Myth: No One Ever Immigrated to a Communist Country

MP writes:

You are right at least on one point: no communist country ever experienced immigration problems. Not because they did not want immigration, but because nobody, on his own mind, would have wanted to immigrate to a communist country.

Beside this, if the US keep on letting Mexicans colonizing its territory, the US will become a second Mexico, since a country is worth what the majority of its residents are worth. An other option for the US would be to become a communist country, which would prevent anyone for immigrating to the the US.

Not true. After the division of Germany, many German Leftists in the West migrated to the new East Germany. This was VERY common. Also, I have heard that Cuba has many recent immigrants from Jamaica and Haiti, and they like it very much and say it is better than their own country. Although Venezuela is not a Communist country, it has recently had a large number of poor and working class Colombians moving to it. They say they like it there a lot better than in Colombia. China is currently run by the Communist country, and it gets quite a few immigrants. Currently quite a few Americans are thinking of moving to Cuba if and when they retire. A number of American Leftists have already moved to Cuba and live there currently. Philip Agee is a prominent one. An old friend of mine from 1980 was from the Azerbaijani SSR in the Soviet Union. He told me that Azeri Soviets and Iranians used to go back and forth across each other’s borders all the time.

Most Communist countries were paranoid and they didn’t want a lot of immigration. They thought there might be spies mixed in.

North Korea Primer

Repost from the old site.

By now you surely have heard that North Korea has a nuclear bomb and has tested it, although the bomb appears very small, the test did not go well, and it has not yet been put on top of a missile. I am not at all worried about this bomb, though maybe I should be.

I have been studying North Korea for years, and this is the basis for my carefree attitude about their nuclear bomb. They simply are not going to use it in an aggressive manner as it is strictly for defensive purposes.

For those reasons, I actually support North Korea’s getting a bomb, as I figure they will never use it anyway (unless we are so stupid as to attack them) and it is only them having a bomb that keeps us from attacking them.

I think all sane, rational countries being threatened by nuclear powers should have the right to get WMD’s to defend themselves. Most countries in the world qualify as sane, and certainly North Korea does. All the nonsense about “crazy Kim Jong Il” is just US propaganda crap. For an example of an insane, irrational country that should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, consider the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

I actually dislike the regime intensely, but there are positive notes amidst all the terror of the gulags and the corruption of the elite.

For one, I really feel that Kim Jong Il has been trying his best to feed his people, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of capitalist regimes in the Third World, whose governments do not make the tiniest efforts to feed anyone, as this is seen as the responsibility of the individual.

The World Bank, the IMF and the US government routinely try to attack and even destroy such governments if they try to feed their people. Jean Bertrand Aristide, for example, was overthrown at gunpoint by the US, France and Canada, in part because he was spending large sums to give millions of poor Haitians one free meal (lunch) a day.

The World Bank and the IMF usually demand that these governments scale back or terminate any government feeding programs in order to continue to get loans from these institutions.

My understanding is that the northern part of Korea has never been able to feed its people, even before the Communist regime. I suppose it has always either relied on imports from Southern Korea or China, or else, if that was not forthcoming, it simply lacked enough food. The country is very cold and mountainous with rocky soil and it is hard to get crops to grow there.

Some background on the famine: North Korea had the worst floods in 100 years in 1995 and 1996, followed by the worst drought in 100 years in 1997, which also involved famine. All this happened after the economy collapsed in 1990 with the loss of Soviet economic cooperation.

To give you an example of what was involved in this 1990 collapse, note that the price of oil immediately climbed by 1000% (10 times) in the space of a year. They simply could not purchase enough oil to run their factories and farms so the whole country pretty much shut down.

For those enamored of the theory that Communist states like Cuba and North Korea can only be maintained by massive aid from outside to “keep them afloat”, we should note that from 1946-1960, South Korea received 4 times the aid to South Korea as the Soviet Union was giving to North Korea. For most of the 1950′s, the US provided 50% of the entire budget of South Korea. Which state is the welfare case, anyway?

The US has been deliberately trying to destroy their economy from Day One so we should talk about their economic problems. Right now, we are trying to cut off the regime from the entire world banking system. This means that factories that make consumer goods have been unable to import the materials necessary to make those products.

During the starvation crisis of the 90′s, my perception is that the world did not exactly step up to the plate for avert the crisis. The US continued embargoing North Korea, as they have since 1950, and as they did during the Great Leap Forward famine of 1959-1962 in which 15 million Chinese died while the US scurried to block all food aid.

The embargo has recently been strengthened in an effort to cut off the North from the world financial system. The US and other nations played politics with the food aid during the famine, a disgusting display of cynical Realpolitik in my opinion.

Regarding the number of deaths in the famine, anti-North Korean polemicists claim that 3-4 million people died. Fine, they can claim that all they want but they need to prove it. The Asian Development Bank says that 500,000 died*. Others put the figure at 600,000.

It was a terrifying, nightmarish time and the horror stories from the era seem for the most part to be true.

It is useful to note that even at the worst of the starvation in the 1990′s, the rate and degree of infant mortality, starvation and malnutrition per 1000 people only began to approach, but did not reach or surpass, the same rate as India experiences day in, day out, every single year, including this one.

So, what happened in North Korea from 1995-1997 has continued to occur on a greater scale and to the same degree every year since then in India. So how come we don’t hear how India starves its people? It should be noted that the regime has not been able to feed its people for the last 10 years and 40% of the youngest generation are stunted from malnutrition.

North Korea has liberated women to a radical degree – there are more college-educated women than men. The regime does an excellent job of taking care of orphans (especially) and children in general.

There are many orphans. – 30% of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, mostly by US carpet bombing, often with napalm, that was frankly terrorist warfare – a devastation comparable in degree to those experienced by Poles, Russians and World Jewry in World War 2.

The US, under Curtis LeMay, destroyed just about every city and town in North Korea, often with blatant napalming of entire cities. When napalm was invented in 1945, no one imagined that it would be used wholesale against entire cities.

As early as 1952, almost every civilian in North Korea was living in either a cave or a tunnel. There are still a huge number of orphans – if you meet North Koreans, you will find that almost everyone lost at least one relative in the war.

North Korea has excellent in the treatment of the handicapped – sending them to the many special schools and programs that are set up for them, finding employment for them and making special efforts to find them marriage partners.

As with the orphans, there are many handicapped, mostly due to the devastating war, and the North Korean people treat the handicapped with a kindness and deference that would surprise most residents of the capitalist dog-eat-dog West.

