Thoughts on John Clegg’s “Capitalism and Slavery”

John Clegg

Like Charles Post’s article in the latest Catalyst (behind a paywall), John Clegg’s “Capitalism and Slavery” that appeared in the Fall 2015  Critical Historical Studies criticizes the New Historians of Capitalism aka NHC (Edward Baptist, Walter Johnson, Sven Beckert, et al) from the standpoint of Political Marxism. However, unlike Post, Clegg maintains that slavery was capitalist, thus distancing himself from the more rigid schemas of Post and others in this camp. For Post, anything except free wage labor is “pre-capitalist”, a category that arguably begins with hunting and gathering societies and continues until the 15^th century when purely contingent—or even “random” as Post put it–events led to the introduction of lease farming in England, which was the seed that led to the industrial revolution, Amazon.com and all the rest. As such, it might be considered in the same light as the asteroid that hit the Gulf of Mexico 66 millions of years ago. If the asteroid had missed Earth, we might be seeing Tyrannosaurus rex rather than Jeff Bezos running Amazon.

Both Post and Clegg fault the NHC for not being interested in defining capitalism, which is the hallmark of the Political Marxists no matter that Marx spent little time trying to define it himself. He was much more dedicated to explaining how the system took root and how it functions. And when he does refer to the origins of the system, he has quite a different outlook than Post’s: “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” If anybody can find a reference from Post, Brenner, Chibber or any other Political Marxist to this sentence or the chapter of Capital in which it appears, I will donate $100 to their favorite leftist cause.

The purpose of Clegg’s article is to expand on his initial definition of it as a system based on “widespread and systematic market dependence” that includes the plantations of the old South. This view puts him in league with Sidney Mintz, James Blaut and even the NHC. Whether it is consistent with the Political Marxism he has absorbed in the NYU Sociology Department is another question entirely. For the more orthodox Brennerites, when human beings are forced to “freely” sell their labor power in the marketplace in order to survive, this satisfies one of the key requirements for capitalism. However, for Clegg the ability of slave-owners, and more specifically the need, to compete with each other for the price of slaves or the goods they produce for the marketplace qualifies them as capitalist property relations:

It is true that markets didn’t allocate slave labor within the plantation, but neither do they allocate wage labor within factories. Insofar as it is capable of being either hired or purchased slave labor is like any other capitalist commodity. The presence of a specialized class of slave traders in the antebellum South ensured that slave markets were exceptionally liquid. Evidence of their allocative efficiency can be found in the estimated net transfer, from 1820 to 1860, of more than half a million slaves from the less productive plantations of the Old South to the more productive plantations in the New South via the domestic slave trade alone.

In a footnote tied to this excerpt, Clegg states: “It is his failure to recognize the liquidity of slave labor markets that leads Charles Post to argue that slaves could not be expelled from the labor process, giving planters no incentive to introduce labor-saving technical change.”

Clegg is not satisfied with the implicit definition of capitalism in the NHC literature, which revolves around profit-seeking and commodification. It is not so much that their hazy definition is incorrect. It is more that they evasively refuse to cast it in concrete. In some sense this is certainly true. I have the three main texts of the NHC but you can search in vain for references to Karl Marx or Marxism in the index.

He recommends to his readers and implicitly to the NHC authors who come across his article that they look into Robert Brenner, whose “conception of capitalism as generalized market dependence may provide the theoretical framing that is largely missing in these works.” He goes on to explain that plantation owners had to compete with each other on the world market and thus find ways to cut costs, either through labor-saving machinery or through the violent enforcement of labor discipline that is recounted in Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told”.

I will pass over Clegg’s critique of some of the arguments made by the NHC since they do not touch upon the question of whether slavery is capitalism or not—the focus of this article—and proceed to the final section titled “The Problem of Origins” that addresses where, when and how capitalism began. (I should add that since I have not read the three main texts of the NHC’ers, I’d be making a fool of myself if I did.)

For Marx, its origin was simply put as “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population”. So now what does Clegg think?

He starts off by revisiting the Eric Williams classic that actually never argued that slavery was capitalist. His thesis (literally speaking since the book was adapted from his PhD dissertation) was that slavery was necessary for the take-off of British capitalism but in itself was an earlier mode of production. However, Clegg argues against this, even citing Sven Beckert himself who made the case that British textile mills survived even after the Civil War cut off supplies from the South. He also questions whether the North was dependent on the plantation system, citing data that cotton represented only 6 percent of GDP from 1800 to 1860.

In my view this is the kind of tunnel vision that makes Political Marxism so inadequate. Rather than focusing on plantation cotton and British textile mills, it makes much more sense to analyze the origins of capitalism as the outcome of a multiplicity of factors including the impact of the Ottoman Empire as I pointed out in my review of Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu’s “How the West Came to Rule: the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism”. Ottoman hegemony in the Mediterranean had consequences that ultimately made the “agrarian capitalism” hailed by Brenner and Wood possible, although it was never acknowledged in their scholarship. Put succinctly, the English benefited from Pax Ottomana while the Italian city-states were shut out. This meant that the nascent textile industry had easy access to wool, cotton, silk and mohair from the East. Furthermore, England’s isolation from the intra-feudal warfare of continental Europe allowed it to invest far less capital in the military. So pronounced was the “peacetime” dividend that by the 1550s Spain had seven times as men in arms than England. And none of this would have been possible without the open door the Ottomans provided.

In the final analysis, understanding how capitalism came to pass requires a much broader scope than that is found in both the Political Marxist literature as well as that of the NHC. At least the NHC historians don’t put themselves forward as experts on its origins, only as men and women intelligent enough to understand that slaves were workers producing commodities even if their labor was coerced just as was the case for the hundreds of years preceding the American civil war, from the tin mines of Bolivia to the sugar plantations of Jamaica.

Near to its conclusion, Clegg makes an observation that is most welcome:

In a capitalist order of fully specified property rights, it is wage labor rather than slave labor that is the anomaly. Far from being a precapitalist holdover, enforceable labor contracts would be the dream of many an employer. Today, indenture and debt peonage are legally restricted in most countries, not because employers found free labor to be in their enlightened self-interest but because workers refused to accept a condition approximating slavery. Commenting on a French slave code, Marx once wrote that “this subject one must study in detail to see what the bourgeois makes of himself and of the worker when he can model the world ac- cording to his own image without any interference.” (emphasis added)

He is totally right. It is wage labor that is the anomaly. In a future post, I will try to show this is particularly true of commercial farming that has been most resistant to the idea of a free market when it comes to boss and bossed relations. Just look at how chocolate is produced and you’ll understand what I am driving at.

Frankly, I sometimes wonder if Clegg pays homage to Robert Brenner despite putting forward such distinctly anti-Brennerite ideas just for professional exigency. Is it possible that kowtowing to Political Marxism is a necessity in the NYU Sociology Department because the two big shots who might be sitting on Clegg’s dissertation committee or influencing it are fanatical Brennerites like former Department chair Jeff Goodwin and Vivek Chibber who was so devoted to this academic cult that he had the balls to heckle me at a Historical Materialism conference when I challenged it during a Q&A.

 

Newsbud versus Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett

Recently I learned that a relatively new Assadist website called Newsbud.com had featured a blistering attack on Vanessa Beeley and Eva Bartlett (henceforth identified as B&B), who are arguably the most well-known propagandists for the dictatorship. In a video titled “Syria Under Siege: Guarding Against Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing”, the wolves were identified by the subtitle: “Vanessa Beeley & Eva Bartlett vs. Ethical Journalism & Human Decency in the Age of Social Media Reporting”.

Drawing upon the testimony of case-hardened Assadists like Paul Larudee, Newsbud founding editor Sibel Edmonds functions as a prosecutor putting the two propagandists on trial. The main motivation seems to be the need to purge them in order to preserve the integrity of the Assadist movement, which amounts to shaving Hitler’s mustache to make him more presentable. Why this indictment in peoples court comes at this stage of the game is real question—one that I really have no definitive answers for although some of my co-thinkers write it off as a battle over spoils. Since it is obvious that the Baathist dictatorship is more than willing to fund propagandists, maybe this is just nothing more than two jackal pups fighting over access to their mother’s teats. Whatever the explanation, it is richly rewarding to see Bartlett and Beeley being discredited—amazingly enough using arguments I have made myself. Maybe the best thing would be to take them at their word. They state that it makes defense of Bashar al-Assad more difficult when people like B&B are out there making them look bad. So, they are angling to be the lesser evil.

Edmonds makes her case quite effectively, like a DA laying out the facts to a jury. Her main charges are that:

B&B make stuff up.

