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This article isreprintedfromCatalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you cansubscribe to the print editionofCatalystfor just $20.

The struggle against capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. The battles have been bitter and bloody, with triumphant highs and painful, lasting lows. But the Left is nothing if not tenacious. We keep the red flag flying, doggedly struggling for a better world, for socialism. Despite the odds, we never give up.

Grard Dumnil and Dominque Lvy, two highly regarded heterodox economists, want us to give up. Theyve had enough of our flailing and failing. To convince us, theyve written a book,Managerial Capitalism: Ownership, Management and the Coming New Mode of Production. The title argues that our quest has been in vain: The working class wont rise up and bring socialism. If anyone is going to save us it will be the doctors, lawyers, bankers, consultants, and other members of the 1 percent.

This may seem like a surprising message coming from Marxists, but Dumnil and Lvy (D-L) have been developing this argument for a long time.Managerial Capitalismreads like an opus, consolidating and honing their empirical and theoretical case for the end of capitalism and the triumph of managerialism a new antagonistic mode of production.

To be sure, D-L havent written off the popular classes (the 99 percent) who they argue still have a role to play. Instead, they argue that the Left has made a mistake in locating them at the center of history a mistake they place at the door of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. D-L say that Marxs theory of history was wrong well, partly wrong.

The correct part of Marxs historical model, according to D-L, was that capitalism has brought increasing socialization expanding and deepening rationalization and bureaucratization which they see as a good thing. Marxs model went south, according to the authors, when it assumed that this background process of advancing sociality would eventually combine with the increasing contradictions of capitalism (stemming from class divides and competition) to empower the working class to rise up and overthrow capitalism, bringing socialism. Marx and Engels were wrong, D-L argue, to believe that capitalism would be replaced with socialism via ordinary folks.

D-L consider the weakness of Marxs historical framework, combined with his under-specification of class, to be a serious analytical barrier, blinding us to a big shift that began as far back as the nineteenth century: namely, the start of a slow transition from capitalism, which values private ownership and hereditary transfers of wealth, to managerialism, which empowers high-wage workers and rests on the values of meritocracy. In short, weve vastly underestimated the importance of managers in the process of accumulation.

If we took the role of managers seriously, the authors contend, we would realize that already by the New Deal, the managerial class the wage earners belonging to the upper fractiles of income hierarchies had taken the reins in a hybrid mode of accumulation called managerial capitalism. In the years encompassing the post-WWII compromise, these managers were actively transitioning society to a new mode of production beyond capitalism. D-L say economists at the time James Burnham, Joseph Schumpeter, John Kenneth Galbraith, Alfred D. Chandler Jr saw the writing on the wall: market mechanisms were constrained and the profit motive dampened, both expressions of the growing distance from the economics of capitalism.

This transition was disrupted by the neoliberal counterrevolution which seemed to herald a return to the old ways (wages and bonuses tied to stock prices, for example). In the melee, the growing power of managers was forgotten, while the postcapitalist musings of Galbraith and Schumpeter were consigned to the dustbin. D-L argue that this forgetting was a mistake. They say that over the past few decades, managers have retained and increased their control, this time in a compromise with the bosses instead of the workers. When the crisis of 20078 hit, the managers used their dual power in the markets and in government to steady the ship.

Today, D-L say, the managers are more powerful than ever theyve become a new ruling class that, unlike elites of old, lives primarily on wages rather than capital. It is the managers, not the owners, D-L contend, who run the global economy, and if we look at the twentieth century overall, it is these high-wage earners, rather than owners of capital, whove seen the strongest gains.

Ten years after the crisis weve reached a turning point. Neoliberalism seems to have run its course, morphing into what the authors call administered neoliberalism an unstable system that is one step closer to the gradual establishment of relations of production beyond capitalism. But in this moment they also see an opening . . . of sorts. Divisions within the upper class are growing and the very top the 0.01 percent has accumulated such unimaginable wealth that it is floating away. D-L argue that this elite polarization creates a space for the popular classes to make an alliance with the lower-upper class those who take home a shade under half a million dollars a year. We just need to convince them to side with ordinary folks instead of capital like we did in the 1930s. In doing so we can develop a new compromise that someday, maybe, will bring us something that we can still call socialism, as the mark of a reclaimed affiliation with earlier endeavors.

There are two interrelated elements ofManagerial Capitalism that are timely and warrant further interrogation. The first is the authors focus on the shifting material basis of the upper class and its significance for the future of capitalism. D-L present data showing how in the 1920s the top 1 percent derived only 40 percent of its income from wages (pensions, bonuses, stock option exercises, etc.); the rest was capital income (sum of dividends, interest, and rents). By the early 2000s, the breakdown was skewed in the opposite direction; elites today make roughly 80 percent of their income from wages. D-L say this shift undermines our traditional understanding of capitalism as a social structure based on the private ownership of the means of production. The capitalists, as owners of the means of production, are the upper class; they make decisions regarding the use of the means of production.Today, the upper class is a bunch of wage earners.

The question of how to classify highly paid workers is an old one: do they fall in the capitalist camp or the worker camp? Generations of historians, development experts, sociologists, economists, and labor scholars, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, have wrestled with how to parse out who benefits from capitalism and actively or passively wants to see it continue and who could be convinced that theyd be better off with socialism. Weve given these high-paid workers in contradictory class locations many names: salaried bourgeoisie, managerial bourgeoisie, and so on, but weve never come up with a pithy solution to the conundrum.