North Korea has truly free housing and practices preventive medicine on a comparatively high level. Prostitution is a memory and it is impossible to bribe a cop. North Koreans had a longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality than South Korea until 1980, and until the tragedies of the 1990′s, North Korea’s rates of these 2 indexes were on a par with advanced industrialized states.

North Korea had higher per capita growth rates than South Korea for decades until the 1980′s. By 1980, visitors riding trains from North Korea to China were shocked at how much better off North Korea seemed to be than China. North Korea’s rural areas were neat and well-built up, with well-maintained farm machinery in ample supply. In contrast, China, both cities and countryside, appeared squalid.

Since then, the system has foundered. It is not so much that the system itself is a completely failed model as capitalist propagandists assert but that it is a limited model. That is, you can get superb economic growth in both agriculture and industry for decades under Communism (the experience of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China are instructive).

But after decades of growth, the system seems to reach a law of diminishing returns and also bogs down into bureaucracy. North Korea has now significantly liberalized their economy to the point where it is not really a totally Communist economy (certainly not a “Stalinist” system – North Korea’s model never really resembled Stalin’s USSR anyway) at all anymore.

A lot of the enterprises are virtually being run by workers themselves and the cities are crowded with farmers markets and stands for small entrepreneurs.

Nevertheless, many of the horror stories you hear about North Korea’s gulags are probably true. Still, there is a problem with these stories. It is now acknowledged that most information from North Korean defectors is pretty much useless. Sometimes they have good information if you can get to them before South Korean intelligence does. After that, they are about useless.

Defectors’ stories are most valuable for telling us what life is like in their immediate surroundings. Few top-level defectors have left North Korea over the lifespan of the regime, so our understanding of the inner workings of the regime is limited.

The notion that North Korea would give their nuclear weapon to terrorists, or God forbid Al Qaeda, regularly heard in the US media, nearly qualifies as a paranoid delusion. The whole notion of “giving a nuke to terrorists” which Americans have been hammered with nonstop since 9-11 is sort of silly and fantastical anyway.

To look into this requires a brief primer on nuclear weapons. I am not an expert, but here goes.

For starters, let us look at the nonsense about the suitcase nukes. A modern nuclear weapon, as I understand it, is about as big as a very small car – say a Volkswagen beetle or an electric car. If you put it in your living room, it takes up a good part of the room. You can put it in a large truck, but a suitcase!? Come on.

Furthermore, most modern-day nuclear weapons are either launched from a missile of dropped from a bomber. A common misconception is that a nuke is detonated on impact. You could put a nuke in a truck and drive it into a building 100 mph, drop it from a plane, shoot it on a missile, set it on fire, or even attack it with another nuclear weapon, and none of that will detonate it.

The only way to detonate a nuclear weapon is to fire a detonator at the atomic core inside the nuke. In modern nuclear weapons, the detonator is a very large precision instrument located inside the nuke itself. It must be fired just right, with mathematical precision down to fractions of a second and many other variables lined up perfectly.

This a process that is enormously difficult, and large states with huge budgets and legions of physicists have had a very hard time doing it, with the project often taking years or decades, and many projects ending in failure. The notion that terrorists living in Afghan caves can make one of these weapons, smuggle it into the US and detonate it is hysterical.

It is testament to the ignorance or duplicity of the US media and politicians that such scenarios resonate across our land to terrify a public that is uneducated about these complex matters.

Another notion, constantly parried about on the “Terror Channels” of the US media, is that Kim Jong Il wants to attack South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, or especially the US, with his nasty nukes. I don’t believe this. The relationship between the South and the North is enormously complex, but the South (and especially its US patron) threatens the North as much as vice versa.

I do not think a North Korean goal is an unprovoked attack against South Korea, and certainly not Japan or, ludicrously, Taiwan. Any North Korean attack on an US target, forget the US mainland, would be met with such a devastating response that North Korea would be history. A Northern attack on the South would be similarly suicidal.

The North has not spent 40 years rebuilding its land from the total devastation of the war to blow it all on a suicidal war of aggression. On the contrary, I think that North Korea would eventually would like to reunify the South and the North. The South Korean population seems to agree, as 80% oppose the US’ belligerent stance towards the North.

I am not sure why the US media, which resembles a Halloween haunted house attraction meant to scare your pants off for sheer entertainment, is always trying to keep us terrified of dubious threats. Unless they just want to keep us chronically terrified for other ulterior motives.

If anyone should be afraid of anyone, the North should be afraid of the US. We are still officially at war with them, as we never signed an armistice. The US holds regular war games with the South aimed at North Korea. Plans to attack and wipe out the regime are being constantly updated, the most recent of which is frightening in its attention to trivial detail and baseless optimism about success.

37,000 US troops at 100 installations dot the South Korean landscape. The largest US bombing range in Asia is the scene of bombing practice 5 days a week, year-round. The US stationed nuclear weapons in South Korea for decades, menacing the North. Those are gone, but they have been replaced by nuclear-armed ships and planes that the US surrounds the North with.

On January 8, 2002, three weeks prior to the declaration of the Axis of Evil, George Bush presented a “Nuclear Posture Review” to Congress, ordering the Pentagon to prepare contingency plans for nuclear attack on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, in addition to the non-Axis states of Syria, Libya, Russia and China.

From their point of view, the North is mystified at why we vilify them. They see themselves as opposing the apparently illegal division of their country (engineered by the US) from the start.

They are angered at being blamed for starting a war that they see as a civil war between a minority of collaborators with the Japanese who occupied their land (those Koreans supporting South Korea) and the majority of Koreans (those Koreans supporting North Korea). They are proud that they held off the US and its UN allies during the war.

For these acts, which they see as heroic, they feel they have been unfairly tagged as “hostile nation”.

A couple of new books** have come out in the past couple of years advocating attack on North Korea. The nonsense about the North’s petty nuke that reverberates from the media machine is downright frightening. For those who wish to hear an antidote to the insane drumbeat of warmongering hostility against North Korea, consider this a beginning primer.

References

Meredith Woo-Cummings, The Political Ecology of Famine: The North Korean Catastrophe and Its Lessons, Asian Dev. Bank Inst., Tokyo, 2001

Jasper Becker, Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 300 pp., and Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004. 868 pp.

The Extraterritorial Nature of the US Cuban Blockade

The US has imposed an embargo on Cuba since 1961. That embargo is probably never going to be lifted. 100% of the US power elite of both parties are all of the US media are against lifting the blockade. Imperialism demands not just free elections and what not but also a total dismantling of the socialist economic system on the island. The blockade has always been more about US capitalism’s international war on socialism that about anything else.

