freedom and reason

In 1976, pharmaceutical corporations and governments around the world, including the US government, manufactured a swine flu epidemic.  Despite the fact that there were no confirmed cases of swine flu anywhere on the planet outside of thirteen soldiers at Fort Dix, a US military facility in New Jersey, the government rolled out a massive vaccination program accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign involving print and television media.  Millions of Americans were injected with the experimental swine flu vaccine.   

The consequence of the program was scores of people suffering vaccine injury, several hundred of them developing a sometimes lethal and always devastating paralytic condition called Guillain–Barré syndrome, or GBS.  The government, shamefaced, had to cancel the program.  

To this day, mainstream news organizations continue to run interference for vaccine manufacturers by denying the link between the vaccines and GBS.  However, as Dr. Meryl Nass, an expert on vaccines and bioterrorism, points out, at least ten separate studies of the 1976 swine flu vaccine have confirmed the link.

One of the more frustrating false claims constantly being promulgated by bourgeoise propagandists and, unfortunately, widely believed to be true by the public, is that a high rate of taxation on the wealthy is bad for the health of the economy. The fact of the matter is that the opposite is true. The higher the taxes on the wealthy, the healthier is the economy. Put another way, an aggressive progressive income tax is good economics.

There are two obvious reasons why an aggressive progressive income tax is good for economic health: First, the capitalist dynamic naturally expands wealth for those who own and control the means of production, which includes the capitalist and their functionaries. This is because capitalism is a social system in which the wealth generated by the direct producers – the worker, slave, so forth – is appropriated by social classes that do not generate that wealth – the capitalist, landowner, etc. This means that when taxes are low on the ownership classes and their functionaries, inequality increases and wealth becomes bottled up in a small network of families whose spending on goods and services cannot effectively complete the circuit of capital. The exploiting classes are too small in number to affect the levels of demand necessary to keep the economy growing. The majority has insufficient income to spend on goods and services. The fall in demand reduces the rate of profit. This contradiction leads to what economists call a realization crisis, and it is one of the main forces in defining the character of business recessions. The deeper the business recession, the worse off just about everybody is, including those social classes who believe they benefit from lower taxes. 

Second, lower taxes on the wealthy means less revenues for the government. Because the government must borrow to continue its operations, most of which serve the interests of the exploiting classes, budget shortfalls drive up budget deficits, which in turn drives up real interest rates. Why do budget deficits drive up real interest rates? This is a basic matter of supply and demand: money has a price (interest on borrowed funds), and the more the government competes with the private sector for investment resources the higher is the price of money. Higher tax rates on the wealthy provide for the government resources with which to drive down inequality, thus allowing the majority to enjoy higher incomes, which they can spend on goods and services. This method effectively completes the circuit of capital and leads to stable economic expansion. Labor union density, as well as a minimum wage, plays an important role in this by raising incomes. At the level of consciousness, and at the level of the firm, capitalists want lower taxes because they perceive they will keep more of their profits. But at the system level, the desire for lower taxes, if met, leads to a drop in the rate of profit. This paradox is very real.

It is, therefore, for the good of the wealthy that high top marginal rates are imposed upon them and the revenues generated redistributed through public projects that secure the long-term health of the society. Higher taxes (along with higher union density) are better for everybody. 

You will note in the chart above that, while income taxes have remained basically flat for most Americans over several decades, they have been systematically reduced for the wealthy during this period. The actual picture is even more dramatic, as the majority pays higher taxes now in the form of payroll taxes and sales taxes. Anybody remotely familiar with the economic history during the period knows that the greatest period of wealth creation and the highest standard of living for most Americans was during the period 1950 through the early 1970s. The period between 1970 through the early 1990s were periods of instability and declining standard of living. Now, if, as the anti-tax advocates claim, high taxes were bad for the economy, the opposite would have been true. The economy would have performed poorly in the period between 1950 and the early 1970s, and would have improved with each reduction in taxes. Given the low level of taxation in the 1980s, the economy should have been better than it ever was. But this is not what happened.

