GlobalTalk

Election Outcome: OK, Now What?

The recent US election shows that America's generational tide has turned, that today's future-oriented young adults and middle-agers (Millennials and GenXers), along with a large minority of short-life-horizon elders (Boomers), are ready to move on from the chaotic reckoning that corporate capitalism's last act has imposed on the nation.

No, the voters said, we're not going back to hate and division -- to Trumpism -- and we want to get on with visions like the Green New Deal, Build Back Better, Medicare for All, and the Birth of the People's Economy. That is the generational verdict of 2018, 2020 and 2022.

We're not there yet, but we beat back the reactionaries and drew sharpened distinctions between progressive and corporate Dems. The light at the end of the tunnel -- 2024 -- beckons as never before!

Our "rendezvous with destiny"¹ is on the brink of resolution, the last phase -- according to William Strauss and Neil Howe -- before the next era erupts in full bloom.

In the 90s, Strauss and Howe (S&H) -- the historians who uncovered the generational root of American political cycles² -- explained that, since the dawn of the Industrial Age and its steady urbanization of human existence, a nation's intensifying need to ensure social cohesion and collaboration compels reconsideration of its social contract every four generations (every 80 years or so), when all the generations alive at the last "rendezvous with destiny" have passed from life and the nation's politics. Their old social contract is outdated and dysfunctional. Renewal is necessary and vital, but due to a variety of class and social complications (evolving through time), these Fourth Turnings are typically accompanied by extreme social violence, war, and a devastating social catastrophe.

From their study of past cycles, S&H constructed a morphology of Fourth Turnings, the final demise of every era's social contract. Writing in 1997 (25 years ago!),³ their construction brilliantly prophesied the vivid loss of capitalist cultural hegemony that US society now displays. Because it dissects the elements of this transition, S&H's insight deserves quotation at length (all emphasis in original):

"From the similarity of [Fourth Turning] eras,⁴ a morphology can be constructed:

• A Crisis era begins with a catalyst -- a starting event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
• Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy -- a new counterentropy that reunifies and reenergizes civil life.
• The regenerated society propels toward a climax -- a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and birth of the new.
• The climax culminates in a resolution -- a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates the winners and losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order.

"This Crisis morphology," Strauss and Howe continue, "occurs over the span of one turning...around fifteen to twenty-five years elapse between the catalyst and the resolution...

"Every Fourth Turning starts with a catalyst event that terminates the mood of Unraveling and unleashes one of Crisis. [S]parks of history -- sudden and startling events -- can arise in any turning. Some sparks ignite nothing. Some flare briefly and then extinguish. Some have important effects but leave underlying problems unresolved. Others ignite epic conflagrations. Which ones ignite? Studying the sparks of history themselves won't help answer this question, because what they are is far less important that how a society reacts to them. This reaction is substantially determined by the season of the saeculum⁵ -- in other words, by the turning in which they are located. Sparks in a High tend to reinforce feelings of security; in an Awakening, argument; in an Unraveling, anxiety. Come the Fourth Turning, sparks of history trigger a fierce new dynamic of public synergy.

"The catalyst can be one spark or, more commonly, a series of sparks that self-ignite like the firecrackers traditionally used by the Chinese to mark their own breaks in the circle of time. Each of these sparks is linked to a specific threat about which society had been fully informed but against which it had left itself poorly protected. Afterward, the fact that these sparks were foreseeable but poorly foreseen gives rise to a new sense of urgency about institutional dysfunction and civic vulnerability. The marks the beginning of the vertiginous spiral of Crisis."

In retrospect, we can see the catalysts of the present Crisis in the US: 9/11, the Afghani and Iraqi wars, Hurricane Katrina, and, ultimately, the global financial meltdown of 2008. By aggregate impact, these catalysts left the Millennial generation staring at the bleakest of futures.

S&H continue: "Once this new mood is fully catalyzed, a society begins a process of regeneracy, a drawing together of whatever definition of community is available at the time. Out of the debris of the Unraveling, a new civic ethos arises. One set of post-Awakening ideals prevails over the others. People stop tolerating the weakening of institutions, the splintering of culture, and the individualizing of daily behavior. Spiritual curiosity abates, manners traditionalize, and the culture is harnessed as propaganda for the purpose of overtly reinforcing good conduct. History teaches that, roughly one to three years after the initial catalyst, people begin acknowledging this new synergy in community life and begin deputizing government to enforce it. Collective action is now seen as vital to solving the society's most fundamental problems."

At this point, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the nation's polarization heading into the present Fourth Turning was more intense and the pace of events more drawn out than S&H anticipated, but, since 2018, we've seen the slow but steady gathering of constructive, civic momentum (as manifest in the Biden's election and the Democrats' capture of the Senate in 2020 and this year's blue wall).

Anticipating the present moment, S&H continue: "With civic ethos now capable of producing civic deeds, a new dynamic of threat and response takes hold. Instead of downplaying problems, leaders start exaggerating them. Instead of deferring solutions, they accelerate them. Instead of tolerating diversity, they demand consensus. Instead of coaxing people with promises of minimal sacrifice, they summon them with warnings of maximal sacrifice. Leaders energize every available institution and direct them toward community survival. Thus invigorated, society starts propelling itself on a trajectory that nobody had foreseen before the catalyzing event. Societal problems that, in the Unraveling, posed insuperable dilemmas now appear to have simple if demanding solutions. A new resolve about urgent public goals crowds out qualms about questionable public means.

"A Crisis mood does not guarantee that the new governing policies will be well designed or will work as intended. To the contrary: Crisis eras are studded with faulty leadership and inept management -- from President Lincoln's poor record of choosing generals to President Roosevelt's colossal blunders with such alphabet soup agencies as the AAA, NRA, and RFC. What makes a Crisis special is the public's willingness to let leaders lead even when they falter and to let authorities be authoritative even when they make mistakes. Amid this civic solidarity, mediocre leaders can gain immense popular following: bad policies can be made to work (or, at least, be perceived as working); and, as at Pearl Harbor, even a spectacular failure does not undermine pubic support. Good policy choices pay off quickly. (In an Awakening, by contrast, even the best leaders and plans can fail, and one misstep can destroy public confidence.)

"Private life also transforms beyond prior recognition. Now less important than team, individuals are expected to comply with Fourth Turning standards of virtue. Family order strengthens, and personal violence and substance abuse decline. Those who persist in free-wheeling self-oriented behavior now face implacable public stigma, even punishment. Winner-take-all arrangements give way to enforceable new mechanisms of social sharing. Questions about who does what are settled on grounds of survival, not fairness. This leads to renewed social division of labor by age and sex. In the realm of public activity, elders are expected to step aside for the young, women for men. When danger looms, children are expected to be protected before parents, mothers before fathers. All social arrangements are evaluated anew; pre-Crisis promises and expectations count for little. Where the Unraveling had been an era of fast-paced personal lives against a background of public gridlock, in the Crisis the pace of daily life will seem to slow down just as political and social change accelerates."