However, most scholars, and not just radicals, agree that a deep, structural divide separates the ruling class and the working class. The ruling class privately owns the means by which ordinary people make their livelihood. They decide to create or not create jobs. The rich reproduce themselves and hoard opportunities and resources through closed networks and back doors to power. The working class does not; the only way it gains power is by collectively refusing to reproduce the system.

D-L arent satisfied with this understanding of class. They are frustrated that even though the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers, the resistance to the development of a new analytical framework remains very strong in the left. They see the skew in the income of the upper class toward wages rather than capital as fundamentally important: its not capitalism if the richest people are getting rich primarily from wages instead of capital.

Setting aside the debate about whether we can neatly distinguish between wages and capital income in this era of financialization (particularly given the post-2008 recovery policies of the US Fed), does the purported shift to wages as the lifeblood of the ruling class mean were no longer in capitalism, or that were transitioning to a new mode of accumulation? How much capital does one have to own to be a capitalist?

D-L joke about circles of stricter or looser Marxist obedience, but in morphing class and centile theyve resuscitated old debates. It may very well be that the ruling class is now living on wages more than it did in the past, but that doesnt mean the divide between the rich and poor has blurred or become more permeable. Class is not reducible to asset classes, income streams, or the skills one brings to the marketplace. Class is about the power of elites elites who actively reproduce their class power through relationships, networks, and institutions.

The rich have prospered since the 1970s while the working class has seen its power reduced to pre-New Deal levels. The ever-widening gap between the rich and the rest (regardless of our Polanyian daydreams of a leftward swing) demonstrates this better than anything.

Capitalism, as a historical system, has evolved over time and by extension so has the makeup and networks of its ruling elite. D-L show this in fascinating detail in their chapter on class and imperial power structures. Drawing from the Orbis 2007 marketing database, they diagram the global network of ownership and control, highlighting both the persistence of a dense Anglo-Saxon global network and how the management of the ownership of the large economy is basically in the hands of top financial management.

But at the risk of beating a dead horse, we shouldnt lose sight of the fact that, despite significant reorganization, the driving imperatives of capitalism to demand competition, to commodify new spheres of life, and to prioritize profit above all else have remained the same. How the ruling elite gets its succor has not changed these imperatives, at least not yet.

This is why many on the Left are resistant to a new framework, not because we cling to the idea that the ruling class must be solely or primarily owners of capital assets, but because the driving imperatives of capitalism havent changed. The ruling class is simply finding new ways to cement and reproduce its power as capitalism evolves.

D-L arent just concerned with fixing Marxs theory of class to properly account for the role of managers in accumulation. They also want to show how managers could be central to building a better world. They do this by emphasizing the part of Marxs theory of history thatwasright, in their opinion: the fact of increasing sociality increasing bureaucratization and rationalization of governance and production. This is the second major thrust of the book.

D-L pull together the threads of Marx and Engels that underscore a tendency towards rising degrees of sociality, or equivalently, socialization, notably the socialization of production associated with the advancement of productive forces. They agree with Marx and Engels that capitalism is the great architect of gradually more sophisticated and efficient economic and, more generally, social relations. They characterize increasing sociality first by the technical aspect of production and the corresponding division of tasks, within firms and among industries and second by the increasing organizational role of central statal or para-statal institutions both domestically and internationally.

This background process of socialization is central to the authors analysis. They say that over time capitalism has engendered increasing complexity in tasks, technology, and production processes, and the needs of governance have become more variegated and demanding (as the state has increased its reach and capacities), increasing the need for, and power of, managers. The old system, D-L contend, in which ownership is transmitted within family relationships by inheritance or marriage just doesnt cut it any longer.

Today individuals are located within distinct positions depending on their skills. A variety of tasks has to be performed; there is a division of labor within firms, as well as among firms connected by markets or interacting through given forms of central coordination or organization. Managers have become the key agents in the progress of organization and they get where they are through hard work and skills, not inheritance. As a result they value meritocracy.

The ascension of meritocracy over inheritance, D-L argue, was already visible in the post-WWII period when the advance of managerial traits, associated with the rise of the new relations of production, gradually dismantled the foundations of capitalist practices as well as the ideologies of the private ownership of the means of production, including its hereditary transmission, under the banner of meritocracy.

Today, meritocratic ideals hold even more sway. Meritocracy is the guiding narrative of the knowledge economy, of the Information Age, of the Silicon Valley disruptors. Advances in science, medicine, business, and finance have made higher education more important than ever. Good jobs require great credentials. All this feeds not only the growth of managers but also the ideology of meritocracy, which D-L say increasingly substitute[s] for the values of ownership.

D-L place great emphasis on this background evolution of increasing sociality, both because they think it has made society better for everyone (a knowledge-based economy is assumed to be better) and because it imbues the emergent legitimating framework of managerialism with a skew toward meritocracy rather than heredity or a might-makes-right logic: Given the enhancement of, notably, social interaction and education, the monopoly of social initiative on the part of minorities [elites] would become more and more difficult to sustain along the course of a managerialism sufficiently bent in a direction of social progress.

D-L say the centrality of meritocracy in todays society holds the promise of building a dignified future on the most progressive traits of managerial modernity. Skilled, smart people will prosper in managerialism. With a bit of elbow grease, and a lot of studying, anyone can be anything. The American Dream might just come true after all.

While meritocracy instead ofinheritance certainly sounds appealing, it doesnt quite fit reality. Most wealth, at least in the United States where D-L concentrate their analysis, continues to be transferred from elite parents to their elite children, and is highly skewed according to race, class, and gender. The United States might have the richest wage workers, but it has the least amount of intergenerational mobility.

