National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #31-01 Corporations of the World Unite? Marxism Today
August 1, 2001

Program description, guest contact information and audio files at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2001/3101.html

Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact...

Paul Goldstene: I think we've had a revolution against capitalism. I think Marx was right about that. It just came from somewhere (else). He was thinking about proletarians. Proletarians didn't bring about the revolution against capitalism. It was corporations.

John Foster: In Marxist theory there's no paradox, it's not really a paradox that hunger in the world is increasing at the same time that food is increasing.

Phillip Babich: More than 150 years ago, Karl Marx argued that capitalism would necessarily concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Today, the richest 300 individuals alone own more wealth than the poorest 1/3 of the planet's population. On this program, we take a look at some aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism.

I'm Phillip Babich -- your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information.

It was in 1848 when the famous last words of the Communist Manifesto, "Workers of the World Unite!" began to reverberate around the globe. The ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels helped spark revolutions, first in Germany and France, later in Russia, China, Cuba, and elsewhere.

Dead for almost 120 years, Marx remains an ideological thorn in the side of capitalism.

John Foster is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and a co-editor of Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine in publication since 1949. He says that there are many misconceptions about Marx and his work.

John Foster: People think all sorts of things about Marx. They think he was an economic determinist. They think that he was rigidly anti-religion in all respects, had no sympathies for religious sensibilities. They think that he believed that the state should have all power. They think that he believed that the media should be completely controlled by the state and there should be no free press. They've been taught to believe that he was an advocate of violence as an end in itself, and so on and so on. And none of these things are really true. In fact, they're all the opposite of the truth.

Phillip Babich: Elizabeth Martinez, an author and long-time educator and activist, says fundamental Marxist values that are important to her include:

Elizabeth Martinez: ...Equity, which is a bigger concept than equal rights. Equity is a view of justice, of social justice that says: this is the way a human society should be organized, the liberation of people's potential. The opportunity to have, to recognize, for any individual to recognize all there potential, which serves them as people and serves society too. I think there's a real nice, sort of dialectic in that. An absence of innumerable forms of injustice that today's society has subjected us all too.

Phillip Babich: Such as downward pressure on wages and increasing concentration of the control of what Marx termed the "means of production." John Foster says these are the developments we see as corporate globalization spreads.

John Foster: The critique of capitalism that Marx and others developed is extremely relevant today - maybe more relevant today than it was at the time that Marx wrote it because these tendencies which Marx described are now global tendencies. When he wrote about it he was, he only really had the experience of England and a few other countries in Western Europe to look at, but he's suggested this was going to become a more global phenomenon. Well now it is a global phenomenon.

Voice of the actor Brian Jones in the play Marx in Soho: I've been reading your newspapers. They're all proclaiming my ideas are dead. It's nothing new. These clowns have been saying this for over a hundred years. Don't you wonder why is it necessary to declare me dead again and again....

Phillip Babich: In the year 2000, Karl Marx returned from the afterlife to defend his work, not the real Karl Marx, of course. Actor Brian Jones portrays him in the one-man play Marx in Soho, written by historian Howard Zinn. Marx has been allowed to return for about one-hour. He expects to be transported to his old neighborhood in Soho, London. Instead, due to a "bureaucratic mix up," he ends up in Soho, New York. He tells his audience that walking past poor men and women living on the streets in Soho, London, partially motivated him to write his magnum opus Das Kapital, or Capital.

Brian Jones in the play Marx in Soho: "But I hear you say, Well of course, that was then, over a century ago. Only then, on my way here this morning, I walked through the streets of your city, surrounded by garbage, breathing foul air, past the bodies of men and women sleeping on the street, huddled against the cold. Instead of a Lassie singing a ballad, I heard a voice in my ear: Some change sir, for a cup of coffee. And you call this progress? Because you have motorcars, flying machines, a thousand potions to make you smell better. And people sleeping on the street."

Phillip Babich: A fundamental concept in Marx's critique of capitalism is that labor has been reduced to the status of a commodity, meaning that its value is equivalent to its cost of reproduction. This may sound like jargon found in dusty textbooks, but Marx's ideas on labor value are very much alive for many groups working for social change. Take for instance the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Selma James, author of the booklet "Marx and Feminism," founded the campaign, along with three other women, in 1972. Based in London, England, James says that members of her organization study Marx's work to help with their efforts to raise awareness about women and what she terms "unwaged" work.

Selma James: We've just finished a study group on volume one of Capital which took us an hour and a half a week and about seventy five weeks, and we're very satisfied that we have found again a way of looking at the world, a way of viewing ourselves, a way of understanding our relationships, and a way of plotting our course in building the movement of women, which is part of the working class movement generally.