Various lies have been parroted about the blockade: That it was imposed due to the Cold War, that it was imposed because Cuba allied with the USSR, that it does not hurt Cuba at all and instead is used as an excuse by the regime, etc.

First of all, if it was imposed as a result of the Cold War, then with the fall of the USSR in 1991, it should have been lifted. The truth is that it was part of US capitalism’s war on the socialist economic system and not part of the war on the USSR. Hence with the fall of the USSR, the behavior of the US state did not change one bit.

It continued its war on socialism, attacking socialist countries, fomenting coups against progressive or socialist governments, blockading socialist countries, supporting fascist and rightwing governments around the word as they are “good for business,” funding anti-Left death squads all around the world, and continuing an ideological war against all progressive forces and states in the world.

We really must smash this lie once and for all that the US reluctantly did all sorts of bad things as a result of the War with the Soviet Union. The truth is that US imperialism simply evil, and it continued to do all of those same bad things after the USSR fell. The war was not against the USSR but against socialism itself, and that is why it continued after the USSR’s fall just as strongly as when the USSR was active.

The embargo was imposed in 1961 because Cuba began nationalizing some US properties of large US corporations. At the same time, the properties of many Cuban large capitalists was also taken. The US companies were offered 100% fair market values for their properties, but all of them told the Cubans to buzz off and those funds have not been collected to this very day. They never will be. However, if the US imposes regime change on Cuba then the first order of business will be a raid on the Cuban Treasury to pay back the US corporations and possibly the Cubans who got expropriated.

Also, Cuba began trading with the USSR. They were also trading with the US. Indeed, they were trading with the whole world. They imported oil from the USSR, but the US refineries on the island refused to refine Soviet oil, so the Cubans heroically confiscated the refineries of the imperialists.

Cuban exiles often say that the embargo doesn’t hurt Cuba at all. Instead Cuba’s economy is hurting due to Communism. One can look at photos of Eastern Europe and the USSR under Communism to see that Communism doesn’t have anything to do with buildings and infrastructure falling apart. I saw a video of Prague from ~1977 that could well have been shot in Paris or Berlin. It looked 100% like a modern Western city.

If you ask these same gusanos,* “Ok, since it doesn’t hurt them, why don’t we get rid of it then?” They will scream and yell and say no way! Obviously it hurts Cuba terribly, and that’s why the gusanos want to keep it. There is scarcely a human being on Earth who lies more than a gusano. Almost everything a gusano says about Cuba is a lie.

The embargo does indeed hurt them very badly. If a ship docks in Cuba, it can’t dock in the US for another six months. There are many penalties on foreign firms doing business with Cuba. It is not quite, “You can either do business with Cuba or you can do business with the rest of the world, but not both,” but it is close to that, similar to the blockade which has completely wrecked North Korea.

There have been massive penalties imposed on and collected from European banks for doing business with Cuba. As you can see below, a solidarity organization in the UK had $1000-2000 seized by the US because it had the world Cuba in its name. The US government says it can go ahead and confiscate that money of theirs and good luck getting it back.

Many products are made only in the US, and many, many products have parts that are made in the US. Any product with any parts made in the US cannot be sold in Cuba. Further, Cubans have many machines that need spare parts and those parts are made only in the US. They might be able to have the specially made by someone else, but that is quite expensive. The regime has to undertake expenses like this all the time.

I recall the case of a man residing in Cuba who made a trip to the UK and tried to deposit some money in Cuba to purchase something or other and he was not able to do so.

The law is crazy and its extraterritoriality is really scary. But US imperialism has always been one of the world’s worst monsters.

British NGO, the Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC) faces financial penalties or the risk having its funds seized by the US treasury department as a result of US blockade legislation against Cuba.

In April 2013, the British based campaign attempted to transfer funds to US publishing house Monthly Review Foundation to pay for 100 copies of The Economic War on Cuba by French academic and journalist Salim Lamrani.

CSC instructed its British bank, the Co-operative, to make the transfer to the publisher’s New York based Chase Bank. However, the payment was never made. Instead CSC received a letter from the Co-op bank stating that this payment has not been completed due to a reference which is similar to an entity related to sanctions as provided by the U.S treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). They require more info regarding Cuba.

The Campaign now faces the option of paying bank charges to try and recover the money, or providing details to the OFAC, who can decide to retain CSC funds if they
chose.

The book’s author Salim Lamrani, who is currently in Britain on a speaking tour to promote the book, said:

It is ironic that a British organisation that campaigns against the US blockade of Cuba, now faces penalties as a direct result of this legislation. Aside from the inhumane suffering the blockade causes the people of Cuba by restricting their access to US medicines and medical equipment, its extraterritorial measures break domestic laws in third countries.

CSC
Director Rob Miller said:

“It’ s farcical that extraterritorial blockade legislation is being used here to stop the sales of a book that itself exposes the breadth of the blockade against Cuba. Perhaps OFAC have specific objections to the book itself, although it is more likely that they object to allowing a payment from a British NGO with the word ‘Cuba’ in its name. Once again the ludicrousness of the US blockade is exposed in this case in trying to stop UK readers enjoying an excellent book published by a US publishing house.”

This is not the first time the British campaign has fallen victim to the extraterritorial nature of the US blockade. Dell computers has refused to sell the campaign a laptop without first being provided with the full name and addresses of directors and trustees of the organisation and bank transfers destined for projects in Cuba have regularly been refused. Salim Lamrani will be speaking in London on Tuesday 28 May, 6.30pm at Bolivar Hall, Grafton Way, London.

*Gusano means worm in Spanish. Cuban exiles are worms.

From Rosa Luxembourg to the Holocaust

Our choice is socialism or barbarism.

- Rosa Luxembourg

Those words are as true today as when she said them in 1918.

By the way, Luxembourg was one of the Jewish leaders of the German Communist and socialist movement which coalesced in the short lived Bavarian Socialist Republic in 1920. The movement was quickly defeated, hundreds were killed, and there was much chaos.

The German people, especially the middle classes, did not think much of the German Left. It’s true that many of the leaders of the movement were Jewish. It’s never pretty for defeated movements and it’s never easy being a minority.

Those two truths coalesced as German Nazism grew out of the German middle classes’ and ruling classes rage at the rebellion of the German Left and their fear of the nascent Bolshevik movement in the USSR, which originally was also pretty heavily Jewish in its higher echelons.

The association of Jews and Communism was all the rage among the Right. Even Winston Churchill (who was basically a bad guy other than WW2) said, “Communism is Jewish.” The resulting theory of Judeo-Bolshevism led directly to WW2 and especially the Holocaust.