Perhaps a manager-led economy will evolve toward meritocracy in the future, given the knowledge and skill requirements of modern-day capitalism? Its possible, but it doesnt seem likely given the current trajectory. The world built and championed by the boy kings of Silicon Valley and Wall Street rainmakers is a world defined by exclusion and hyper-competition. The most advanced sectors create the fewest good jobs. Young people are more educated, more productive, more hardworking than ever, yet they are worse off than their parents or grandparents. The knowledge economy is an economy that doesnt need or want most peoples knowledge, particularly the knowledge of poor people and people of color. Ordinary folks are increasingly consigned to tending to the wealthy and shopping. If they cant service or consume they are ignored, warehoused, or killed.

The meritocratic ideals of the managerial ruling class, to the extent that they exist at all, will not trickle down to spur a more equitable society.

Dumnil and Lvy are no Pollyannas. They acknowledge that a world run by managers could be just as bad as capitalism. They say the trend of increasing sociality has created the potential for a more equitable society, and that, despite our losses during the neoliberal period, were in a better place than many believe. All the hard work of the popular classes hasnt been in vain because century after century gains accumulate.

D-L are counting on ordinary people to, through patient conquests and obstinate class struggle, sway our managerial overlords to our side to bend them to the left. They say bifurcations are moments of contingency. For example, in the 1970s crisis they argue that there was nothing that required a transformation of the postwar compromise to the benefit of the alliance between upper classes in neoliberalism. Following Marx, they contend that circumstances were created, but the outcome, that is, the determination of one specific configuration of class alliances and domination, remained contingent and determined by political circumstances. Today, they see a similarly contingent moment. To seize the gains we want, they implore us to look back to when things were the best for the American working class and to rebuild the Keynesian compromise.

The Keynesian era, D-L contend, represented a new hierarchy of class powers and a new social order that was the expression of a political compromise between popular classes and the rising classes of private and public managers. Under this social order, based on an alliance between managers and popular classes, exceptional degrees of democracy were . . . reached.

D-L are right that there is an opening today. But looking back is not the answer. The postwar compromise was shaky, exclusionary, and riddled with contradictions at its peak. The bosses never gave in. They fought the whole time. The only thing that kept the compromise alive was the threat posed by the Soviet Union, the space for profitable economic growth after the devastation of World War II, and the power of organized labor and mass social movements a power so great it made ruling elites quake.

The 1970s was a crossroads. In that moment of profound crisis workers and social movements demanded deeper, more radical change to push beyond the contradictions of Keynesianism. The ruling class was faced with a choice. It could have gone with the workers, instituting real industrial democracy and meaningful redistribution. It didnt. Elites opted to side with capital, to circle the wagons rather than manage away capitalism.

In doing so, elites left us with a powerful lesson a takeaway that is the opposite lesson from Managerial Capitalism. Beyond a certain point, the rich will never vote away their wealth and power. When push came to shove in the 70s, highly paid professionals knew which side their bread was buttered on. There is no reason to believe that this time around will be different, that the managers will be able to, or choose to, use their position to manage away capitalism. Why would someone making half a million dollars a year side with someone making $30,000? A shared belief in meritocracy?

None of this is to say that D-Ls analysis isnt valuable. They expertly demonstrate how global capitalism has evolved as a historical system. It has become more rationalized and bureaucratized. The pathways through which the capitalist class accumulates wealth and reproduces itself have shifted. But the fundamental drives of accumulation, of gaining and reproducing power, have not changed.

Correspondingly, the role of the working class has not changed. If we want a better world, its up to us to make it. Dumnil and Lvy are right that there will be no natural progression to socialism, but the Left has known this for a long time. We keep the red flag flying anyway to rein in our bosses, to fight injustice, to build a better world here and now.

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The Managerial Class Will Never Give Us Socialism - Jacobin magazine

THE last couple of years can seem a bit of a blur, a depressing sequence of semi-lockdowns and partial reopenings.

The virus casting its shadow over all our plans, as in the background the Conservative government assiduously strips away rights to protest, to vote, to freedom of speech, to seek refuge from persecution, even to receive warning if it decides to remove our citizenship.

This monotony should by now have exploded any notion that Covid is a temporary emergency after which we can go back to normal.

As the left economist James Meadway points out, it has long been obvious that the period of time over which the virus would be an acute social problem [is] likely to be measured in years rather than months.

The same is true for the Morning Star itself. The first lockdown caused an immediate crisis from forcedadaptation to home working to the collapse in shop sales, sales to trade union offices and advertising for inevitably cancelled events.

We weathered these thanks to the hard work of staff and the extraordinary commitment of our readers, who met two special fundraising appeals on the trot.

As time went on, improvements to our web operation and e-edition boosted online subscriptions, while a new home delivery service is also taking off, allowing easier daily access to the print edition.

But it has become clear that print sales will not simply bounce back during reopenings a precarious title marginal to most vendors takings is vulnerable to being taken off the shelves, while shoppers habits are changing as are union office working arrangements.

At the same time soaring inflation affects our costs too. For the Star like the broader left, 2022 must be a year of hard miles steady work to rebuild sales in whatever format to secure the future of our newspaper.

It continues to play a unique and irreplaceable role on the British left and we plan to hold a major Morning Star conference this year because of that.

The reason for the viruss especially severe impact on Britain whether measured in the number of deaths or the economic fallout is linked to the nature of the neoliberal state, the extent of privatisation and outsourcing in our public services, their chronic underfunding and understaffing especially in the NHS, the prevalence of poverty pay and insecure jobs and housing.