For example, they claimed that the White Helmets falsified evidence to make it seem like they had rescued a girl named Aya, who supposedly showed up in 3 different videos as if she was a stunt girl in a movie co-produced by the CIA and al-Qaeda. Edmonds answers them with evidence that there really were 3 different girls and, even more importantly, denies that the White Helmets were al-Qaeda operatives. I should add that this charge has also been made by Max Blumenthal who was accused by Vanessa Beeley of plagiarizing her material.

B&B label everybody as a terrorist

Edmonds defends the doctors who served in East Aleppo and is outraged that they were accused of being in league with the jihadists. Her own father was a surgeon killed by the Shah’s military after he had been forced to treat wounded guerrillas so this kind of smear makes her particularly angry. She also lashes out at them for denying that the al-Quds hospital in East Aleppo had been bombed, offering graphic evidence of a bombing taking place that killed the city’s sole surviving pediatrician.

She is also outraged that in addition to violating elementary journalistic norms such as fact-checking or issuing a retraction when an error has been made, they have been calling for the arrest of other journalists as terrorists for simply offering their own version of what is taking place in Syria. Most ominously, B&B have urged the FBI and MI6 to arrest these reporters who they accuse of being terrorist agents. To bolster her case against B&B, she calls upon a real journalist named Rebecca Baker who has no background on Syria to speak on behalf of journalistic ethics. Baker works at the Daily News and is a member of the Society of Journalistic Ethics. Her testimony is valuable even though she is apparently unaware of the shoddy reporting that can be found on Newsbud as well.

B&B are too close to the regime

Edmond calls attention to the tendency of B&B to tour Syria on the regime’s dime and especially to stay at fancy hotels far away from the conflict zones. She argues that it is incumbent for serious reporters to either raise their own money if they are free-lancers or to be funded by their employer. Needless to say, this doesn’t guarantee accuracy if you’ve read Robert Fisk lately.

It is clear that Newsbud is doing everything it can to destroy B&B. A new video has gone up reprising the same points as the one discussed above that is narrated by retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Tim Ferner. I should add that Ferner, who is on the Newsbud editorial board, is not particularly noted for having written Assadist propaganda in the past.

To give you an idea of how far Newsbud has strayed from within the Assadist comfort zone, it supplies links to articles and videos that back up their case against B&B. Among them are:

Syria Hospital Airstrike: Are The Rules Of War Breaking Down? (https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2016/04/28/476064028/syria-hospital-bombing-are-the-rules-of-war-blowing-up)

Eva Bartlett’s claims about Syrian children (https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-eva-bartletts-claims-about-syrian-children)

Syrian children’s trauma is a laughing matter—if you are Vanessa Beeley (http://orient-news.net/en/news_show/134365/0/Syrian-childrens-trauma-is-a-laughing-matter%E2%80%94if-you-are-Vanessa-Beeley)

Considering the origins of these articles, which are about as remote from SANA, Press TV, and RT.com as can be imagined, it is quite remarkable to see Assad supporters like Sibel Edmonds citing the “enemy press”.

Even more startling is the inclusion of a Youtube video that shows a Syrian solidarity activist speaking about Assad’s ties to imperialism during the Q&A at a Beeley appearance  In referring to Syria’s attacks on Fatah and its support for the CIA extraordinary rendition program, he will certainly cause at least some of Newsbud’s readers to rethink the usual talking points in favor of the dictatorship.

Leaving aside Sibel Edmonds’s ulterior motives in going after B&B, I am happy to give credit when credit is due. I was very pleased when Sukant Chandan broke with some Assadists who had lined up behind Brexit, something that he saw as a  nativist attack on the immigrants he strongly identifies with.

Edmonds has an interesting background. Shortly after 9/11, she went to work for the FBI translating material from Turkey. (Her father was Iranian and her mother was Turkish, she lived in both countries.) She was fired in 2002 after accusing the FBI of having prior knowledge of the attacks. She continued to make news as a whistle-blower. In 2005, she accused Congressman Dennis Hastert of being paid by the Turkish government to promote its interests, including opposition to anything favoring Armenian claims on genocide.

The fallout from her attack on B&B has already begun. An Assadist named James Corbett released a video yesterday that offered a point-by-point refutation of Sibel Emonds’s video titled “Fact checking Newsbud’s ‘Syria Under Siege’ Video” (https://www.corbettreport.com/fact-checking-newsbuds-syria-under-siege-video/). Since Corbett is a 9/11 Truther, I just didn’t feel motivated to get his side of the story.

I wonder if some of Newsbud’s editorial team will be comfortable where she is going with this. Included there are Kurt Nimmo, a former editor at Infowars, James Petras who lost his mind about 25 years ago or so, and F. William Engdahl, a former member of LaRouche’s cult who told RT that the 2011 Egyptian Revolution was orchestrated by the Pentagon to facilitate Barack Obama’s Middle East foreign policy and that the Arab Spring was a plan “first announced by George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003”.

It is hard for me to believe that they will be happy with this.

Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, & Class Conflicts in the American West

COUNTERPUNCH, March 30, 2018

While not a school in the same exact way as the NHC, the historians grouped around the Labor and Working Class History Association(LAWCHA) website have set themselves to the task of promoting “public and scholarly awareness of labor and working-class history through research, writing, and organizing.” Among its members is Chad Pearson, whose “Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement” helps us understand the threat posed by Janus today even if the period covered in the book is over a century ago.

Pearson’s LAWCHA colleague Mark A. Lause, a civil war era historian just like the NHC’ers, has just come out with a new book titled “The Great Cowboy Strike: Bullets, Ballots, & Class Conflicts in the American West” that should be of keen interest to CounterPunch readers. Since American society is guided by notions of “rugged individualism” embodied in the old West, it is high time for that mythology to be put to rest. Reading Lause’s magisterial account will leave you with only one conclusion: Billy the Kid had more in common with Occupy Wall Street than he did with faux cowboys like Ronald Reagan chopping wood and George W. Bush clearing bush in their respective ranches. In fact, he was more likely to put a bullet in their counterparts way back then.

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Not about oil?

(A guest post by Brian A. Mitchell)

Not About Oil? They Must Be Joking – Just One of the World’s Many Resources that the History of Interventions, Occupations, and Wars Are Always About.

What many of the world’s wars and interventions are all about. One of the world’s most valuable resources controlled by a wealthy few; from British control of Middle East oil before the Second World War to US control of global oil resources after the war.

“We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require.”

(British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill’s policy towards Iraq, 1913.)

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“He who owns oil will own the world… who has oil has empire.”

(Henry Berenger, Commissioner General for Oil Products, France, during WWI.)

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“In oil Baku is incomparable… Baku is greater than any other oil city in the world. If oil is king, Baku is its throne.”

(British journal The Near East, on Britain’s invasion of the Soviet Union along with 14 other countries in the Wars of Intervention after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.)

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“These International bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government”

(US President Theodore Roosevelt, New York Times, March 27 1918.)

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“if we appear to be reactionary in Mesopotamia, there is always the risk that Faisal will encourage the Americans to take over both, and it should be borne in mind that the Standard Oil company is very anxious to take over Iraq.”

(Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Head of the British government’s India Office Political Department, 1919.)

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“The pioneering spirit should now lead American capital and American engineering to seek new sources of petroleum supplies in foreign fields for the benefit of the America of tomorrow. Nor can this be done without popular support inspired by general appreciation of oil as our servant, a servant that works 24 hours a day and 7 days a week”.

(National Geographic magazine February 1920.)

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“The real menace of our republic is this invisible government which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over city, state and nation. Like the octopus of real life, it operates under cover of a self created screen… At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both political parties.”

(New York City Mayor John Hylan, 1922.)

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“I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. … In China in 1927 I helped see to it that the Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

(Testimony of General Smedley Butler, US Marine Corps, to the McCormack Dickstein Committee. 1935.)

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“Hitler’s deputy Hess’s mission to Britain was to suggest:”a profitable agreement in the form of an alliance against Russia as a result of which Germany was to receive the Ukraine and the Caucasus oil regions… .”

(The Times Oct 5 1942.)

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“The oil of Saudi Arabia constitutes one of the world’s greatest prizes.”

(US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, 1943.)

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“The oil in this region is the greatest single prize in all history.”

(US oil geologist and director of the American Petroleum Institute Everette Degolyer, 1944.)

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“Our petroleum policy toward the United Kingdom is predicated upon a mutual recognition of a very extensive joint interest and upon a control, at least for the moment, of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world … it is the view of the United States government that US-UK agreement upon a broad, forward looking pattern for the development and utilisation of petroleum resources under the control of nationals of the two countries is of the highest strategic and commercial importance.”