Good Brief Analysis of Adolf Hitler

Via Daryl Basarab’s interesting Gangster Bolshevism page.

I agree with the analysis that Hitler’s style was to target the easy targets while the people with real power simply left the country or were declared “Aryans.” Harmless assimilated Jews were murdered, the Zionist movement encouraged, Poles butchered. Capitalists were left in place while socialists were purged during the night of the long knives. But Hitler underestimated the strength of the Soviet Union.

That’s about it. How anyone but a German nationalist could possibly support such a project is beyond me. How can even White nationalists, not to mention ordinary White people, get behind such a monstrosity? How many White nationalists, forget ordinary Whites, think that Slavs are an inferior race to be massacred on nearly the same level as Hitler slaughtered Jews?

How many people really think that the mentally and physically ill should be killed (their murder was rationalized via semantics as euthanasia but it was nothing of the sort). Even the retarded? Surely their lot is unfortunate, but do they deserve murder? Come on now.

Keep in mind that this was not even the same thing as the euthanasia we discuss nowadays. Now we ask if the suicidal, with terminal or even terrible illnesses, should be allowed the assistance of physicians or helpers in their quest for suicide. Nazism went way beyond that. There was no pretense at assisted suicide. The unfit were simply murdered, exterminated, slaughtered such as mercilessly as the Jews were cut down.

What sane White nationalist supported German colonization and resulting imperial exploitation of the conquered nations of Europe? The plan for the Slavic nations was much more evil. 25% were to killed, 50% were to be removed and the 25% who looked “German enough” were to be Germanized.

Their lands were to be stolen, the people conquered and ethnically cleansed off the land, similar to the Zionist project in Palestine. But it was even crueler than Zionism. The Zionists never even theorized murdering 25% of the Palestinian Arabs and in practice a very low number of Arabs were killed in any of the wars, and the overall number is surely quite low.

The rightwing likes to talk about the socialist nature of Nazism, but that isn’t really correct.

Nazism started out as socialist, but Hitler never cared one whit about economics. All he cared about was nationalism, race, militarism, colonialism, imperialism, etc. Hitler cared no more about capitalism than about socialism, and he cared nothing about either.

Hitler shrugged and went along with the early socialist nature of the project, but when his big money backers (the junkers – the large landowners, the big capitalist industrialists and the military) rebelled with alarm against socialism, Hitler quickly had the socialists dispatched in the Night of the Long Knives. Workers were often worked to death or nearly to death in this “socialist” country.

Unions were #3 to be targeted in the early stages. They were considered more of an enemy than Jews at number. Communists and socialists were numbers 1 and 2 to the concentration camps. What sort of socialist or even Left project goes after Communists, socialists and trade unionists as enemies numbers 1, 2 and 3? It makes no sense.

Once big German money was on board and the Jewish capitalist competitors were out the way, great profits were to be made making various products for the Reich. The rich and business were served very well by Nazism.

Of course Hitler underestimated the USSR. He thought that the Communists were decrepit and weak due to the essential degenerate nature of Communism itself.  Communism was always his true enemy deep down in his heart. He hated Communists more than he hated Jews, and he hated Jews something serious. In fact, much of the anti-Semitism stemmed from the peculiar prejudice of the time that “Communism was Jewish,” writ via the Nazis as “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

At the end of the day, this can only be seen as a mad ultranationalist project.

Extreme nationalism, colonialism and imperialism were the orders of the day, with racism shot through it all. But that’s not unusual, and colonial and imperial projects are typically racist, often brutally so.

There was also extreme militarism on a near Athenian level, but many nationalist projects are militaristic.

It was also deeply conservative socially, but this is also a hallmark of primordialist nationalist projects. After all, modernity and its cosmopolitanism are precisely the problem for which ultranationalism is the brutally molded solution, no?

Eric Hobsbawm Interview

Very nice interview with Michael Ignatieff (who I don’t like too much) interviewing the late, great Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm joined the Communist Party at age 14 in Germany in 1933 and remained a party member for the rest of his life. He always supported the Communist cause.

He now admits that the Stalinist paranoia of the USSR was a disaster (beginning with the “Trotsky was a British agent” line soon after the Revolution). Stalin killed so many people for little or no good reason. As Hobsbawm points out, many of those killed by Stalin were Communists themselves, often the finest revolutionaries.

Hobsbawm’s statistics on the deaths in the USSR are exaggerated. There were at least 2.6 million excess deaths in the USSR from state violence, not including the population transfers during the WW2, various wartime deaths of the enemy, and the famine of 1932. That’s a lot, but it’s not 10-110 million as we often hear.

Hobsbawm took a lot of heat for this 1994 interview in which he implied that the deaths during the USSR might have been worth it if a better world had unfolded as a result. He meant this as an analogy to the 50 million deaths in WW2. Most say that those deaths were worth it in order to defeat fascism and rightwing militarism. So it is as an analogy to the WW2 statement that he wonders if the Soviet deaths might have been worth it if things had turned out differently.

Hobsbawm makes no apologies for the crimes of Stalin. He also says that the invasion of Hungary was a turning point among Western Communists. This is when they started to abandon the USSR. Hobsbawm says the Hungarian invasion was a catastrophe.

Hobsbawm is correct though, along Rosa Luxembourg’s lines, that the question is still one of a better world versus barbarism (Luxembourg said the choice is “socialism or barbarism). With the triumph of neoliberal capitalism the world over, what we are seeing is barbarism writ large spanning the planet. Hobsbawn says this is also a catastrophe, and I agree with him.

Hobsbawm was a famous Marxist historian who authored a number of famous books, including “The Age of…” series.

Questions of Meritocracy under Capitalism and Socialism

Galton, an HBD type, writes:

First, there is nothing wrong with inequality, join in the same country a population heterogeneously cognitive and you will never be able to achieve equality and social justice, really.

You do not really know what you’re saying, Chile seems a great country, much better than mine, Brazil. Venezuela and Brazil believe in education, but it does not work miracles. If you have a population stupid not believe that with education they will become intelligent or politicized. Education can polish a rough diamond, but never an ordinary stone.

Socialism, Trotskyite style, is the death of meritocracy and all its qualities.

This is a socialist blog. We don’t believe in extremes of inequality such as you see in Chile, Brazil and the US. It’s just wrong! And inequality is actually a catastrophe. It’s bad for society in countless ways. It’s even bad for the individual on the medical health level.

The truth is that there are no Trotskyite projects happening in any nation anywhere on Earth. There aren’t even many Soviet-style Marxist programs. That project had so many problems that the truth is that no one wants to copy that model anymore. And that’s what my Leftist, Marxist-sympathetic friends tell me.