Aside from women stepping aside for men, we see all these trends in today's emerging, new set of dominant values. With the regeneracy finally taking shape, next comes the climax.

S&H: "When society approaches the climax of a Crisis, it reaches a point of maximum civic power. Where the new values regime had once justified individual fury, it now justifies public fury. Wars become more likely and are fought with efficacy and finality. The risk of revolution is high -- as is the risk of civil war, since the community that commands the greatest loyalty does not necessarily coincide with political (or geographic) boundaries. Leaders become more inclined to define enemies in moral terms, to enforce virtue militarily, to refuse all compromise, to commit large forces in that effort, to impose heavy sacrifices on the battlefield and home front, to build the most destructive weapons contemporary minds can imagine, and to deploy those weapons if needed to obtain enduring victory.

"The Crisis climax is human history's equivalent to nature's raging typhoon, the kind that sucks all surrounding matter into a single swirl of ferocious energy. Anything not lashed down goes flying; anything standing in the way gets flattened. Normally occurring late in the Fourth Turning, the climax gathers energy from an accumulation of unmet needs, unpaid bills, and unresolved problems. It then spends that energy on an upheaval whose direction and dimension were beyond comprehension during the prior Unraveling era. The climax shakes a society to its roots, transforms its institutions, redirects its purposes, and marks its people (and its generations) for life. The climax can end in triumph, or tragedy, or some combination of both. Whatever the event and whatever the outcome, a society passes through a great gate of history, fundamentally altering the course of civilization.

"Soon thereafter, this great gate is sealed by the Crisis resolution, when victors are rewarded and enemies punished; when empires or nations are forged or destroyed; when treaties are signed and boundaries redrawn; and when peace is accepted, troops repatriated, and life begun anew.

"One large chapter of history ends, and another starts. In a very real sense, one society dies -- and another is born."

A new social contract in hand, four generations -- as unified as ever is possible in any complex society -- step forward to tackle the nation's rebirth and the new era ahead.

We're almost there, and the 2024 election should push us through today's unsteady dual (progressive and corporate) power (since 2022) and into full-out resolution of our nation's and the world's socioecological crisis.

Preparing and conducting this final struggle is the work of the next two years.

First order of the day is new leadership. Pelosi and her leadership team have resigned. Most likely, Biden will soon announce his plan to fight like hell for the nation's future while urging voters to choose their next President from among the Democrat's rich stable of would-be commanders-in-chief. If he decides to run again yet fails to mount an effective battle against corporate power next year, he almost certainly will be challenged from the left in the 2024 presidential primaries. Either way, a rich tableau of political debate is bound to energize and guide the electorate in its 2024 decisions.

In the coming 24 months, this Fourth Turning's general command will take final shape, and, upon the guidance indicated by the elections' outcomes, it will direct the design and implementation of America's next social contract.

By 2030, this Fourth Turning will seem distant history. All focus will be on advancing social justice in the course of creative, energetic problem-solving in civilization's existential battle with climate change, an agenda dictated and molded by service class values, necessities and capacities. Despite immense hardship, the generations of the coming First Turning will be solid and fervent in their efforts, and they will enjoy the fruits of a civilization whose living generations are unanimously committed to common, human interest ahead of inanimate corporations and the elite who run them.

This being the present era's path, the only question is the actual content and political leadership of the coming social contract.

The parameters seem set, if not yet consistently acknowledged and respected in debate:

1. Climate change is an existential emergency, and necessitates a global strategy that can be unleashed only with the political transformation of the only financial and military superpower remaining from the post-war era, the US.

2. Corporate capitalism orchestrated today's impending dark age by polarizing society through neglect of social/public investment and goading the private, hoarded, wealth accumulation of corporate elites. Public investment for the strategic good of civilization must become the primary purpose of government at all levels, worldwide. Without enhanced social justice in the US and worldwide, a new dark age is inevitable.

3. The credit and currencies of sovereign nation-states should be tools of public administration in the service of public interest. While supporting a private economy of corporate and small capitalist businesses, governments must ensure social investments in people and infrastructure that negate economic polarization and strategically buttress social cohesion, collaboration and security.

The main line of struggle for power in contemporary US politics is between the corporate Dems -- who, in politics, serve corporations and their elite management -- and progressive Dems, who serve the public, social, non-profit, and small business interests that deploy/employ about 80 percent of the nation's workforce.

The next two years in American political life will be marked by the struggle to clarify direction and leadership in the post-2024 resolution of today's Fourth Turning. Better or worse outcomes are still in the offering. The next two years are likely to be the most politically consequential, yet, in the lives of all of today's living generations, in the US and throughout the world.

Steve Clark

Footnotes:
¹ Franklin D. Roosevelt, Presidential nomination acceptance speech, Democratic National Convention, 1936.
² William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, William Morrow and Company (New York, 1991).
³ Strauss and Howe, The Fourth Turning, Broadway Books (New York, 1997); quoted section pp 256-259.
⁴ Six eras of crisis and transformation in Anglo-American history:

Wars of Roses (1459-1487), Late Medieval Saeculum
Armada Crisis (1569-1594), Reformation Saeculum
Glorious Revolution (1675-1704, New World Saeculum
American Revolution (1773-1794), Revolutionary Saeculum
Civil War (1860-1865), Civil War Saeculum
Great Depression and World War II (1929-1946), Great Power Saeculum

⁵ Latin for a long, natural life that passes through four phases: childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and elderhood.

Money on the Left Advances Framework for Socialist Construction in US, World

Okay, this podcast -- Democratizing University Finance -- blew my mind.

It vividly explores the present, yet outer boundaries of applied Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, aka, modern macroeconomic theory) and, in the process, opens a wide, instructive vista on socialist construction in a modern, democratic, Service Age economy like our own (and, indeed, like the world's economy, as well).

The Money on the Left collective (an affiliation of Monthly Review) is a cluster of MMT academics who have designed a (let's call it) "public service" currency -- the Uni -- to model an alternative means (to dollars) for universities to finance and conduct their core work -- teaching and research. Currently, universities rely on corporate-financed research and returns on their market-invested endowments (rentier interest), both of which tilt their core mission in ways that prioritize private, corporate wealth ahead of the public's interest.

The basic idea is taken from the on-going, long-sanctioned practice of private banks issuing dollar-denominated loans or credit lines without the use of any money of their own (or their depositors). In actuality, every bank's credit lines are creations of new dollars "from thin air" (achieved through keystroked entries in the necessary online, digitized accounts).

Private banks are able to do this because they are "franchised" for this purpose by the US Congress, which enacted the 1913 Federal Reserve Act that requires all banks that issue dollar-denominated credit to accept membership in and regulation by the nation's then-newly-established (first) central bank, the Federal Reserve.

