I have been thinking about how to introduce some of the methodologies we use in DK to augment the basic liberalism and progressivism necessary to produce more and better Democrats. This piece is intended to introduce some basic texts which for many might seem too simplistic and even heretical but are hopefully useful for those wanting to consider that many of the perspectives often refelected in DK have a sincere and authentic theoretical foundation.

I chose a recent diary by Kos on conservative understanding of the decline in bee populations to serve as an example of how an understanding of Marx can add to the interpretive strength of an already strong argument. The “light comes on” is not enlightenment in any earth-shaking sense but it is a reflection on the need to consider that there are preexisting social analysis methodologies that have made progressives more effective in guiding action and organizing resistance to the rise of RW power.

Buried way at the bottom of this piece on the increasing death rate of honey bees:

But Mr. Adee [the South Dakota owner of the nation's largest beekeeping company), who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about [pesticide use in crops], said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”

I’m going to do some stereotyping and assume that a South Dakota farmer who scorns “extremist” environmentalist is a Republican. It’s not much of a stretch. So like Sen. Rob Portman’s conversion on marriage equality because of his gay son, or Sen. Mark Kirk’s conversion on health care services to the less-wealthy because of his debilitating stroke, Adee decides that maybe the dirty fucking hippies are onto something when he, himself, is directly affected by unfettered degradation of our environment.

I emphasize the expression directly affected because it is important for acting in a way to understand Anti-Capitalism This point of view recognizes that there are changes in consciousness, the understanding that a tension between beliefs and reality has been heightened and proven transformative. In this diary Kos discusses the contradiction of GOP ideology in confronting the complex yet revelatory incidence of bee death as a sign of impending ecological disaster. This serves as a useful way to provide a foundation to discuss the theories necessary to understand a Marxist position on the need to transform the present relations of production.

But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests. While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths. The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths. Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.

This suspicion is the simple result of an economy driven by capitalist desire to systematically maximize profit that also ignores the externalities connected to the use of technologies that also harm the environment and in the long-run destroy even the industry itself. American beekeeping and honey production is both hobby-farm, small scale cottage industry and large-scale agribusiness. In other countries it can be even barely organized gathering. Ultimately change comes from knowledge and its productive application, but a knowledge that is crucially aware of direct effects as critical practices.

I have chosen two elementary texts on Marx to give readers an introduction that is often distorted by cold-war anti-communist reactionaries that one finds in the Marx 101 search on the internet, although Brad DeLong’s Understanding Marx lecture is a good one. I have chosen Peter Singer’s. Marx: A Very Short Introduction (2000) and Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right (2011). This is not a book review, although I would hope that these two accessible texts might appeal even to the less doctrinaire Kossack. Please continue reading to contribute to the discussion of the basics.

The relationship between humans and their environment is one of the ways which we can develop a position against capitalism and for a future that embraces greater democracy. For Marx it is human effort, the energy of cognitive and physical labor(sic) and its relation to the transformation of nature in language, land, materials, and activity as well as the interactions among humans. This diary is intended to introduce two introductory texts on Marx in the hope that readers might become more interested in the necessity of continuing to revisit the Specter of Marx if only to ensure that after the fall of monolithic Soviet style State Capitalist communism in the 1990s he is neither Ghost nor Zombie but with Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, the community of scholars necessary for an Anti-Capitalist future.

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.
The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments.
(Karl Marx. Capital Volume One Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value, Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value, Section 1 – The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm)

The imagination here is as important a labor process as that of the body. In an age of increased mediation, it is not the potential magic of the cave painting but the many ideological constructions that affect the awareness of the modality of work and ultimately at scale the modality of production, from primitive communism, to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, and then to advanced communism. In each instance it is accumulation of matter, whether as cognitive knowledge formed in minds and transmitted across generations orally or by documents, or physical accumulation of knowledge shown in training, or the accumulation physical objects as wealth or machinery. Unlike the RW, these endowments are based in equity and equality and are a common-pool resource as part of our existence on this planet and remain important for our self-governance.

The ignorance of conservatives that irks Kos as well as so many here in DK is often embodied as the lack of conservative imagination and sometimes referred to as the low-information voter/citizen. Progressives have inevitably embraced the need to consider the greater system of values that exist in economic systems especially those closest to nature and its cultivation as agricultural production. Here’s some of the interpretation of the concept of “low-information” as a hierarchical term

American pollster and political scientist Samuel Popkin coined the term “low-information” in 1991 when he used the phrase “low-information signaling” in his book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Low-information signaling referred to cues or heuristics used by voters, in lieu of substantial information, to determine who to vote for. Examples include voters liking Bill Clinton for eating at McDonald’s, and perceiving John Kerry and Mitt Romney as elitist for wind-surfing and jet-ski riding respectively. Some low-information voters’ views are more moderate than those of high-information voters, they are less likely to vote, and are looking for a candidate they find personally appealing. They tend to be swing voters, and they tend to vote split-ticket more than well-informed voters do, researchers say because they lack a coherent ideology. Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against their own interests, and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters. Thirty-year Republican House of Representatives and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren, in a 2011 article entitled “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”, characterized low-information voters as anti-intellectual and hostile-to-science “religious cranks,” and claimed Republicans are deliberately manipulating LIVs to undermine their confidence in American democratic institutions. Popular syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh uses the term with regular frequency to denote voters who pull the lever for Democratic candidates for largely esoteric reasons. In a March 25, 2013 transcript, Rush says “I have never said that low-information voters are stupid. I just said they don’t know what they think they know. They are prisoners to the media, which has dumbed them down. Low-information voters can be doctors. Low-information voters can be scientists. They can be among all walks of life. It has nothing to do with IQ. It has to do with what they don’t know because of their media sources. Low-information voters are clearly people that don’t have all the information available to make a voting choice. That’s all they are. And they’re all over the place. And most of them do vote Democrat. Most of them did vote for Obama. It’s not a comment on their intelligence. It’s not that they’re stupid or don’t understand the issues. They just haven’t had it all explained to them.”

This short-sightedness or false consciousness as shown in the latter example was perhaps even more common in the 19th century of Marx, the self-limiting of human potential is as evident then as it is now with those who cannot understand that the death of honey bees might signal a breakdown in an ecology taken for advantage or as in the 19th century, as easily alienated from its origins as the American frontier and its bounty was alienated from its aboriginal First Nation owners. The colonizers always have an ideology, often referred to as a form of ideology or system of beliefs that rationalizes the separation of ownership or alienation of property from its original owners as a matter of exploitable advantage or power. An individual can regain power or autonomy by appropriating it by some right imposed by a claim of comparative advantage. Money or wealth helps to establish that warrant and eventual social divisions or classes established by wealth or claims to wealth alienate land labor and eventually capital. The goal in the 19th century as it is in a world with unevenly developed economies is to command, control and coordinate the value of what ultimately has always been a more collective product. New forms that mediate that value are proxies like money which arbitrarily measures labor and mystifies its values of uses and exchange.

For the Young Hegelians the ‘superficial expression’ of Hegel’s philosophy was his acceptance of the state of politics, religion, and society in early nineteenth-century Prussia: the ‘inner core’ was his account of Mind overcoming alienation, reinterpreted as an account of human self-consciousness freeing itself from the illusions that prevent it achieving self-understanding and freedom. (Singer p. 21). When rewritten in terms of the real world instead of the mysterious world of Mind, it made sense. ‘Mind’ was read as ‘human self-consciousness’. The goal of history became the liberation of humanity; but this could not be achieved until the religious illusion had been overcome. (ibid p. 22). The solution is to realize that theology is a kind of misdescribed anthropology. What we believe of God is really true of ourselves. Thus humanity can regain its essence, which in religion it has lost.(ibid p.23) …human beings are in a state of alienation, a state in which their own creations appear to them as alien, hostile forces and in which instead of controlling their creations, they are controlled by them.
(ibid p. 69).

This reversal of control is easiest seen in even the most trivial of Easter-time constructions where the entry to Heaven in the Christian religion compares the pursuit of profit to a variety of metaphors ultimately made contradictory later in history by the practice of indulgences. One does not need to think of the money-lenders in the Temple to see Marx’s point of view:

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it. (J 60) The final sentence points the way forward. First the Young Hegelians, including Bauer and Feuerbach, see religion as the alienated human essence, and seek to end this alienation by their critical studies of Christianity. Then Feuerbach goes beyond religion, arguing that any philosophy which concentrates on the mental rather than the material side of human nature is a form of alienation. Now Marx insists that it is neither religion nor philosophy, but money that is the barrier to human freedom. The obvious next step is a critical study of economics. (Singer p. 27)

The formation of classes is problematic for many reasons none the least of which is the synchronous/asynchronous unevenness of cultural and economic developments in a world of differentiated social divisions and cultural locations, but in a determinist sense the development of divisions of labor and technologies produce new alienations including the property relations of land, labor, and capital including means of (re)production.

