Power Systems (3 page)

 

India, Pakistan's neighbor, has seen a huge surge in internal resistance to neoliberalism. Manmohan Singh, the current prime minister, was the finance minister in the early 1990s. He let the cat out of the bag when he told the Indian parliament in June 2009, “If left-wing extremism”—the catchall phrase for Naxalites, Maoists, terrorists—“continues to flourish in important parts of our country which have tremendous natural resources of minerals and other precious things, that will certainly affect the climate for investment.”
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It's certainly true. There are foreign investors and, for that matter, Indian investors who want to get into these resource-rich areas, even if that means, of course, getting rid of the tribal people, destroying their way of life. But India has been at war internally ever since its founding. In fact, this war goes back way before, to the British in earlier periods. Large parts of India are at war at the moment. Whole states are under attack. You have to get the resources for what's called economic growth.

 

India figures into U.S. geostrategic planning vis-à-vis China. There has been a major expansion of U.S. weapon sales to India, training, intelligence sharing.
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Israel is involved, as well.
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How has India gone from a country that was once nonaligned to one that's become very aligned with Washington?

 

India was not only nonaligned, it was a leader of the nonaligned movement. It had pretty close military relations with Russia, but in both power and ideology it was at the core of the nonaligned movement. It's shifted. India is playing a complicated game. It's keeping its relations with China, although there are also conflicts with China. So economic and other relations with China are proceeding. At the same time, there is a conflict with China in the Ladakh area. The Sino-Indian War was fought there in 1962, and it still remains a conflicted area.

I think India is trying to decide how to position itself in the global system. The relations with the United States and with Israel, its U.S. client, are very close. Indian forces attacking the tribal areas are apparently using Israeli technology.
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For years, one of the services Israel has provided to the United States is to carry out state terrorism. It's very efficient at doing that. Israelis did it in South Africa and Central America.
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Now they're doing it in India. They're probably doing it in Kashmir—it's claimed, but I don't know if it's true—and very likely in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq.
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Israel has been a hired gun for thirty years and has helped the United States—by “the United States,” I mean the White House—get around congressional sanctions. For example, there were congressional sanctions against giving aid to Guatemala, the worst of the terrorist states of Central America. So Washington funneled money through Israel and Taiwan.
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The United States is a big power. Small countries hire individual terrorists like Carlos the Jackal. The United States hires terrorist states. It's much more efficient. You can do a much more murderous and brutal job. Israel is one. Taiwan is another. Britain has also played that role.

Indian-Israeli relations have gotten very close as part of the overarching U.S. effort to maintain a global system that will give the United States a geostrategic advantage over China. But it's complex. China, for example, is now moving into Saudi Arabia, the real heartland of U.S. concerns. I think China may be the leading importer by now of Saudi oil.
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And China has had a historic relationship with Pakistan. It's now moving to develop a port system in Karachi and Gwadar, which would be a way for China to get access to the South Asian seas and also key for importing oil and even minerals from Africa.
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Actually, the same thing is going on in Latin America. China is now probably the leading trading partner of Brazil. It has surpassed the United States and Europe.
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We were both at a talk that Arundhati Roy gave at Harvard describing the rather extraordinary amount of resistance to neoliberal policies in India.
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There is a tremendous amount of push-back. I wrote to Howard Zinn about her talk. He wrote back to me, in one of the last e-mails I received from him, “Compared to India, the United States seems like a desert.”

 

It wasn't at one time. If you go back to the nineteenth century, the indigenous population of the United States resisted. In this respect, the United States is a desert because we exterminated the native people. The United States won that war. By the end of the nineteenth century, the indigenous people were essentially gone. India is now in the stage the United States was in during the nineteenth century.

 

I'm thinking more of workers here who have lost their jobs, who have lost their pensions and benefits. At a talk you gave in Portland, Oregon, called “When Elites Fail,” you decried the fact that the Left has not been able to mobilize dissent.
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The Right has certainly been able to.

 

That's true. But I don't think India is a good comparison. Earlier periods in U.S. history are a better comparison.

Take, say, the 1930s. The Depression hit in 1929. About five years later, you started getting real militant labor organizing, the forming of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, sit-down strikes.
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That's what basically impelled Roosevelt to carry out the New Deal reforms. That hasn't happened in the current economic crisis. Remember the 1920s were a period when labor was almost completely crushed. One of the leading labor historians in the United States, David Montgomery, has a book called
The Fall of the House of Labor
.
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The rise of the house of labor was from the nineteenth-century militants on through the early-twentieth-century labor agitation that was crushed by Woodrow Wilson, who was as brutal internally as he was externally. The Red Scare almost decimated the workers' movement. That was the 1920s. There was a change in the 1930s, in the course of the Depression. But it took quite a few years. And the Depression was much worse than the current recession. This is bad enough, but that was much worse.

And then there were other factors. For example, we're not supposed to say it, but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element. It didn't show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else then had to start something else. It was always there—and it was in for the long haul. That's not the type of organization we have now. And the Communist Party was in the forefront of civil rights struggles, which were very significant in the 1930s, as well as labor organizing, union struggles, union militancy. They were a spark, which is lacking now.

 

Why is it lacking?