Under current US law and practice, private banks are the only entities other than the government, itself, that issue "new" dollars into the economy through credit extension. Currently, about 90 percent of the new dollars that enter the economy each year come through private bank lending.

That said, the government has the option of issuing its currency directly into the economy through government spending. During times of war, for instance, government spending vastly exceeds bank spending. And, for instance, in the face of today's global climate disaster, the government could not only spend as much as necessary but, also, channel (via tax and regulatory policy) private bank lending, by design, to pull every available American into work addressing the catastrophe.

This power of public investment was well-understood by the Roosevelt Administration during the Great Depression. With the economy in shambles and banks reluctant to lend, FDR needed to spur commerce. Working with Congress, he granted "the lending franchise" to certain designated federal agencies, and with a tiny amount of federal seed money to get started, they unfolded an array of programs that put people to work, provided income, spurred spending, built back local economies, and enriched the public's wealth. After WWII and FDR's death, the corporate sector successfully lobbied to depress (and obscure) direct government spending in order to reposition private banks in the voters' minds as far more useful than "socialism" for the strategic good of the country (after all, this was the beginning of the Cold War!).

Nevertheless, in this 1930s and 40s history -- with the insight of MMT -- we can see the powerful potential of "fiat" or "sovereign" money to serve the public's interest: it can be created and disgorged at government will!

Robert Hockett, a Cornel University law professor and MMT proponent (who also has a regular column in Forbes and recently published The Citizens' Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Finance), is the legal consultant behind HR-3339, the National Infrastructure Bank Act, currently introduced in the US House. When the corporate Dems finally succumb to the progressive Dem majority in Congress, this bill may become the first, trail-brazing marker in the democratic, socialist reconstruction of the American economy. The NIB would be positioned to pour vast amounts of new dollars into the nation's service and industrial economy to revitalize, strengthen, and diversify public sector investment to immediately tackle the unfolding, catastrophic, global, climate-change emergency.

Further, as the Uni model indicates, the coming reconstruction of the US economy along socialist lines -- aka, "socialism with American characteristics" (democratic republic, rule of law, mixed economy, transparent macroeconomic planning) -- does not have to be spurred solely by new federal investment banks. Congress, as it wishes, can extend the "lending franchise" to any public-purpose entity (post office system, universities, CDFIs, non-profit hospital associations) as well as state, local and tribal governments. And to guide, coordinate and regulate such new, diverse, substantial injections of credit into the economy, creative vehicles for overarching economic planning -- Green New Deal Authority, enhanced Council of Economic Advisors, a more transparent and democratic Fed, a Job Guarantee Board at Labor, activist leadership at the Treasury -- will, of course, be necessary and implemented. In this, the service class will enlarge and enhance the government's capacity to serve the strategic interests of Service Age society enduring its existential battle with climate change.

What is evidently possible in the US is equally possible in world macroeconomics. Indeed, the climate change catastrophe cannot be managed, must less diverted, until a plethora of globally-spurred, nationally-specific, public investments are initiated, not under dictates of the US-dominated IMF, but under the guidance of local communities with their national and regional collaborators. But, to enable such collaborative investment, world-scale economic and financial justice must first be achieved. In particular, the US dollar must be replaced as the world's reserve currency (WRC) by a new, global reserve currency that is internationally and democratically administered. Maybe it'll be called the "Globi" or "Climate Salvation Bucks" or something else, but all it really needs is the official backing of the UN/IMF and a new, worldwide, BIS-administered, "financial transaction fee" ("bank tax," "Tobin Tax") on corporate electronic funds transfers (EFTs).

A new global reserve currency will give the world the fiscal engine it needs to save itself from climate change catastrophe. Once progressives gain control of the Presidency and the Congress, an insightful, financial justice advocate can be appointed Chair of the US Federal Reserve, and the new Chair can initiate a global campaign to redesign the Bretton Woods financial architecture for the complex, sustained era of global collaboration and investment ahead.

Bottom line: the advent of "fiat" currency post 1970 (when Nixon ended the gold standard) freed credit and currency from the limitations of capitalist-controlled money supplies, but it has taken decades for economic and financial experts to fully understand the social potential unleashed by "sovereign" (state-owned) money. Today, with the insight of MMT, we're on the cusp of a grand but difficult new era in which the government's -- and, in a democracy, the peoples' -- money is persistently and effectively invested in the public's interest.

This podcast on the "Uni" is a revelatory delight.

Steve Clark

American Socialism Lacks Vision and Plan: Post-Marxist Social Science Can Help

[Below are the remarks I delivered at a Voices for New Democracy forum on the future of American socialism on September 11, 2022.]

[Slide 1: title slide]
Thanks for the introduction. Hello, welcome to all of you, and thanks for joining tonight's discussion.

[Slide 2: Socialist revolution in today's "post-industrial" society]
Tonight, I want to talk about socialist revolution in a country like ours -- what that looks like and where we're at in the process.

I'm going to follow this three-point outline...and, also, here is my email, should anyone want to pursue the conversation after tonight. I hope you will.

[slide 3: Current political assessment]
1. Let me start with the principal, controlling contradiction in the world today; in my opinion, it's between Human Civilization and Nature; three things seem especially relevant:

First, the climate-change calamity is an existential threat to humanity; "existential" means existential, and climate change, already, is imposing a new dark age on our civilization.

Second, the only way to mitigate and abate this calamity is through sustained, world-scale collaboration of all nation-states.

Third, in this crisis, the US state, the world's last financial, military and imperialist superpower, is the single most dominant, most powerfully-positioned state...and, in fact, the only state that we Americans can and do directly control.

2. Now, let's note the changing vibe around prospects for the fall election and 2024.

a. The outcome of the election, of course, remains uncertain, but, best case, Dems could hold the House majority and elect enough Senators to change the filibuster rule; think what that will open up; even if we're not that successful this year, the writing looks to be on the wall...if not this fall, the congressional log-jam will likely be broken in 2024.

b. Already, the majority of House Dems are self-declared progressives...and, as the social media make plain, a host of even more progressive Dems are running for local and national office, all across the land.

c. Pelosi and Biden, both nearing 80, are in the twilight of their careers; both are under strong, persistent pressure from their left.