Yet as in some previous national dilemmas that over EU membership springs to mind the ruling classs domination of the airwaves, print and social media shapes a debate in which working-class interests barely get a look-in.

Take the discussion on protecting the NHS, which is often restricted to how far we ought to impose lockdowns and seldom touches on the deeper structural reasons for NHS fragility most prominently understaffing, with tens of thousands of vacancies across the health service now regarded as the norm.

While trade unions are raising these questions, the defeat of the left in the Labour Party means they are not being fought for at a national political level.

The government is clearly not prepared to protect the NHS by raising pay to reward existing staff, attract new staff and reduce workloads which are becoming unsustainable.

By voting in favour of whatever Covid powers it asks for without making these conditional on specific demands that address deeper problems raising NHS pay, raising statutory sick pay, restoring the universal credit uplift Labour helps to normalise both the degrading of our public services and the states right to impose highly intrusive restrictions on ordinary people not as an emergency measure, but as a means of covering up for its refusal to invest in our health service or its workers.

This problem will only become more serious the longer Covid remains a fact of life which it seems sure to be for the indefinite future, given the effectiveness of British and EU support for big pharma in blocking a vaccine patent waiver.

The channelling of anti-system anger into the anti-social opposition to vaccines and Covid precautions is only likely to grow.

Currently, both Labour and Tory policy is to ignore the social causes of these phenomena and make up for the lack of public confidence with heightened authoritarianism.

Labours bid to ban anti-vax disinformation online is reminiscent of its calls for a ban on the RT channel for allegedly spreading propaganda ahead of the EU referendum both show a tendency to ascribe popular discontent to the work of malign agitators and a complacent belief that increasing state power to police communications is a solution with no downsides.

In the process they make the underlying problems worse. Mandatory vaccination for health workers does not address the particular reasons why people from some communities (particularly certain ethnic minorities) show higher levels of vaccine hesitancy.

It smacks of contempt when health workers are being denied a proper pay rise.

It is likely to exacerbate understaffing if it drives more health workers away, especially in particular sectors.

The British Dental Association has warned of a devastating impact on NHS dentistry, already a service reduced to the point of non-existence across large parts of the country, as the Communist-led Toothless in England campaign has demonstrated.

That campaign which began when a couple of comrades in Leiston noted the closure of the towns only two dental practices that provided NHS services is an instructive one.

The speed with which street stalls, social media and petitions attracted support was impressive.

The campaigners have built a high profile and won significant local media coverage. It has spread beyond Suffolk and secured meetings with the East of England NHS commissioners.

All because campaigners were finally taking action on an issue which concerns millions of us the extortionate cost of privatised dental care but about which our established politics is silent.

Many people see the inability to afford a dentist as a fact of life. Toothless in England says its one we shouldnt have to put up with.

Thats an attitude we need to build across a whole range of issues, because it is clear by now that rather than levelling up the Tories are intent on levelling down, and using the disruption caused by Covid to permanently inure us to lower living standards.

For all their heady promises on climate change, Conservative policy is, as in the health service, making things worse: passengers face the biggest price rises for train tickets in a decade while from London to Scotland hundreds of routes are threatened.

A drop in revenues caused by the pandemic and lockdowns is being used to permanently degrade our transport systems.

In London, headlines suggesting hundreds of bus routes and entire much-used Tube lines could be axed the Bakerloo and Jubilee Lines have been mentioned are met with scepticism.

The prevailing attitude is that they couldnt get away with such a blatant downgrade to the capitals network.

The truth is of course that they can get away with anything unless they are stopped.

For much of Britain the axe looming over Londoners did its dirty work years back.

Our transport network was much more extensive, much more reliable and much cheaper a few decades ago than it is today.

Yet because of the pro-privatisation, pro-car consensus at Westminster, we have usually lacked a political movement prepared to say, like the Toothless in England campaigners, enough is enough.

The defeat of Corbynism in 2019 has left us without such a movement on a national scale. But the necessity of rebuilding one is clear.

Aside from a pandemic whose impact underlines the urgency of taking greater public control of the economy, we face a climate catastrophe that politics as usual is simply incapable of addressing and an increasingly tense new cold war with the nuclear powers Russia and China.

Nor does the logic of capitalisms constant need to break open new markets and exploit to the end every last resource make it amenable to gradual reform.

The half-hearted calls for a more responsible capitalism by Ed Miliband in 2015 resulted in a media savaging only tame by comparison with the attacks on Corbyn which followed.

Similarly, Keir Starmers leadership of Labour aims not at offering a more electable form of the politics Corbyn stood for though this was the false prospectus on which he stood for leader but at the systematic removal of all socialist content from the partys offer.

Every shift, from abandoning the Green New Deal to ditching support for energy nationalisation, and every shadow cabinet reshuffle have marked this consistent march to the right.

Starmer is not the candidate of reforming the capitalist system, but of restoring its unquestioned supremacy.

We face a serious assault on living standards. This takes multiple simultaneous forms: the attacks on public transport, the refusal to take action to strengthen the NHS despite the pandemic, soaring utility bills accompanied by cuts to social security and below-inflation pay offers.

Industrial resistance has already begun in the transport sector but has got off to a rockier start in the health service.

But alongside the organising to be done in workplaces, workers need the confidence of knowing the public are on their side.

It is all of our responsibility to make it clear that we see what is going on here and that we though not the health contractorsor the rail profiteers or the majority of our representatives in Parliament are truly all in it together.

We cannot shy away from political demands the case for energy nationalisation is obvious and it commands majority support.

With unions, campaigns like We Own It can raise the profile for such demands, but we need to put politicians on the spot at local level, which means building effective local activity whether through trades councils or branches of the Peoples Assembly or other bodies.