Marx is very relevant today. Marx understood the power differences between industrial and rural societies within countries and within the world. He did not do a study of the Third World. He did a study of a world that was making a transition from feudalism to capitalism. And he did not give us any prescription of the kind of society we should build, but he did give us a goal. He said, what we want to achieve was the "social individual:" The individual whose needs were the major concern of the society. That is, the society was based on the needs of each individual. And he did that with the most extraordinary historical analysis, the most extraordinary precision, with the most extraordinary wit and some very good jokes. I must say some of the best jokes I know are in volume one of "Capital."

Phillip Babich: James says she finds humor in the way Marx used language.

Selma James: One of them is, he says that in order for capitalism to exist you have to have workers who were, who are, "free as birds;" that is, who have absolutely nothing. And then he says they have to be, they are so free as birds that they are compelled to sell their labor power voluntarily. And it is such a profound statement. We are compelled to choose between employers, but it looks like a free choice. And he says, "compelled" to sell ourselves voluntarily.

Phillip Babich: Labor, said Marx, creates capital, which then in turn uses its power to exploit labor to create more capital.

Kevin Danaher: I'll give you a quote, a historical quote from 1861 from the father of the Republican Party who, this is Abe Lincoln, sounds like a Marxist.

Phillip Babich: Kevin Danaher is an author and co-founder of the human rights organization, Global Exchange.

Kevin Danaher: Quote: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed, if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. So, you're not going to say that the founder of the Republican Party, Abe Lincoln, was a communist or a Marxist. He was just a smart guy who came up from a humble background, and understood a simple fact of life: that capital is the fruition of human labor interacting with the natural environment.

John Foster: Marx argued that, and in this he was very much in the tradition of classical, political economy, that labor, or labor power, had been reduced to a commodity virtually like any other.

Phillip Babich: John Foster.

John Foster: It's not like a commodity but it had been essentially "commodified." Wages were determined by the cost of reproduction of the workers. That's how you had to understand it. And that surplus or profit was a residual after wages were paid. So that the business interest, or capital, had every interest in keeping wages down as much as possible in order to maximize their profits. And Marx argued that the main way in which wages were kept down was through the creation of a reserve army of labor, or a reserve army of the unemployed which held down wages.

Phillip Babich: At times, women have been that reserve army. Unequal pay between women and men, says Selma James, keeps wages down. And, unpaid work for raising children, the process of reproducing workers, keeps the sexes divided, says James, because often mothers depend on men for money.

Selma James: Men have always felt a bit ripped off by the fact that we are financially dependent of them when children are dependent on our work. That is an enormous tension, and what happens is when women go out to work, men you work with treat you like their wives. They first of all expect you to make the tea and the coffee, but secondly, they don't necessarily assume that you should get the same wages as they do, in spite of the fact that, the fact that you don't get equal pay with them for doing the same work, or work of similar value, is a pressure on the wages that they get, because there's always somebody who can do it cheaper where the employer is concerned.

Phillip Babich: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, or you would like to get in touch with any of our guests, visit our web site at radioproject.org. That's radioproject.org.

John Foster: In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engles had said, this is in 1848, that 10% of the people have 90 percent of the wealth, and 90 percent of the people have 10 percent of the wealth.

Phillip Babich: John Foster.

John Foster: Well, if you look at the United States today, according to a Federal Reserve Board report that came out this last summer, 1 percent of the population in the United States has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, and it's far, far more unequal, astronomically more unequal than it was in Marx's day. And this is, this inequality is increasing very, very rapidly. If you took the 300 richest people in the world, their wealth is greater than the income, annual income, of almost about 1/3 of the population of the planet. That's a, Marxists aren't surprised at this. This is what the theory predicts.

Phillip Babich: Not only has capital become highly concentrated, but money itself has become a commodity to such a degree that the volume of currency trading on world markets far outweighs investments in goods and services. Kevin Danaher.

Kevin Danaher: So what you're seeing going on is a shift in capital away from the productive economy, things like tires and toothpaste and shoes and things, to the casino economy. There's probably about forty times as much money now in that unproductive casino economy, they call it within the industry "securitization." It's the turning of capital into a commodity, where they're selling betting shares on "will this currency go up against that currency? Will this bond market go in that direction or this direction?" All these kind of (things), which doesn't produce any real goods, and more and more money is shifting toward that. So you not only have a concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer bigger and bigger corporations, which now span the globe and care nothing about your local conditions, and you as a local citizen can't get hold of them, but also you have a shifting of the money into this unproductive casino financial sector, so that finance capital, disconnected from production now carries more and more weight. They're exchanging trillions of dollars a day, not billions, trillions of dollars a day in those markets.