3. So, prospects look good, but there's more...in my view,

a. Trump won in 2016 only because the corporate Dems blocked Bernie from the nomination, and independent voters -- about a third of the electorate -- weren't willing to vote, again, for a Clinton with a faltering, neoliberal, corporate Dem agenda.

b. Trump was -- still is -- a racist, misogynist huckster and, once in office, he had nothing constructive to do but pull together other opportunists and use Americans' mounting dismay, and grievances, to wreck government from within.

c. As his notions and designs had nothing to do with the people's interest, his support among independents soon flagged; but just as covid unleashed the gravest national crisis since the Great Depression, the Dems' second derailment of Sanders and their nomination of Biden restored enough comparative luster to give Trump an outside chance at re-election that fall, two years ago, in 2020.

d. Before that election could be decided, however, the televised police murder of George Floyd on May 25 sparked a national uprising against state violence at the local level; the public squares of virtually every American city and town were inundated and occupied under the banner of Black Lives Matter and broader social justice, in general.

e. A week later, in bumbling fashion, Trump attempted a coup by declaring his intent to impose law and order and brought out the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to back him up.

f. But, the top general quickly turned his back on Trump, declared his support of Black Lives Matter, and announced the military's support of free and fair elections come November.

g. Just as we might have fantasized back in the 70s, the US military sided with the popular uprising, and the peoples' confrontational, yet peaceful revolution was a full go.

h. Yet, this being a democracy, the revolution still had to prove itself and choose its leaders at the ballot box.

i. In November, with independents holding their nose to vote against Trump, Biden edged him for the Presidency, and with the sweep of the special Senate election in Georgia, a dual power alliance of progressives and corporate Dems regained control of the government.

j. Desperate, Trump fomented a rightwing insurrection on Jan 6; it failed, and the right is now on the defensive, dodging investigations and choosing lousy candidates for this year's elections.

k. Hence, prospects are good for a qualitative leap in progressive power in government after November, one that turns dual power with the corporate Dems on top into dual power with progressives in control.

So what's going on here? Is this just another round of back-and-forth between the rightwing and the Democrats, one that just happens to be swinging our way right now? Is this merely more of the culture wars we've endured, now, for decades? Is it possible that Trump and his ilk will get back into power? Or is this, as I suggest, a revolution, one just past its tipping point, that is ever so slowly gaining momentum...indeed, irreversible momentum? How can we tell?

[Slide 4: Post-industrialism: what's going on and why?]
This is where revolutionary theory and modern social science can help.

a. Like many of you, I was active in the party building efforts of the New Left in the 1970s and 80s, and, not to belittle the differences among the various formations, we all tried to use the prevalent Marxist-Leninist theory of the time as our guide; already a self-identifying revolutionary when I encountered Marxism, I found this theory -- on the nature of the state, class struggle, and cultural hegemony -- immensely illuminating; still, when all of our study and almost two decades of on-the-ground work produced no meaningful results, it was obvious that some things were missing in our theory and practice, and I agreed with the decision to disband the CWP/NDM and go, individually, into the mainstream, hoping to figure things out.

b. For me, the mainstream was teaching high school social studies, which had the benefit of allowing a lot of time for personal study and wider investigation; this put me in touch with a number of social scientists whose work -- once integrated with basic Marxism and applied to understanding the evolving politics of the post-WWII era -- paints a vivid, instructive picture of what's going on today.

in a nutshell, here's what the science says:

a. Because of accelerating global oil depletion throughout the postwar era -- so-called "peak oil" -- and, consequently, its steadily rising price, industrial mass production -- and industrialism, in general -- was strategically imperiled, and, as early as the 1950s, a new mode of production that relied substantially less on oil -- what we and others called "post-industrialism" -- emerged and became dominant; in this new mode -- let's call it "service production," a more descriptive name -- people sustain their lives by providing service to others, rather than by providing labor in factories, mines and mills; this new mode produced a new class of working people, not proletarians, but, rather, servicers...the service class; today, according to BLS data, 80 percent of everyone who works in the US is a servicer of some sort, and they are a rapidly growing and strategically-powerful class in every nation, worldwide; servicers differ from proletarians in many ways, including the fact that, whether self- or corporate-employed, servicers understand that they succeed or fail on the basis of the quality of their service; they grasp intuitively that racial, gender and national prejudice gets in the way of effective service and do not abide such continuing oppression; further, without top quality servicers, no business -- or any nation, nor the global economy, in general -- can succeed and prosper, much less mitigate the escalating impacts of climate change; with service production, the workforce, itself, replaced oil as production's key resource; for the first time since perhaps the Stone Age, the skills, talents, knowledge, networks, and empathy of ordinary people -- qualities attained in the course of lifelong learning -- are now the single, most crucial factor in our mode of production, a reality that has qualitatively empowered labor in its contest with capital.

b. Meanwhile, the complexity of postwar global production and trade, especially given the inherent anarchy of capitalist production and the uneven, never-settled competition among imperialist rivals, forced the US and the world -- with Nixon's 1970 decree -- to abandon gold-based finance in favor of universal, state-created money and credit, otherwise known as "fiat" or "sovereign" currency; while banks retained their role in purveying the state's currency into the economy -- and continued collecting interest on their credit lines -- the banking industry was effectively "expropriated" and reduced to the role of government franchisee; since 1970, all dollar-denominated funds for investment, public and private, whether they come through a bank or are allocated directly from government, are created by authority the US Treasury which, in theory and under Article I of the Constitution, is directed solely by the US Congress and the President; thus, only a continuing lack of financial literacy among the voters and our elected representatives -- a fog that is persistently nurtured by Wall Street banks via their control of the Federal Reserve -- prevents the government from immediately adopting a new, service-oriented -- shall we say "socialist"? -- social contract and, in that way, directly tackling the dark age that is descending on our nation and the world.

c. Meanwhile, through the course of the entire postwar era, right up to the present, the New Deal -- the social contract that had resolved the last great round of historic crisis, the Great Depression and WWII -- lost its vigor in the face of astounding social and ecological change and with the gradual die-off of all the generations who had been alive for its creation; after the Boom generation's cultural rebellion of the Sixties produced the "generation gap," the nation sank into two decades of cultural warfare that polarized society while further and fully undermining confidence in the old order and its values; after the 2008 financial meltdown, and with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, capitalist cultural hegemony fell to the low-point of its 80-year cycle, and service class opinion leaders in all of today's living generations -- Boomers, GenXers and Millennials -- announced their common objection to continuing corporate rule, proclaiming, "We are the 99%!"; thus, four generations after the last "rendezvous with destiny" in 1934, today's generations now face destiny once again...and with less than a decade left to make the most of it before our rattled culture coalesces again, around the best set of values it can find; increasingly becoming a class-for-itself in the aftermath of Occupy, the service class turned against neoliberalism and, in 2016, began its direct struggle for state power via Sanders' socialist candidacy; then, in 2020, upon George Floyd's murder, the service class rose in national rebellion, and this revolutionary uprising has resulted, so far, in today's unstable political reality in which progressives and corporate Dems share dual power in the Congress and Administration, yet the corporate Dems remain tenuously on top; though the cultural tide has turned against corporate rule, the service class still must turn dual power into progressive power in Congress and vanquish the corporate elite though the institutionalization of a new, service-oriented social contract.

All this was, and is, independent of human will.