When did our economic troubles begin? They began in the early 1970s following the first major reduction in the top marginal tax rates in the 1960s. The 1970s were a period of economic instability and rising inequality. At the start of the decade of the 1980s, taxes were again slashed. The effects were extremely high interest rates and a dramatic rise in unemployment. Later in the 1980s, taxes were cut again and the economy tumbled into a deep recession. Only when taxes were raised in the early 1990s did the economy tack off. Look at this chart: 

Why did the tax increases in the 1990s kick off one of the longest periods of business expansions in US history? In part because lower budget deficits drove down interest rates, which allowed for more investment, growth in jobs, growth in consumer spending. The expansion would have been more successful if the budget surplus, which reached record levels under Clinton, had been invested in public projects to improve the long-term health of the economy. Raising top marginal rates even more would have made the expansion even more successful still. This should have been a period of economic contraction, according to the theory of the anti-tax propagandists. But it wasn’t. What happened when taxes were slashed under Bush Junior? Did, as the anti-tax propagandists claim, the economy take off? The economy tumbled. We are now in the middle of the worst economic catastrophe since the great depression. The massive budget deficits and accumulation of wealth among capitalists and their functionaries has crippled our economy. 

Facts and logic show us the way out of the crisis: dramatically raise taxes on the wealthy, redistribute that money to the masses through public projects that will improve the long-term health of our society. What do the anti-tax ideologues say? They say raising taxes in a recession is the worst possible thing to do. But, as you can see, this claim is based on the false claim that tax cuts grow the economy. The question for policymakers now is whether they act based on the facts, or act on the basis of the propaganda of the capitalist class.

After a presentation in Speech 101, in which Los Angelese City College student Jonathan Lopez read the dictionary definition of marriage and then two verses from the Bible, Lopez found an evaluation form left in his backpack by Professor John Matteson that said, “Ask God what your grade is.” This pulled a hardy laugh out of me. 

Lopez’s feelings were hurt. But why not ask God? If Lopez believes Yahweh is the final authority on gay marriage, then why not believe Yahweh is the final authority on his grade? After all, the rest of Lopez’s speech was all about the miracles Yahweh performed in his life (apparently one of which was not allowing him to escape Speech 101 without criticism for his bigotry).

Conservatives are claiming that Matteson violated Lopez’s free speech rights. But it’s more like conservatives, believing Lopez has a right to use a classroom assignment to spread hatred, and that rules of logic and evidence aren’t relevant in a college classroom, are the problem. Sure, you can cite the Bible if you wish. But you must also be aware that there may be a reasonable person in the audience. 

One student in the class said, “I do not believe that our classroom is the proper platform for him to spout his hateful propaganda.” Another student said, “I don’t know what kind of actions can be taken in this situation, but I expect that this student should have to pay some price for preaching hate in the classroom.”

These complaints are worth entertaining. Suppose Lopez had stood before the class and read the dictionary definition of race and then verses from the Bible to advocate for racial segregation or genocide. It’s easy to find scriptural support for such hateful beliefs and actions. Is it not the same thing as denying homosexuals equal protection before the law? Or is it because hating homosexuals is not perceived as quite as terrible as racism and genocide?

Matteson also has free speech rights. He used them to criticize Lopez’s presentation. 

Obama asserted in his inaugural speech that our “badly weakened” economy is the result of “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

What was the hard choice working people should have made to prepare the nation for a new age? Are workers really to blame for this mess? Or are persons in positions of power? You can only hold people accountable for the things under their control.

The President of the United States has not always blamed the public for the crimes and failings of elites. In his 1933 inaugural speech, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened with a promise to “speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly” and then proceeded to blame “the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods.” He said that they “have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence,” to properly lead the nation.

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men,” the thirty-second president said, attacking the rulers of exchange as only knowing “the rules of a generation of self-seekers.” (Polls regularly show that more than 80 percent of Americans today believe corporations have too much power.)

“They have no vision,” FDR said of the corporate leaders; “and when there is no vision the people perish.”

FDR preached about “the moral stimulation of work,” contrasting it with “the mad chase of evanescent profits,” and asserted that the restoration of our ideals “lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

(Read the speech here: First Inaugural Address, 4.3.1933. This is the speech Americans deserved this week, not this: Obama’s Inaugural Address.)

In the speech on Tuesday, Obama talked about “greed” and “irresponsibility” without identifying the culprits. When he identified the party at fault, he implicated everybody.

