense dimension (even the
US acknowledges that Taiwan is “part of China”) and also an interimperialist rivalry. In order to
“unify with Taiwan,” not to speak of a global ambition, Beijing must first overcome China’s
persistent weaknesses especially in its technology, its economy, and its lack of international
allies.

That’s where China 2025 and One Belt One Road come in. Through China 2025 they want to
develop their independent technological capacities and move up the global value chain. They
want to use One Belt One Road to build infrastructure throughout Eurasia in line with Chinese
interests. At the same time, we should be clear that One Belt One Road is also a symptom of
China’s problems of overproduction and overcapacity. They are using One Belt One Road to
absorb all this excess capacity. Nevertheless, both of these projects are central in China’s
imperialist project.

There has been a big debate on the international left about how to understand China’s rise. Some
have argued that it is a model and ally for “third-world” development. Others see China as a
subordinate state in an American informal empire that rules global neoliberal capitalism. Still
others see it as a rising imperial power. What’s your viewpoint?
China cannot be a model for developing countries. Its rise is the result of very unique factors I
outlined previously that other third-world countries do not possess. I don’t think it’s wrong to say
that China is part of global neoliberalism especially when you see China come forward and say
that it is willing to replace the US as a guardian of free-trade globalization.

But to say that China is a part of neoliberal capitalism doesn’t capture the whole picture. China
is a distinctive state capitalist power and an expansionist one, which is not willing to be a
second-rate partner to the US. China is thus a component part of global neoliberalism and also
a state capitalist power, which stands apart from it. This peculiar combination means it
simultaneously benefits from the neoliberal order and represents a challenge to it and the
American state that oversees it.

Western capital is ironically responsible for this predicament. Their states and capitals came to
understand the challenge of China too late. They flooded in to invest in the private sector or in
joint ventures with the state companies in China. But they did not fully realize that the Chinese
state is always behind even seemingly private corporations. In China, even if a corporation is a
genuinely private, it must bow to the demands put to it by the state.

The Chinese state has used this private investment to develop its own state and private
capacity to begin to challenge American as well as Japanese and European capital. It is
therefore naïve to accuse the Chinese state and private capital for stealing intellectual property.
That’s what they planned to do from the beginning.

Thus, the advance capitalist states and corporations enabled the emergence of China as a
rising imperial power. Its peculiar state capitalist nature makes it particularly aggressive and
intent in catching up and challenging the very powers that invested in it.
In the US there is increasingly a consensus between the two capitalist parties that China is a threat
to American imperial power. And both the US and China are whipping up nationalism against each
other. How would you characterize the rivalry between the US and China?
Some years ago, many commentators argued that there was a debate between two camps over
whether to engage China or confront it. They called it a struggle between “panda huggers
versus dragon slayers.” Today the dragon slayers are in the driver’s seat of Chinese diplomacy.

It is true that there is a growing consensus among Democrats and Republicans against China.
Even prominent American liberals bash China these days. But many of these liberal politicians
should be blamed for this situation in the first place. Remember that after the 1989 Tiananmen
Massacre it was liberal politicians like Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in Britain that forgave
the Chinese Communist Party, reopened trade relations, and encouraged massive investment
flows into the country.

Of course, this was about padding the ledgers of Western multinationals, which reaped super
profits from exploiting cheap labor in Chinese sweatshops. But they also genuinely, if naively,
believed that increased investment would lead China to accept the rules as a subordinate state
within neoliberal global capitalism, and “democratize” itself in the image of the West. This
strategy has backfired, enabling the rise of China as a rival.

The two camps of panda huggers versus dragon slayers also find their theoreticians in
academia. There are three main schools of the foreign policy establishment. On top of that, all
three schools have their own panda huggers and dragon slayers, who could also be called
optimists and pessimists. Within the optimist camp, different schools argue different
perspectives. While the liberal internationalists thought that trade would democratize China, by
contrast, the realists argued that even if China had its own state ambitions to challenge the US,
it was still too weak to do so. The third school is social constructivism; they believe international
relations are the result of ideas, values, and social interaction, and like the liberals, believe
economic and social engagement would transform China.

In the past, most of the American establishment bought the optimist liberals’ case. The liberals
were blinded by their own belief that trade could change China into a democratic state. China’s
rise has thrown all of the optimist schools into a crisis because their predictions about China
have been proven wrong. China has become a rising power that has begun catching up and
challenging the US.

Now it is the pessimist camp of these three schools that is gaining ground. The pessimist
liberals now believe that Chinese nationalism is much stronger than the positive influence of
trade and investment. The pessimist realists believe that China is rapidly strengthening itself
and that it will never compromise over Taiwan. The pessimist social constructivists believe that
China is very rigid in its own values and will refuse to change.

Yet if the pessimist school is now proven right, it also suffers from a major weakness. It
assumes US hegemony is justified and right, ignores the fact that the US is actually an
accomplice of China’s authoritarian government and its sweatshop regime, and of course never
examines how the collaboration and rivalry between the US and China occurs within a deeply
contradictory and volatile global capitalism, and along with this a whole set of global class
relations. This should not surprise us; the pessimists are ideologists of the American ruling class
and its imperialism.

China is moving in an imperialist trajectory. I’m against the Communist Party dictatorship, its
aspiration to become a great power, and its claims in the South China Sea. But I don’t think it’s
correct to think that China and the US are on the same plane. China is a special case right now;
there are two sides to its rise. One side is what is common between these two countries––both
are capitalist and imperialist.