[Slide 5: Post-Marxist social science can help]
So, that's where things stand today, according to the most advanced social science available; tonight, there's not time to buttress this assessment with any kind of meaningful elaboration of the theory that guides it; for that purpose, in June, I published a short booklet titled American Socialism Lacks Vision and Plan: Post-Marxist Social Science Can Help; I urge you to read it, along with any and all of these books by the analysts who've enlightened me since the CWP disbanded; I welcome questions and ongoing evaluation of this theory and its implications, even after tonight's discussion...you've got my email!

[Slide 6: What's the Left to do?]
The only thing left to say is what all this might mean for the work of American socialists and political revolutionaries in the period ahead...

a. In this, I think the DP is an adequate vehicle for progressive, mainstream governance, which must be grounded in the new social contract that will coalesce over the course of the next few election cycles.

b. To influence and guide voters, candidates for office, the progressive Congressional majority, the next President, and the next Administration in the creation and implementation of this new social contract, the nation needs to fill an important gap in our politics with a progressive Left North Star with a socialist vision.

c. Millennials and GenX leftists are already out front, signaling their strong support of socialist solutions; in contrast, Boomers were the only generation that stood with the status quo in 2020; that needs to change and it will, when the Boom generation's aging left wing embraces the time-honored role of social elders, helps forge a cross-generational Left North Star, and guides it to the front of the nation's struggle for a new social contract.

Between now and 2030, there's a lot of hard work for a Left North Star to do. With CPAC, the conservative movement showed what can be achieved in a few decades, even if your line is fallacious and self-serving; if the Left -- rising to the immediate, obvious, pressing necessities of climate-change catastrophe -- can apply some of CPAC's methods in the shorter period ahead, we'll certainly be constructing and living under socialism with American characteristics by the end of this decade.

I'll leave it at that. Thanks for listening. I look forward to your comments and further discussion.

Steve Clark

New Essay Critiques Theoretical Shortcomings in US Left

Below is the preface of my new e-booklet: American Socialism Lacks Vision and Plan: Post-Marxist Social Science Can Help, available now at Smashwords for 99 cents. It's a short essay (9700 words) that can be read in about an hour. I look forward to comments and response.

"At this crucial juncture in world affairs – with climate change compelling a revolutionary re-examination of corporate capitalism – the inspiration and direction of a Left North Star in American politics is essential.

"Unfortunately, today’s US Left, laboring with Marxist theory that has been stagnant for more than a century, cannot project a useful vision of American socialism. Nor can it see its way ahead. Until this flaw is corrected, the Left cannot fill the leadership void so crucial now for revolutionary success.

"Fortunately, the social science necessary to pull the Left's vision and plan together exists…it just wasn’t distilled by Marxists so, for the most part, the Left hasn't noticed. This instructive science is, instead, the work-product of relatively contemporary, disassociated, activists and academics from outside the Marxist tradition. If the American Left hopes to be a serious force in political revolution and socialist construction as the present crisis deepens and resolves, it needs to transcend its ideological icons and catch up with major advances in social, economic and class analysis.

"This pamphlet summarizes three, key 'post-Marxist' insights necessary to infuse and project a contemporary vision of American Socialism that inspires, guides, and gains the confidence of today's surging revolutionary movement.”

Steve Clark

Getting to the Principal Contradiction in Ukraine

The situation in Ukraine is complex and has caused a rift within the American Left.

Both sides oppose both Russian violence and US (NATO, western) provocation, but one wing – blindered by its staunch opposition to US imperialism – justifies Russia’s violence by the West’s persistent NATO expansion and (euro and dollar) financial penetrations.

“At some point," they say, "the West knew (or should have known), Putin would draw the line. They baited him, and, now, they hope to vanquish him.”

“Baited, no doubt,” says the other wing, noting a common imperialist ploy. “But, at every juncture since the socialist camp disintegrated, Ukrainians freely and reasonably chose independence from the Russian Federation rather than reintegration. Morality’s not about picking US or Russian imperialism but, instead, about siding with Ukrainian self-determination and its liberation from Russia’s military yoke.

In On Contradiction, Mao showed how to dissect complex realities (like Ukraine) and, accordingly, how to uncover the principal contradiction that controls the overall outcome. The essay deserves a complete read, but this excerpt sets forth its rationale:

As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within a thing is the fundamental cause of its development, while its interrelations and interactions with other things are secondary causes. Thus, materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism.

Saying the Ukraine crisis was caused by the US (or Russia) ignores the fundamental reality that it arose from centuries of occupation (oppression) of the Ukrainian nation by (generally Russian but occasionally Austria-Hungary, German or Polish) imperialism. Ukrainians want to set their own destiny and are in the process of doing so.

That is the principal contradiction in Ukraine. Once we leftists fully embrace this cause, we’ll find ourselves on the “right side” of history, aligned with the suddenly-emergent, global consensus against violence in international conflict and ready to deploy it against the Saudi war in Yemen (and other regressive force applications backed by US imperialism).

Accordingly, we can join Ukrainians in genuine solidarity while we continue our own domestic (internal) struggle to gain state power and end US imperialism, forever, in practice.

Steve Clark

A Proposal to Democratize and Restructure Global Finance

The war in Ukraine has revealed a potential fault line in the US left. A significant segment is justifying Putin’s invasion as a fair reaction to aggressive, US financial and commercial advances into eastern Europe and Ukraine since the end of the Cold War.

But, in a surprise for Putin, using war to tackle international problems has suddenly become morally reprehensible, and he has put himself and Russia on the wrong side of history.

Before this war, one line of leftist thinking already heralded a financial alliance of US-dissident states -- China, Russia, Iran, others -- concentrating their commerce and boosting a worthy currency alternative (the renminbi, perhaps) that would undermine the dollar's present hegemony, thus strengthening the struggle to overcome US imperialism (a view expressed, for example, by Michael Hudson). While such monetary competition could prove useful along the way, the mere advent of competition for world reserve status does not, itself, offer hope of a fair, stable and enduring financial system for the whole world.

There is a better way to fight US imperialism, and Russia – along with the US left and China – should get on board:

1. Rewrite the Bretton Woods Accords to replace the dollar as de facto international reserve currency with (a) a new, IMF-designated, digital, de jure world reserve currency (WRC) that is supported by (b) a system-wide, WRC-denominated tax on the electronic funds transfers (EFTs) of the world's corporate commerce.
2. Establish a new, integrated system of global fiscal and investment management in which a democratic assembly of central bankers of the world's currency-sovereign states systemically discourses with the world's governments (via the UN?) and people (via social media and advisory forums, TBD) and, with this popular input and oversight, directs public credit to pursue vital, global, social and ecological goals.
3. Cancel foreign-denominated debt held by all Global South nations to clear their path to domestic currency sovereignty and establish a level playing field, going forward, with IMF-designated, WRC-denominated reparations for past imperialist exploitation and expropriation.
4. Institutionalize a global system of WRC-denominated, direct, global-to-local block grants to deploy and administer flexible, community-based, Global Job Guarantee programs, at sustainable local compensation, for anyone unable to find suitable, private sector employment.
5. Institutionalize a global system of WRC-denominated, progressively-scaled, per capita block grants to every nation to administer two global policy (civilizational) initiatives: a Global Green New Deal and a World Health, Education and Reconciliation Service.