Even Cuba,which has copied the Soviet model, has a model that no one wants to copy anymore. Cuba itself is probably going to copy the Vietnamese doi moi market socialism model. The Cuban project as it stands has not been able to overcome the problems of the Soviet model “We pretend to work; they pretend to pay us.” Overcrowded housing with a huge backlog. Shortages in state stores. Lousy state products. Low productivity on state farms. Mass theft from state institutions.

North Korea has removed all statues of Marx and Lenin. Market socialism is alive and well in Vietnam and Laos.

So the specter of Marxism is basically an idiotic boogeyman raised by the Right.

The modern socialist projects look a lot like what is happening with the Leftist governments in Latin America who are instituting a variety of Leftist and socialist type projects. These are occurring in Cuba,Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. There is talk of one in Peru, but it may not materialize. Leftist projects were overthrown by US-backed coups in Paraguay and Honduras.

I never liked the socialist model whereby a doctor doesn’t make much more than a ditch-digger. Why go to school for all those years to be a doctor then. Under a proper socialist society, I think there should be a graded pay scale, say 1-8

Let us say that Scale 1 is the minimum wage in the US of 14,250 year.

Grade 1 (lowest level workers): $14,250/year.

Grade 3 (Bachelors Degree) $42,750/year.

Grade 4 (highly skilled blue collar workers such as mechanics, tool and die, welders, plumbers, electricians) $ $57,000/year.

Grade 6 (Master’s Degree or Secondary Degree like Teaching Credential) – $85,500/year.

Grade 10 (highest level workers at the doctorate level – physicians, professors, vets, pharmacists, professors, physical therapists, dentists) – $142,000/year.

There is your meritocracy right there. Education = IQ. I don’t see why society should pay you a whole lot more than that Grade 10 though. Why should we?

Now, if we allow a market to exist, maybe you could go try your hand in the market and see what you can make. Despite the nonsense of free market idiots, successful businessmen are not necessarily the best and brightest at all, and many only have average IQ’s.

There’s nothing meritocratic about capitalism in the market sense as far as entrepreneurs go. Sure, a few inventors get rich, and now there is a “brains capitalism” whereby smart, nerdy types set up companies, often in IT and the like, using the cognitive talents to make money as entrepreneurs.

But businessmen in general all down through history have simply had good people smarts, a lot of ruthlessness, extroversion and mostly a lot of luck. Capitalism is hardly a meritocracy!

Anyway, states like China, the USSR and Cuba did have relatively equalized wages without great differentials for persons of radically different intelligences, so it’s certainly possible to set up a society on that basis.

join in the same country a population heterogeneously cognitive and you will never be able to achieve equality and social justice, really.

So the comment above is just not correct.

How Castro Held the World Hostage

This is a good article. It shows just how insane Castro was during the crisis. He was ready to go to war, even nuclear war, to stop a US invasion of Cuba. Kennedy was also absolutely reckless.

The hero of the whole crisis was Khrushchev. Khrushchev got Castro to back down and he stopped listening to him. He gave in to Kennedy’s outrageous and belligerent demands that nearly set off a nuclear war. Khrushchev was the only one out of the three who wanted to avoid war or nuclear war at all costs. Kennedy and Castro seemed to have that as a secondary goal.

The New York Times
October 25, 2012

By James G. Blight And Janet M. Lang

Waterloo, Ontario. On Oct. 26-27, 1962, human civilization came close to being destroyed. Schoolchildren were ordered into shelters; supermarket shelves were emptied of soup cans and bottled water. It was the most perilous moment of the Cuban missile crisis, and of the cold war. But the danger of Armageddon did not begin, as legend has it, when the United States learned that Soviet missiles had reached Cuba’s shores earlier that month.

Rather, it was driven by Fidel Castro’s fears and insecurities after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion and by the failures of President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev to take him seriously.

With Soviet missiles stationed on the island and America poised to attack, Cuba 50 years ago was far more dangerous than Iran or North Korea is today. But the 1962 crisis shows that a small, determined revolutionary state, backed into a corner and convinced of its inevitable demise, can bring the world to the brink of catastrophe.

Twenty years ago, we spent four days in Havana discussing the missile crisis with Mr. Castro, former Soviet officials and American decision makers from the Kennedy administration, including the former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.

Mr. Castro’s interest had been piqued by the declassification and release of Soviet and American documents in 1991 and 1992, which both surprised and angered him. These included long-suppressed passages from memoirs, released 20 years after Khrushchev’s death, in which he wrote that Mr. Castro had become irrational and possibly suicidal and that the crisis had to end before Cuba ignited a nuclear war.

In addition, declassified letters between Khrushchev and Kennedy revealed the extent to which Washington and Moscow cut Cuba out of negotiations, refused to consider Cuban demands and eventually resolved the crisis in spite of Mr. Castro’s objections. So to truly understand how the world came close to Armageddon, one must look not to Washington and Moscow but to Havana.

After the American-sponsored Bay of Pigs debacle, Fidel Castro, then just 35 but already Cuba’s unquestioned ruler, drew an astonishing conclusion. “The result of aggression against Cuba will be the start of a conflagration of incalculable consequences, and they will be affected too,” he told the Cuban people. “It will no longer be a matter of them feasting on us. They will get as good as they give.”

For the next 18 months, Mr. Castro prepared for nuclear Armageddon, while Kennedy and Khrushchev sleepwalked toward the abyss. Focused on their global competition, the United States and the Soviet Union were clueless about the mind-set of the smaller, weaker, poorer party. Kennedy wanted Cuba off his agenda and he resolved never again to cave in to his hawkish advisers and critics, who had continued clamoring for an invasion of the island, even after the Bay of Pigs disaster.

Khrushchev, for his part, was worried about “losing Cuba” and decided in early 1962 to offer nuclear missiles to Mr. Castro to deter the invasion they both believed was being planned but that Kennedy was privately resolved to avoid. But as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, the Soviet Union never intended to actually use the missiles; they were merely pawns in a game of superpower competition.

However, Mr. Castro believed the fundamental purpose of Soviet nuclear weapons was to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. After centuries of humiliation and irrelevance, he concluded, Cuba would matter fundamentally to the fate of humanity. Cuba couldn’t prevent the onslaught, nor could it expect to survive it. He insisted that the Cubans and Russians on the island would resist “to the last day and the last man, woman or child capable of holding a weapon.”

Around noon on Oct. 26, Mr. Castro summoned the Soviet ambassador, Aleksandr Alekseev, to his command post. Mr. Castro couldn’t understand why Soviet troops in Cuba were sitting on their hands while American planes were flying over the island with impunity.