Here is the germ of a new solution to the problem of human alienation. Criticism and philosophical theory alone will not end it. A more practical force is needed, and that force is provided by the artificially impoverished working class. This lowest class of society will bring about ‘the actualization of philosophy’ – by which Marx means the culmination of the philosophical and historical saga described, in a mystified form, by Hegel. The proletariat, following the lead of the new radical philosophy, will complete the dialectical process in which humans have emerged, grown estranged from themselves, and become enslaved by their own alienated essence. Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property – thus excluding others from the freedom they gain – the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity. (Singer pp. 29-30) Marx had now developed two important new insights: that economics is the chief form of human alienation, and that the material force needed to liberate humanity from its domination by economics is to be found in the working class. (ibid p. 32). Marx draws another important point from the classical economists. Those who employ the workers – the capitalists – build up their wealth through the labour of their workers. They become wealthy by keeping for themselves a certain amount of the value their workers produce. Capital is nothing else but accumulated labour. The worker’s labour increases the employer’s capital. This increased capital is used to build bigger factories and buy more machines. This increases the division of labour. This puts more self-employed workers out of business. They must then sell their labour on the market. This intensifies the competition among workers trying to get work, and lowers wages. (ibid p. 33). The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien objective world which he fashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, the less there is that belongs to him. It is the same in religion. The more man attributes to God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; then it no longer belongs to him but to the object… The externalization of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside him, independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him. The life he has given to the object confronts him as hostile and alien.(ibid p. 34)

Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” – Bee Attack from Anselm von Seherr-Thoss on Vimeo.

With beekeeping this is less so, although it is the market for the byproduct which becomes commodified and whose accumulated value becomes contestable, as in who owns the artifical hives, the land on which they sit, the logistics of bringing the honey to market, etc. But the value of the practice is even referred to in the context of cultural products such as Ridley Scott’s movie, Robin Hood, where Friar Tuck is ” a procreator by design”, rather than being a “churchy friar” and that “the bees keep (him) and much as he keeps them”.

A consequence of this alienation of humans from their own nature is that they are also alienated from each other. Productive activity becomes ‘activity under the domination, coercion and yoke of another man’. This other man becomes an alien, hostile being. Instead of humans relating to each other co-operatively, they relate competitively. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests. (Singer p. 36)

Inevitably it is the emerging social divisions, owners and owned, leaders and followers, worshipped and worshippers, first in language, then in subsistence reality. The generational and intergenerational social relationships constitute with material reality a life often in contradiction to the potential of utopian futures, but in all cases social existence creates consciousness because it is living minds that cognitively produce a conscious life.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals… Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or by anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life… (Singer p. 44). This is as clear a statement of the broad outline of his theory as Marx was ever to achieve. Thirteen years later, summing up the ‘guiding thread’ of his studies, he used similar language: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness’. With The German Ideology we have arrived at Marx’s mature formulation of the outline of historical materialism (though not the detailed account of the process of change). In view of this, and Marx’s later description of the work as settling accounts with his ‘former philosophic conscience’, it might be thought that his early interest in alienation has now been replaced by a more scientific approach. It has not. Henceforth Marx makes more use of historical data and less use of abstract philosophical reasoning about the way the world must be; but his interest in alienation persists. The German Ideology still describes the social power as something which is really nothing other than the productive force of individuals, and yet appears to these individuals as ‘alien and outside them’ because they do not understand its origin and cannot control it. Instead of them directing it, it directs them. The abolition of private property and the regulation of production under communism would abolish this ‘alienation between men and their products’ and enable men to ‘regain control of exchange, production and the mode of their mutual relationships’ (GI 170). It is not the use of the word ‘alienation’ that is important here. The same point can be made in other words. What is important is that Marx’s theory of history is a vision of human beings in a state of alienation. Human beings cannot be free if they are subject to forces that determine their thoughts, their ideas, their very nature as human beings. The materialist conception of history tells us that human beings are totally subject to forces they do not understand and cannot control. Moreover the materialist conception of history tells us that these forces are not supernatural tyrants, for ever above and beyond human control, but the productive powers of human beings themselves. Human productive powers, instead of serving human beings, appear to them as alien and hostile forces. (Singer pp. 45-46)

This premise of conflict as a natural and inevitable condition is the history of human governance whether by sovereign or by elites and conditions the fictive universe of those who would manipulate mass consciousness in what the Internet has proven to be the lowest of information forms.

For Eagleton, the need to reiterate the need for Marxian thought in an age of ‘bagger Dittoheads is evermore necessary in the simplest of cultivated activities like beekeeping. The movement for urban beekeeping is such a pervasive example of the power of alterative and progressive philosophies and inverting the relation of country and city not unlike the potential for radical liberalism cited by E.P. Thompson.

“The rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property,” Marx writes in Capital, is “an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.” 19 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 219. Capitalist agriculture, he considers, flourishes only by sapping the “original sources of all wealth … the soil and its labourers.” As part of his critique of industrial capitalism, Marx discusses waste disposal, the destruction of forests, the pollution of rivers, environmental toxins and the quality of the air. Ecological sustainability, he considered, would play a vital role in a socialist agriculture. 20 See Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits,” New Left Review, no. 178 (November/ December 1989), p. 83. Behind this concern for Nature lies a philosophical vision. Marx is a naturalist and materialist for whom men and women are part of Nature, and forget their creatureliness at their peril. He even writes in Capital of Nature as the “body” of humanity, “with which [it] must remain in constant interchange.” The instruments of production, he comments, are “extended bodily organs.” The whole of civilisation, from senates to submarines, is simply an extension of our bodily powers. Body and world, subject and object, should exist in delicate equipoise, so that our environment is as expressive of human meanings as a language. Marx calls the opposite of this “alienation,” in which we can find no reflection of ourselves in a brute material world, and accordingly lose touch with our own most vital being. When this reciprocity of self and Nature breaks down, we are left with the world of meaningless matter of capitalism, in which Nature is just pliable stuff to be cuffed into whatever shape we fancy. Civilisation becomes one vast cosmetic surgery. At the same time, the self is divorced from Nature, its own body and the bodies of others. Marx believes that even our physical senses have become “commodified” under capitalism, as the body, converted into a mere abstract instrument of production, is unable to savour its own sensuous life. Only through communism could we come to feel our own bodies again. Only then, he argues, can we move beyond a brutally instrumental reason and take delight in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the world. Indeed, his work is “aesthetic” through and through. He complains in the Grundrisse that Nature under capitalism has become purely an object of utility, and has ceased to be recognized as a “power in itself.” Through material production, humanity in Marx’s view mediates, regulates and controls the “metabolism” between itself and Nature, in a two-way traffic which is far from some arrogant supremacy. And all this— Nature, labour, the suffering, productive body and its needs— constitutes for Marx the abiding infrastructure of human history. It is the narrative that runs through and beneath human cultures, leaving its inescapable impress on them all. As a “metabolic” exchange between humanity and Nature, labour is in Marx’s opinion an “eternal” condition which does not alter. What alters— what makes natural beings historical— are the various ways we humans go to work upon Nature. Humanity produces its means of subsistence in different ways. This is natural, in the sense that it is necessary for the reproduction of the species. But it is also cultural or historical, involving as it does specific kinds of sovereignty, conflict and exploitation. There is no reason to suppose that accepting the “eternal” nature of labour will deceive us into believing that these social forms are eternal as well.
Eagleton pp. 231-232)

It bears repeating: “Nature, labour, the suffering, productive body and its needs— constitutes for Marx the abiding infrastructure of human history. ” This is why we fight and why we know what is to be done.