The other side is that China is the first imperialist country that was previously a semicolonial
country. That is quite different from the US or any other imperialist country. We have to factor
this into our analysis to understand how China functions in the world. For China there are
always two levels of issues. One is the legitimate self-defense of a former colonial country under
international law. We should not forget that even as late as the 1990s US fighter jets flew on the
southern border of China and crashed into a Chinese airplane, killing its pilot. These kinds of
events naturally remind Chinese people of their painful colonial past.

Britain until recently controlled Hong Kong, and international capital still exerts enormous
influence there. An example of Western imperialist influence just came to light recently. A report
revealed that just before Britain withdrew from Hong Kong, they disbanded their secret police
and reassigned them into the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). The ICAC
enjoys huge popularity here as it makes Hong Kong a less corrupt place. But only the head of
the Hong Kong government, formerly chosen from London and now chosen from Beijing,
appoints the commissioner, while the people absolutely have no influence over it at all.

Beijing was very concerned that the ICAC could be used to discipline the Chinese state and its
capitals as well. For example, in 2005 the ICAC prosecuted Liu Jinbao, the head of the Bank of
China in Hong Kong. It appears that Beijing is trying hard to take control of the ICAC, but the
public is kept in the dark about this power struggle. Of course, we should be happy that the
ICAC goes after people like Liu Jinbao, but we must also recognize that it can be used by
Western imperialism to advance its agenda. At the same time, Beijing asserting its control will
mean consolidation by the Chinese state and capitalists, something that will not serve the
interests of the Chinese working masses.

There are other colonial holdovers from the past. The US basically maintains Taiwan as a
protectorate. We should, of course, oppose China’s threat to invade Taiwan; we should defend
Taiwan’s right to self-determination. But we must also see that the US will use Taiwan as a tool
to advance its interests. This is the downside of the colonial legacy that motivates the
Communist Party to behave in a defensive manner against American imperialism.

China is an emerging imperialist country but one with fundamental weaknesses. I would say that
the Chinese Communist Party has to overcome fundamental obstacles before it can become a
stable and sustainable imperialist country. It is very important to see not just the commonality
between the US and China as imperialist countries, but also China’s particularities.

Obviously for socialists in the US, our principal duty is to oppose US imperialism and build
solidarity with Chinese workers. That means we have to oppose the relentless China bashing not
only on the right but also among liberals and even the labor movement. But we should not fall into
a campist trap of giving political support to the Chinese regime, but with the country’s workers.
How do you approach this situation?
We must counter the lie used by the American right that Chinese workers have stolen American
workers’ jobs. This is not true. The people who really have the power to decide are not the
Chinese workers but American capital like Apple that choose to have its phones assembled in
China. The Chinese workers have absolutely zero say over such decisions. Actually, they are
victims, not people who should be blamed for job losses in America.

And as I said, Clinton, not China’s rulers or workers, was to blame for the export of these jobs. It
was Clinton’s government that worked with China’s murderous regime after Tiananmen Square
to enable big American corporations to invest in China on such a massive scale. And when jobs
in the US were lost, those that appeared in China actually were not the same kind of jobs at all.
The American jobs lost in auto and steel were unionized and had good pay and benefits, but
those created in China are nothing but sweatshop jobs. Whatever their conflicts today, the top
leaders of the US and China, not workers in either country, put today’s wretched neoliberal
world order in place.

One thing we have done here in the US is help to put on tours of Chinese workers on strike so that
we can build solidarity between American and Chinese workers. Are there other ideas and
initiatives that we can take? There is a real danger of nationalism being whipped up in both
countries against workers in the other country. It seems overcoming this is very important. What
do you think?
It is important for the left in the rest of the world to recognize that China’s capitalism has a
colonial legacy and that it still exists today. So, when we analyze China and US relations, we
must distinguish those legitimate parts of “patriotism” from those whipped up by the Party. There
is an element of common-sense patriotism among the people that is the result of the last
century of imperial intervention by Japan, European powers, and the US.

It does not mean that we accommodate to this patriotism, but we must distinguish this from
reactionary nationalism of the Communist Party. And Xi is certainly trying to whip up nationalism
in support of his great power aspirations, just like American rulers are doing the same to
cultivate popular support for their regime’s aim to keep China contained.

Among common people nationalism has been declining rather than rising because they despise
the Chinese Communist Party, and more of them now don’t trust its nationalism, and hate its
autocratic rule. One funny example of this is a recent opinion poll that asked if people would
support China in a war with the US. Netizens’ response online was really interesting. One of
them said, “Yes, I support China’s war against the US, but we first support sending the
members of the Political Bureau to fight, then the Central Committee, and then the entire
Chinese Communist Party. And after they either win or lose, we at least will be liberated.” The
censors, of course, immediately deleted these comments, but it is an indication of the deep
dissatisfaction with the regime.

That means there is the basis among Chinese workers to build international solidarity with
American workers. But that requires American workers to oppose their own government’s
imperialism. Only that position will build trust among Chinese workers.

American imperialism’s threats are real and known in China. The US Navy just sent two
warships through the Taiwan Strait in a clear provocation to China. The American left must
oppose this militarism so that Chinese people understand that you oppose the US imperialist
agenda on the Taiwan question––although one should also acknowledge Taiwan’s right to
purchase arms from the US. If the Chinese people hear a strong voice of anti-imperialism from
the American left, they could be won over to see our common international interests against
both US and Chinese imperialism.