He urged them to start shooting at U-2 spy planes with surface-to-air missiles and suggested that Cuban troops should begin firing on low-flying planes with antiaircraft guns, contrary to Soviet wishes.

Alekseev promised to relay Mr. Castro’s complaints to the Kremlin. Alekseev later told us he felt “almost schizophrenic” when he sent the cables to Moscow, because it was his duty to represent the cautious Soviet position, yet he himself, like Mr. Castro, expected an American onslaught. At that moment, “I was almost 100 percent Cuban,” he recalled.

While Cuba was preparing for nuclear war, Khrushchev and Kennedy were, unbeknown to Mr. Castro, moving toward a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Terrified that a catastrophic war might break out, Khrushchev took the initiative even as Kennedy was preparing an offer of his own. He wrote to Kennedy on Oct. 26: “Let us then display statesmenlike wisdom. I propose: we, for our part, will declare that our ships bound for Cuba are not carrying any armaments.

You will declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its troops and will not support any other forces which might intend to invade Cuba. Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba will be obviated.” It would take another three agonizing weeks to work out the details, but Kennedy and Khrushchev had finally locked onto a common wavelength.

All these letters (except those delivered over the radio at the peak of the crisis) were methodically dictated, translated, encrypted and then transmitted. Such slow communication in a time of crisis seems inconceivable today, but at the heart of the cold war absolute secrecy was the objective, not speed. (It was only after the missile crisis that the “red phone” hot line between the White House and the Kremlin was installed.)

Unaware of Kennedy’s and Khrushchev’s progress toward a deal, at 2 a.m. on Oct. 27, Mr. Castro decided to write to Khrushchev, encouraging him to use his nuclear weapons to destroy the United States in the event of an invasion. At 3 a.m., he arrived at the Soviet Embassy and told Alekseev that they should go into the bunker beneath the embassy because an attack was imminent.

According to declassified Soviet cables, a groggy but sympathetic Alekseev agreed, and soon they were set up underground with Castro dictating and aides transcribing and translating a letter.

Mr. Castro became frustrated, uncertain about what to say. After nine drafts, with the sun rising, Alekseev finally confronted Mr. Castro: are you asking Comrade Khrushchev to deliver a nuclear strike on the United States? Mr. Castro told him, “If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth!” Alekseev was shocked, but he dutifully assisted Mr. Castro in fine-tuning the 10th and final draft of the letter.

From his bunker, Mr. Castro wrote that, in the event of an American invasion, “the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it.”

An invasion, he added, “would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate defense however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.” Mr. Castro was calm as he composed this last will and testament for the 6.5 million citizens of Cuba, and the 43,000 Russians on the island who would be incinerated alongside them.

According to his son and biographer, Sergei Khrushchev, the Soviet premier received that letter in the midst of a tense leadership meeting and shouted, “This is insane; Fidel wants to drag us into the grave with him!” Khrushchev hadn’t understood that Mr. Castro believed that Cuba was doomed, that war was inevitable, and that the Soviets should transform Cuba from a mere victim into a martyr.

By ignoring Mr. Castro’s messianic martyrdom, both Kennedy and Khrushchev inadvertently pushed the world close to Armageddon.

The parallels between the Cuban missile crisis and today’s nuclear standoff with Iran are inexact, but eerie. Cuba then and Iran now share a revolutionary mind-set, a belief that Washington’s goal is regime change, and a conviction that nuclear weapons might guarantee their survival in the face of unrelenting American hostility.

The third player in today’s crisis is not a superpower but Israel, which views a nuclear Iran as an unacceptable threat to its existence. Israel shares with Iran (and 1960s Cuba) a national narrative that is steeped in the glorification of military heroism in the face of potential defeat.

Whoever wins the presidential election must persuade the Israelis to restrain themselves. Iran’s leaders are rational, and Israel’s overwhelming nuclear superiority means that Israel need not fear Iran. America must convince Iran that it doesn’t need nuclear weapons, because it has nothing to fear from Israel or the United States. The American president must do what even Kennedy and Khrushchev could not: treat a lesser power as an equal and pay attention to its fears.

Ignoring Cuba’s insecurities 50 years ago pushed the world to the brink of catastrophe. Today we must be wary of backing the Iranians into a corner so that they feel they must choose between capitulation and martyrdom. In 1962, the Soviets just barely stopped the Cubans; this time, there is no Khrushchev.

James G. Blight and Janet M. Lang are professors at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the authors of The Armageddon Letters: Kennedy/Khrushchev/Castro in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“How the U.S. Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War,” by Noam Chomsky

Great article by Chomsky shows just how sickening US imperialism really is. The Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by the US, which was threatening to invade Cuba since the Bay of Pigs operation was defeated. The purpose of Operation Mongoose, a series of often-terrorist attacks and sabotage, was to prepare for a US invasion of Cuba.

In order to ward off the invasion, the Cubans asked for the missiles to be installed there. The only reason it was resolved was because Khrushchev backed down agreed to Kennedy’s outrageously one-sided terms. However, the US did agree to remove missiles from Turkey and to not attack Cuba. The Pentagon wanted to attack Cuba several times during the crisis, but Kennedy turned them down. He is to be commended for this.

The Soviets pointed out that the US reserved the right to place nuclear missiles anywhere on Earth targeting the USSR, China and anyone else, including right up on their borders (the US put missiles on the USSR’s borders in Turkey), but the USSR and its allies had no right to reciprocate by placing defensive missiles in Cuba.

As usual, the hypocrisy of US imperialism won out. The US has a right to target anyone on Earth with whatever weapons it has, and place those weapons anywhere, even right on country’s borders, but not one nation on Earth has the right to fight back against US imperialism by responding in kind.

US imperialism is one sick, depraved monster!

One thing that Kennedy was worried about was not that the Cuban missiles would attack the US (the lie that was portrayed to gullible American fools) but instead that the missiles would serve to deter the murderous meddlings of US imperialism elsewhere in the Hemisphere. Kennedy worried that the missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela that Kennedy was then planning.

We see the same thing with Iran. The US and Israel are presently targeting Iran with nukes. If Iran got a bomb, they might be able to even the score and defend themselves against US and Israeli hegemony. This cannot be tolerated.

Prior to that, Kennedy had run for President on a platform involving a “missile gap” with the US and the USSR. The Soviets supposedly had many more missiles than we did, and it was all Eisenhower’s fault. However, this was a complete lie, and Kennedy knew it at the time. It was disgusting of Kennedy to lie his way into office like that.