(US government memo of June 1945.)

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“[Middle East oil is] a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

(US State Department, 1945.)

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“We need to promote internal political stability and in particular to influence individuals so that public opinion does not become so hostile to our oil companies that their commercial operation becomes impossible.”

(British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, in a note to a government cabinet, October 1945.)

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“As the largest producer, the largest source of capital, and the biggest contributor to the global mechanism, we must set the pace and assume the responsibility of the majority stockholder in this corporation known as the world… Nor is this for a given term of office. This is a permanent obligation.”

(Secretary-Treasurer of US Standard Oil Company, Leo Welch, 1946.)

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“Behind the conflict in the Near East is OIL. Britain owns rich wells in Iraq … Socialists … [must] … condemn the Oil Imperialism of Britain and America and demand the pooling of all the oil resources of the world according to the needs of the peoples.”

(British Lord Fenner Brockway, 1947.)

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“Our strategic and security interests throughout the world will be best safeguarded by the establishment in suitable spots of ‘Police Stations’, fully equipped to deal with emergencies within a large radius. Kuwait is one such spot from which Iraq, South Persia, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf could be controlled. It will be worthwhile to go to considerable trouble and expense to establish and man a ‘Police Station’ there.”

(British Foreign Office memo, 1947.)

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“Now the Pacific has become an Anglo-Saxon lake, and our line of defence runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia.”

(US General MacArthur, Daily Mail March 2 1949. [Areas which have massive oil resources.])

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“Persian [Iran] oil is of vital importance to our economy. … We regard it as essential to do everything possible to prevent the Persians from getting away with a breach of their contractual obligations. [To give the British massive advantages in their oil supplies.]”

(British Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison, 1950s.)

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“The most significant example in practice of what I mean was the Iranian experiment with which, as you will remember, I was directly concerned. By the use of economic aid we succeeded in getting access to Iranian oil and we are now well established in the economy of that country. The strengthening of our economic position in Iran has enabled us to acquire control over her foreign policy and in particular to make her join the Bagdad Pact. At the present time the Shah would not dare even to make any changes in his cabinet without consulting our Ambassador.”

(Letter from US Council on Foreign Relations member billionaire Nelson Rockefeller to President Eisenhower, January 1956.)

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“We must at all costs maintain control of this oil.”

(British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, to US Secretary of State Allen Dulles, January 1956.)

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“Our interest lies in keeping Kuwait independent and separate, if we possibly can, in line with the idea of maintaining the four principle oil producing areas under separate political control.”

(Head of the eastern department of the British Foreign Office Derek Riches, August 8 1958. [Classic divide and rule again. The British separated Kuwait from Iraq in 1913.])

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“Iran is the only source of Middle Eastern oil which is not under the control of an Arab government, and present production could be considerably increased in an emergency. This strengthens the West’s hand viv-a-vis the Arab oil producing countries.”

(British Joint Intelligence Committee, 1961.)

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“It [Saudi Arabia] has no moral code of laws and its criminal justice is is of mediaeval barbarity… Corruption is widespread. The country sits on top of some of the richest oil resources in the world…”

(British Ambassador Colin Crowe, to Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home, June 20 1963.)

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“Aden is essential for our vital oil and strategic interests.”

(British commander in the Middle East Air Marshal Charles Ellsworthy, mid 1960s.)

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“The economic health and well-being of the United States, Western Europe, Japan depend upon continued access to the oil from the Persian area.”

(US President Carter, Department of State Bulletin, April 1978.)

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“The US deliberately constructed out of the ruins of the war an international monetary order based on the dollar… With its nuclear and armed forces, the US stood ready to guarantee this open economic system against threats from the Soviet Union on the outside and enemies that might close off certain markets and needed resources such as oil on the inside. As both banker and cop, the US was the guarantor of the postwar global economy.”

(Business Week March 12 1979.)

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“Western industrialised societies are largely dependent on the oil resources of the Middle East region and a threat to access to that oil would constitute a grave threat to the vital national interests. This must be dealt with; and that does not exclude the use of force if necessary.”

(US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, March 11 1981.)

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“As outlined in the paper, the strategy for Southwest Asia, including the Persian Gulf, directs American forces to be ready to force their way in if necessary, and not to wait for an invitation from a friendly government, which has been the publicly stated policy.”

(US Defense Dept, New York Times May 30 1982.)

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“In the future, we are more likely to be involved in Iraq-type things, Panama-type things, Grenada-type things… Our position should be the protection of the oilfields. Now whether Kuwait gets put back, that’s subsidiary stuff.”

(Chairman of US Armed Services Committee Les Aspin, 1990.)

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“Mideast oil is the West’s lifeblood. It fuels us today, and being 77 percent of the Free World’s proven oil reserves, it is going to fuel us when the rest of the world has run dry. … It is estimated that within 20 or 40 years the U.S. will have virtually depleted its economically available oil reserves, while the Persian Gulf region will still have at least 100 years of proven oil reserves.”

(US General Schwarzkopf, February 8 1990.)

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“It’s been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the Unites States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price.”

(US political scientist and academic Noam Chomsky, September 11 1990.)

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“Shell’s operations are impossible unless ruthless military operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to commence.”

(Ken Saro-Wiwa, from a secret Nigerian military memo, May 1994. He was executed in 1995.)

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“If they turn on the radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn SAMs [missiles]. They know we own their country [Iraq]. We own their airspace… We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.”

(US Brigadier General William Looney, June 24 1996, Washington Post, August 30 1999.)

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“So where is the oil going to come from? … The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,”

(US Vice President Richard Cheney, CEO of oil company Halliburton, 1999.)

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“Colombia is now the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid after Israel and Egypt. Direct U.S. military intervention looms on the horizon for this region
(Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru), which exports more oil to the U.S. than the entire Middle East.”

(CovertAction Quarterly magazine, 1999.)

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“US aid is to improve U.S.-Kazakh military cooperation while establishing a U.S.-interoperable base along the oil-rich Caspian.”

(US State Department Report, 2002.)

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“In oil’s name, the United States is immersed in a new kind of colonialism, for the resources that lie under foreign feet. They couldn’t care less about the people. Therein lies an even greater tragedy.”

(U.S. Dept. of State, Congressional Budget Justifications: Foreign Operations, 2003.)

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“… we’ve got to win a real war, which involves using a lot of troops and building a nation, and that’s at the core of the president’s strategy for rebuilding the Middle East.

(William Kristol, chairman of the PNAC
(Project for the New American Century), 2004.)

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“Whoever controls oil controls much more than oil.”

(US Senator John McCain, June 17 2008.)

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“Our aim is not simply to appropriate oil in one way or another
(say in easily accessible Nigeria or Venezuela) but to crush OPEC. Therefore we have to use direct force in order to get hold of large and concentrated oil deposits which can be opened up rapidly so as to put an end to the artificial oil shortage and thus to lower the price… Since this is the ultimate and there is only one target possible: Saudi Arabia… Fortunately, these are not only rich oilfields but they are also concentrated in a very small area, a fraction of the Saudi Arabian territory… While Vietnam was full of trees and brave people and our national interest was almost invisible, what we have here is no trees, very few people and a clear objective.”

(Adviser to US Defence Department Professor Miles Ignotas.)

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“The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world’s oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.”

(British novelist Salman Rushdie.)

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“We do not have any defence treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defence or security commitments to Kuwait.”

(Margaret Tutweiller, US State Department, deliberately enticing the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which was a few days later.)

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“Venezuela has the biggest oil reserves in the world. And the biggest gas reserves in this hemisphere, the eighth in the world. Venezuela was a U.S. oil colony. All of our oil was going up to the north, and the gas was being used by the U.S. and not by us. Now we are diversifying. Our oil is helping the poor. … If the United States was mad enough to attack Iran or aggress Venezuela again the price of a barrel of oil could reach $150 or evan $200.”

(Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez.)

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“And finally, this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. And having said that, all options are on the table.”

(US President George Bush.)

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“[Genocide] certainly is a valid word in my view, when you have a situation where we see thousands of deaths per month, a possible total of I million to 1.5 million over the last nine years. If that is not genocide, then I don’t know quite what is.”

(UN humanitarian coordinator Denis Halliday on US sanctions on Iraq.)

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“Natural resources and inanimate energy… are increasingly regarded as affected with public interest… Certainly they were left by God or geology to mankind and not to the Standard Oil Company of California. If this is not sound moral doctrine, I do not know what is.”

(US writer Stuart Chase.)