Phillip Babich: So, has global capitalism as we know it today surpassed Marx's theories? Paul Goldstene, professor of political science at California State University, Sacramento, says in some ways, "Yes."

Paul Goldstene: Clearly we have moved from anything resembling capitalism, which is what Marx is actually writing about in his time, into a system of corporate property relations which is a very different system than capitalism, even though it goes under the name of capitalism. But, that's ideological. That sells.

Phillip Babich: Does that mean that applying Marxism to analyzing our current economic systems, political systems, is less relevant if we're looking at more of a corporatist structure, a corporatist system of economics and politics?

Paul Goldstene: Well I think what's not relevant anymore is his forecast about proletarian revolution. I think proletarian revolution is based on the argument that the system is capitalistic. That means you truly have a free market. It means that you have competing entrepreneurs who are competing in prices. It means that prices are always being driven down automatically toward the cost of production. It means that the capitalist then has to squeeze the worker harder and harder. That has not happened. There was a reversion to it in the 1980s, but nothing like what Marx is talking about. And I think so, I mean, to look for proletarian revolution in a corporate world is to misjudge the whole problem of power which, and I think Marx in many ways, is a very important theorist of power.

Phillip Babich: According to Marx, a revolutionary proletariat, or working class, would emerge from the capitalist system. In other words, capitalism set in motion the class struggle between the bourgeoisie, those owning the means of production, and the proletariat, the workers. This struggle would give rise to class consciousness, an understanding among workers that their labor was exploited, their freedom robbed.

Elizabeth Martinez: In anything the class struggle is more acute and it's more, it's globally clear.

Phillip Babich: Elizabeth Martinez.

Elizabeth Martinez: Millions of people running all over the world trying to find work. What's happening in the so called less civil countries is, is again, so horrendous. And children being, you know, girl children being sold into prostitution at the age of ten, because how else can you make a few whatever it is to live on. And I, there's always been that kind of poverty in this world, certainly under colonialism there was. But I think that today, as capitalism strives to maintain its profit rate and combat the threat of overproduction, where's the market going to be, if nobody's rich enough to buy anything? So, I mean, it's, as a system, it's dealing with some of it's, with it's own contradictions and in the process generating more inequity than before.

Phillip Babich: This is becoming increasing clear to workers in the United States as corporate executives slash payrolls at manufacturing plants across the country, says Judith Le Blanc, a vice-chair of the once politically significant but now isolated Communist Party USA.

Judith Le Blanc: Over a million manufacturing jobs have been lost since last November. Well, those workers are mad as hell. They're facing incredible problems and have for the last ten years with runaway shops, plant closures. Almost all the major steel companies, for example, are in bankruptcy and trying to welch on their responsibilities to the pension funds. So therefore, those workers in the manufacturing area, are, you know, in a very direct confrontation with capital.

Phillip Babich: Building working class unity is tricky business, particularly when U.S. society is not only divided along class lines, but race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientations keep many of us divided as well. Phil Hutchings has worked with civil rights and social justice movements over the past four decades, and he's co-founder of the Institute for Multiracial Justice. He says that organizing today for a Marxist vision of democratic control of the economy must address racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Phil Hutchings: Because I think the capitalist system is the thing that holds things together. I think there needs to be a frontal movement, organization, party formation, mass movements that gear at that. But, the idea of a proletarian party, or even a proletariat, to use the classical definition, is something of real creation itself. And it's not, it doesn't come as a fully made organism. And as I said before, I think one of the precise purposes of capitalist rule is to divide the working class and keep it in those divisions. And so, I think that you have to have movements against racism, or against nation chauvinism, against sexual chauvinism. All the "ism" fighting all the "isms" before, because, I think, what's also happened is in the countries where you have had successful revolutions to a great degree, that to the degree that those questions were not taken care of earlier, they don't get taken care of later.

Phillip Babich: Elizabeth Martinez agrees.

Elizabeth Martinez: I think because their roots are so deep that very special efforts are going to have to be made to uproot them, because there is privilege attached to them which doesn't fall only along class lines. By that I mean you can have a poor man who beats his wife. He may be poor, but he's still oppressing her. So just making him less poor doesn't solve the problem of women's situation.