During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the US threatened nuclear war again against the USSR while authorizing Israel to break a cease-fire that had been imposed on both sides.

Again in 1983, Reagan threatened the USSR again by placing Pershing missiles on 5 minute launch and instituting massive US air and naval probe attacks on the USSR. This led to a major war scare.

India and Pakistan have also had a few nuclear war near misses and scares.

Chomsky concludes the article by noting that nuclear war probably cannot be held off forever, and some day, someone won’t back down, or a scare will turn into a launch. He finishes by saying that nuclear missiles are incompatible with the survival of mankind.

How the U.S. Played Russian Roulette with Nuclear War

by Noam Chomsky

The American attacks are often dismissed in U.S. commentary as silly pranks, CIA shenanigans that got out of hand. That is far from the truth. The best and the brightest had reacted to the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion with near hysteria, including the president, who solemnly informed the country that:

“The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong … can possibly survive.”

And they can only survive, he evidently believed, by massive terror though that addendum was kept secret, and is still not known to loyalists who perceive the ideological enemy as having “gone on the attack” the near-universal perception, as Kern observes.

After the Bay of Pigs defeat, historian Piero Gleijeses writes that JFK launched a crushing embargo to punish the Cubans for defeating a U.S.-run invasion, and “asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to lead the top-level interagency group that oversaw Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare and sabotage he launched in late 1961 to visit the ‘terrors of the earth’ on Fidel Castro and, more prosaically, to topple him.”

The phrase “terrors of the earth” is Arthur Schlesinger’ s, in his quasi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility to conduct the terrorist war, and informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries “the top priority in the United States Government all else is secondary no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared” in the effort to overthrow the Castro regime.

The Mongoose operations were run by Edward Lansdale, who had ample experience in “counterinsurgency” a standard term for terrorism that we direct. He provided a timetable leading to “open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime” in October 1962.

The “final definition” of the program recognized that “final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention, ” after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis. The implication is that US military intervention would take place in October 1962 when the missile crisis erupted. The events just reviewed help explain why Cuba and Russia had good reason to take such threats seriously.

Years later, Robert McNamara recognized that Cuba was justified in fearing an attack. “If I were in Cuban or Soviet shoes, I would have thought so, too,” he observed at a major conference on the missile crisis on the 40th anniversary.

As for Russia’s “desperate effort to give the USSR the appearance of equality”, to which Stern refers, recall that Kennedy’s very narrow victory in the 1960 election relied heavily on a fabricated “missile gap” concocted to terrify the country and to condemn the Eisenhower administration as soft on national security. There was indeed a “missile gap”, but strongly in favor of the US.

The first “public, unequivocal administration statement” on the true facts, in his authoritative study of the Kennedy missile program, was in October 1961, when Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric informed the Business Council that “the U.S. would have a larger nuclear delivery system left after a surprise attack than the nuclear force which the Soviet Union could employ in its first strike.”

The Russians, of course, were well aware of their relative weakness and vulnerability. They were also aware of Kennedy’s reaction when Khrushchev offered to sharply reduce offensive military capacity and proceeded to do so unilaterally when Kennedy failed to respond: namely, Kennedy undertook a huge armaments program.

In Retrospect

The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962.

It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere, aimed at China or Russia or anyone else, and right on their borders; and the accompanying principle that Cuba had no right to have missiles for defense against what appeared to be an imminent US invasion.

To establish these principles firmly, it was entirely proper to face a high risk of war of unimaginable destruction, and to reject simple, and admittedly fair, ways to end the threat.

Garthoff observes that “in the United States, there was almost universal approbation for President Kennedy’s handling of the crisis.” Dobbs writes that “the relentlessly upbeat tone was established by the court historian, Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, who wrote that Kennedy had ‘dazzled the world’ through a ‘combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated’.”

Rather more soberly, Stern partially agrees, noting that Kennedy repeatedly rejected the militant advice of his advisers and associates who called for military force and dismissal of peaceful options.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour. Graham Allison joins many others in presenting them as “a guide for how to defuse conflicts, manage great-power relationships, and make sound decisions about foreign policy in general”. In a very narrow sense, that judgment seems reasonable. The ExComm tapes reveal that the president stood apart from others, sometimes almost all others, in rejecting premature violence.

There is, however, a further question: how should JFK’s relative moderation in management of the crisis be evaluated against the background of the broader considerations just reviewed?

But that question does not arise in a disciplined intellectual and moral culture, which accepts without question the basic principle that the U.S. effectively owns the world by right, and is, by definition, a force for good despite occasional errors and misunderstandings, so that it is plainly entirely proper for the U.S. to deploy massive offensive force all over the world, while it is an outrage for others (allies and clients apart) to make even the slightest gesture in that direction, or even to think of deterring the threatened use of violence by the benign global hegemon.

That doctrine is the primary official charge against Iran today: it might pose a deterrent to US and Israeli force. It was a consideration during the missile crisis as well. In internal discussion, the Kennedy brothers expressed their fears that Cuban missiles might deter a US invasion of Venezuela then under consideration. So “the Bay of Pigs was really right,” JFK concluded.

The principles still contribute to the constant risk of nuclear war. There has been no shortage of severe dangers since the missile crisis. Ten years later, during the 1973 Israel-Arab war, Henry Kissinger called a high-level nuclear alert (Defcon 3) to warn the Russians to keep hands off while he was secretly authorizing Israel to violate the ceasefire imposed by the US and Russia.

When Reagan came into office a few years later, the US launched operations probing Russian defenses and simulating air and naval attacks, while placing Pershing missiles in Germany with a five-minute flight time to Russian targets, providing what the CIA called a “super-sudden first strike” capability.

Naturally, this caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., has repeatedly been invaded and virtually destroyed. That led to a major war scare in 1983. There have been hundreds of cases when human intervention aborted a first strike minutes before launch, after automated systems gave false alarms. We don’t have Russian records, but there’s no doubt that their systems are far more accident-prone.

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have come close to nuclear war several times, and the sources of the conflict remain.

Both have refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty, along with Israel, and have received U.S. support for development of their nuclear weapons programs until today, in the case of India, now a U.S. ally. War threats in the Middle East, which might become reality very soon, once again escalate the dangers.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands. But we can hardly count on such sanity forever. It’s a near miracle that nuclear war has so far been avoided. There is more reason than ever to attend to the warning of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein , almost 60 years ago, that we must face a choice that is “stark and dreadful and inescapable”:

Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?

How Does the Cooperative Mode of Development Fit into the Critique of Capitalism?

It turns out that it works very well.