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“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”

(US activist and author Ralph Nader.)

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“The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is.”

(US Vice President Dick Cheney.)

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“It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil.”

(US President George Bush.)

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“Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They’re interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.”

(US writer Gore Vidal.)

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“Bahrain lies at the epicenter of Gulf security and any violent upheaval in Bahrain would have enormous geopolitical consequences. Global economic stability depends on the uninterrupted export of crude oil from the Gulf to markets around the world, a job that historically has been assigned to the U.S. Fifth Fleet.”

(King of Bahrain Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, whose billionaire family have ruled Bahrain since 1780.)

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“From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain’s standard of living was supported by oil from Iran. British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil.”

(US journalist and author Stephen Kinzer.)

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“Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.”

(US critic and author Christopher Hitchens.)

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“The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law.”

(English playwright Harold Pinter.)

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“If you go into the Ecuadorian Amazon and you stick your hand in the ground, what you get is oil sludge. The oil companies continue doing whatever they please.”

(Equadoran President Rafael Correa.)

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“In Iraq, [American administration] said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction endangering mankind. With this pretext, the U.S. intervened militarily, and all they did is take control over oil fields, and oil wells.”

(Bolivian socialist President Evo Morales.)

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“My point is that it’s incorrect to say that the Iraq policy isn’t working. It is working. It is doing what they want. They have got control of the oil and they are exporting it, and they have stripped a government that was 90% state owned and they are privatizing it.

(US political economist, social scientist and author Michael Parenti.)

---

“…an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq… with no public debate and at enormous potential cost… allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields, accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves, for development by multinational oil companies.”

(In other words, mostly US companies. The Rip Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, British Non Government Organisation, Platform, 2005. Quoted in William Blum “America’s Deadliest Export. Democracy. The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything else.”)

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“…an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq… with no public debate and at enormous potential cost… allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields, accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves, for development by multinational oil companies.”

(In other words, mostly US companies. The Rip Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth, British Non Government Organisation, Platform, 2005. Quoted in William Blum “America’s Deadliest Export. Democracy. The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything else.”)

Brian was born in the bombed out wartime East End of London and developed an interest in political books early on. He worked in various technical fields for 20 years, all of which thoroughly bored him. He entered academic life (History and Classical Economics) and became an independent journalist, worked for the ANC (secret at the time) until the end of apartheid, and was a trade union representative in a large hospital. He is now retired and still works (when able) as an independent journalist.

 

Reflections on the March for Our Lives

(A guest post by Farans Kalosar)

A cross-section

The Boston contingent

Unopened water bottles (see below)

For gun control but possibly not?

Against gun control and the human race

I attended the MfOL rally in DC yesterday. I had a few observations:

• A higher percentage of African-Americans were in attendance than at other marches in DC by my subjective count. African-Americans, as always, are at much greater risk of getting shot than the rest of us, so no wonder.
• I saw virtually no counter-demonstrators. One unarmed and obviously safety-minded chap (wearing both a belt and suspenders) was selling pro-gun baseball caps. I saw another fellow carrying a sign reading “Socialism or Barbarism,” and, quite frankly, I think he was as much a counter-demonstrator as the first guy.
• Speeches were mostly somewhat incoherent attempts by very young people trying their wings–dramatic repetition of “It must never happen again” and similar phrases, interspersed with exhortations to go out and vote for Democrats. As I was not there long, my impression of this may well be inaccurate, but that’s what I heard.
• The truly enormous crowd (i can easily believe the 1+ million estimate) were bottled up around the intersection of 12th and Pennsylvania to the point where it took me half an hour to cross the street. from curb to curb. This was distinctly frightening, and I believe this confinement was a deliberate strategy by police to “protect” the demonstrators. Of course the tight-packed crowd would have been sitting ducks for a sniper, had one been in evidence. Luckily, nothing happened, and none of the people suffering from claustrophobia (me) freaked out or started a stampede. I was lucky enough to reach a porta-potty before my aged bladder gave out.
• I noticed a big pile of pallet-sized bundles of plastic bottles of water on the Mall a few blocks south of the (virtual) corral in which the marchers were penned up. I wondered at the time how/why this had been abandoned there. Anyone’s guess is as good as mine, but it does suggest that the march’s organizers were not planning for the demonstration to be as tightly confined as it was. I noticed a column of bicycle police backed up by motorcycle police that formed just south of the 12th and Penn. intersection as I was approaching the area where the marchers were concentrated. It looked like herding to me, but what do I know? No complaints about police behavior have surfaced, to my knowledge.
• The emphasis on voting for Democrats disturbed me. This movement could easily be co-opted by the neoliberal core of the Democratic Party power establishment–and people who can’t imagine anything nicer than Joe Biden in the White House. This is the perfect “moral” issue to wash away any taint of social equality from the reactionary DP and stampede potential radicals away from anything tainted with working class consciousness or Marxism.

I fear that if the elan of this moment can’t be captured by the left (and since this is very much a single issue, that will have to be something that leads temporarily opened minds in an unanticipated direction), the whole thing will dissipate sooner rather than later. It may provide a temporary Democrat majority in the House of Representatives and some sort of tightened gun control, but, without another mass movement altogether, will have little impact beyond the single issue of mass shootings and maybe the need to get rid of Trump as president. The melodrama of this issue certainly seems to point away from renewed labor militancy, as the great outrage of young people getting shot all over the place is likely to bypass all such effort in the public mind.

I’ve read some stuff about this being a venue for “intersectionalism.” Hillary Clinton claimed to be an intersectionalist. As a socialist, I don’t find that reassuring–quite the reverse in fact.

I took a few pictures of the event, but as I understand this is not an appropriate venue I have not attached them.

Comradely,

Farans Kalosar

Capitalism and slavery

Read the book here

Fifteen years ago I began writing a series of articles about capitalism and slavery to answer Charles Post’s July 2003 Journal of Agrarian Change article titled “Plantation Slavery and Economic Development in the Antebellum Southern United States” that applied the Brenner thesis to the “peculiar institution” and its abolition. In essence, Post argues that slavery in the south was “pre-capitalist”, a term I always found rather noncommittal since it failed to make a distinction between a slave economy based on commodity-production—such as the American south—and those that were associated with a tributary society like the Ottoman Empire. There is a huge difference obviously between Janissary slaves who were highly privileged military elites and those men and women kidnapped from Africa and forced to produce cotton for the textile mills of capitalist England.

Post has basically been self-plagiarizing the article ever since and has made a studied effort to pretend I do not exist, except to make snarky references to me on FB. I was treated rudely by his good buddy Vivek Chibber at an HM conference a few years ago. One wonders if these two high priests of Marxism ever had a regular job like mine working in a cubicle whether they would have written a single article about anything at all.

Chibber and Post belong to an academic cult called “Political Marxism” around Robert Brenner and the late Ellen Meiksins Wood that has a beachhead in the NYU Sociology Department. It is there that you get trained to write articles arguing that colonialism and slavery had little to do with the rise of capitalism even though that’s specifically what Marx wrote in chapter 31 of V. 1 of Capital. If having faith in Political Marxism separates you from the ideologically impure, what can one make of Post’s recent polemic against Chibber’s defense of market socialism in Jacobin? If the Brenner thesis is a vaccine against revisionism, Chibber must have been injected with a placebo.

For many years, the Brenner thesis was virtually hegemonic in the academy, with support from many professors having no connection to Marxism. My good friend, the late Jim Blaut, explained why there was such readiness to accept it:

This point of view is basic diffusionism: autonomous development at the center, diffusion of development to the periphery. It is also tunnel history: a form of tunnel-vision which tries to explain the rise of capitalism, and the rise of Europe, by looking only at prior European facts, looking, as it were, down the European tunnel of time, ignoring the history of the world outside of Europe both as cause of change within Europe and as the site of historically efficacious change in its own right (Blaut, 1989). The Euro-Marxists — as I will call the socialists of this tradition — accept this view, and so they are diffusionists. To this extent, they agree with their mainstream colleagues about the rise of Europe, of capitalism, of modernization, of industrialization, of democracy: basically all of it is European.

Euro-Marxism went into eclipse during the period when liberation movements were decolonizing most of the world. In this period, the idea that the colonial or Third World has been, and is, unimportant in social development was not popular among Marxists. After the end of the Vietnam War, however, this point of view became again popular, and indeed became the Marxism most widely professed in European and American universities. Today we witness the curious phenomenon that Euro-Marxists are quoted with approval by anti-Marxist scholars, who can use them to show that “real” Marxist scholarship supports some of the same doctrines, theoretical and practical, that conservatives do.