In contrast to Roosevelt, who argued that the problem was not the spirit of America but the material failure of the economic system, Obama said (after talking about “the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics”):

Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land — a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

He blamed the people’s spirit.

Recall Carter’s words from the notorious “malaise speech” of 1979:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

Roosevelt charged that the money lenders were “pleading tearfully for restored confidence” after losing “the lure of profit to induce our people to follow their false leadership.” Obama, like Carter, like the false leaders Roosevelt assaults, accuses the public of losing confidence in their country.

Obama turns not to Roosevelt in this time of crisis, but to Carter, who failed to show the courage necessary to challenge corporate power on behalf of the nation that elected him.

Workers are not to blame. Workers woke up every morning over the last several decades and did the right thing all day long (in the context of the prevailing economic system, a system they were told was just and fair). It’s not their fault they’re being thrown out of work and home. The “rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods” are to blame.

Roosevelt spoke the truth without advocating the overthrow of capitalism. Why can’t Obama? Why couldn’t Carter? Why must the victims of economic calamity bear the brunt of austerity? Where is the critical analysis from the media watchdogs who are supposed to keep the politicians honest?

Roosevelt said in the spring of 1938:

Unhappy events abroad [the rise of fascism in Italy and nazism in Germany) have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.

Roosevelt didn’t just assert these facts but provided a detailed statistical analysis of the situation: One-tenth of one percent US corporations owned 52 percent of all corporate assets and received 50 percent of all corporate income in the 1930s. Less than 5 percent of US corporations owned 87 percent of the assets and less than 4 percent of manufacturing corporations received 84 percent of their net profits. In 1929, three-tenths of the population received 78 percent of dividends. In 1933, 33 percent of all inheritances went to 4 percent of heirs.

Roosevelt’s New Deal pushed back corporate power and redistributed income. He opened the way for the normalization of organized labor and the creation of a broad middle class. Educational opportunities were expanded. Poverty plummeted from 33 percent in 1950 to less than 12 percent by the end of the 1960s. Home ownership grew.

But big capital fought back, gaining strength over the decade, buying off our leaders, crushing labor, shrinking the middle class, taking control of both political parties. Corporations are now more powerful that before – capitalism has colonized virtually every aspect of our lives and its reach is global. Roosevelt’s statistical profile reads like that of the present day. And his warning sounds like prophecy.

More than ever the supporters of capitalism – for the capitalists themselves are driving the system into the ground – need Roosevelt’s words and deeds. But they get instead Carter’s rhetoric, Clinton’s cabinet, and operatives from the Federal Reserve, World Bank, and IMF.

Was this the change those who voted for Obama were expecting?

“This is the source of our confidence – the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.”

So Barack Obama’s god, a male god named Yahweh, who myth contends created the universe and sent his only begotten son (Jesus) to die for the sins of Obama’s congregation, sets before his worshippers no certain destiny. He created the universe so that his worshippers could make history, and it is, according to Obama, belief that their god has no definite plan that is the source of the worshipers’ confidence.

Not exactly something that should fill the faithful with confidence, it seems to me. Belief in a god or gods, if it is anything at all, is the need for certainty when everything else is uncertain. The idea that the people need to make their own destiny is disconcerting to those who pray for Yahweh to tell them what to do.

How will those Christians, Jews, and Muslims who believe Yahweh has worked out a destiny – revealed, albeit in murky phrases, in prophecies – feel about Obama interpreting the theology of the People of Book in this way? Many Muslims incessantly repeat “god willing” because they know nothing happens without Allah wishing it to. Kurt Warner, quarterback of the Phoenix Cardinals, after winning the conference championship, said that his team won because his “Lord up above…knew [he] was going do it” and, he added, he had to win it because of that.

Indeed, if Yahweh is omnipotent, if he is able to create the universe out of his imagination, then how can the future be uncertain? Why does he need human beings to shape a destiny? Don’t they need to simply realize that destiny by following Yahweh’s commandments? Would Yahweh allow human beings to make choices that in the end destroyed them and his creation?