 

First of all, the Communist Party was totally crushed. In fact, the activist Left was crushed under President Harry S. Truman. What we call McCarthyism was actually started by Truman. The unions did grow in size, but they grew as collaborationist unions. That's one of the reasons why, say, Canada, a very similar country, has a health care system and we don't. In Canada, the unions struggled for health care for the country. In the United States, they struggled for health care for themselves. So if you're an autoworker here in the United States, you had a pretty good health care and pension system. Union workers won health care for themselves in a compact with the corporations. They thought it was a deal. What they couldn't see was that it's a suicide pact. If the corporation decides the compact is over, then it's over. Meanwhile, the rest of the country didn't get health care. So now the United States has a completely dysfunctional health care system, while Canada has one that more or less works. That's a reflection of different cultural values and institutional structures in two very similar countries. So yes, the working class did continue to develop and grow here, but with class collaboration, that is, in a compact with the corporations.

You may recall in 1979, Doug Fraser, who was the head of the United Auto Workers, gave a speech in which he lamented the fact that business was engaged in what he called “a one-sided class war” against working people.
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We thought we were all cooperating. That was pretty dumb. Business is always engaged in a one-sided class war, especially in the United States, which has a very class-conscious business community. They're always militantly struggling to get rid of any interference with their domination and control. The labor unions went along with it. They benefited their own workers temporarily. Now they're paying the penalty.

 

In a lecture at the Left Forum in New York on March 21, 2010, you talked about Joseph Stack and his manifesto.
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He is the man who took a plane and flew it into the IRS building in Austin.
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You went on to talk about the Weimar Republic. You said, “All of this evokes memories of other days when the center did not hold, and they're worth thinking about.” Talk about Stack. And why did you bring up Weimar?

 

Joe Stack left a manifesto, which liberal columnists just ridiculed. They dismissed him as a crazy person. But if you read his manifesto, it's an eloquent and insightful commentary on contemporary American society. He starts by describing how he grew up in an old industrial area. It happened to be Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. When he was about eighteen or nineteen, he was a college student living on a pittance. In his building there was an eighty-year-old woman who was living on cat food. And he tells her story. Her husband had been a steelworker, someone who belonged to what is called the “privileged working class,” the part that made out pretty well during the period of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. He was guaranteed a pension. He looked forward to his retirement. It was all stolen from him. He died prematurely. That happens pretty commonly among people who are faced with these situations. His future was stolen by the company, by the government, and by the union. And she's left eating cat food. That was his first recognition that something was wrong with the picture of the world that he had been taught in grade school. Then he goes on to say, “I decided that I didn't trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.”

He talks about his own efforts over the years to start a small business and how at every point he was smashed down by corporate power, by the government. Finally, he got to the point of saying, we've got to “revolt,” and the only way to revolt is to awaken people from their torpor and show that we're willing to die for our freedom. And then he smashed himself into the building in Austin as a wake-up call to the many people like him.

So what's happening to what we call the middle class—because we're not allowed to use the word
working class
. That's what's happening to working people. In other countries, it's called the working class. But here everybody has to be middle class or underclass.

The Left Forum used the phrase “the center cannot hold” as the title of the conference at which I spoke, and correctly. What's happening all over the United States is tremendous anger against corporations, against the government, against the political parties, against institutions, against professions. About half the population thinks that every person in Congress, including their own representative, should be thrown out.
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That's the center not holding.

Take a look back at the Weimar Republic. It's not a perfect analogy by any means, but it's strikingly similar. First of all, Germany was at the peak of Western civilization in the 1920s—in the arts, sciences, and literature. It was considered a model democracy. The political system was lively. There were large working-class organizations, a huge Social Democratic Party, a big Communist Party, many civic institutions. The country had plenty of problems but it was, by any standards we have, a vibrant democratic society.

Germany was beginning to change even before the Depression. In 1925, there was a mass popular vote for Paul von Hindenburg for president. He was a Prussian aristocrat, yet his supporters were petty bourgeois storekeepers, disillusioned workers, and others—in fact, demographically not unlike the Tea Party movement. And they became the mass base for Nazism. In 1928, the Nazis still got under 3 percent of the vote. In 1933—that's only five years later—they were so powerful that Hindenburg had to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Hindenburg hated Hitler. Again, Hindenburg was an aristocrat, a general. He didn't pal around with the hoi polloi. And Hitler was this “little corporal,” as he called him. What the heck is he doing in our aristocratic Germany? But he had to appoint him as chancellor because of his mass base. That was within five years.

If you look at the forces behind this shift, initially one was disillusionment with the political system. The parties were bickering. They weren't doing anything for the people. By then, the Depression had hit and the Nazis could appeal to nationalism. Hitler was a charismatic leader. We're going to create a powerful new Germany, which is going to find its proper place in the sun. We have to fight our enemies: the Bolsheviks and the Jews. They're the trouble. That's what's spoiling Germany. By 1933, Hitler for the first time declared May Day a workers' holiday. The Social Democrats, who were a powerful group, had been trying to do that ever since the Second Reich was established, but they could never do it. Hitler did it. There were huge demonstrations in Berlin, which was called “Red Berlin,” a working-class, left-wing city. There were about a million people demonstrating, very excited. Our new united Germany is going to forge a new way. End all this political nonsense by the parties, and we'll become a unified, organized, militarized country that can show the world what real power and authority is.