At the same time, the immediate response we see from unions in multiple sectors is the right one. Rising energy costs are one aspect of rising living costs and the answer must be higher pay.

The wave of workplace militancy we are seeing in several major unions is key to this. Fighting and winning regardless of Westminster is our only option. But understanding the context of these attacks is also crucial.

As with the attacks on our public services, the long-term plan to force down living standards for the majority of people in this country is down to capitalisms inability to satisfy the take the money and run demands of a tiny elite while meeting ordinary peoples expectations of life and work.

The same dilemma prevents meaningful action on climate change and a rational, global approach to handling the pandemic, while the refusal of the worlds dominant imperialist power, the United States, to countenance a loss of hegemonyis behind dangerous tensions with China that could yet erupt into a catastrophic war.

It is more than a century since Rosa Luxemburg said the choice we face is between socialism and barbarism. All the crises threatening our world today demonstrate how right she was.

There is only one daily voice in the British media fighting that corner thank you for keeping the Morning Star shining in 2021, and lets build a wider readership and a higher profile through 2022.

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Socialism is still the only answer to the war on living standards, public services and the planet itself - Morning Star Online

John Stipa| Guest columnist

A guest column by ChuckGabrielepublished Dec.12in The Desert Sunused a fabricated conversation between FDR and Harry Truman to accuse Democrats ofpushing the U.S.toward socialism.

Abraham Lincoln feared that would happen when he freed slaves in 1863, but his crystal ball was better than Franklin and Harrys. Old Abe knew capitalism would be the root cause.

Using some of Lincoln's actual words as a basis, I can imagine Abe talkingto his wife, Mary, when drafting the Emancipation Proclamation:

Evenas IwritethisMary,I worryabout those damned capitalists.

Abe, capital has its rights, which are worthy of protection as any other right.

Capital is only the fruit of labor,Mary,and could never have existed had not labor first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. His moodgrew grim. These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.

Fleece is a strong word, Abe.

Youre right,Mary. Abuse is a better descriptor.Markmy words,thosecapitalists will refuse toshare profits with employees, the workers whogeneratedthose profits.Or, theyll hold wages down.Hell, they might even find ways to have work done by machines or in other countries to eliminate jobs.

Why would they do that, Abe?

Because maximizing shareholder wealth is their priority.Capitalists dont care about workers. To them, labor is expendable, easily replaceable and abundant in supply.

Abe, calm

The great man slammed his fist on the table.

This greed will extend into controlling food, water, housing, and healthcare. Can you imagine whatcapitalists will do to the cost of education? The average working man wont be able to afford to send his children to college or buy a houseor take a decent vacation. They wont ever be able to retire; all their meager income will go to food and rent. Both parents will have to work which will endanger the family as a sacred unit. Theylltoilsofeverishly untilthey wear out and get sick. Of course, capitalism will take control of peoples medical care. Theyll make care something thatonly the rich can afford. Theyll dream up Machiavellian excuses to avoid paying for peoples care.

Abe, how will they do that?

Capitalism will create mechanisms of control to influencewhat people read, listen to and learn in school. Like a fox, they will trick people into believing false narratives likethe Civil War was about states rights instead of slavery. When Tom Jefferson wrote All men arecreated equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, he meant all people, not just people with money.

They might even go so far as to saythere is no point in protecting the masses frompollution ordisease. Where does all that smoke from trains and factories go, Mary?Can you imagineifGeorge Washingtondidnot inoculatehis troops against smallpox? Theres no way wewould have won the Revolutionary Warif he hadnt mandated that. IfBen Franklin knew capitalistswould pervert his free press to support all of this, he would roll over in his grave.

Capitalistswantto divide people intohave and have-notsbecause poor peoplewill always be hungry and thereforeasier to control.When people go hungry, not just for food, but alsotheir right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, they will become unruly and desperate. Theyll use their guns to take their frustrations out on the world.

How much damage can a musketdo, Abe?

Trust their greed, Mary.Capitalists will invent better weaponry thatwilleviscerate people in mass quantities.If I had myway,Idallow people to bear arms,but restrict the seriously dangerousweapons to our military.

But the Second Amendment allows you to regulate the militia. Its necessary to the security of a free state.

It also says it shall not be infringed, Mary.Capitalistswillfocus on thepart that allows them to profit.

Whoever drafted thatAbe,should be sent back to grammar school.

I agree. Ultimately, the people will look to their leaders for solutions. But I fear, Mary,instead of solving the root causethat capitalism abusesthe workerwe will drift toward socialism.Someone will create a retirement fund ortax-funded education or medical care.

The sad partisit all could be avoided.If capitalism would simplydo the right thing share their profits withtheir workers,at leastenough tolead a comfortable lifethere would be no need for socialist solutions.

Im not optimistic, dear husband, Mary said, But Ihope capitalists take your advice.

John Stipa lives near Wilmington, North Carolina.

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Counterpoint: If capitalism did the right thing, we wouldn't need socialism - Desert Sun

On April 17, 1945, Hilda Montes luck ran out. In unclear circumstances on the frontier between Nazi Germany and neutral Liechtenstein, the lifelong socialist and resistance fighter was mortally wounded in the final few weeks of war in Europe.

Yet despite her apparent aptitude for hiding details about her life in order to remain an anonymous militant in the anti-fascist struggle, Monte wove a fascinating thirty-one years of life, which today highlights the forgotten stories of the many unknown Germans who went as far as to physically fight the Nazi regime but also of a largely unknown effort by a founder of Tribune, her onetime publisher, to fund an attempt on Hitlers life.