Jim never wrote much about American slavery in his books and articles but he certainly did in Internet mailing lists like PEN-L where support for the Brenner thesis ran deep. Even before I ran into Jim on Marxmail, I would have found arguments like Post’s questionable at best because like many 60s radicals I had read Eric Williams’s “Capitalism and Slavery”, based on his doctoral dissertation, that was mandatory reading whatever your ideology, especially for Trotskyists. In Kent Worcester’s biography of CLR James, we learn that the Trotskyist theorist served as a tutor to Williams at Oxford. It seems that James read both drafts of Williams’s dissertation and had a significant role in formulating the book’s primary thesis, namely that sugar plantations, rum and slavery trade helped to catapult Great Britain into world domination at the expense of the African peoples in the Diaspora. Without the underdevelopment of Jamaica, Trinidad, etc., capitalist development in Great Britain would not have had the supercharged character that it did.

In 2013 and 2014, three books came out that rested firmly on the foundations of Eric Williams’s “Capitalism and Slavery”:

• Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Belknap, 2013)
• Edward Baptist, The Half That Has Never Been Told: The Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic, 2014)
• Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).

As expected, Post wrote an attack on what has now become known as the New Historians of Capitalism (NHC) school for not having a proper understanding of capitalism. In a preface to an article in Catalyst, part of the Bhaskar Sunkara publishing empire, Post wrote:

The New Historians of Capitalism (NHC) claim that their refusal to “define” capitalism is a historical and theoretical virtue. In reality, NHC do have a concept of capitalism — a system of trade, finance and extra-economic coercion and dispossession. Unfortunately, these social processes have existed trans-historically.

If you’ve read the founding document of Political Marxism, Robert Brenner’s 1977 NLR article “The Origins of Capitalist Development: a critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, this will sound familiar. The Brennerites have a rather narrow definition of capitalism, one based on the premise that it involves free wage labor producing commodities on the basis of relative surplus value—in other words, using machinery rather than ratcheting up the work-day hours to produce absolute surplus value, especially through coercion. Strictly speaking on this basis, there was no capitalism anywhere in the world in the mid-1800s except in England and the American north. Not even in France or Germany.

Unfortunately, I could not justify spending $60 to take out a Catalyst subscription to read Post’s article that is behind a paywall but in lieu of that, you can join me in reading NYU Sociology Department dissertation student John Clegg’s “Capitalism and Slavery” on ResearchGate. Like Post, Clegg faults the three historians for not having a coherent account of capitalism. To be fair to Clegg, he differs from Post in defining slavery as capitalist because of its “widespread and systematic market dependence.” Oddly enough, Clegg’s understanding is based on an idiosyncratic version of the Brenner thesis:

In this essay I argue that Robert Brenner’s conception of capitalism as generalized market dependence may provide the theoretical framing that is largely missing in these works.10 Brenner points out that while markets have existed in all known societies, only in capitalism are productive agents dependent on the market for their survival. This is because producers in capitalist societies have no direct (nonmarket) access to the means of production, including their own means of subsistence, and must therefore sell to survive. Since prices will be determined by the interaction of many producers in the market, producers in capitalist societies are compelled not only to sell but also to produce at a competitive cost.

Well, maybe so but if two people swearing by the Brenner thesis can come up with a definition of slavery totally opposed to each other’s, you really have to wonder if the theory itself is problematic especially since Brenner’s 1977 article was emphatic:

To state the case schematically: ‘production for profit via exchange’ will have the systematic effect of accumulation and the development of the productive forces only when it expresses certain specific social relations of production, namely a system of free wage labour, where labour power is a commodity. (emphasis added)

For Post and Clegg, the NHC represents a challenge to their understanding of Marxism even if they can’t seem quite able to agree with each other on the finer points of the Brenner thesis.

But only recently did I discover that Johnson, Baptist and Beckert are also fending off attacks from other quarters having little connection to Marxism. It doesn’t surprise me that they never bothered to answer Post or Clegg since having Talmudic debates over Marxist theory would have little appeal. I sometimes wonder why I bother myself.

I had run across a link somewhere, probably on FB but I can’t be sure, to a recording of a panel discussion on “Free and Unfree Labor: The Political Economy of Capitalism, Share-Cropping, and Slavery” chaired by Robert Brenner in the UCLA Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. Unfortunately, it cuts off in the middle of a presentation by Columbia professor Suresh Naidu who is working on a book about these questions and even before John Clegg had a chance to weigh in. But I was able to hear the entire talk by Gavin Wright, a 74-year old Stanford professor who has written a number of books and articles on these questions as well but none in recent years until the NHC cropped up.

Wright comes at the slavery and capitalism from two contradictory angles. He begins by stating that Eric Williams was correct in attributing the rise of British capitalism to slavery but then changes gears to attack Johnson, Baptist and Beckert for overemphasizing the importance of slavery. I know that consistency is the hobgoblin of petty minds but really..,

Much of Wright’s attack is based on an article written by Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode titled “Cotton, Slavery, and the New History of Capitalism”, which is particularly focused on the work of Edward Baptist who is particularly reviled by the non-Marxist critics of NHC.

Basic to Baptist’s research is the notion that it was torture that accounts for an increase in productivity on cotton plantations. Olmstead and Rhode, who are economists rather than historians, claim that it was a new variety of seeds that was key. They write, “Baptist ignored the well-documented argument that picking rates had increased in large part due to a succession of improved cotton varieties.” In other words, it was technological advances rather than the whip that worked.

In trying to get a handle on Olmstead and Rhode’s approach, I discovered that they co-authored a book in 2008 titled “Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development” that sounds like it might have subsidized by Monsanto given the blurb on Amazon:

This book demonstrates that American agricultural development was far more dynamic than generally portrayed. In the two centuries before World War II, a stream of biological innovations revolutionized the crop and livestock sectors, increasing both land and labor productivity. Biological innovations were essential for the movement of agriculture onto new lands with more extreme climates, for maintaining production in the face of evolving threats from pests, and for the creation of the modern livestock sector. These innovations established the foundation for the subsequent Green and Genetic Revolutions. The book challenges the misconceptions that, before the advent of hybrid corn, American farmers single-mindedly invested in laborsaving mechanical technologies and that biological technologies were static.

In addition, they co-authored an article titled “Biological Innovation and Productivity Growth in the Antebellum Cotton Economy” for Dec. 2008 Journal of Economic History that even finds the same kind of entrepreneurial innovation in a region viewed as a “precapitalist” sinkhole by Charles Post:

The achievements of antebellum southern cotton breeders surpassed those of northern wheat breeders. Our findings shed light on these advances in cotton breeding, as well as the movements in slave, cotton, and land prices; the factors responsible for the growth of cotton output and the spread of cotton cultivation; the sources of the differences in regional production and productivity between the Old and New South; as well as the conventional static comparisons of plantation and non-plantation efficiency.

I’ll close with a passage from a very useful article on the debate by Marc Parry that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Shackles and Dollars”, which is behind a paywall (contact me at lnp3@panix.com for the entire article.)

Much criticism of Baptist and others originates within the subfield of economic history. These are scholars, trained mostly in economics, who bring a social-science perspective to studying historical economic behavior. That means testing hypotheses against data. It means quantitative analysis. And it means counterfactual thinking. When historians claim slavery was essential to the Industrial Revolution, as Beckert and Baptist both do, to economists that implies it would not have happened in slavery’s absence. If scholars feel uncomfortable making that statement, “than they should think harder about the initial claim,” Hilt says. Economic historians have thought very hard about the slave economy for decades. They believe slavery was profitable. But they also believe the institutions created to sustain it harmed the South’s long-term development.

As they see it, the problem with the new slavery books stems in part from how the discipline of history has developed. In the ’60s and ’70s, historians and economists battled over economic history. But as historians turned toward culture, and economists became more quantitative, economic history increasingly became just a subfield of economics. For a variety of reasons, including the 2008 crisis, historians are turning their attention back to financial matters. But they “did not build up their tools in order to understand the material world,” says Rhode. “And they carry along certain ideological positions which they hold fervently and are not willing to test.” Historians, he says, “can’t be making stuff up.”

Not surprisingly, Rhode’s targets see things differently. Start with Baptist. He ended up pulling out of the Dartmouth debate, blaming scheduling problems, so he was not on stage to rebut Olmstead’s wand-waving. Reached by phone, however, he does so aggressively. Baptist sees a basic flaw in Olmstead and Rhode’s research — a problem that points to the methodological gulf dividing historians and economists.