If Yahweh made the universe and controls the universe he made, then Barack Obama is president because this is what Yahweh wanted. Everything that happens happens for a reason, Christians are fond of telling me. John McCain did not win because this was part of Yahweh’s plan. Donovan McNabb and Philadelphia Eagles lost to the Cardinals because Yahweh wanted Kurt Warner to win. Nobody knows beforehand what Yahweh wants. Afterwards we know, because if he had wanted things to be another way, then he would have made them that way. There is no uncertain destiny because Yahweh by definition knows all. History can never be something other than what it is.

Obama disagrees with those who believe Yahweh has a plan. Does he disagree with those who believe – as did George W. Bush – that Yahweh calls on certain people to realize his plan?

Obama’s position presents a logical problem for those who claim Yahweh is omnipotent. Yahweh must know what Obama and his congregation will do (even if he lets them do it, he still knows what they will do, therefore there is no uncertain destiny) or Yahweh is not omnipotent. If it is the latter, then it follows that Yahweh is a limited god. He’s not all powerful. He doesn’t control everything.

Then what – or who – does?

Note December 4, 2023: Man, was I wrong about this.

Andrew Sullivan writes in a blog entry, “The Siege of Gaza,” the following, “The latest twist in this ancient and hopeless struggle is hard to address without equal measure of distaste for Hamas’s religious barbarism and dismay at Israel’s apparent determination to commit slow suicide.”

This is not an ancient struggle. European Jews began migrating to Palestine in the late nineteenth century and the colonization of Palestine began in earnest in the twentieth century. Before that time, Arabs, Christians, and Jews lived side by side in relative harmony. Sullivan attempts to mystify the cause of the conflict by rooting it in ancient history. Typical propaganda tactic: naturalize a conflict by making it primordial.

This is not at its core a religious struggle. This is an iteration of settler colonialism, in this particular case European Jews dispossessing indigenous Arabs of their land and lives. To be sure, religion, as it almost always does, fits in here in some way. Religion rationalizes oppression, fills the gaps in the consciousness of purpose, represents to the oppressed the heart in a heart world, the hope that finds hopelessness. But religion is not the ultimate cause of current situation.

The final cause of the situation really requires no analysis. Did Native Americans sit by idly while Europeans dispossessed them of their land and lives? Can anybody seriously claim that religious fanaticism drove Indians to massacre white settlers in North America? How should any people in possession of self-dignity act when colonized and oppressed? Sullivan’s claim that the Palestinians are guilty of “religious barbarism” is an attempt to shift the burden of responsibility: Israel is responsible for the predictable consequences of its behavior. The question for the international community is whether it will hold Israel accountable for its wrongdoing.

Israel is not committing suicide by pursuing this course of action. It’s leaders are orchestrating a situation—as they have been doing for decades—designed to incorporate Palestine into the state of Israel. Israel is the region’s sole nuclear power armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry the United States can provide. It enjoys the vast military arsenal of the US at its back. It enjoys the blessings of US client states in the region. If the surrounding Arab countries were likely to come to the defense of Arabs in Palestine, then Israel might be in some peril. But given the unlikelihood of such an outcome, Israel is, from a strategic imperialist point of view, strengthening its position with respect to its long-term project of consuming Palestine.

Although it appears that Rick Warren, in anticipation of giving the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, has removed from the Saddleback web site his extended thoughts on the matter of god and science (although he left up the important questions of whether our pets will be with us in Heaven), the Internet has preserved some gems.

“If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t,” said Pastor Rick to Newsweek, April 2007.

Concerning dinosaurs, Pastor Rick was asked (this was in a different interview), “How do they fit in with the idea that God created the world rather than the world evolving on it’s own? Why doesn’t the Bible talk about dinosaurs?”

Here’s Pastor Rick’s response:

The Bible tells in Genesis 1 that God made the world in seven days, and that he made all of the animals on the fifth day and the sixth day. All of the animals were created at the same time, so they all walked the earth at the same time. I know that the pictures we all grew up with in the movies were that dinosaurs roamed a lifeless, volcanic planet. Remember these are just pictures drawn by someone today! The Bible’s picture is that dinosaurs and man lived together on the earth, an earth that was filled with vegetation and beauty.