Marx had a passionate faith in the individual and a deep suspicion of abstract dogma. He had no time for the concept of a perfect society, was wary of the notion of equality, and did not dream of a future in which we would all wear boiler suits with our National Insurance numbers stamped on our backs. It was diversity, not uniformity, that he hoped to see. Nor did he teach that men and women were the helpless playthings of history. He was even more hostile to the state than right-wing conservatives are, and saw socialism as a deepening of democracy, not as the enemy of it. His model of the good life was based on the idea of artistic self-expression. He believed that some revolutions might be peacefully accomplished, and was in no sense opposed to social reform. He did not focus narrowly on the manual working class. Nor did he see society in terms of two starkly polarized classes. He did not make a fetish of material production. On the contrary, he thought it should be done away with as far as possible. His ideal was leisure, not labour. If he paid such unflagging attention to the economic, it was in order to diminish its power over humanity. His materialism was fully compatible with deeply held moral and spiritual convictions. He lavished praise on the middle class, and saw socialism as the inheritor of its great legacies of liberty, civil rights and material prosperity. His views on Nature and the environment were for the most part startlingly in advance of his time. There has been no more staunch champion of women’s emancipation, world peace, the fight against fascism or the struggle for colonial freedom than the political movement to which his work gave birth.
Eagleton, Terry (2011) Why Marx Was Right (pp. 238-239).

top image information: The daughter of a member of an Ethiopian bee-keeping cooperative in Freweyni village looks after the hives. Her father has been appointed by the cooperative to act as a permanent manager of the colonies, which require protection from ants and small rodents. The cooperative of 19 local people – primarily unemployed and landless – bought the colonies on credit from Millennium Promise. For more information on Millennium Promise, please visit www.millenniumpromise.org, The closing image is a typical company beekeeping “factory” operation

It has been said many times that “sustainable capitalism” is an oxymoron. There are reasons why people believe this. The nature of capitalism has the need for growth built in. If there were any really strong contradictions in Tuesdays SOTU speech they rest right here. The call for economic growth and some sort of action toward addressing the climate change problem are really at odds with each other in their present context. Here is one example of the claim that capitalism is not in harmony with sustainability: Is Sustainable Capitalism an Oxymoron?

The root problem with capitalism is not that individual firms are incentivized to grow, but that the economy as a whole must grow…

When oligopolies are the form of economic structure the need for regulation and the effect of regulation on growth is even more important.On the Need for Regulation of Oligopoly and Oligopsony

This is the important point. Unregulated oligopy, with its extra normal profits, when it becomes extensive, arrests the growth of the entire economy. Indeed, the situation is actually worse, because by continuing to purge the rest of the economy of its normal income, it can cause the rest of the economy’s revenue to be less than its expenses. Thus, the remainder of the economy, the oligopist’s market, may actually be forced into contraction. But this is bad for the oligopist as well.

This is a familiar theme and would be resented by those who detest regulation. Maybe if their wishes are not followed the result is more favorable for growth, but what will that growth do to sustainability?
The nature of oligopolies

Firms often collude in an attempt to stabilize unstable markets, so as to reduce the risks inherent in these markets for investment and product development. There are legal restrictions on such collusion in most countries. There does not have to be a formal agreement for collusion to take place (although for the act to be illegal there must be actual communication between companies)–for example, in some industries there may be an acknowledged market leader which informally sets prices to which other producers respond, known as price leadership.
In other situations, competition between sellers in an oligopoly can be fierce, with relatively low prices and high production. This could lead to an efficient outcome approaching perfect competition. The competition in an oligopoly can be greater when there are more firms in an industry than if, for example, the firms were only regionally based and did not compete directly with each other.

The way these things are discussed in economic theory would lead you to believe that these are just another form of business groupings. Yet is seems clear that they are a natural way for a capitalist system to develop. Read on below and I will try to make this clear.

Here are some of the attributes of oligopolies:

Profit maximization conditions: An oligopoly maximizes profits by producing where marginal revenue equals marginal costs.

Ability to set price: Oligopolies are price setters rather than price takers.

Entry and exit: Barriers to entry are high. The most important barriers are economies of scale, patents, access to expensive and complex technology, and strategic actions by incumbent firms designed to discourage or destroy nascent firms. Additional sources of barriers to entry often result from government regulation favoring existing firms making it difficult for new firms to enter the market.

Number of firms: “Few” – a “handful” of sellers. There are so few firms that the actions of one firm can influence the actions of the other firms.
Long run profits: Oligopolies can retain long run abnormal profits. High barriers of entry prevent sideline firms from entering market to capture excess profits.
Product differentiation: Product may be homogeneous (steel) or differentiated (automobiles).

Perfect knowledge: Assumptions about perfect knowledge vary but the knowledge of various economic factors can be generally described as selective. Oligopolies have perfect knowledge of their own cost and demand functions but their inter-firm information may be incomplete. Buyers have only imperfect knowledge as to price, cost and product quality.

Interdependence: The distinctive feature of an oligopoly is interdependence. Oligopolies are typically composed of a few large firms. Each firm is so large that its actions affect market conditions. Therefore the competing firms will be aware of a firm’s market actions and will respond appropriately. This means that in contemplating a market action, a firm must take into consideration the possible reactions of all competing firms and the firm’s counter-moves. It is very much like a game of chess or pool in which a player must anticipate a whole sequence of moves and counter-moves in determining how to achieve his or her objectives. For example, an oligopoly considering a price reduction may wish to estimate the likelihood that competing firms would also lower their prices and possibly trigger a ruinous price war. Or if the firm is considering a price increase, it may want to know whether other firms will also increase prices or hold existing prices constant. This high degree of interdependence and need to be aware of what other firms are doing or might do is to be contrasted with lack of interdependence in other market structures. In a perfectly competitive (PC) market there is zero interdependence because no firm is large enough to affect market price. All firms in a PC market are price takers, as current market selling price can be followed predictably to maximize short-term profits. In a monopoly, there are no competitors to be concerned about. In a monopolistically-competitive market, each firm’s effects on market conditions is so negligible as to be safely ignored by competitors.

Non-Price Competition: Oligopolies tend to compete on terms other than price. Loyalty schemes, advertisement, and product differentiation are all examples of non-price competition.

Here are some examples in our economy:

Many media industries today are essentially oligopolies.
Six movie studios receive 90% of American film revenues.[citation needed]
The television and high speed internet industry is mostly an oligopoly of seven companies: The Walt Disney Company, CBS Corporation, Viacom, Comcast, Hearst Corporation, Time Warner, and News Corporation. See Concentration of media ownership.
Four wireless providers (AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel) control 89% of the cellular telephone service market. This is not to be confused with cellular telephone manufacturing, an integral portion of the cellular telephone market as a whole.
Healthcare insurance in the United States consists of very few insurance companies controlling major market share in most states. For example, California’s insured population of 20 million is the most competitive in the nation and 44% of that market is dominated by two insurance companies, Anthem and Kaiser Permanente.
Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors control about 80% of the beer industry.

In March 2012, the United States Department of Justice announced that it would sue six major publishers for price fixing in the sale of electronic books. The accused publishers are Apple, Simon & Schuster Inc, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins Publishers.

In today’s global economy there are far more:The world’s seed oligopoly

PLAYERS: A fistful of transnational firms, the Gene Giants, dominates global seed sales. Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta – all among the world’s top-ranking pesticide firms – lead the pack.

The fossil fuel oligopoly has its special qualities:Capitalism = Corporatism = Oligopoly = Rentier Stagnation

I contend that corporations have always been the main instrument of this drive toward oligopoly, and they have been the only significant modern form of it. It would have been difficult if not impossible for Oil Age economic actors to achieve oligopoly if not for the way the corporate form tilted the playing field and rigged the markets. Cheap, plentiful oil in itself would have been a radically democratizing force. (Who knows? Perhaps textbook “free markets” could even have thrived.) Only a severe artificial restriction on economic freedom could ever have enabled oligopolies to cohere. This artifice was the corporation.

Similarly, modern technology, whatever its other issues, would have been a tremendously liberating egalitarian force if not artificially enclosed and controlled. The corporate form was the main mode of this enclosure.

In all ways legally and politically possible, corporations have monopolized the vast bounty and freedom which fossil fuels and the modern human mind held in potential. Privatization of public commons like the resources of the earth, including fossil fuels, is at one, physical extreme. The radical extension of the IP regime to the point that it constitutes a new enclosure of a potentially infinite public commons is at the other extreme of intellect and spirit. In both cases, and all in between, there’s been little of private individual involvement. In every case I can think of, the corporate form is preferred. Certainly if the genius of capitalism could conceive of a non-corporatized way to compete, someone would be doing it.