Economists are ‘so obsessed with detail that they don’t really confront the broader dynamics of the interpretations.’ It comes down to seeds. Olmstead and Rhode say that cotton picking got more efficient because of improved varieties of Upland cotton. They reach that conclusion in part by comparing the growth in Upland cotton to the lack of growth in Sea Island cotton. The problem, Baptist says, is that comparison assumes there was no real difference in the labor systems used to produce those crops. But there was. As Baptist writes in a blog post responding to Olmstead and Rhode, historians have shown that Sea Island planters assigned slaves a “task,” or a specific amount of work they had to get done each day. Task accomplished, they could go home. The quantity of work demanded under the task system did not change much prior to emancipation, he says, partly because those slave communities resisted increased labor demands.

To Baptist, the root problem with Olmstead and Rhode’s work is reductionism. The economists are bent on stripping causality down to one variable (seeds), assuming away things they have no business discarding (different systems of labor). They also falsely suppose that economic actors will always look at a situation and identify the most efficient way of achieving their goals. So, by this logic, planters in 1800 understood everything about extracting labor that they understood in 1860. But that’s antithetical to how many historians think, Baptist says. Historians believe causality is complex and cultural frameworks are in constant flux. By 1860, planters may have formed different ideas about what they should be trying to get out of laborers.

Baptist calls Olmstead and Rhode “profoundly naïve” about the plantation records that anchor their research. “These are not documents that were generated to test seeds,” he says. “They are documents that were generated to measure labor. And to measure labor that was being extracted by force. And to measure labor that we know, from dozens and dozens of different testimonies by people who survived it, was generated by the threat of being whipped for not picking enough cotton.”

When economists gripe about historians retreating from economics, historians offer a counternarrative: “The problem is the economists left history for statistical model building,” says Eric Foner, a historian of 19th-century America at Columbia University. “History for them is just a source of numbers, a source of data to throw into their equations.” Foner considers counterfactuals absurd. A historian’s job is not to speculate about alternative universes, he says. It’s to figure out what happened and why. And, in the history that actually took place, cotton was extremely important in the Industrial Revolution.

Some economists who attack the new slavery studies are “champion nitpickers,” adds Foner, who has praised Baptist’s book in The New York Times and who taught Beckert at Columbia. “They’re barking up the wrong tree. They’re so obsessed with detail that they don’t really confront the broader dynamics of the interpretations. Yes, I’m sure there are good, legitimate criticisms of the handling of economic data. But in some ways I think it’s almost irrelevant to the fundamental thrust of these works.”

The Workshop; A Bag of Marbles

COUNTERPUNCH, March 23, 2018

Two French films open today in New York that are deeply engaged with the country’s malaise both present and past. Laurent Cantet’s “The Workshop”, which can be seen at the IFC Center, examines the troubled interaction between a successful novelist Olivia Dejazet and seven local students attending her writer’s workshop in La Ciotat, a southern town once dominated by the defunct ship-building industry and the militant Communist-led trade unions to which their workers belonged. Now, the only boats being built in La Ciotat are yachts for the super-rich who are resented by the economically depressed locals, including the students. “The Bag of Marbles” that opens at the Landmark on 57^th Street is set in Vichy France and tells the story of two Jewish boys who are on the run from the Nazis. In preparing the boys for their trek across France into the Italian-controlled south of the country, their father trains them to deny their Jewishness. Over the kitchen table, he grills them as if he were a Gestapo interrogator. “Are you Jewish?”, he snarls at Joseph, the 10-year old who is more vulnerable than his 12-year old brother Maurice. When the boy says no, the father slaps him across the face and repeats the question. After 4 or 5 slaps, the father is satisfied that they are ready to send on their way.

Continue reading

Michael Karadjis on East Ghouta

via Ghouta: Issues Behind the Apocalypse: Armed and civil rebellion, Class and Islam

The Internet Research Agency and Meddling in the 2016 elections

(Another Alexander Reid Ross article Max Blumenthal’s lawyer forced the SPLC to delete.)

In an editorial published on Monday, January 15, Russia Insider, one of the most important pro-Russia news and analysis hubs in the West, declared, “hostility to Putin’s Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon.”

Penned by founding editor, Charles Bausman, the 5,000-word editorial drew positive responses from a number of important sources. Alt-Right.com announced “Russia Insider Decides to Go Alt-Right,” while Unz.com proclaimed that Bausman had “named the Jews” and far-right Congressional hopeful Paul Nehlen called it an “excellent article” and “a useful jumping off point for the ‘discussion’ we must have[.] The ensuing attention and compliments indicate the prevalence of far-right politics amid pro-Kremlin media and political networks.

Bausman’s antisemitic screed first lists well-worn euphemisms used by antisemites in lieu of naming Jews, including ‘Zionists’, ‘elites’, ‘global elites’, ‘globalists’, ‘neocons’, ‘liberal interventionists’, ‘the war party’, ‘the Israel lobby’, ‘the deep state’, ‘bankers’ and ‘new world order’

Indulging his theory, Bausman blames Jews for the Bolshevik terror, remarking that “much of the Bolshevik leadership was Jewish, in particular, Trotsky,” along with members of the secret police. He claims “cursory evidence” supports this theory, adding that “Henry Ford was heavily influenced by this view,” and “the German National Socialist movement became radically more antisemitic in reaction to this interpretation.”

The antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that Jews used the Soviet Union to undermine the Russian “ethnos” is prominent among so-called “National Bolsheviks” — fascists who insist that an ultranationalist version of the Soviet Union would restore ethnic Russianness through a return to traditional society. Leading “National Bolshevik,” Aleksandr Dugin, has spearheaded influential initiatives to support Kremlin-centered “geopolitics” oriented toward a “Eurasian” spiritual empire stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Dugin has featured as a prominent figure among the pro-Kremlin far-right, including the alt-right, as well as news sites like Fort-Russ, RT, and Russia Insider.

Continuing in this vein, the editor of Russia Insider declares, “We follow the Alt-Right media and republish the occasional article, and they are invariably very popular on Russia Insider — largely, I think, because they are offering a fresh point of view, and talking about vitally important issues others refuse to address.” Bausman praises, in particular, racist alt-right podcasts like “Fash the Nation” and Richard Spencer’s “Alt Right Politics.”

Bausman’s editorial prompted a cautiously complimentary letter-to-the-editor from Gilbert Doctorow, a retired Brussels-based businessman who writes for Consortium News and cofounded the revived American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA).

Doctorow has been featured as a writer for Russia Insider since the site’s early days in 2014, penning such articles as “Twilight of the Gods: George Soros in Brussels,” and Bausman’s antisemitic editorial clearly reflected on Doctorow’s own career. In response, Doctorow wrote to Russia Insider, “for the sake of argument I will concede to you [Bausman] the point that Jewish controlled media have been a big factor in the hate-Russia mania that sweeps America today.”

“The overriding point that I wish to make here is that the anti-Russian rant from Jewish politicians and media moguls are only one of several contributing factors to the Russia-bashing that is going on,” Doctorow continued.

Arguing that Jews abandoning the Soviet Union in the late-19th Century and again in the 1970s held a grudge against Russia for their own inability to climb the financial ladder in the U.S., Doctorow’s letter proceeds, “In the big picture, the Jews are only one of several ethnic-religious groups or nationalities who left what was the Russian Empire or the Soviet Empire, and have been making trouble for Russia ever since. Therein lies the problem.” Doctorow’s letter concludes, “I stress that the issues raised in your [Bausman’s] editorial essay are serious and demand multi-disciplinary and multi-sided examination.”

The American committee

In 2014, Doctorow agreed to help jump-start the long-dormant American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA) with original member, NYU and Princeton University professor emeritus and contributing editor of The Nation, Stephen F. Cohen. Originally a group of academics, leftists, politicians and business leaders supporting Nixon’s policies of détente with Russia, the ACEWA’s new manifestation currently includes on its board such prestigious figures as Chuck Hagel, former ambassadors Jack Matlock and William vanden Heuvel, and Senator Bill Bradley.

From the start, the ACEWA afforded Doctorow the pretext to bring far-right and left-wing politicians together for public gatherings. On December 2, 2014, Doctorow launched the European branch of the ACEWA at the Brussels Press Club with a Round Table that included two left-wing members of the European Parliament and far-right Front National MEP Aymeric Chauprade.

Then Marine Le Pen’s advisor on international relations, Chauprade had recently returned from Crimea where he served as an election “observer” for the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections led by Belgian fascist Luc Michel and joined by fascists Enrique Ravello and Valerio Cignetti. Far-right monitoring group Berliner Osteuropa-Experten called the ACEWA’s European launch, “a little Querfront.”