Warren insisted that the Bible does mention dinosaur-like creatures. “The Bible uses names like ‘behemoth’ and ‘tannin.’ Behemoth means kingly, gigantic beasts. Tannin is a term that includes dragon-like animals and the great sea creatures such as whales, giant squid, and marine reptiles like the plesiosaurs that may have become extinct. The Bible’s best description of a dinosaur-like animal is in Job chapter 40,” he said.

He then provided from evidence (Job 40:15-19), “Look at the behemoth, which I made along with you and which feed on grass like an ox. What strength he has in his loins, what power in the muscles of his belly! His tail sways like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are close-knit. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like rods of iron. He ranks first among the works of God.”

Perhaps the interviewer had a puzzled look on his face, for Pastor Rick commented, “This should not sound so strange. After all, God tells us that he created all the land animals on the sixth day of creation, the same day that he created mankind. Man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. There was never a time when dinosaurs ruled the earth. From the very beginning of creation, God gave man dominion over all that was made, even over the dinosaurs.”

Warren had not always believed that the Bible and science were incompatible. This is because, according to him, he had not made a full study of the Bible:

I found that, although I’d understood the science side of the equation, I needed to take some more time to read what the Bible really had to say about this subject. Not having taken the time to really read the Bible, I was very ignorant about what it had to say. Let me give you one example. I discovered that the problem of sin, as addressed in the Bible, was much more serious than I had previously thought. When I realized that the world was clearly a perfect place as God created it, and that this perfection was ruined by the sinful choice of Adam and Eve, it really started me thinking. Did the Bible teach evolution or did it teach the creation of a first man and woman named Adam and Eve? If we evolved, which human being would have made the choice that brought sin into this world? Since God clearly says that it is our sin that brought death into our world, how could there have been death for billions of years before the arrival of the first man who sinned on the earth? As I asked questions about this issue and studied what the Bible had to say, I found it to be one of the greatest times of learning in my life as a new believer. My prayer is that you will have this same experience!

Don’t pray for me, Pastor Rick. This is what understanding the “science side of the equation” looks like? If God first made the world perfect, then how could Adam and Eve make only the biggest blunder ever in the history of the universe? Yahweh created man and woman to fuck everything up? What definition of perfect are we working with here? Did Yahweh do this so that some of us could burn in everlasting hellfire for refusing to believe this bullshit story? And he gave this fuckup Adam dominion over everything, including dinosaurs? Why don’t interviewers interrupt these asshats and point out the idiocy of their opinions?

Mike the Mad Biologist’s comment is perfect, “Radiometric dating is probably something homosexuals do, anyway.”

I’m guessing all these questions are above Obama’s pay grade.

People are horrified to learn of the practice of human sacrifice by the Triple Alliance in modern-day Mexico, of the thousands of persons—criminals, slaves, and war captives—fed annually the god Huitzilopochtli to keep the sun rising every day, to make the giver of life victorious in its eternal struggle with the forces of darkness. Some claim that Cortés exaggerated the numbers of those sacrificed to justify conquest. Some claim the killings never took place, that it is a racist lie.

Of course, the killings did take place, as the historical record plainly shows. For the sake of making a point about how we should think about these deaths, let’s assume that Cortés’ figure of “three to four thousand souls” annually. Charles C. Mann, in his book 1491, which chronicles the history and prehistory of the Americans before European arrival, offers this fascinating passage putting the human sacrifices in Mexico into perspective:

Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris – Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historical Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of “at least 12 or 14,000 people.”) In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. “The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes standout against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail,” Braudel observed. “They were part of the landscape.” Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historical V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel. In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike that either side grasped. In both places the public death was accompanied by the readings of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create a cathartic paroxysm of loyalty to the government – in the Mexica case, by recalling the spiritual justification for the empire; in the European case, to reassert the sovereign’s divine power after it had been injured by a criminal act.

Apologists for colonialism exploit the accounts of human sacrifice in ancient Mexico to justify European conquest of the Americas. I have before been asked to reflect upon the thousands of human beings saved by the gallant efforts of Europeans to Christianize the native peoples of Mexico. The Europeans were, from the perspective of the rulers of civilizations throughout the Americas, seen as enemies; but, from the perspective of the victims of these indigenous empires, the Europeans were—or at least should have been—viewed as saviors. But examining the practices of the Europeans in their homelands, leaving aside the brutality of the European conquest of the Americas, the descendants of Europeans are confronted with an awful truth about their own history: Europeans engaged in human sacrifice of their own people, as well.