Not only is the corporation the most efficient wealth-extracting machine. By design it’s forbidden to do anything but all it can to maximize its extractions. According to the responsibility of management to shareholders, a corporation is required to subvert the rules of capitalist competition. If the more effective expenditure for short-term gain in lobbying for anti-competitive legislation or regulatory treatment, that must be chosen over longer-term research investment. Same for the mergers and acquisitions and offshoring which we know are so destructive and serve no purpose even from the “capitalist” point of view, but which can accomplish a short-term goosing of the stock price.

It’s clear that in reality capitalism always seeks oligopoly; that corporatism is the only viable form of oligopoly under the conditions of the Oil Age and now energy descent; and therefore that capitalism is synonymous with corporatism.

Economic theory is one thing. Actual practice is another. We are witnessing what is being said above in many ways right now. The corporations with successful oligopolies are quite content with what we have. They will only welcome changes (growth) that increases their profit. They will distribute propaganda that projects various myths about the role of government to protect themselves. These groupings of corporations are one reason for limits on growth that are systemic. Changing this is a goal that can only lead to a better situation if the changes are done in an intelligent manner with planning and ongoing monitoring to change course when the outcome conflicts with desired goals. As we make fun of republican obstruction it may pay to ask ourselves if they are really as dumb as we paint them. Clearly profits are high and their world is grinding along very securely. Meanwhile speeches from the Whitehouse seem to speak to a fictitious world.

The economy we have is locked into well established patterns of resource depletion, needless consumption, and deadly waste production. Clearly we do not want that economy to grow. We do not need growth we need change. We need to build a sustainable system and to create jobs for both the unemployed and those who now work in places that are doing us harm. If people are to live a decent life they need to earn wages to make that possible. Excess profits and needless consumption can be eliminated to make this happen. Manufacturing those things we need to last and in a form that is repairable is imperative. Growing food in sane ways locally whenever possible is also a part of such a transformation. Such measures would include green energy sources and life styles that cut back on energy and other resource consumption.

No, it is not possible to ask a sitting president to start such a revolution. Yet if you understand what is really needed the kind of theater we are given in our political world is not even close to satisfying. We need better weathermen to tell the people which way the wind is blowing. And we need them soon.

Van Jones said not so long ago: “If we want to fix the economy, the first thing we got to do is repeal the Bush tax cuts and pull back our military expenditures to Clinton level expenditures.”

The first corrective action one takes does not have to be a vanguard one, but it is clear that President Obama’s second term requires an understanding of the stakes for labor and capital, ones greater than those at the Clinton levels. Critical analyses might require interrogating the problem of how the base economy depends on the superstructure’s contractual complicity in coordinating industries that have regional impacts and cultural effects. In the case of the Fiscal Cliff(FC), a critical political economic analysis of the defense sector and its associated practices including procurement pork-barreling can give us some small insights on the fictive, yet dimensional nature of the capital and labor involved. The myth of the cliff metaphor functions as though lemmings were at risk. But as with everything “we have entered the house of language and the doors are closing behind us”.

For those requiring a summary:

“The “fiscal cliff’, however, is an invented term applied by politicians to the date various temporary legislative changes to the country’s tax code and spending policy take effect. Politicians began instituting temporary tax cuts with the intention of later transforming them into permanent law in the 1990s. According to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report, this practice exploded during the George W. Bush administration and was accompanied by budget gimmickry to hide their affect on the federal deficit. The Bush era tax cuts, known respectively as the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, are at the center of the storm that is raging around the “fiscal cliff’. The legislation, which was set to expire in 2010 but was extended to 2012, significantly reduced rates on income, estate and dividends and capital gains taxes and exemptions. After the sunset of the Bush era tax cuts, estate and gift tax exemptions will end raising the tax rates on transferred estates over $1 million to 55%. Long-term capital gains taxes will rise from its current rate of 15% to 20%. The tax bracket for the country’s wealthiest citizens will rise from the current 35% to 39.6%. In other words, the tax code will largely return to the rates that were in place prior to the George W. Bush administration.”http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Myth-of-the-Fiscal-Cli-by-Abigail-W-Adams-121218-861.html http://jonathanturley.org/2012/12/22/the-fiscal-cliff-an-example-of-myth-and-propaganda/

For our purposes here, the cliff is more like a speed bump because the funding for defense will continue with little effect because of the contractual aspects of procurement that occur in a spatial and temporal context.

For their part, some defense contractor executives are now making it a point to stress that sequestration, if a fiscal cliff deal isn’t reached by Jan. 1, would be less of a “guillotine” than a “speed bump.” That’s long been the view of military analysts. “The fiscal cliff metaphor just isn’t accurate,” says Todd Harrison, senior fellow in the Defense Budget Studies program at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. “It’s more of a slope – but it is a slippery slope.” Moreover, sequestration does not apply to cases in which defense companies are working now on vehicles and weapons contracts that have already been obligated. “That’s an important point, because if you’re a defense contractor, whatever you’re working on now is something that has already been obligated, and that will continue until the money runs out,” Mr. Harrison says. “There won’t be any immediate impact on Jan. 2.” http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/1217/How-fiscal-cliff-is-already-hitting-defense-industry

The Fiscal Cliff is largely such a speed bump in the ever-self-correcting however badly managed capitalist economy, given that it has all the sausage of policy problems derived from trying to constrain one form of the ideological state apparatus (the legislative branch budget power) with another more materially destructive institution like the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Without rehearsing what others have contributed, I want to make a small point on the spatial analysis of the FC with respect to the defense industry if only to make a point concerning the regulation of the firearms industry and citizens. The subsequently mediated cultural effects that produce calls for citizen disarmament illustrate a false consciousness that show that political power (can) grow out of the barrel of a gun, real and digitally imagined because of a lack of awareness of armaments production, or its application abroad. Yet militarization whether domestic or international will continue unabated; an FC agreement will be made, compromises will be achieved, and the continuing path of exploitation and stagnant growth will run through the first quarter(s) of the Second term. Recent domestic historical spectacles of violence have obscured the necessary path to global demilitarization which cannot be called at any moment world peace.

Another diarist came to this spatial contradiction recently

But of course in a country which cares so little for however much collateral damage we inflict on innocent civilians with drone strikes, so long as none of our boys and girls get hurt, it’s hard to expect that emotional pain visited on Afghani non-combatants counts for much in the American scheme of things. We have a national melt down over twenty dead school children in Connecticut. Twenty dead Pakistani school children lost to a drone strike not so much. It’s who we are. It’s about us. Always about us. Little brown people on the other side of the world are beyond our awareness. I don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is.

We value things that seem closer to us but as its says in our cars’ right hand mirrors: “objects closer may appear larger than they are”. As it is with tragedy, the proportion of its causes are disproportionate to its scale. Self-defense and self-determination must be bravely seen in their globalized context with a constant goal of nonviolence and choose the appropriate targets for regulation whether individual products or entire industries, tempering social costs with social justice.

Please follow me below the orange squiggle to view exceptionally grim(m) triggers for more moral hazards.

***

This diary considered the GOP’s fiscal cliff actions as moving pessimistically:

Only 50 percent of Americans think it’s likely a deal will be struck, while 48 percent think it’s unlikely, according to a Gallup Poll conducted Dec. 21-22. The same poll conducted Dec. 15-16 found 57 percent of Americans were confident in the abilities of House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama to come to an agreement, while 40 percent believed a deal was unlikely. [...]

While success polls as less likely, its success or failure is not one of binary choice, rather it will be that slippery slope of partisan intentions and political agendas. Slope rather than cliff, gravity is not the final arbiter, rather it will be the “unresting antagonisms of their surroundings”. The space of these struggles is uneven and whether it is the areal perception of threat of gun violence or the support of military industries the meme is more like the fictive space of Michael Moore’s in Bowling at Columbine, comparing the political violence of ballistic missile production as proximal to school shootings in Colorado. It appears as Marx and Engels argued in The German Ideology,

“The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into those definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production.” (p.46, my emphasis).