Phillip Babich: Two examples of worker organizations that are building race and working class unity are in North Carolina. Black and Latino workers there, members of the African American/Latino Alliance, joined forces to launch a boycott against a pickle manufacturer that paid low wages. In another case, Black and Latino members of the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network, based in Durham, demonstrated against immigration policy, recognizing that low wages for undocumented workers means low wages for all other workers.

Elizabeth Martinez: In March of this year, they had a conference and one of the activities during this conference, which was a conference for organizers from all over the Southeast and also eight other countries in this hemisphere, they all went down together to the INS office to protest the immigration policies of the US government in Atlanta, Georgia, which is a very largely African-American city. Here come all these African-Americans supporting these immigrant's demands for justice. That's not, I mean, that's a fairly rare event.

Phillip Babich: Likewise, Phil Hutchings says that efforts to end racial injustice should also include challenges to the class structure. He points to gains made by African Americans in the political arena as an example. Hutchings, an African American, says while there may be a Black Secretary of State, Black members of Congress and Black mayors, the roots of Black poverty still need to be addressed.

Phil Hutchings: A lot of places they're worse off than they were before the sixties. And, and they've had all this black political stuff. And so, at a certain point, as we used to say, "it's thick." Blackness is necessary, but it's not sufficient. It's nice to have a black mayor, and a black mayor can do certain things, and they certainly do things for parts of the black middle class, like contracts and so on, access. But for the masses of black people in terms of the essential questions of poverty, or the need to moveupward in society which are basically structural questions, you've got to have a force that goes beyond simply the question of race or some of the "isms," that basically understands how the structure uses those "isms" in a way that comes up with a real...a negation of a negation, to use Marxist terminology. If that, if that capitalist structure is a negation of humanity, the negation of that negation is a new system, that basically understands from living those contradictions what they are, but you oppose it in a way that basically brings up a whole new kind of situation.

Phillip Babich: What that new situation will look like is anyone's guess. Reaching the moment through non-violent means when there's democratic control of society and the economy, say many advocates for social change, is what's important. Kevin Danaher says that with increasing economic pressure on working class families, there are more calls for such democratization.

Kevin Danaher: Not just the capitol with an "O" the capitol city, but also the capital with an "A" the economy. Let's, and that's what's on the agenda now, is lets democratize the economy in a million different ways. Let the creativity of the people flourish by putting this project out there. Can we have a democratic global economy with no starving children; no clear-cut forests, no vanishing species? Yeah, we can do that. We can do that.

Phillip Babich: Meanwhile, multinational corporations wield enormous economic and political power. Paul Goldstene says it's important to understand the nature of this power to clearly assess future prospects for social change. One of the first things to note, he says, is that, as Marx predicted, capitalism has not stabilized; meaning that the capitalist model of perpetual competition among businesses to keep prices down is no longer functioning. Instead, says Goldstene, heavy consolidation, price fixing, and massive production capabilities have introduced a new model.

Paul Goldstene: With the introduction of machinery, what happens is that entrepreneurs are driven out of the market by other entrepreneurs who, in his words, devour them. And with the increase in machinery, as he puts it, which I would say means with increasing sophistication and productive technology, you are getting more and more concentrations of control of that technology in fewer and fewer hands. I think that's exactly what happened. I think we've had a revolution against capitalism. I think Marx was right about that. It just came from somewhere. He was thinking about proletarians. Proletarians didn't bring about the revolution against capitalism. It was the corporations. And you've had a corporate revolution. And the concentrations of control of material production in this country are overwhelming.

Phillip Babich: So, where does Goldstene see a revolutionary force emerging from this new model?

Paul Goldstene: I see a revolutionary force emerging out of increasing consciousness that we've arrived at a point where economics is not relevant to power. And in fact, where economics should not be even relevant to human concerns. Of course, we have that capacity for that kind of productivity. I think the means of production are there to do it and they are more there every day. I think when we start to realize that we've reached the point in history where there rationally should be an absolute disconnect between status and power on one, hand and personal wealth on the other hand, or control of that which makes the wealth, which is more important, then I think we're on the road to quite a revolutionary transition in human history.

Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact: A look at the relevance of Marxism today. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Susan Wood, Martin Voelker and Third Eye Video Productions in Eugene, Oregon for recorded portions. We had production assistance from Samantha Haimovitch.

Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law, executive director. Associate producers, Stephanie Welch and Shereen Meraji. Women's desk director, Lisa Rudman. Senior advisor, Norman Solomon. National producer, David Barsamian. Administrative coordinator, Rosalyn Fay. And, I'm your host and managing producer Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, or if you would like to get in touch with any of our guests, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter trio. Bye for now.