The thousands of executions that took place annually in Europe—of single and menopausal women, Jews, homosexuals, heretics, the disabled, and a myriad of others—were sacrifices to a powerful god, Yahweh, the creator of the sun and stars, and his representatives on Earth, the mighty sovereign figures moving with power derived from Heaven. What insanity can be attributed to the inhabitants of Mexico during fifteen hundreds can be attributed to the inhabitants of Europe during the same century (and beyond)?

The lesson to be learned is not that Europeans were more civilized than their savage contemporaries in the Americas, but that absolute power rationalized by myths of the supernatural and cloaked in elaborate popular rituals represent a certain and deadly threat to human beings. Debunking the myth of European superiority requires sober assessment not only of the practices of the colonized subject before conquest, but of the colonizer himself.

In a op-ed supplied below, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan is claiming that Obama is a socialist because he is advocating a progressive income tax. He backs up his argument with a quote from the Communist Manifesto: “A progressive or graduated income tax.”

It is true that Marx and Engels advocate in the Communist Manifesto a progressive or graduated income tax. It is a recommendation in a list of ten which includes these that have also been achieved in modern capitalist society:

Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.”

You will note that these ideas – progressive income taxation, public education, and so forth – have been folded into capitalism with no movement towards socialism, which is defined as a social system that involves the redistribution of productive assets from non-producers (capitalists) to producers (workers).

This is because these items are not particularly socialistic. Think about it. Do Americans reject public education because two communists recommend it? Do Americans reject child labor because communists said we should reject it? Shall we return to child labor so as not to be socialist?

Moreover, other items on Marx and Engels’ list are not particularly socialistic:

Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

All of these are compatible with capitalism and have functioned to preserve capitalism in crisis (and could function to entrench capitalism). State ownership of banking, for example, has been necessary to preserve the financial system attendant to capitalist production.

Just as saying that the progressive income tax is socialist is nonsense, so, too, is the claim that nationalization of banks is socialist. Nader’s claim that we have socialism for the rich while we have capitalism for the poor is thus inaccurate. While it would be true that such nationalization would be socialist in a society based upon a socialist mode of production, in a capitalist mode of production, such nationalization is capitalist.

Some of the other items on Marx and Engels’ list are more arguably socialistic:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

If land is publically owned and proceeds from the value of that land are distributed to the public, then this is an example of a socialistic arrangement. The assumption in all these things in the Communist Manifesto is that they concentrated in the hands of and administered by a workers’ state and this really is the key to understanding Marx and Engels’ argument.

Then there is this slogan: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” What should we make of this? Does this follow from Obama’s “spread the wealth around” idea?

The line comes from the Critique of the Gotha Program, which Marx penned in 1875 in response to a document produced by representatives of the contemporary socialist movement. In fact, Marx did not coin the spirit of this phrase. It is found throughout socialist literature going back to the 1840s.

Early variations on the theme of a different model of redistribution are found in the work of Saint Simon, whom we have talked about in this class (he was Comte’s mentor). Saint Simon argued that what citizens receive in wages should reflect the value of their productive output.

Marx assumes that Saint Simon’s formulation is appropriate to socialism, the lower phase of communist society, whereas his statement of principle in the Critique of the Gotha Program concerning distribution based on need is appropriate to the higher phase of communist society.

Here is what Marx writes about “the higher phase of communist society,”

[A]fter the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!

Marx is talking about the world after the socialist transformation takes humankind to a higher level sufficient to free individuals from particular and necessary labor in order to explore labor efforts in the creative realm, to achieve self-actualization, something capitalism systematically precludes for the majority.

In the early stages of the transformation – what Marx refers to as socialism – “The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.” That is Saint Simon’s formulation. Marx explains further in this passage:

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

Marx sees this as a problem to overcome in the socialist phase. He notes that

these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

To summarize, under communism, once the highest phase has been achieved, citizens redistribute the social product on the basis of need. If a family has ten members, then it will require a larger dwelling, more food, more energy – in short, a larger social provision – compared to smaller families. This is because the need is greater. A solitary man does not need the same provision that a family of ten does, therefore he will receive less (this is the way it was in ancient society).