But history, this “best of all Marxists,” has taught us differently. It has taught us that “administering of things,” despite Engels’ expectations, may turn into unlimited “administering of people,” and thus not only lead to the emancipation of the state from the economy but even to the subjection of the economy to the state. Once subjected to the state, the economy secures the continued existence of this form of government. The fact that such a result flows from a unique situation primarily brought about by war does not exclude a Marxist analysis, but it alters somewhat our rather simplified and schematic conception of the correlation between economy and state and between economy and politics which developed in a completely different period. The emergence of the state as an independent power greatly complicates the economic characterization of a society in which politics (i.e. the state) plays a determining and decisive role. Rudolf Hilferding State Capitalism or Totalitarian State Economy The Modern Review, June 1947, pp. 266-71

With the possibility of 5000 types of regulation, the emergence of a regulatory state in the post-progressive era requires more dimensional forms of analysis as represented in recent economic geography. This spatialized state manifests itself throughout US industrial history, and is as uneven as the analysis of firearms production in small production units in 19th Century Britain. (Hounshell 1984) In 2009, David Harvey wrote on this in the context of the stimulus:

Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and depth is almost certain. The events of 2008 have therefore to be situated in the context of a deeper pattern. Since these stresses are internal to the capitalist dynamic (which does not preclude some seemingly external disruptive event like a catastrophic pandemic also occurring), then what better argument could there be, as Marx once put it, “for capitalism to be gone and to make way for some alternative and more rational mode of production.” I begin with this conclusion since I still find it vital to emphasize, if not dramatize, as I have sought to do over and over again in my writings over the years, that failure to understand the geographical dynamics of capitalism or to treat the geographical dimension as in some sense merely contingent or epiphenomenal, is to both lose the plot on how to understand capitalist uneven geographical development and to miss out on possibilities for constructing radical alternatives. But this poses an acute difficulty for analysis since we are constantly faced with trying to distill universal principles regarding the role of the production of spaces, places and environments in capitalism’s dynamics, out of a sea of often volatile geographical particularities.

Geographic particularities like the location of personally owned firearms mapped above for one New York county lives in contradiction often to the actual location of their uses or their exchanges. The concentration of firearms does not match the dispersion of ownership if 20% of the national population owns 65% of all guns. Similarly the location of production of firearms or the MIC might have regulatory policies much different than the locations of distribution and consumption.

Military expenditure is the largest category of discretionary spending in the US federal budget. As such, its spatial patterns are also among the most concentrated. An analysis of recent defense spending data indicates that ten to fifteen states receive between them at least 70% of military contracts, and higher proportions of high-technology and research-related contracts. Examination of subcontracting data reveals that little wider dispersion of defense spending occurs to states outside the core areas in the West, on the East Coast, and in a few interior locations. (Malecki 1984)

We found that for each direct employee of the aerospace and defense industry, there are between 4.67 and 0.40 additional employees which are indirectly employed, with variability principally due to the employee’s geographic location. The reason for the range of employment multipliers is that each state has its own characteristics of wages and job classifications present in its geographies. (The Aerospace and Defense Industry in the U.S. — A financial and economic impact study p.20 )

This disproportionality of defense production among states and the subsequent effects on labor and capital signals the broader problems of distributing that production and circulating capital. This also shows what Harvey meant about the “principles regarding the role of the production of spaces, places and environments in capitalism’s dynamics, out of a sea of often volatile geographical particularities”.

The cliff we face appears more sheer than for the MIC, after WWII the national, regional, local manifestations of the state created a spatial disintegration that does not allow reconciling the consciousness of the contradiction of MIC production with the perceptions of gun violence. Interest-group lobbying has dominated the ideological terrain and pundit-driven fear-mongering pervades class divisions. The social divisions are signified by the differences between the profiles of industries and their labor forces due to pork-barreling and outsourcing of production and assembly.

Especially for industries that comprise important segments of the trade specializations of regions, and those undergoing rapid change, local occupational structures may diverge from profiles derived from industry-by-occupational profiles at a larger geographical scale. These are precisely the sectors that are of central importance to economic development practice. Furthermore, industries on the innovative wave, such as medical instruments, electronics and biotechnology, are often those most sought by states and localities that do not yet host them. Major miscalculations could result from estimating future occupational composition of regional employers on the basis of these industries’ profiles nationally. Regional Occupational and Industrial Structure: Does the One Imply the Other? (Barbour and Markusen 2006)

I have found myself in this critical discourse much like H.G. Wells in his 1934 reflection on his attempts to thread the gap between pacificism and militarism. In Experiment in Autobiography. Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), Wells noted how relationships suffered in trying to chart a path to self-determination between militarism and pacificism:

Let me return first to the disillusionment about the beneficence of our war-making (1915-16-17) that followed my first attempt in 1914 to find a justifying purpose in “our” war. I did not become “anti-war.” I found the simple solution of the conscientious objectors and war resisters generally, too simple for me altogether. My brain was quite prepared for conflict on behalf of the law and order of the world-state. I believe that is necessary to this day. Peace will have to be kept—forcibly. For ages. The distinction people draw between moral and physical force is flimsy and unsound. Life is conflict and the only way to universal peace is through the defeat and obliteration of every minor organization of force. Carrying weapons individually or in crowds, calls for vigorous suppression on the part of the community. The anti-war people made me the more impatient because of the rightness of much of their criticism of the prevailing war motives. I was perhaps afraid, if I yielded to them, of being carried back too far towards the futility of a merely negative attitude. What they said was so true and what they did was so merely sabotage, I lost my temper with them (Chapter 9 §5 p.579 War Experiences of an Outsider)

The real power in the discourse on militarism as an aspect of the FC will be located in the networking of information and its institutional application of political power articulated by paramilitary police organizations rather than individual firearms conflicts. Scale trumps spectacle. If power indeed comes from the barrel of a gun, the political communication and legal environment might not protect civil rights from their institutional abuse. The history of Southern Black armed self defense groups reveals that very dear necessity. National, regional, state, and local security will be further fragmented even as it becomes further interconnected.

For many defense firms, the new market realities will require innovation, risk taking and bold moves to continue growth in revenues and profitability. Several areas for growth are expected to be in critical emerging and growing product segments, including – cyber security, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, defense electronics, precision targeting and response, remotely controlled platforms, directed energy, data fusion and energy security. Furthermore, given the slowdown in U.S. defense spending, contractors are considering how to replace revenues with growth in adjacent markets and through gap filling, game changing and/or scale building acquisitions. Growth in foreign military sales may also contribute to some revenue growth, but this is yet to be determined.

Where we are headed is toward a cliff that is less fiscal than it is false, since it signals the kinds of crisis or shock doctrines discussed by others. Our consciousness, as it becomes more commodified, also becomes one of risk, real or imagined. This is a kind of principal-agent paradigm that is based on “one party who possesses information affecting the welfare of both (informed party) and one who does not have this information (uninformed party). The information is either about what the informed party does (hidden action) or about what her characteristics are (hidden information).” This can be combined with the analysis of a grim trigger strategy, where one “initially cooperate(s) with the other players and then proceed(s) to defect for eternity if the other player fails to cooperate just once.” The GOP’s strategy in the Fiscal Cliff may be modeled this way, especially in insisting that for example the CRS reports cannot be trusted, implying an ultimately blind approach to legislation and budgeting.

The black(sic) nature of defense budgets whether hidden in plain sight or hidden completely has this fragmented information environment like the domestic and global market for small arms which is as connected to our current gun violence crisis as the original AR-15 was connected to materials Eugene Stoner derived from the aerospace industry. Its subsequent adoption in the Vietnam War was for maximum mass production and firing capability where the aluminum/plastic M-16 and its 30 round magazine with 5.56mm rounds was lighter than the standard milled steel M-14 and its 15 round magazine with the larger and heavier 7.62mm rounds and affects even the production of its adversary as the pressed steel AK-47 and its original 7.62 round is reduced to 5.45mm in newer versions. It is not a coincidence that the technology of urban pacification used by our military in Southwestern Asia has an interoperable relationship with police militarization.

Our current national spate of gun violence is predicated on contradictory direct and indirect actions performed in unevenly fragmented regional spaces, where the hidden illnesses of children spawn the murder of others in quasi-public learning environments. This is not to minimize the horror and sadness that comes from loss of life and its ideological escalation in news coverage. The mass media treatment of these events reveals a falsity of collective mediated consciousness situated in a complex cultural and economic space that does not connect the production of civilian assault weapons with the MIC producing them for militaristic agents, both foreign and domestic. A putative pacifism that would condemn individual firearms possession yet condone more militarized police services that support a growing surveillance state is a contradiction that must be subjected to the material critique it deserves. An Occupy NRA movement that focuses on firearms manufacturers and their diverse clienteles would help mobilize that critique.