Born Hilde Meisel in 1914 to a Jewish family in Vienna, Montes parents relocated to Berlin, where they had previously lived, in 1915. It was in the combustible environment of 1920s Berlin that she became politicized, joining her sister Margot in the Schwarze Haufen (Black Company), a Jewish socialist ramblers youth movement which took its name from a rebel group in the sixteenth-century German peasant revolts.

It was here that Margot met Max Frst, whom she soon married; she then worked as secretary to his friend Hans Litten, the lawyer who notoriously dared to cross-examine Hitler for three hours in a 1931 court case and who ended his life a decade later in Dachau concentration camp.

Meisel had been on the left of German social democracy since 1928. Moving to England a year later, she became an informal student of Harold Laski at the London School of Economics. From there, she seems to have worked for some time in the German mining heartlands of the Ruhr before joining the editorial staff of Der Funke(The Spark), the paper of the Internationale Sozialistische Kampfbund (ISK), a socialist split from the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) that called in vain for left-wing unity against Nazism.

After the Nazis suppressedDer Funke in February 1933, Monte then took responsibilities organizing illegal groups, briefly moving to Cologne to do what she described as frontier service work helping smuggle hunted labor movement figures and finances out to nearby Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, while smuggling banned literature into Nazi Germany. Upon her return to Berlin, she set up underground socialist propaganda organizations, organizing mass opposition to the August 1934 plebiscite which confirmed Hitler as the Fuhrer.

After moving to Paris to join the editorial board of theSozialistische Warte(Socialist Outlook) newspaper, Meisel still continued regular trips into Germany, helping facilitate underground trade union groups and sending propaganda and other material into the country, until moving to England in 1936. However, operations were getting increasingly difficult. Mass arrests had hit the ISK hard in 1937 and 1938, leading Monte to return to Germany to presumably complete necessary tasks herself for several months.

It was during this period that the drums of war beat ever louder; in this moment of great intensity, Meisel broke with the ISK over its perceived lack of militancy. In that same desperate year, Monte entered into a marriage of convenience to John Olday, a gay German artist who had fought in the 191819 Spartacist Uprising and whose half-Scottish heritage gifted him and her the relative safety of a British passport.

It is also likely that this was the year she first met with George Strauss. Strauss, the Labour MP for Lambeth North and future Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson, was a young, wealthy, and idealistic left-winger who, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, helped finance, establish, and organize Tribune in order to in the words of its January 1937 first issue advocate a vigorous socialism and demand active resistance to fascism at home and abroad.

In 1946, in an uncharacteristic revelation to theSunday Times, Strauss admitted that in the late thirties he had funded a mysterious firm called Union Time Ltd. While formally a press agency, the organization was in reality a front for various German emigres working across various professional fields to encourage anti-Nazi opinion in Britain and combat Nazi propaganda in general. It was Union Time Ltd which had camouflaged, among many others, the activities of Meisel, who approached them with plans to assassinate Hitler and in doing so, hopefully averting the imminent outbreak of war.

The details on the exact events are, like many aspects of Meisels life, unclear. It seems that after returning to London from a period organizing underground cells in Germany, she approached Strauss asking for money to murder Hitler. Strauss sent her to the City of London to meet Werner Knop, a financial journalist connected to Union Time Ltd. In a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article regarding the affair, Knop wrote that Strauss visited him on May Day 1939 to ask if he would meet an unusual visitor with an unusual proposition. He was then introduced to Meisel, who described her plans.

After recognizing the compelling quality of Meisel, as well as her cold matter-of-factness, Knop granted her the necessary financial support. On a trip to Cologne, Monte was given part of her expenses for the trip, with another part of it to be collected by a trusted person. This figure had been told to shadow her during her stay in Germany in case she was an agent provocateur or a fantasist; the contact reported that she had vanished within thirty minutes of collecting the money, causing Knop to reflect that they had at least negative proof that she was an old hand in the tricks of the underground trade. Monte had given notice to Knop that on July 18, her group would conduct a demonstration attack on that day, nine people on the Nazi-chartered Strength Through Joywere killed in a boiler room explosion.

At this same time, she wasnt the only radical British citizen out in Cologne on orders. The committed young anarchist Albert Meltzer was also sent to the city by German anarchist exiles, with orders to pass on clandestine documents to comrades there the hope being that Meltzers British citizenship would protect him from any potential security intrusions. Though at the time he thought the documents were related to emigration, he was later told by the anarchist Willy Fritzenkotter they were for the escape of [a] planned attacker in the assassination attempt which never happened. He had met Meisel with Fritzenkotter, remembering her unusual backing from Strauss.

History tells that whatever happened with Meisel and her contacts, her organized attempt on Hitlers life never happened. But two months later, on November 8, 1939, a time bomb engineered by Georg Elser detonated at the Brgerbrukeller in Munich, killing eight people and injuring sixty-two and missing Hitler by just seven minutes.

There is open speculation over whether Meisel was directly linked to the Elser bomb; her husband, John Olday, certainly thought so. Her long-standing ISK comrade Fritz Eberhard was more open-minded, however; while he believed it highly unlikely she had anything directly to do with it, he stated the possibility that she had made a financial transfer to the assassin Elser as part of her Union Time work, particularly since it was clear that Elsers attempt on the Fuhrers life was a long-term, planned venture.