A month ago, restructuring global finance was on no one’s agenda, but Putin’s war and the West’s truly unprecedented financial sanctions have brought Chinese mediation into play.

Apparently, the short-cut to the future we all need is a global declaration against war that is enabled by a new, just, financial system in which no nation dominates and every nation has fair and equal access to the investment credits necessary to tackle the climate crisis according to its own specific needs and opportunities.

Speaking for all nations dissatisfied with the US dollar regime, China can advance global financial reform as a concession worthy of Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine. American leftists – including progressive MMT advocates – should encourage China’s involvement.

Steve Clark

What is Socialism with American Characteristics?

[Some friends from the old CWP are currently engaged in an assessment of "our mission" as we continue our year-long collaboration, Voices for New Democracy. To that end, it may be useful to reconsider and update conceptions of "socialism with American characteristics."]

Every socialist state is different from all others. Taken at their best, their commonality is the self-declared intention and real-world effort to put their nation’s broad, strategic, public interest ahead of narrow, immediate, private and corporate interests.

The Paris Commune, Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Viet Nam – history’s most prominent socialist states – each has (or had) characteristics unique to its particular time and place. Inevitably, American socialism will also display a unique character, one consistent with our nation’s history and temperament as well as its 21st century, domestic and global imperatives.

Marx, Lenin and Mao – each a practical and successful revolutionary in his time and place -- never composed a vision of socialism in a modern, post-industrial nation, much less a passed-its-prime, global superpower like the US. With no vision at hand, today’s American Left is aging in place, and the struggle for a new social contract cannot defeat the right’s manipulation of traditional values to perpetuate capitalist systems of power and profit.

What is a reasonable vision of socialism in America? Here’s a framework to start discussion:

1. Socialism with American characteristics is a national political-economy in which the “commanding heights of finance” (the dollar and its key functionalities) are (a) in the self-aware, overtly-acknowledged, public control of our democratic state and, accordingly, are (b) systemically deployed – legally and institutionally – to maintain full employment while tackling the social, economic and ecological crises of Americans and the world’s people.
2. Socialism with American characteristics does not entail the violent overthrow of the state. And aside from its full assumption of the Constitution-designated “power of the purse” (Art. I, Sec. 8), it involves no broad nationalization (state seizure) of current or future, private or corporate capital, nor any actual means of production. Neither does it mean the elimination of markets or systems of global commerce and trade.
3. Socialism with American characteristics is today’s same, democratic, constitutional government -- augmented with constitutional amendments in key areas, such as election systems and voting rights -- but with one crucial difference: complete, public control of the US dollar via the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and the formal delineation of private banks and bank corporations as “US-regulated agents” for private sector investment.
   

   With the dollar’s financial power under public control, the American socialist state augments traditional government spending with new tracks of public purpose investment. On the one hand, it implements a Federal Job Guarantee (FJG), a Green New Deal (GND) and other national, industrial policies that tackle key problems while also fostering for-profit, private sector enterprise (to enable entrepreneurialism, general production and exchange, employment, and private savings). On the other hand, it invests heavily -- directly and via block grants to tribal, state and local governments -- in non-profit, caring and service enterprise that is vital to social cohesion and stability but not profitable enough to attract capitalist investment (for example, indigenous and slave reparations; emergency civilian service corps; healthcare, childcare, and education for all, preschool through college).

4. Socialism with American characteristics holds the nation to account for its history as the last imperial superpower by paying reparations to victim-nations while casting US votes at the IMF/BIS and the UN to end the US-directed sanctions regime and democratize the world’s reserve currency.
5. Socialism with American characteristics relies on the steady perfection of democratic government through the persistent engagement of Americans in elections, policy and legislation and with our Constitution and its amendment. Unlike most socialist states from earlier eras, American socialism does not rely upon the collective viewpoint of any particular social or political entity (such as a communist party), though such entities – indeed, all kinds of entities -- may exist and contribute to the on-going reform and reconstruction of American politics and culture.

These five points comprise a working vision of socialism with American characteristics. When American socialism finally comes to life, contradictions between it and other socialist systems will be struggled out and resolved in the course of collaborative efforts to save the whole world.

Steve Clark

Review: Revolutions, a Podcast for Revolutionary Times

At heart, every revolution is the strain and chaos of conflicting social forces confronting and resolving an uncontrolled rush of life-and-death political crises. Darkest just before their new dawn, revolutions generally catch by surprise and overwhelm their antagonists.

No one should expect a revolution to run smoothly, but – if they succeed and enter history – revolutions, one way or another, discover their own, unique paths to liberation.

American podcaster and historian Mike Duncan has made it his business to examine and report on many of the world’s greatest and most important revolutions. Starting with Rome’s revolution – which he chose to research when, a decade ago, he discovered that no one had ever done a podcast on the topic. Duncan was captured by his listeners’ enthusiasm and went on to cover nine more of these momentous human events. In the process, Revolutions won awards, and Duncan has become perhaps the most prominent history podcaster in history. Caught up in his energy and style, I recently binged the Russian Revolution, just for the fun of it…and was not disappointed!

Readers may know that I referred to Lenin as “my political avatar and alter ego” in a book I published in 2015, titled: What Is To Be Done? Class Struggle in the 21st Century. Two things I especially like about Lenin: one, he relied on theory as a guide to action, yet was seldom dogmatic and intentionally creative in its application; and two, he got the job done! He led the Bolsheviks who led the Soviets who led the working class that led the national revolt against Russian absolutism that culminated in socialist revolution in 1917. Lenin’s truth was proven in practice.

So, yes, in general, I am a Lenin fan -- and that’s what drew me to Duncan’s story – but, it turns out, his history of the Russian Revolution is hardly focused on Lenin. Rather, Duncan provides a sweeping survey of all the class forces, would-be leaders (Tsar Alexander, Plekhanov, Stolypin, Kerensky, Martov, Trotsky, Krupskaya, Stalin, Rasputin, etc.) and political organizations (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Cadets, Social Revolutionaries, the Bund, etc.) that played any serious role in the revolution, beginning with Catherine the Great’s last year on the throne (1796)…and he does it with the confident, immaculate voice of an accomplished story-teller.

If Duncan didn’t do such a good job pulling together and telling the whole story, I’d never recommend Revolutions because it’s just too long. I didn’t realize when I started that the Russian Revolution was going to run 80+ episodes, each about 30 minutes. That’s 40+ hours! I’d have never bitten off so big a chunk. But, when Tom Clark told me about it, he failed to mention its full length, and, after I listened to the first episode, I was hooked. That was the episode: 10.1 The International Working Men’s Association, I dare you to try!