Let us look here, at a National Bolshevik site from the Netherlands. I don’t think much of NatBols, but let’s leave that aside for now.

An Analysis of Capitalism

In this contribution the NSA will attempt to further elaborate on the matter of capitalism. How can we describe it, how does it work and how should we analyze this in the contemporary movement?

We consider society to be a class society, in which there is an ongoing class struggle every day. This class society exists out of different classes, the (property-less) working class and the propertied class. The propertied class we call capitalists.

In this matter we define property not as ownership of a house or a car, but as the ownership of the means of production. Think of capital, machines, land, labor and so on. The working class is forced to “hire” his labor to the capitalist in order to stay alive.

The capitalist has to bring a product onto the market.
This product has a certain value and profit, also known as surplus or overvalue. From the value of the product the workers wage is paid, who uses this to pay his rent and to buy provisions. Without this the worker would not be able to survive.

The profit is used for the maintenance of the production machines and goes to the capitalists themselves (industrial owners and stockholders). This exploitation of the working class is what we call the capitalist economy.

For the NSA collective this is the only correct analysis of the capitalist system. In the early ’20′s Gottfried Feder thought that the crucial problem of capitalism lies in the sphere of money circulation. But we are not merely opposed to the economic system of debt slavery and the credit of banks (financiers- or banking capital).

We believe, just like Marx, that the fundamental problem of capitalism lies in the ownership of the means of production. Therefore we stand on the basis of class struggle. A struggle between different classes who have different interests.

The worker has an urge to survive, in which he depends on the capitalist class, who is only interested in more profits. This has been a fact throughout history: slave and slaveholder, bondman and feudal lord.

It goes on to say that the solution is to overthrow capitalism and replace it with “soviet socialism.” That would not be the same as the socialism of the Soviet Union. You have to read the piece to figure out what they are talking about.

Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that “soviet socialism” would solve the problems of state socialism better than any other kind of socialist mode of development. These models have all been fraught with typical problems that seem to reproduce themselves perfectly no matter how many ways new states try to tinker with the model.

Cubans now recite the same saying that Soviet citizens used to say in the 1970′s: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” There is endemic thievery from the state (after all, if it’s the property of everyone, it’s my property, so why not steal stuff?) the same way the there was endemic pilfering from the state in the USSR. There is the exact same housing shortage, though Soviet housing was not falling apart the same way Cuban housing is.

This shows that the Cubans have not been able to successfully modify the Soviet model so that it works any better than it did 40 years ago. This model only appears to have one endgame, now matter how much you mess around with it to try to make it work better.

Now let us look at the cooperative mode in light of the problems of capitalism listed above.

We consider society to be a class society, in which there is an ongoing class struggle every day. This class society exists out of different classes, the (property-less) working class and the propertied class. The propertied class we call capitalists.

There may well end up being different classes of workers under the cooperate mode, but it ought to eliminate class struggle at least. Because all of the working class employed in cooperatives ought to be the owners of some sort of property. At any rate, the propertied workers would not be exploiting any non-propertied workers by hiring them and brokering out their labor, and any worker could theoretically become a property owner by getting himself hired by a cooperative.

We could get away from the property question altogether by instead just having the state own all of the land and lease it out to homeowners, businesses and farmers on a long term basis. Only the state would actually own property, and it would not exploit anyone’s labor.

In this matter we define property not as ownership of a house or a car, but as the ownership of the means of production. Think of capital, machines, land, labor and so on. The working class is forced to “hire” his labor to the capitalist in order to stay alive. The capitalist has to bring a product onto the market.

In this case, the workers themselves, the working class, would be the owners of the means of production, which would be the capital, machine, land and labor utilized on the cooperatives. No worker would be forced to hire out his labor to any capitalist to survive, because there would be no capitalists. There would only be other workers.

Unemployed workers would need to find work at a cooperative enterprise, it is true. Workers would need to find other workers that would hire them in order to survive. If some folks can’t find any work still, the state could provide a welfare state at a basic level lower than that which the workers would make working at cooperatives. This way all would be allowed to survive.

The capitalist has to bring a product onto the market. This product has a certain value and profit, also known as surplus or overvalue. From the value of the product the workers wage is paid, who uses this to pay his rent and to buy provisions. Without this the worker would not be able to survive.

The people bringing products to the market would be the working class themselves, the workers. They would bring products to the market and sell them to their fellow workers. The worker would retain the full value of his labor, obviating the Labor Theory of Value whereby the worker does not get the full value of his labor as the capitalist in effect brokers out the worker’s time when he sells the product produced by that worker.

The profit is used for the maintenance of the production machines en goes to the capitalists themselves (industrial owners and stockholders). This exploitation of the working class is what we call the capitalist economy.

The profit, instead of going to the capitalist exploiters, would go to the workers themselves. Some would also be reinvested in the enterprise to keep it running. So there would be no exploitation of the working class, no capitalists, and no capitalist economy.

For the NSA collective this is the only correct analysis of the capitalist system. In the early ’20′s Gottfried Feder thought that the crucial problem of capitalism lies in the sphere of money circulation. But we are not merely opposed to the economic system of debt slavery and the credit of banks (financiers- or banking capital).

The problem of banks is a difficult one, but banks could be run by the state or the community in some form such as the community banks in the Mondragon Cooperatives and the state bank in China. Or the banks could be credit union that are owned by their own consumers.

We believe, just like Marx, that the fundamental problem of capitalism lies in the ownership of the means of production. Therefore we stand on the basis of class struggle. A struggle between different classes who have different interests.

The worker has an urge to survive, in which he depends on the capitalist class, who is only interested in more profits. This has been a fact throughout history: slave and slaveholder, bondman and feudal lord.

The cooperative mode completely wipes out Marx’s central problem of capitalism which is capitalists owning the means of production. Under socialism, the means of production is supposed to be owned by the workers. This socialist goal is accomplished very effectively via the cooperative mode.

As there no capitalists and no workers being exploited, there would be no class struggle in the typical form that we know it under capitalism anyway. The workers’ need to survive would however by incumbent upon being hired on at a co-op by one of their fellow workers, however the worker would not really sell his labor power to survive, instead he would need to become an owner of a co-op in order to survive.

Workers still have no guaranteed survival. However, a sufficient welfare state could allow jobless workers to survive at a low level while they search out work among their fellow workers. The central relationship of exploitation carried over from feudalism to capitalism, that of the slaveowner and the slave and the bondsman and the lord would be eliminated as there would no longer be any exploitation of labor for profit in any form.

As you can see though, the cooperative mode does solve many of the problems of capitalism and substitutes well for socialism by fulfilling many of socialism’s goals.