Following her split with ISK and the Western failure to halt fascism before it threw the world into war, Meisel lived with the Austrian artist Hannes Hammerschmidt and his wife Tess in the town of Sleights, by the North Yorkshire moors. She changed her underground code name to Hilda Monte and began writing regularly in English for Tribune, Victor GollanczsLeft News, and coauthored a book, How to Conquer Hitler, with Eberhard. She became a popular Workers Educational Association lecturer, and also found work as an advisor to the International Committee of Labours governing National Executive Committee.

Run by William Gillies, the International Committee was involved in rescuing senior German social democrats and was strongly backed by Labours minister for economic warfare Hugh Dalton and Dick Crossman, the propaganda chief and head of Daltons German bureau. Being brought into the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Meisel started working with Walter Auerbach, a German official of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF) broadcasting to Germany from Crossmans left-wing radio station, SER (Transmitter of the European Revolution).

In the ministry, Monte worked within the Central European Joint Committee. As the ministry was the parent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was formed by Churchill to set occupied Europe ablaze by sabotage, assassination, and dirty tricks, the multilingual underground veteran Meisel found a niche role, and was flown to Lisbon in 1941, where she acted as the courier of international telegrams using the codes of both SOE and the ITF.

Though it seems she was scheduled to go into Switzerland and unoccupied France to build links with German, Italian, and Spanish anti-fascist refugees, these plans seem to have run into a wall, and Monte remained in Lisbon until June 1941. There, she met Peter Leopold, a German exile living in Marseille, who took over for her while she herself established a distribution service for German anti-Nazi literature.

In London and neutral Sweden, exiled ITF leaders were working out how to smuggle information, cash, and fugitives on barges, ships, and trains in and out of Nazi Germany, with connections far more established and professional than the British secret service. Although the deliberate postwar destruction of SOE files makes this hard to ascertain, it is more than possible that this is how Monte got back to London from her foreign missions time after time.

Once back in England, she continued her propaganda, using the firsthand knowledge of her resistance contacts in her appeals to German people. In a 1943 BBC radio broadcast, she made one of the earliest references to the Holocaust in the Western world:

What is happening today in Poland, the cold-blooded extermination of the Jewish people, this is being done in your name, in the name of the German people. Show evidence of your solidarity to these people, even if it requires courage especially if it requires courage.

In 1942, Victor Gollancz published Help Germany to Revolt, another book cowritten with Eberhard, in which they told the reader that

We feel that you and some of your comrades in the Labour Party are beginning to realise that an immense responsibility falls today on these last vestiges of European Socialism which exist in Britain. The suppressed masses on the continent look to the British Labour Movement for guidance and assistance in the fight for their liberation and the establishment, after this war, of a European Commonwealth and there is only one way of laying that basis: the way of a German revolution.

Monte went back behind the lines again in September 1944 as agent Crocus of the United States Office of Strategic Services, organized by Wild Bill Donovan who had recruited droves of hardened anti-fascists, International Brigade veterans, and assorted radicals into its ranks. Monte and Anna Beyer became agents in the Faust Project and were trained near London in summer 1944 to act as undercover agents inside Nazi Germany.

After being flown by an RAF Lysander and landing by moonlight in a meadow near Lake Geneva, the French Resistance took Monte and Beyer by lorry to a disused railway tunnel. There they met a British army officer who took them into the lakeside frontier town of Thonon-les-Bains, where they waited four weeks for a connection. The Swiss socialist Ren Bertholet, who had worked with Monte onDer Funke and had been imprisoned in Nazi Germany, had also become an SOE agent, and had arranged the cover job at a garage in Montauban for SOEs most successful agent, Tony Brooks.

Brooks had been dropped into occupied France at the age of twenty, where resistance fighters sent him by bicycle and train to a caf in Toulouse. There he recognized Bertholet not as his SOE contact, but as a prewar friend of his family in Switzerland. With the assistance of railwaymen belonging to the illegal General Confederation of Labour (CGT) union, Brooks and Bertholet organized rail sabotage between Toulouse, Marseille, Lyon, and the Swiss border. And soon enough, it was Bertholet who took Monte and Beyer into Switzerland, where Monte was handed new papers and assigned as a courier to Jupp Kappius, a German socialist who was parachuted into Germany by the RAF in late 1944 for a campaign of sabotage.

With the exception of a tersely written CV discovered in war archives, it is clear that Monte was acutely conscious of leaving little traces of her activities behind. We know that she found herself in Austria on April 16, 1945, as the Red Army launched its final attack on Berlin. After a mission to the Austrian resistance group 05, and with papers identifying her as Eva Schneider (allegedly a clerk with a home address in bombed-out Berlin), she was walking through the dense forest of Rappenwald, close to the frontier with Liechtenstein, with a gun and nearly three thousand Reichmarks in her rucksack.

At 3:45 AM, she encountered a border patrol; after telling the part-time officials she was delivering two letters to Switzerland for Joseph Goebbels (to presumably justify her handling of a pistol), she persuaded the patrol to detach a single guard to escort her to the Hauptzollamt at Tisis.

At a point on the border just a hundred fifty meters from Liechtenstein territory, Monte bolted for Switzerland. The Austrian guard shot her once, which hit her in the right thigh, but the bullet hit an artery, and she bled to death. Allied forces took months to inform her parents, who were then refugees in Cairo, and Austrian records would not reveal her fate until 1947.

When Victor Gollancz published her novelWhere Freedom Perished after the wars end, the leading Tribunite Jennie Lee penned the introduction. Writing of the pity and the waste of Montes death she also heralded the hazardous work that had characterized her whole adult life, writing that she knew how her capture would mean imprisonment, torture, and death; Hilda Monte again and again walked alone across the frontier.