Despite the longer-than-expected commitment in which I was thus entrapped, I cannot complain because, in addition to the refresher course in Russian history (which I’d studied but largely forgotten), the podcast was a lucid rendition of the interplay of class and social conflict that might unfold in any revolutionary situation (of which Russia had several during the 125 years covered in the podcast). Leaving aside any dry, academic expositions of such interplay, Duncan simply tells the story, enabling a listener’s search for relevance that might be applicable in other revolutionary settings (such as the US).

Of course, readers who are (or were once) Marxist-Leninists know the socialist revolution in Russia was the beacon for revolutionaries in all countries for pretty much all of the 20th century. But it’s been a long, long time since that beacon shined brightly. Duncan’s history respects the revolutionaries who prevailed – Lenin and the Bolsheviks – but his very wide scope also illuminates the power of the bigger, extremely complex, political milieu that that every revolution must navigate in order to succeed.

Today’s American society is far different but no less complex than Russia back in the day. It is rife with classes and class struggle and with a host of fascist, centrist and (less so, unfortunately) leftist organizations, each with leaders on a tumultuous but uncertain playing field, trying to figure out what to do. I find that very much today’s circumstance as our nation steers itself through a profound, enduring, political (I would say revolutionary) crisis that has no relief in sight.

Like the socialists in Petrograd after the February (1917) revolution, we socialists in the US today find ourselves sharing dual power with corporate-capitalist politicians who still dominate government, yet have little idea and no capacity to tackle the rapidly worsening crisis at hand. Our options and today’s remedies are far different than Russia’s, but the dynamics of flailing bourgeois enemies trying to bully the scene for their own sake is so similar that you can’t miss the parallels.

Revolutions won’t tell you what to do, but it will make you feel better and more confident that we can (and will) figure it out. Just like the revolutionaries before us.

Steve Clark

Sorting Lines in Climate-Change Struggles:Mass Migration, Land Back and a Sustainable Earth

At long last, our world seems to have accepted the reality of climate change and the devastation it portends. But, we still have a long way to go in assessing -- much less implementing -- an effective, global response.

Inevitably, the struggle for programmatic clarity unfolds against the backdrop of long-entrenched corporate domination of the key entities – the IMF and most of today’s nation-states -- that might do something about it. These cautious and self-interested perspectives controlled the agenda at the recent COP26 climate conference in Glascow. Outside the conference, however, more thoughtful voices are beginning to be heard.

"US immigration policy is harsh and xenophobic, but it’s also rear-looking and stupid,” says (I paraphrase) Parag Khanna, author of Move: The Forces Uprooting Us.

Khanna was interviewed November 20 on the MMT-themed Macro ‘n Cheese podcast by regular host Steve Grumbine.

In world system geographer Khanna’s mind, climate change will impose adaptations on civilization that, unfortunately, the recent COP26 conference barely mentioned. Anticipating the conference’s stance, he says, it will focus on mitigations to “virtue signal” that “we can do this, world.”

That’s not good enough, says Khanna. Instead, he is laser-focused on one imposing, yet well-ignored adaptation: mass migration. Already unfolding and irreversible -- just like climate change, itself – mass migration can be ignored only at civilization’s peril.

This is because, as climate change deepens and imposes its will, a great swath of the places where people live today will become increasingly uninhabitable. This devastation of ancient, previously-productive habitats distresses the Global South and indigenous people far more than the “modern” societies of the Global North. According to Khanna, mitigation efforts must, of course, be deployed, but they won't be adequate to prevent the impending catastrophe in the South. Independent of our will and efforts, our warming earth is going to make life for humans in equatorial regions difficult and sparse. Adapting to that reality, mass migration from South to North is vital, but unfortunately, excruciatingly difficult.

While tragic in so many ways, this inevitable migration, Khanna avers, is also a “silver bullet.” For people of the Global South, it provides a place to go to sustain families and build new lives. And for nations in the North that are already at or near zero population growth, migration provides the younger workforce that these aging societies can’t do without.

In Khanna’s prophecy, mass migration serves both North and South and helps get humanity to the other side of its ecological nightmare. In stark contrast, the indigenous radicals behind The Red Deal say mass migration (social displacement) is just the latest and greatest catastrophe imposed on Nature and native people by capitalism and settler colonialism. “Land Back!” is their demand. They insist on full, indigenous control of natural resource management everywhere because, without such strategic (anti-capitalist, anti-colonial) oversight and guidance, human life – indeed, all life – is in jeopardy.

To indigenous people, the earth – just like the water, animals, plants and other people – is a “relative” and, like all relatives, must be treated with care, justice and opportunity. Relative-care is the only way to save our planet from the destruction of capitalist exploitation. Thus, indigenous people look forward to managing the earth’s fragile, climate-ravaged, equatorial regions, and they will endure whatever hardship is necessary to restore their wounded relative -- the earth. But for this, indigenous people expect nothing less than the decisive voice in civilization’s long-range, natural resource management agenda (aka, the Green New Deal) as well as all the resources necessary to mitigate and abate the crisis wherever it exists or emerges. In the meantime, indigenous people expect the right to emigrate and to be welcomed wherever they choose (or are forced) to go.

Today’s ill-conceived, US immigration policy erects walls against the very workforce the nation needs for its own survival. Biden-Harris take note. A good policy would encourage immigration and a path to citizenship. Khanna cites Canada and Kazakhstan as nations that have sound immigration and citizenship programs and stand to prosper as people and production move north through the 21st century. After traveling extensively in Russia (where global warming is creating vast regions of newly arable land), he also reports rising interest in the Russian hinterland for a more welcoming immigration policy. The US, meanwhile, stands to lose substantially if it does not ease its anti-immigrant policies and correct its white-supremacist fringe.

Khanna acknowledges but doesn’t much concern himself with the injustice that, “once again,” hits the Global South far worse than the North. In his brief allowance that mitigations (as well as adaptations) must be deployed, Khanna expresses solidarity with those seeking redress of imperialism’s unjust equatorial legacy, yet he stresses the inevitability and redeeming worth of mass migration and, accordingly, urges an “incremental evolution” in anti-imperialist demands. He does not so much as mention “indigenous rights” or “indigenous authority,” apparently presuming that existing means of natural resource management and allocation can be adequately reformed within the framework of evolving but on-going capitalism and nation-state authority. He also never mentions socialism or any transformational vision of mainstream production and exchange.

His omission of indigenous impacts and roles is hardly unexpected given the white, settler, colonial blind spots of Western imperialism and the academics within. It is a major, ideological shortcoming but should not disqualify Khanna’s factual point that -- depending on various geographic factors (resources, borders, infrastructure and people) -- climate change is already having uneven and divergent impacts that will make life easier and more sustainable in northern regions than in southern. Sound public policy will ground itself in this reality.