Registering as an ACEWA lobbyist in the European Union on March 1, 2015, Doctorow hosted another Brussels Round Table the next day featuring co-author of the controversial text, The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer, as well as editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel and her husband Dr. Cohen.

The YouTube video of Mearsheimer’s speech appeared with a bullet-point summary on Russia Insider, which declared, “We owe a special thanks to Gilbert Doctorow, our invaluable RI [Russia Insider] contributor and moderator of this round table, for providing us with the video material.”

Two weeks later, Doctorow flew to Washington, D.C., for the U.S.-Russia Forum as a representative of the ACEWA. There, in the Central Hearing Facility (Room 216) of the Hart Senate Office Building, immediately following a speech from Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, Doctorow appeared on a panel with Cohen and Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher to decry anti-Putin sentiment.

After a short coffee break, the audience returned to the illustrious room to see Katrina vanden Heuvel moderate a panel on alternative media featuring the late Robert Parry of Consortium News, which is apparently Russia Insider’s fiscal sponsor. In the next time slot, Bausman took to the podium to give a presentation boasting of Russia Insider’s three million views per month during its first six months of existence. Today, both the homepage and the speakers’ page of the Russia Forum’s website feature Basuman’s photo in the banner image.

That September, Doctorow was back in Belgium, where he chaired another ACEWA Round Table featuring contributions from EU politicians and such academics as Richard Sakawa, a participant in Russia’s elite Valdai Discussion Club, and The Israel Lobby’s other co-author Stephen Walt.

As the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 heated up, the ACEWA argued that Trump proposed a “new détente-like relationship” with Putin’s Russia, while deriding Clinton’s platform. On July 12, Doctorow’s branch of the ACEWA screened a film against the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act at the Brussels Press Club featuring a Q&A with the film’s director, Andrei Nekrasov, as advertised on the ACEWA website.

Following Trump’s election, Doctorow’s signature appeared on a letter published in TheNation with Noam Chomsky, whom he had criticized in a 2014 Nation article for being too slow to embrace Putin’s Russia, and four prestigious members of the European political community calling for a new détente in Europe. Doctorow left the ACEWA around March, 2017 to pursue other interests. He has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Ongoing relationships

Until January 19, 2018, the ACEWA’s website carried some 66 articles by Doctorow crossposted from websites like Consortium News and the Washington Times. The most recent piece from Doctorow was posted at ACEWA less than a month before time of writing. As of January 19, 2018, however, Doctorow’s content appears to have been scrubbed. Nevertheless, the overlap between articles posted by ACEWA and Russia Insider remains significant, and Consortium News remains one of the 14 sites shortlisted under the ACEW’s “additional resources.”

In a phone conversation with Hatewatch, Cohen said that he “kept up a personal correspondence with [Doctorow] about things that interest both of us, mainly Russia,” and that Doctorow resigned from the ACEWA “because he found it constraining,” not due to any “specific policy disagreement” or “anything personal.” According to Cohen, antisemitism never arose as an issue in his experience with Doctorow or in Doctorow’s role regarding the ACEWA.

However, along with his confab with Chauprade at the ACEWA’s launch in Brussels, Doctorow’s writings while representing the ACEWA indicate that his relationship to the far-right remained relatively consistent, insofar as he supported neo-Eurasianist geopolitical strategy against the North Atlantic as a ballast of national interest against the “tyranny” of “universal values.”

Doctorow’s piece published at Consortium News on June 3, 2016, for instance, lauds a former-member of Poland’s fascist Association for Tradition and Culture “Niklot” named Mateusz Piskorski as “an outstanding spokesman of the minority view and founder of the Zmiana (or Change) party.” According to researcher of far-right networks, Anton Shekhovtsov, Zmiana is an attempt to “combine Polish right-wing and left-wing extremists,” and one of its leaders, Bartosz Bekier, also heads up Poland’s fascist Falanga.

Also a veteran of the far-right Self-Defence party, Piskorski’s European Center for Geopolitical Analysis is connected to Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union, a relationship consummated as early as 2004 during Piskorski’s efforts to “oversee” elections throughout Eastern Europe. More recently, he joined Chauprade in Michel’s fascist-laden, Russia-funded Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections, overseeing the illegal Crimean “referendum.”

James Carden, editor of the ACEWA’s website, stated by email, “The ACEWA, its website, and Stephen F. Cohen have had no direct relationship with Russia Insider and/or with Charles Bausman.” However, Doctorow’s relationship with Russia Insider while operating as ACEWA’s European coordinator belies this denial, as exhibited by the video that appeared on Russia Insider of ACEWA’s Round Table with special thanks to Doctorow.

Far-right and pro-Putin networks

As the diagram below shows, when the site metrics search engine Alexa runs an audience overlap comparison using only Russia Insider, their apparent fiscal sponsor at Consortium News, Bausman’s friend at pro-Russia site, The Saker, and ACEWA-linked magazine, The Nation, three different audience clusters emerge: (1) a largely direct Russian propaganda cluster; (2) a mostly U.S.-based cluster of conspiracist sites and syncretic left-right geopolitics sites; (3) a more mainstream cluster of sites thought to be far more credible than the latter two.

Doctorow’s activity as a writer and political operative indicate a capacity to triangulate a syncretic left-right movement against liberalism based on trans-national connections between media and politics. However, he, Consortium, and Russia Insider intimate the broader problem that the conduits of “geopolitical” ideology from Russian media to pro-Russian sites and the U.S. mainstream can serve as a Trojan horse for fascist tendencies and sympathies.

Pro-Putin networks like RT and Sputnik, which have played host to far-right commentators like Dugin, Richard Spencer and German neo-Eurasianist Manuel Ochsenreiter serve as vehicles for far-right ideologies laundered into US news and commentary sites under the auspices of geopolitical commentary. Unfortunately, the Left has not launched a serious effort to disconnect from collaborations with far-right groups in the context of networks that support and are often supported by Putin’s Russia. This situation has caused influential bodies like the ACEWA to facilitate the growth of transnational, far-right politics and, more specifically, the fascist neo-Eurasianist movement.

The far-right influence in pro-Kremlin media and political networks

(Another Alexander Reid Ross article Max Blumenthal’s lawyer forced the SPLC to delete.)

In an editorial published on Monday, January 15, Russia Insider, one of the most important pro-Russia news and analysis hubs in the West, declared, “hostility to Putin’s Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon.”

Penned by founding editor, Charles Bausman, the 5,000-word editorial drew positive responses from a number of important sources. Alt-Right.com announced “Russia Insider Decides to Go Alt-Right,” while Unz.com proclaimed that Bausman had “named the Jews” and far-right Congressional hopeful Paul Nehlen called it an “excellent article” and “a useful jumping off point for the ‘discussion’ we must have[.] The ensuing attention and compliments indicate the prevalence of far-right politics amid pro-Kremlin media and political networks.

Bausman’s antisemitic screed first lists well-worn euphemisms used by antisemites in lieu of naming Jews, including ‘Zionists’, ‘elites’, ‘global elites’, ‘globalists’, ‘neocons’, ‘liberal interventionists’, ‘the war party’, ‘the Israel lobby’, ‘the deep state’, ‘bankers’ and ‘new world order’

Indulging his theory, Bausman blames Jews for the Bolshevik terror, remarking that “much of the Bolshevik leadership was Jewish, in particular, Trotsky,” along with members of the secret police. He claims “cursory evidence” supports this theory, adding that “Henry Ford was heavily influenced by this view,” and “the German National Socialist movement became radically more antisemitic in reaction to this interpretation.”

The antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that Jews used the Soviet Union to undermine the Russian “ethnos” is prominent among so-called “National Bolsheviks” — fascists who insist that an ultranationalist version of the Soviet Union would restore ethnic Russianness through a return to traditional society. Leading “National Bolshevik,” Aleksandr Dugin, has spearheaded influential initiatives to support Kremlin-centered “geopolitics” oriented toward a “Eurasian” spiritual empire stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Dugin has featured as a prominent figure among the pro-Kremlin far-right, including the alt-right, as well as news sites like Fort-Russ, RT, and Russia Insider.

Continuing in this vein, the editor of Russia Insider declares, “We follow the Alt-Right media and republish the occasional article, and they are invariably very popular on Russia Insider — largely, I think, because they are offering a fresh point of view, and talking about vitally important issues others refuse to address.” Bausman praises, in particular, racist alt-right podcasts like “Fash the Nation” and Richard Spencer’s “Alt Right Politics.”