But when Hilda Monte died, it was Raymond Postgate ofTribune, her comrade and editor, who broke the news of her death in the June 29, 1945 edition. Describing her life, he suggested that it make the Tory parliamentary candidate and prominent fascist sympathizer Eleonora Tennant pause in her campaign against the presence of Jewish refugees. While no medals and no titles are awarded to her kind by this countrys ruling class, Postgate wrote, British Socialists will honor her name and remember this woman, who gave her life in the service of our cause.

The rest is here:
The Jewish Socialist Who Tried to Kill Hitler - Jacobin magazine

From December 26, 1907, to January 9, 1908, ten thousand tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York Citys Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by 33 percent. With their cry to fight the landlord as they had the Czar, the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for two thousand households.

The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the citys tenants today. As the COVID crisis continues, New York City renters are again organizing against rapacious landlordism.

The 19078 rent strike was led by a remarkable woman, Pauline Newman, who had arrived in the United States from Lithuania in 1901, aged about nine (her birth certificate was lost along the way). She was one of 2 million Jews who arrived in the country between 1881 and 1924, escaping antisemitic pogroms. Still a child, she started work, first making hairbrushes and then in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.

Newman had been exposed to radical ideas in her homeland, where one trade unionist commented that behind every volume of the Talmud was a volume of Marx. Still young, she argued against gender segregation in the synagogue and demanded the schooling that was often denied girls. Her political education continued in America through the pages of the mass circulation Yiddish-language socialist newspaper theJewish Daily Forward, and in discussion groups that included some of the left luminaries of the time.

Pauline Newman was the epitome of intersectionality long before the term was coined. She became known as the East Side Joan of Arc, combining housing activism with trade unionism, socialism, the fight for womens suffrage, and gender and sexual equality. As a gay woman who raised a child with her partner and assumed a nontraditional style of dress, she lived in a way that challenged patriarchal orthodoxy, and died in 1986 after a lifetime devoted to the struggle that saw her go from the garment shop floor to positions of influence in the American labor movement, according to Annelise Orlecks 1991 bookCommon Sense and a Little Fire.

The legacy and contemporary relevance of Pauline Newman abounds. Inspired by the 1907 rent strike, in November 1909, she helped build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and its Uprising of 20,000 against the exploitation of the textile industry. After two hours of indecision at a mass meeting at the Cooper Union, one of the workers, Clara Lemlich Shavelson, famously said, I am tired of listening to speakers. . . . I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now! Once again, the strikers demands were only partially met but their women-led grassroots campaigning challenged both the employers and the male-dominated union hierarchy, leading to a wave of industrial action by textile workers across the United States.

The tradition of working-class New Yorkers fighting for a better life extended beyond housing. ILGWU members were also heavily involved in a succession of protests and boycotts against excessive food prices, beginning with a boycott of Kosher butchers in 1902. As theNew York Timesput it, when East Siders dont like something, they strike. In 1914, the ILGWU founded the Union Health Center to provide medical care to its members; they also promoted education projects in the same period, including the successful Workers University.

By March 1911, Pauline Newman was working with the US Socialist Party alongside Eugene Debs, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory firekilled 146 workers. The negligence of the factorys bosses was yet another example of the corporate manslaughter that still puts working-class lives at risk, from the sweatshops of Dhaka to Grenfell Tower. But the ILGWU kept up the struggle for better conditions, at work and at home. The union was part of a highly significant movement to build cooperative housing developments for New York City workers, several of which survive today: the Penn South development in central Manhattan, for example, was sponsored by the ILGWU, and continues to provide 2,820 truly affordable homes in the heart of one of the worlds most unaffordable cities.

Rent strikes have been a recurring theme in New York Citys working-class history and a vital weapon in the ongoing fight for better housing conditions. As Ronald Lawsonwritesin the introduction to his history of the citys tenant movement, elites do not always have their way . . . ordinary people working class and poor, women, immigrants, minorities do help shape political agendas when they are organized and mobilized.

This year has brought new evidence of this. With millions losing income and unable to pay rent during the pandemic, a huge increase in evictions and homelessness was threatened. But a vibrant, well-organized coalition of housing campaigners fought to ensure that the state of New York has been virtually eviction-free for eighteen months. This reversal of a cornerstone of capitalism is a remarkable achievement one that has not yet been replicated in other places. It results from the same kind of assertive and often women-led mobilizations that Pauline Newman personified, including rent strikes. The early role of trade unions in building these movements was vital, too, and needs urgently to be revived.

Another recurring theme of housing and social justice movements in New Yorks history is the role of radical Jewish socialists. Much of the citys truly affordable housing was inspired and built by them. Sadly, the ILGWU fell foul to the red scares and infighting that have so often afflicted the US labor movement, and its a horrible irony that, as we remember the 19078 rent strike, the leadership of the UK Labour Party is busy purging itself of people following in the tradition of Pauline Newman.

In New York City today, the call for unity to defend workers at work and at home continues. Community Action for Safe Apartments (CASA) in the Bronx is just one of numerous tenant organizations fighting against the renewed threat of mass evictions as COVID enters its third year in the United States. Some CASA members are on rent strike, demanding their landlord carry out repairs, and the organization is spearheading a campaign demanding that the anti-eviction protections are extended for as long as the pandemic is with us.

Private landlords have filed 240,000 cases against New York tenants with rent arrears, threatening a huge spike in homelessness next year, particularly among the citys poor people of color and immigrants. Its a situation Pauline Newman would instantly recognize. But CASA and other organizations like it are determined to fight in a way shed recognize, too.

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New York's Winter Rent Strike Inspired Generations - Jacobin magazine