What will be required from all, if they are able bodied, is to produce the social surplus; but, with that production put to the task of need, technology will be put in the service of freeing citizens from most necessary labor.

Finally, it has always been of particular interest to me, having grown up in the church (my father was a Church of Christ preacher, as was my maternal grandfather), that Marx’s slogan resembles most closely passages found in the New Testament.

In Acts 2:44-45, it is written:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common; And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.

In Acts 4:34-35 it is written,

Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

These passages are found in the description of the principles and character of the first Christian church, which was a commune in which all members held property in common and distributed the proceeds from that wealth on the basis of need not productive effort. In fact, these passages contain the case of a man and his wife who withheld from the church a portion of the wealth derived from the sale of land and were executed for their crime by church members (clearly, the early Christians were serious about their redistributive scheme).

Christian socialists have argued that Marx’s formulation is a secular version of the Christian principle that lays emphasis on sharing of wealth, indeed of afflicting the comfortable while comforting the afflicted, a principle that finds its expression through the New Testament in the condemnation of concentrated wealth and privilege.

Ironic, isn’t it? What would the author of the op-ed I have supplied below say if we were to note that the slogan upon which he so enthusiastically heaps piles of scorn comes from the gospels he so enthusiastically embraces?

Demagogues have long depended on the failure of adherents to foundational texts to actually study the texts about which they so faithfully adhere.

“It’s kind of hard to figure how Warren Buffett endorsed me, Colin Powell endorsed me, and John McCain thinks I’m socialist.” —Barack Hussein Obama

This is how brainwashing works. Let’s take the example of a prisoner of war—his name is Tom—kept in isolation from his comrades for many days. The enemy wants to make Tom believe that the enemy’s cause is greater, that the enemy’s system is superior, and that the POW’s cause and system are wrong. The enemy tells the POW all sorts of things in an effort to break him, but Tom resists because he knows it is the enemy telling him these things. Tom knows what’s going on. Tom is his own man.

For months, we have heard that Barack Obama is a “transformational figure,” a leader who has come to take us all to higher ground. Many of Americans have resisted the man and the message because they are suspicious of both. Of course, Republicans and conservatives are suspicious. How can a progressive Democrat represent their interests? But some progressives were suspicious. How can a centrist Democrat represent progressive interests? The media continued to hammer away the Obama narrative. The man and his message are everywhere.

Then Obama rolls out the Warren Buffetts, the Colin Powells, and the Bernie Sanders—men from the right and the left, businessmen, generals, labor leaders, conservatives, liberals, and social democrats. Powell says, “Obama is a transformational figure.” Like our POW Tom, the sentiments of those who were suspicious of Obama were transformed. So many different sorts of figures, appealing to so many different sorts of people—all elites, of course—rolled out in a massive propaganda campaign represents a deft brainwashing campaign of historic proportions.

Obama’s half hour propaganda special, which appeared last night one several channels, was another key aspect of the brainwashing campaign. Did you see the way the people were responding to Obama? One man kept muttering in a whisper, tears in his eyes, “Thank you … thank you,” as Obama told him he would save his pension. The old man looked like an enraptured zealot at a Benny Hinn anointing, hands clasped together, “Thank you, sweet Jesus…. Thank you, sweet Jesus.” 

The Obama campaign believes—and given the ground of religiosity of this country, their assumption is not far off the mark—that Americans will fall for a politician who is every bit the image of an evangelical faith healer, especially progressives who want a religious leader even if they reject organized religion. Obama is pitched as a liminal figure on a divine democratic mission to save America from decay and pollution. The clouds will part and the seas will recede—he told us this himself—and a righteous leader will step through the breech to take us all to higher ground. He is “the One,” the special man who will unify his people—class, gender, racial matter no more—and lift the nation to new heights. We will be saved. Reborn in a New America.

If the ruling class succeeds in pulling off this moment, the United States political system will have entered into a political phase, one closely paralleling—of course, in its own unique American way—the personality cults of Nazi Germany and North Korea. For this reason alone, we should hope for its failure.

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Note: This post was migrated from my old platform. I have added to it an image generated by Sora.