We seem to have survived the Great Recession’s crises as reflected on 6 November and in the Second Obama term need to more precisely target an industrial and security policy in the fiscal cliff negotiations, however flawed. The path, whether over the cliff or down the slope should mirror the collective nature of the American Experiment in Democracy rather than a fetishized and solipsistic Exceptionalism that projects a neocon imperial hegemony in real and virtual militarized spaces. A favored video game mentioned in the most recent tragedy is symptomatic of that decision making process not unlike the “intellectual resistance” of the Grimm folktale where it shapes individual action as cliff-like jumps into potentially fatal situations and in FPS games using small arms. Regardless of the outcome these coming weeks, at all levels of consciousness the Fiscal Cliff as quasi-crisis represents a Grimm trigger strategy that should be studied with alternative and progressive forms of critical social analysis.

Walmart Strike in Seattle, November 15, 2012.

Written by Le Gauchiste

“The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.”

- Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, 1879

On November 6, an electoral coalition made up mostly of working class Americans prevented the election victory of a reactionary party and slate of candidates whose policies would have wreaked untold misery on working people, including the poor, and wrecked the macro-economy as well. But the working class’s real political move this November has occurred not in voting booths but in Walmart parking lots across the country, where Walmart workers protested their wages and working conditions, even as, halfway around the world in Bangladesh, more than 100 textile workers making clothing for Walmart were killed by a fire caused by unsafe working conditions.

We have global capitalism, but have we a global working class or not?

The ongoing grassroots labor activism at Walmart in the U.S. reminds us that while the election is over the class struggle is not, and that class politics moves now from the voting booth to the workplace and the streets. For any Progressive whose political imagination extends beyond the narrow ideological confines of today’s two-party discourse, that is good news indeed. For those of us who consider ourselves socialists or radicals, it is essential, because those confines have rendered electoral politics basically irrelevant to advancing working class interests, as opposed merely to defending them.

Part I: What’s Going On?

Starting in June, Walmart workers have unleashed an unprecedented wave of labor unrest that has shaken the retail behemoth and its global supply chain. The ongoing protests reached one peak on so-called “Black Friday,” when 1,000 strikes and protests were held across the country and at least 500 Walmart workers walked off their jobs, making it the largest U.S. strike in the history of Walmart.

The Black Friday walkout was organized by the “Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart” (OUR Walmart), a year-old group of Walmart employees sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW). OUR Walmart and its allies the Warehouse Workers United Union and the National Guestworker Alliance are pushing for an end to unsafe working conditions, a living wage, benefits, and an end to corporate retaliation against employees for organizing activity.

Notice what is missing: There is no demand, or even request, for the formation of a union. Whatever the current Walmart activism is, it is not a union organizing drive, at least not formally and not today. The reason for that lies in the fact that an organizing drive at Walmart at the present time would lose spectacularly, setting back labor organizing in the retail branch of the service sector of the economy by a generation.

In any union drive, there are three basic elements: the workers, the company and the law, and in the case of Walmart all three elements work against labor, at least for now: If asked today Walmart employees would vote heavily against a union; Walmart corporate is ideologically anti-union, once actually closing a store (in Quebec) after its workers voted in a union; and the law is so heavily tilted in favor of employers and against unions that formal organizing drives are virtually a thing of the past.

So OUR Walmart instead emphasizes respect for employees and the problem of wealth inequality within the Walmart company. A low-level Walmart employee averages $8 an hour and won’t get a pay raise until after 6 years of committed employment. And even then, the raise only brings the worker’s pay to $10.60 an hour or $22,048 a year, still below the national poverty line for a family of four in 2012. Low wages force many Walmart employees to rely on food stamps and other government assistance to provide for their families.

Of course, this being capitalism, this poverty is by no means shared equally across the company. In 2011 Walmart’s net income was $15.7 billion, and the net worth of the Walton family totaled $89.5 billion in 2010, as much as the bottom 41.5 percent of U.S. families combined.

Part II: What Does It Mean?

“This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.”

- Karl Marx, 1864

The Walmart activism, limited as it is both in word and deed, is remarkable because of the significant role–both practical and symbolic–that Walmart plays in the political economy of the 21st century U.S. Walmart’s business model, based as it is on a philosophy of intrusively authoritarian management, payment of the lowest wages possible, and intransigent hostility to unions, is the epitome of neo-liberal business theory. Based in right-to-work Arkansas, Walmart has stayed almost entirely union-free for most of its existence.

The point is that Walmart, with its global supply chain and network of stores, is today’s equivalent of U.S. Steel or General Motors–what we used to call the “commanding heights” of the capitalist system of production. Scaling those heights is the most difficult and most crucial task, for just as the successful organizing drives at GM and USS helped lead to waves of organizing of heavy industry, so too could victory at Walmart open up the service sector to unions.

The company has never before dealt with coordinated labor protest on this scale. Dan Schlademan, director of Making Change at Walmart, another organization backed by the UFCW which works closely with OUR Walmart, explains the significance.

“In the past, Wal-Mart would fire people, would threaten people … and that would be enough to stop people in their tracks. The difference now is workers are using Wal-Mart’s own tactics to challenge the company and not backing down. Really, for the first time in Wal-Mart’s history, the tools that are used to keep people silent and under control are now being used against them. That’s significant.”

“Here is what’s so significant about this: this strike was about sending a message to Walmart that these workers won’t be silenced. This wasn’t a strike to try to cripple Walmart’s operation. This wasn’t a strike to impact their Black Friday sales. This was an unfair labor practices strike to send a message to Walmart that your retaliation is going to get a response like this: it is going to get publicized, and a tool they’ve been using is going to be used against them.”

Although, as noted above, OUR Walmart isn’t pushing for union representation, Schlademan explained why OUR Walmart. “All the other things that are the heart and soul of the labor movement and of workers’ organizing are there, which is collective action, workers pulling their resources together so they have a bigger voice, and utilizing the public to educate and build power to change the company.”

Schlademan said that OUR Walmart is in it for the long haul.

“It’s gotta start somewhere. … Workers are having enough. You look at the sit-down strike, you look at the civil-rights movement, you look at the women’s rights movement, you look at anything, you look at Occupy, right? It started off with a few people sleeping in a park, and it grew,” Schlademan said. “So this is a process—people are building a movement inside of Wal-Mart, and they’re building a movement outside of Wal-Mart. What was in October was the beginning. What’s gonna happen on Black Friday will be a continuation of that … and this will just continue to build.”

The number of union-related work stoppages involving more than 1,000 workers, which reached an all-time low of just five in 2009, rose to 13 this year as of October. And unions aren’t done yet.

Nurses are striking this week at hospitals operated by Sutter Health in California; workers voted against concessions at Hostess Brands Inc., forcing the company’s hand; pilots at American Airlines are wreaking havoc on the airline’s schedule as it tries to cut pension and other benefits.

Julius Getman, a labor expert at the University of Texas, points out that labor activism tends to snowball.

“There’s a lot of agitating going on, people are unhappy. They feel that they’re not being well-treated. There is a swelling of annoyance at the rich. If there really is turmoil at Wal-Mart on Friday, it will set in motion a lot of other protests. There will be a sense of, ‘Well, they did it, why shouldn’t we?’”

Photo by OURWalmart under Creative Commons license.

Has it occurred to you how strange it is that your job can slip across international boundaries, but you are prohibited from crossing the same border to follow that job? It should.

Multinational Corporations have been busy for the last twenty years creating a new type of serf. In feudal Europe and Asia, serfs were tied to the land by a master, called the lord, and obligated to work for him. Now, the 1% are creating serfs out of whole nations of people. Sure, those lands are huge—nations—but they are still boundaries that bind you, and prevent you for selling your work freely, while multinational corporations are borderless entities.

Seeking to continue the tail spin to the bottom of wages, big business has been busy writing international treaties, allowing jobs to shift to ever lower paying environments with the least protections for workers. Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam are already involved in the latest negotiations, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If signed the treaty will be a “docking agreement” open to any country to sign later. Canada and Mexico are expected to join this month. Japan and China are being courted to join. It is the largest trade agreement the world has ever seen.

The treaty creates an über-government superseding and overriding existing law in sovereign nations–seeking to stamp out democracy. In old feudalism, it was the Catholic church that held dominion over the nations of man. Now “the market” has taken the place of God. Profits are all that matters. Anything the market endorses is right because the market is infallible, unchallengeable. Keep democracy out of it.