Bausman’s editorial prompted a cautiously complimentary letter-to-the-editor from Gilbert Doctorow, a retired Brussels-based businessman who writes for Consortium News and cofounded the revived American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA).

Doctorow has been featured as a writer for Russia Insider since the site’s early days in 2014, penning such articles as “Twilight of the Gods: George Soros in Brussels,” and Bausman’s antisemitic editorial clearly reflected on Doctorow’s own career. In response, Doctorow wrote to Russia Insider, “for the sake of argument I will concede to you [Bausman] the point that Jewish controlled media have been a big factor in the hate-Russia mania that sweeps America today.”

“The overriding point that I wish to make here is that the anti-Russian rant from Jewish politicians and media moguls are only one of several contributing factors to the Russia-bashing that is going on,” Doctorow continued.

Arguing that Jews abandoning the Soviet Union in the late-19th Century and again in the 1970s held a grudge against Russia for their own inability to climb the financial ladder in the U.S., Doctorow’s letter proceeds, “In the big picture, the Jews are only one of several ethnic-religious groups or nationalities who left what was the Russian Empire or the Soviet Empire, and have been making trouble for Russia ever since. Therein lies the problem.” Doctorow’s letter concludes, “I stress that the issues raised in your [Bausman’s] editorial essay are serious and demand multi-disciplinary and multi-sided examination.”

The American committee

In 2014, Doctorow agreed to help jump-start the long-dormant American Committee for East-West Accord (ACEWA) with original member, NYU and Princeton University professor emeritus and contributing editor of The Nation, Stephen F. Cohen. Originally a group of academics, leftists, politicians and business leaders supporting Nixon’s policies of détente with Russia, the ACEWA’s new manifestation currently includes on its board such prestigious figures as Chuck Hagel, former ambassadors Jack Matlock and William vanden Heuvel, and Senator Bill Bradley.

From the start, the ACEWA afforded Doctorow the pretext to bring far-right and left-wing politicians together for public gatherings. On December 2, 2014, Doctorow launched the European branch of the ACEWA at the Brussels Press Club with a Round Table that included two left-wing members of the European Parliament and far-right Front National MEP Aymeric Chauprade.

Then Marine Le Pen’s advisor on international relations, Chauprade had recently returned from Crimea where he served as an election “observer” for the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections led by Belgian fascist Luc Michel and joined by fascists Enrique Ravello and Valerio Cignetti. Far-right monitoring group Berliner Osteuropa-Experten called the ACEWA’s European launch, “a little Querfront.”

Registering as an ACEWA lobbyist in the European Union on March 1, 2015, Doctorow hosted another Brussels Round Table the next day featuring co-author of the controversial text, The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer, as well as editor and publisher of The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel and her husband Dr. Cohen.

The YouTube video of Mearsheimer’s speech appeared with a bullet-point summary on Russia Insider, which declared, “We owe a special thanks to Gilbert Doctorow, our invaluable RI [Russia Insider] contributor and moderator of this round table, for providing us with the video material.”

Two weeks later, Doctorow flew to Washington, D.C., for the U.S.-Russia Forum as a representative of the ACEWA. There, in the Central Hearing Facility (Room 216) of the Hart Senate Office Building, immediately following a speech from Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, Doctorow appeared on a panel with Cohen and Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher to decry anti-Putin sentiment.

After a short coffee break, the audience returned to the illustrious room to see Katrina vanden Heuvel moderate a panel on alternative media featuring the late Robert Parry of Consortium News, which is apparently Russia Insider’s fiscal sponsor. In the next time slot, Bausman took to the podium to give a presentation boasting of Russia Insider’s three million views per month during its first six months of existence. Today, both the homepage and the speakers’ page of the Russia Forum’s website feature Basuman’s photo in the banner image.

That September, Doctorow was back in Belgium, where he chaired another ACEWA Round Table featuring contributions from EU politicians and such academics as Richard Sakawa, a participant in Russia’s elite Valdai Discussion Club, and The Israel Lobby’s other co-author Stephen Walt.

As the U.S. presidential campaign of 2016 heated up, the ACEWA argued that Trump proposed a “new détente-like relationship” with Putin’s Russia, while deriding Clinton’s platform. On July 12, Doctorow’s branch of the ACEWA screened a film against the anti-corruption Magnitsky Act at the Brussels Press Club featuring a Q&A with the film’s director, Andrei Nekrasov, as advertised on the ACEWA website.

Following Trump’s election, Doctorow’s signature appeared on a letter published in TheNation with Noam Chomsky, whom he had criticized in a 2014 Nation article for being too slow to embrace Putin’s Russia, and four prestigious members of the European political community calling for a new détente in Europe. Doctorow left the ACEWA around March, 2017 to pursue other interests. He has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Ongoing relationships

Until January 19, 2018, the ACEWA’s website carried some 66 articles by Doctorow crossposted from websites like Consortium News and the Washington Times. The most recent piece from Doctorow was posted at ACEWA less than a month before time of writing. As of January 19, 2018, however, Doctorow’s content appears to have been scrubbed. Nevertheless, the overlap between articles posted by ACEWA and Russia Insider remains significant, and Consortium News remains one of the 14 sites shortlisted under the ACEW’s “additional resources.”

In a phone conversation with Hatewatch, Cohen said that he “kept up a personal correspondence with [Doctorow] about things that interest both of us, mainly Russia,” and that Doctorow resigned from the ACEWA “because he found it constraining,” not due to any “specific policy disagreement” or “anything personal.” According to Cohen, antisemitism never arose as an issue in his experience with Doctorow or in Doctorow’s role regarding the ACEWA.

However, along with his confab with Chauprade at the ACEWA’s launch in Brussels, Doctorow’s writings while representing the ACEWA indicate that his relationship to the far-right remained relatively consistent, insofar as he supported neo-Eurasianist geopolitical strategy against the North Atlantic as a ballast of national interest against the “tyranny” of “universal values.”

Doctorow’s piece published at Consortium News on June 3, 2016, for instance, lauds a former-member of Poland’s fascist Association for Tradition and Culture “Niklot” named Mateusz Piskorski as “an outstanding spokesman of the minority view and founder of the Zmiana (or Change) party.” According to researcher of far-right networks, Anton Shekhovtsov, Zmiana is an attempt to “combine Polish right-wing and left-wing extremists,” and one of its leaders, Bartosz Bekier, also heads up Poland’s fascist Falanga.

Also a veteran of the far-right Self-Defence party, Piskorski’s European Center for Geopolitical Analysis is connected to Dugin’s Eurasian Youth Union, a relationship consummated as early as 2004 during Piskorski’s efforts to “oversee” elections throughout Eastern Europe. More recently, he joined Chauprade in Michel’s fascist-laden, Russia-funded Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections, overseeing the illegal Crimean “referendum.”

James Carden, editor of the ACEWA’s website, stated by email, “The ACEWA, its website, and Stephen F. Cohen have had no direct relationship with Russia Insider and/or with Charles Bausman.” However, Doctorow’s relationship with Russia Insider while operating as ACEWA’s European coordinator belies this denial, as exhibited by the video that appeared on Russia Insider of ACEWA’s Round Table with special thanks to Doctorow.

Far-right and pro-Putin networks

As the diagram below shows, when the site metrics search engine Alexa runs an audience overlap comparison using only Russia Insider, their apparent fiscal sponsor at Consortium News, Bausman’s friend at pro-Russia site, The Saker, and ACEWA-linked magazine, The Nation, three different audience clusters emerge: (1) a largely direct Russian propaganda cluster; (2) a mostly U.S.-based cluster of conspiracist sites and syncretic left-right geopolitics sites; (3) a more mainstream cluster of sites thought to be far more credible than the latter two.

Doctorow’s activity as a writer and political operative indicate a capacity to triangulate a syncretic left-right movement against liberalism based on trans-national connections between media and politics. However, he, Consortium, and Russia Insider intimate the broader problem that the conduits of “geopolitical” ideology from Russian media to pro-Russian sites and the U.S. mainstream can serve as a Trojan horse for fascist tendencies and sympathies.

Pro-Putin networks like RT and Sputnik, which have played host to far-right commentators like Dugin, Richard Spencer and German neo-Eurasianist Manuel Ochsenreiter serve as vehicles for far-right ideologies laundered into US news and commentary sites under the auspices of geopolitical commentary. Unfortunately, the Left has not launched a serious effort to disconnect from collaborations with far-right groups in the context of networks that support and are often supported by Putin’s Russia. This situation has caused influential bodies like the ACEWA to facilitate the growth of transnational, far-right politics and, more specifically, the fascist neo-Eurasianist movement.