Khanna also anticipates sharpening competition between the US and China because both are competing for younger workers, yet both are rather xenophobic. He says that China, with a younger domestic workforce, was ascendant as the (post-Soviet) global economy took shape in recent decades – and was more nimble with state finances than the West. But, going forward (post pandemic), it will endure strong competition as all economies seek to add (restore) local production and commercial circulation against the pandemic-made-apparent danger of over-reliance on global supply chains. Diversification and localization are the now the rising trend. China’s share of global trade is bound to shrink. He notes that Cuba and Viet Nam (among others) evidence sound practice in endogenous self-sufficiency. In contrast, he lists Norway and other Scandinavian countries that, despite their welcoming social perspective, cast a heavy global footprint due to their national reliance on oil revenue.

The divergence in viewpoint between Kahanna and the Red Nation reveals the depth that the present climate change discourse must still fathom. It’s a deep and wide chasm, but with only a decade or less to figure it out, a much intensified debate and a re-tooled strategy is indispensable. Who is going to lead us to salvation...the corporate sector with its financial and technological "fixes" or indigenous people at the head of a popular, global movement? Time is short; we need to get this right, and we need to do it soon.

The podcast is titled: Mapping the Future of Humanity with Parag Khanna. It runs 1 hr 7 min.

The Red Deal, Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (2020) is an ebook by the Red Nation, a revolutionary collective of native people.

Steve Clark

Marvin Harris' Legacy for Today's Class Struggle

In my opinion, Marvin Harris (1927-2001) -- who passed away 20 years ago this month -- is the most significant anthropologist that no one (outside the profession) knows. I count myself lucky to have discovered and connected personally with Harris in the last years of his life.

In Cannibals and Kings (1977) Harris explained why and how humans' modes of production sometimes transform, creating wholly new tableaus of class struggle in economic, political and cultural affairs. Unfortunately, his insight has been buried in history, leaving today's socialists and revolutionaries to operate as if contemporary class struggle is essentially the same as that encountered by Marx or Lenin more than 100 years ago. If he were alive today, Harris would set us straight.

By 1995 (when our paths crossed), Harris -- a prominent chair of Columbia University's anthropology school in the turbulent 60s -- was a semi-retired professor emeritus at the University of Florida. With the end of his career in sight, he was keenly engaged defending cultural materialism (the school of thought he'd demarcated in 1968) against the loose relativism of then-rising post-modernism. But, he also had written two 1980s books -- America Now (1981) and Why Nothing Works (1987) -- on the unraveling of economic and cultural norms during the Reagan era.

During the 80s, I'd been a member of a New Left socialist party (CWP/NDM) that had outlived the demise of the Boomer-powered antiwar and national liberation movements of the 60s. In two significant efforts authored by Jerry Tung -- The Socialist Road (1981) and Post-Industrial Society (1985) -- we, too, had assessed trends emerging in the 80s. Not long after, however, our organization disbanded, leaving its cadre to uncover the path to revolution, each on our own.

Career-wise, I became a high school social studies teacher and, in the early 90s, encountered Harris' prolific work. Impressed with his insight, I quickly devoured a half-dozen of his books. As brilliantly illuminating as these were, however, it seemed to me that some especially worthy insight was underemphasized. In 1995, I wrote him saying, "In my opinion, further elucidation and application of these points would be a significant contribution to current debates about the way forward for humanity."

As succinctly as I could, I summarized the crucial insight of Cannibals and Kings:

As their populations grow, human societies always intensify production to sustain their established standard of living. However, these intensifications deplete the natural resources that are key to the established mode of production. Eventually, a depletion crisis ensues which, in the right conditions, may force discovery and adoption of a new mode of production, one reliant on different key natural resources.

Thus, under pressure of population growth and resource depletion, as Neolithic societies killed off the big game, some adopted agriculture. At a later time in history, when all land in certain agricultural regions was employed to the max, some societies adopted mass commodity production (aka, industrialism). Now (1995), I suggested, as the world's fossil fuel is depleted and its fresh air polluted, society is inventing a new mode that I characterized as service-oriented, niche production. I added that the emergence of a new mode implied the concurrent emergence of new classes and class interests that, in time, would likely wage decisive cultural and political struggles with the present regime.

Explicitly, I asked if he shared my view that his theory cogently illuminated our mid-90s reality. Surprising me, Harris responded this way,

Cultural materialism is quite powerful in retrodiction, but its predictive utility may not be as good. The problem is that the hyperindustrial mode of production (see my American Now) does not appear to be linked to rapid population increase in the former third world. There really is no great population cooker set to explode in the northern tier.

But here, Harris -- an early-cohort Silent, born before the Great Depression and raised before WWII -- evidenced none of the innate, global perspective that became a hallmark of postwar Boomers (and the GenXers, Millennials and GenZs who've followed). Given my generation's outlook (forged by mass telecommunications -- TV -- in the postwar era), I found it impossible, in contrast to Harris, to assess population growth and resource depletion within purely national parameters. To me, the world had "gone global," and imperialism had tightly and irreversibly fused the fates of first and third world nations.

Harris displayed a perceptual grasp of the global phenomena…he wrote of the importance of "China's example" and speculated that "we may be at an open moment in global history when the new mode of production will not be squandered on reproduction." An "imponderable," he wrote, is "the future of the state in relation to global capitalism." He identified the problem of transnationals' interest in "infinite consumerism," asking "will they ever make the effort to bring down the fertility of their customers?"

But, he refrained from any outright concession, per his theory, that a new mode of production had emerged.

Thus demurring, he wrote, "It seems to me you are as close to answering these questions as I am. In the mean time, I'll send you by post some of my more recent ruminations." When the package arrived, I reviewed it with great anticipation, but all of the content concerned his polemics with post-modernism.

Although our dialogue soon dropped off, events of the next 25 years amply proved his general thesis.

It is perfectly clear, now, that exponential, worldwide, population growth since the advent of imperialism's global exploitation has vastly intensified mass commodity production and steadily depleted its most crucial natural resource, fossil fuel, while also polluting humanity's vital, clean air and water. With industrialism thus strategically doomed, humanity has discovered and put in place its next mode of production, the service economy.

Harris summarized the theory, and -- despite his personal uncertainty 25 years ago -- history proved his thesis.

Now, if we Marxists accordingly update our class analysis, we can spur the struggle of our world's service class (aka, care workers, professionals, knowledge workers, post-industrial labor) and help lead the socialist revolution that is actually necessary and possible (and happening) at this stage in history.

To that end, I honor Marvin Harris on this anniversary of his death.

For any readers with interest in today's class structures and the emergence of servers as a "class for itself," this GlobalTalk essay -- grounded in Harris -- is a good place to start: Ecology and Class Struggle.

Steve Clark