The powerful and wealthy have finally found a way to regain the power they once held in feudal times. They have done it in ways intentionally hidden from the majority. Most of us don’t even realize we are in a battle for the type of global governance we will have in the future. For the last 50 years corporate leadership have simply bought our democracies and media outlets, making it easy for corporations to gain the upper hand, and convince voters to support governance that is secretive and totalitarian, without letting voters know they are doing so. Now the 1% want to solidify that power into an actual international treaty. They are seeking one economy under the rule of American corporations. They are, in fact, seeking world dominion.

The Cost of NAFTA

In 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was sold to the American public with grand promises. NAFTA would create tens of
thousands of good jobs here. U.S. farmers would export their way to
wealth. NAFTA would bring Mexico’s standard of living up, providing
new economic opportunities there that would reduce immigration to the
U.S.–Public Citizen

NAFTA was the opening salvo for the economy of outsourcing. Instead of focusing on reducing tariffs and trade quotas, NAFTA was a new breed of trade agreements. It protected the rights of foreign investors—even over the rights of the people in democratic countries.

Now, 19 years after NAFTA, most of us can clearly see the benefits touted to the
American worker never materialized. Instead of creating jobs, free trade agreements slashed wages and jobs on both sides of national borders. Investors used NAFTA’s new protections to move US operations to Mexico, where wages were lower and regulations lax. This skyrocketed the US trade deficit and unemployment. Since NAFTA, one in four manufacturing jobs in the US has eroded away, more than a million jobs lost.

Even for the jobs left in the US, the race to the bottom was on. The workers, who still had jobs, felt pressure from the growing number of jobless to accept poorer benefits and, finally, lower wages. NAFTA gutted worker unions, leaving workers without protections from downward pressure on their wages. Decreased income, means decreased tax base, and decreased ability to pay mortgage payments, adding fuel to the housing crisis. This deprived state funded social services, like schools and road repair, eroding local safety nets just when people needed them most.At the same time NAFTA allowed companies to off shored their production, it also allowed those same companies to bring goods and services back into the US duty (tariff) free–thus the “free” in free trade. The end result was increased worker productivity that was rewarded with lower wages, no safety net, and a smaller share of the wealth of the nation, resulting in the redistribution of wealth to the upper 1%. The pro-NAFTA Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that 39% of the wage inequity that developed during this time was due to trends in international trade. Even with the cheaper goods on Walmart shelves, US workers are worse off with the wage decreases they have suffered.

Bad for American workers, the agreement was a disaster for Latin Americans. NAFTA duped Mexico, the same way Walmart duped the rest of America. It promised more jobs to Latin American countries if they would give foreign investors a tax break. Local businesses were put at an economic disadvantage by this unequal taxation. Instead of bringing new jobs, foreign corporations merely shifted jobs from local companies to foreign companies. This lead to a large share of profits going off shore, destabilizing Latin American economies. Additionally, NAFTA was used to extract $325 million from member countries in tribunals that overturned already frail environmental laws and labor protections.

Mexican markets were flooded with US taxpayer subsidized corn and wheat products. The subsidized products were priced below what it costs to actually grow these commodities due to the US tax money given to industrial producers of wheat and corn. The price paid for a bushel of corn to a small Mexican farmer, campesino, fell by 50%. Yet the price of tortillas actually increased 279%, leading to food riots in Mexico. The real value of Mexican minimum wage fell by 20%, and the number of families in need of food assistance increased by 50%. Yet, every attempt the Mexican government made to preserve jobs was met with judicial challenges by corporations whose investors are “wronged” by such favoritism of the government. Mexico is now on the verge of becoming a failed state. Migration to the north, due to this social collapse, increased 60% in the years after NAFTA. The massive influx of Latin American workers into the US (undocumented workers up 185%) cycled around to put further downward pressure on US worker wages.

Public Citizen: NAFTA’s Broken Promises

Obama and Free Trade

Leaked drafts of the agreement “sent shock waves through Congress because it showed that U.S. negotiators had totally abandoned Obama’s campaign pledges to replace the old NAFTA trade model and in fact were doubling down and expanding the very Bush-style deal that Obama campaigned against in 2008 to win key swing states.” –Lori Wallach, Public Citizen Global Trade Watch

Obama campaigned against NAFTA and used his stance on NAFTA in his bid for the presidency in 2008, saying it was time to rewrite our trade agreements to something that would create jobs. After his election, he dusted off the free trade deals, Bush could not get through Congress, and became their champion.

Obama also called for congressional passage of three controversial free trade pacts, stating “It’s time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements that would make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama, Colombia and South Korea.” –Between the Lines

All these deals made it past the Republican dominated Congress. Obama even touted this as a success in the recent debates. Despite his assertion that the deals bolstered US exports, the governments own figures show a widening of the trade deficit by 29% over 2011 levels, dragging down jobs with it. Estimates are that 50,000 jobs were lost in the first few
months of the trade deals. The promised controls over laws in South America have not materialized either—Panama is still a tax haven and Columbia is still the most dangerous place in the world to be a labor leader.

AFL-CIO President, Richard Trumka, has warned that a free trade agreement with South Korea will cost U.S. workers 159,000 jobs, while a deal with Colombia will cost 54,000 jobs. — Between the Lines

After the election, Obama called for a stop to Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations for a “period of reflection.” That reflection never came. The negotiations continued, and Obama’s stance shifted, possibly due to worsening recession—with the thought that the trade agreement would increase jobs. This is nonsense, of course, but many of his advisers supported NAFTA in the Clinton era.

CWA Chief of Staff Ron Collins said, “The TPP is shaping up to become one of the biggest and most destructive trade agreements because it could lead to even more offshoring of our manufacturing and service sector jobs, downward pressure on wages and benefits, and the subversion of our labor rights and environmental protections. But the public is unaware that the TPP even exists because negotiators are keeping their proposals hidden. Americans deserve the right to know what’s being proposed in our names.” –Communications Workers of America

At the time that NAFTA was being negotiated, the full text of the agreement was available on line. This led to a firestorm of controversy—not that the demonstrations against NAFTA had any effect. The agreement was still passed by the Clinton administration.

With NAFTA, jobs went to lower paid Mexico. Other free trade agreements saw jobs flee from Mexico to China. Now, big business feels Chinese workers are being paid too much and have too many protections! They want to move jobs to Vietnam and Malaysia. Labor unions and opposition political parities are illegal in Vietnam
making it the new bottom for low paid, exploited workers.

ACLU has called TPP one of the biggest threats to free speech that nobody knows about. Almost every environmental group and most worker unions have come out against the agreement. Even the Tea Pary is largely against both NAFTA and TPP. Unfortunately, Tea Party candidates usually vote for free trade once in
Congress.

Globalization leaders apparently learned a lesson from their ordeal with NAFTA. While Obama’s trade negotiator, Ron Kirk, called the TPP negotiations “the most engaged and transparent process [possible].”–Public Citizen the truth is self evident. TPP is being negotiated behind closed doors since 2008. (That’s right in the middle of the financial crisis that NAFTA helped to create, the Bush administration opened up another chapter of globalization in secret. Color me surprised.)

None of the text of this agreement is available for the press, Congress, or the peoples of the world who will labor under the treaty. When Sen Ron Wyden, on both the Budget and Finance Committees, requested to read the agreement, he was told
it would not be available in the Congressional reading room, where secret
documents are kept, but he would have to go to the negotiations without staff, paper or pen, in order to read the text.

The secrecy surrounding the negotiations is breathtaking. In July, 134 members of the House of Representatives sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk requesting that the appropriate congressional committees be consulted and that a draft of the text be released. The members reminded Kirk that draft texts were circulated and congressional committees consulted throughout the NAFTA negotiations in the early 1990s. Their letter received no response. A month later, House members petitioned Kirk to allow a congressional delegation to observe the negotiations—as in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the launch of the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization, and numerous NAFTA rounds. Despite its persistence, Congress has not been granted any significant oversight or insight regarding the
negotiations.–Foreign Policy in Focus

A quarter million signatures on petitions were turned in to the US trade representative asking for the text to be released. The only response from the negotiators was to accelerate the timetable for the process so the deal can be signed before public outcry can be obtained.

The schedule for negotiation has recently accelerated in order to bring the agreement to a close. The process has become more and more closed—stakeholder forums, which were more common toward the beginning of the process, have now been replaced with “stakeholder tables” – a table staffed by interested stakeholders to which negotiators may or may not go. The negotiators are also holding off-the-record “intersessional” meetings between official sessions. Public Knowledge

Currently the text is not to be release to Congress or the public until the negotiations are complete. Congress will be asked to ratify it after a brief time for the public to comment on the deal. Of course, the public will need to comment on it after a near complete media blackout. Proposals that lead up to the final agreement would not be available until four years after it is signed.

Yet, 600 corporate “advisers” from companies like Wal-Mart, Cargill, Halliburton, Dow Chemical, and led by General Electric, the US corporation that prides itself in pioneering outsourcing, have direct access to the US trade negotiator. It is actually US law that the US trade rep consult with corporate leaders before, during, and after the writing of a trade agreement. The corporate leadership gets to red line any part of this agreement before Congress and the rest of us get a chance to even see it.

Springing a Leak

All the concerns about NAFTA and jobs and trade deficits are amplified in the TPP. Asia, unlike South America, is a hub of technology. Green jobs and high tech
jobs promised in the presidential campaign will go overseas to Asia under this
agreement.

Luckily, the secrecy has been rather leaky. Three sections of the draft have been leaked to the public so far. What has emerged is NAFTA on steroids, with even more
draconian provisions by corporations to overturn democracy and national sovereignty. Only 3 of the 26 chapters of the agreement deal with trade. The other 23 chapters are a dream sheet of corporate hegemony.

1. A Gift for Big Pharma:

The agreement increases the number of years a pharmaceutical company has a monopoly over a drug, beyond the twenty years that already applies in the US. It would broaden the scope of patents, making even minor variations of an old medication patentable, while making it harder to challenge a patent. Finally, it would demand that patents be allowed on plants, animals and surgical procedures.

Developing nations would be prevented from using generics before drug monopolies ended. TPP would negatively impact the number of patients getting compassionate AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria therapy. The first round of generic treatments for patients with HIV in poor nations brought the price per patient from $10,000 to $120.

Just because Britain was such a smarty-pants about your public health care system at the Olympics, the US trade negotiator is pushing several clauses to prevent governments from using formularies to reduce prices for medications, considered a form of price fixing here in the Pharma-friendly US. Of course, most other countries use formularies to keep prices low. TPP would force countries to have a judicial appeal system for pharmaceuticals to make sure governments “appropriately recognize the value” of various drugs. In Australia, where such a system has been implemented, the result was predictably higher drug costs.
–Public Citizen, Citizen Trade

“The leaked text confirms the worst fears of health officials.
The Obama White House is walking back the core concessions on patent
extensions, patent linkage and test data protection that were
negotiated with the Bush White House in May 2007. Obama is now
objectively much worse than Bush on these issues. It may help
the White House raise campaign money from big drug companies, or help
USTR officials find their next high paying job working as lobbyists
for the drug companies. It is a huge disappointment for us.
The texts cover complex issues, and it is hard to summarize all that
is important. Even as regards to the reference to the WTO Doha
Agreement, the White House tries to sneak in text that makes it
appear as though it is limited to only some diseases or emergencies.
Collectively, the provisions are designed to strengthen IPR
monopolies on drugs, and make it harder to regulate prices. The
consequences of stronger monopolies and higher prices are less access
to medicine.”— James Love, Knowledge Ecology International

Don’t be fooled here. Obama is touting increased access. “Increasing access” means new drugs get to market faster and drug companies have access to more markets. What we need is not access to medications, but affordable medications.

“The leaked draft intellectual property proposals by the United States for the Trans-Pacific Free Trade Agreement have confirmed our fears that the Obama administration is walking away from previous efforts to ensure that developing countries can access affordable medicines, setting a dangerous new standard that will likely be replicated in future trade agreements with developing nations. The administration is touting a so-called ‘access window’ as a mechanism to boost access to medicines. In fact, the administration is confusing access with affordability. The ‘access window’ is all about getting brand-name drugs to market faster, and giving their producers longer monopoly rights that prevent price-lowering competition and keeping medicines out of the hands of the millions of people who need them. Our doctors who work across the developing world rely on affordable generic medicines to trade patients. For example, competition among generic manufacturers is what brought down drug prices for HIV/AIDS by 99 percent, from US$10,000 per person per year to roughly $100 today. Trade agreements of the type being pushed this week in Peru threaten these types of crucial gains in access to life-saving medicines.”— Judit Rius Sanjuan, Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders

2. Gutting Worker and Environmental Protections at the Global Level:

. . . negotiations thus far have given corporations the right to avoid government review when acquiring land, natural resources, or factories. They have also banned corporate performance requirements, guaranteed compensation
for the loss of “‘expected future profits’ from health, labor, [or] environmental” regulations, and included stunning provisions concerning the right to “move capital without limits.” If these are indeed terms of the TPP, then the agreement would make it nearly impossible for countries to hold corporations accountable for their conduct—and would in fact hold governments liable for any “damage” incurred by corporations due to the institution of regulations.–Foreign Policy in Focus

TPP has a rewrite of NAFTA’s “Investor State Section.” Corporations can sue governments directly for violations of their investor’s rights and for projected loss of profits due to democratically passed laws. They do this, not in an impartial international court, but in a tribunal set up with corporate interests in mind, called an “investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.” If the democratic laws of a nation are found to be in conflict with the trade agreement, the trade agreement wins. Corporations can demand taxpayer money to replace predicted future profits not realized due to a nation’s laws. Multinationals already did this in Guatamla Peru, El Salvador, Ecuador and the US. In the US portions of the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammals Protection Act have all been rolled back under similar agreements. That is why you don’t see dolphin free tuna any more. In fact over $325 million have been extracted already just from countries involved in NAFTA via such a tribunal.–Counterpoint, Public Citizen, Citizen Trade

So far, Australia stands alone in resisting this part of the TPP agreement. Kudos to
the Kiwis.

The provisions undo laws that force exports to be manufactured into some sort of
commodity, making “rip and ship” economies more likely. Current laws in developing nations prohibit raw materials, like logs, from leaving the country. They force exporters to make raw materials into a commodity, like boards, so they support local manufacturing economies. These laws would be undercut, allowing foreign corporations to come into a country, and take the raw materials for export at an inexpensive price, increasing mining or drilling in less developed nations by the cheapest way possible, without regard for the local people or the environmental destruction. The acquired raw materials are shipped to the Western world at a lower financial cost, but a much higher environmental and social cost. Citizen Trade

3. Capital Controls Overturned

After the banking crisis, some countries did re-regulate banks. Countries which instituted such capital controls could be taken to court by private corporations and could be held liable for damages. Limits on the size and scope of financial institutions (too big to fail laws) would be outlawed, reducing the regulation of hedge funds and insurance companies.–Foreign Policy in Focus, Public Citizen –Citizen Trade

4. Public Safety Sacrificed

Countries would be forced to import food that does not meet their minimal safety requirements. The pact would mandate “scientifically justifiable” safety laws, which would undercut any “precautionary principle” for putting new pesticides and other chemicals into the environment. In other words, you would have to provethat a new or current chemical, food additive, genetically modified food caused cancer or some other harm before it could be restricted or removed from your countries shelves.

Additionally, US subsidized corn, soy, cotton, wheat and rice would be dumped on the poorer countries, driving out their family farms. This works to condense the owners of the global food supply into fewer and fewer hands. (Anyone read The Wind Up Girl?) –Public Citizen, CitizenTrade

5. Copyright Use

The draft strengthens copyright to the point of the ridiculous. “Fair use” laws that allow limited copies at libraries and for educational purposes (including the
block quotes commonly seen on blogs) could be abandoned.–Public Knowledge

6. Public Procurement Provisions:

The agreement provides companies greater access to government contracts. This would prevent local governments from favoring local businesses to keep taxpayer dollars in the local economy. It also prevents local governments from spending money preferentially on businesses that do not pollute their environment, advance social goals, or have good human rights records.–Citizen Trade

These represent roll backs of legislation won during the Bush era, making Obama actually worse than Bush on these issues. TPP is being called a trade agreement, but most of the agreement is granting business new privileges over nations and democracies. Collectively this agreement represents big businesses interest in domination of world governments and the end of democracy.

Citizen Trade
Citzens Trade Campaign
Transnational Capitalist Class (i.e. the 0.0001%)
Between the Lines Audio with Ben Beachy
Counterpoint audio with Arthur Stamoulis
Eyes on Trade
What Corporations are Seeking from the Deal
Sign the Petition to tell Obama you want to see the text of the agreement
Donate to reward offered by Wikileaks for leaks of the Agreements drafts