The sad spectacle of lesser-evil elections

One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!

Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?

At the top of the list is recognizing the limitations of voting and concentrating on organizing. There is no vote that is going to fix a hopelessly archaic voting system, a system that simply reflects the state of U.S. politics. The Democratic Party is not going to save us, no matter how fervently liberals wish to believe. Even if President Biden could somehow be magically replaced by a true progressive dedicated to putting an end to corporate control of U.S. society and all the many social, political and environmental ills that flow from that, not much would change. One person can’t be a savior and if one person could at least do something tangible to ameliorate our conditions, the Democratic Party apparatus itself would stop it. Remember the 2016 campaign — the mere presence of Bernie Sanders and his social democratic prescriptions that posed no threat to capitalism as it is practiced in the United States sent Democratic leaders into fits of frothing panic as they did everything they could to tip the scales in favor of their corporate candidate despite that candidate’s unpopularity. That candidate, Hillary Clinton, Wall Street’s choice, even intimated that she might prefer Trump in the White House than Senator Sanders.

But simply waiving off the Democrats as a party of capitalists (although true) doesn’t explain anything. We need to be more concrete. Beyond the obvious observation (again, quite true) that money talks and those with a lot of money get to do the talking, why is the Biden campaign — and Democratic Party political office candidates in general — unable to conceive of any campaign strategy other than chasing dissident Republicans and those centrists not already committed to the party? Why are even the modest goals of their own liberal base too “radical” for them? Three factors immediately come to mind: 1) A fear of the party’s progressive wing and even more those to the left of the party; 2) a lack of imagination due to being imprisoned by ideology; and 3) the internal logic of a winner-take-all political system designed by 18th century aristocrats to keep themselves in power.

^{We’ve been here before: Protesting the Democratic National Convention in 2012 (photo by Debra Sweet)}

Let’s take them in turn, starting with the first item. Is there any party on Earth that is more dedicated to “standing up to its base”? Is there any other party that even contemplates doing that? The Republican Party, to seek the nearest counter-example, panders to its base at all time and has even become frightened of its own base, thus the pathetic groveling at the feet of Trump that has become a standard operating procedure. Independent thinking? Even setting aside that independent thinking is verboten in conservative circles, doing so would draw the wrath of Trump or his followers. If you don’t believe that lockstep “thinking” is the default in right-wing milieus, ask yourself why talk radio skews so heavily to the hard right. Talk radio is about an authority who tells you what to think; recall the sad spectacle of Rush Limbaugh followers who called themselves “ditto heads” because agreeing with Limbaugh’s ignorant bloviating was the only permissible response by his reality-challenged fans. 

And so it is now, with an ignorant barstool ranter, a total narcissist who sees other human beings as only tools for his service, a charlatan whose goal is to be a fascist dictator (and doesn’t bother to hide that), whose every mangled word, no matter how incoherent or free of reality, is received as a message from Olympus by his fans. The steady stream of reports that make their way into the news media noting that many Republican members of Congress have a diametrically opposed opinion of the Orange One-Man Crime Wave than the unquestioning fealty they express in public demonstrate merely that, although showering corporate benefactors is the only conceivable outcome of political activity in their limited minds, lockstep echoing of whatever line the leader decrees and making sure to never say anything that would anger or confuse the base is what is expected.

Money is what matters, not voters

In contrast, Democrats have no trouble at all not simply “challenging” their base but regularly launching outright attacks on their base. Both of the first two items above come into play here. In large part Democratic officials’ disdain for their voters derives from their need to raise gigantic sums of money to run campaigns, money at such a scale that it can only be raised by begging the wealthiest capitalists and the biggest corporations. Passing legislation that the party’s base would actually like to see, however tepid and failing to get at root causes, would anger their corporate benefactors. That much is obvious and as the piles of money poured into congressional and presidential campaigns reaches absurd heights, Democratic needs to placate their donors’ wishes only grows more acute.

That money talks, however, isn’t the full picture. The surrender of Democrats to neoliberal austerity, corporate control of the levers of political power and the endless erosion of working peoples’ ability to defend themselves and our working conditions, can’t be grasped without understanding the intellectual dead end of liberalism. (To be fair, this is hardly unique to U.S. Democrats; Canadian Liberals, British Labourites and European social democrats all travel the same road.) In parallel with European social democracy, North American liberalism is trapped by a fervent desire to stabilize an unstable capitalist system. The political and intellectual leaders of liberalism believe they can discover the magic reforms that will make it all work again. They do have criticisms, even if they are afraid of saying them too loud, but are hamstrung by their belief in the capitalist system, which means, today, a belief in neoliberalism and austerity, no matter what nice speeches they may make. 

Those who are conflicted between their belief in something and their acknowledgment that the something needs reform, and are unable to articulate a reform, won’t and can’t stand for anything concrete, and ultimately will capitulate. When that something can’t be fundamentally changed through reforms, what reforms are made are ultimately taken back, and society’s dominant ideas are of those who can promote the hardest line thanks to the power their wealth gives them, it is no surprise that the so-called reformers are unable to articulate any alternative. With no clear ideas to fall back on, they meekly bleat “me, too” when the world’s industrialists and financiers, acting through their corporations, think tanks and the “market,” pronounce their verdict on what is to be done. As always, the capitalist “market” is nothing more than the aggregate interests of the biggest industrialists and financiers.

^{Cherry Blossoms in Washington during March (photo by Sarah H.)}

There is nowhere for Democrats to go other than in circles, hoping fruitlessly that some tepid reform that does nothing other than tweak a system that works against the overwhelming majority will be enough to induce another round of votes for them while not angering their corporate benefactors. The party has descended from the “graveyard of social movements” to more actively opposing movements rather than merely coopting them. Lesser evilism tends to head in a single direction. And what of the third factor from above, the internal logic of a winner-take-all political system? Simply put, a system as closed as that of the U.S. has no room for more than two parties.

The reason for such a constricted choice in the U.S. does not lie in its constitution (which makes no mention of parties), nor even in the iron-gripped dominance of its large corporations (although the Republican/Democratic split tends to replicate the industrialist/financier rivalry among capitalists). Unlike parliamentary systems that use either proportional representation to better reflect the spectrum of political opinion or use multiple-seat districts where more than one party can be seated, a legislature based on districts each with one representative is a closed system. (This includes the U.S. Senate, which, because of its staggered terms, is effectively a single-seat system in which the district is an entire state.) That these districts are heavily gerrymandered does exacerbate this closed system, but is more a symptom than a cause. When there are two entrenched parties contesting for a single seat, there is no space for a third party to emerge. The two parties are necessarily unwieldy coalitions; they must be so because they will have to contain room for people and ideas across long portions of the political spectrum. (That does not mean that all factions’ desires are incorporated into the party’s positions or are even heard).

Heads, corporate power wins; tails, you lose

Voting for a party or an individual becomes a sterile exercise in ensuring the other side doesn’t win. From the point of view of the candidates and parties, the safest strategy is one of peeling away voters from the only other viable candidate, thereby encouraging platforms to be close to that of the other viable candidate, promoting a tendency to lessen differences between the two dominant parties. If the more extreme party moves further right, this tendency means that the relatively more moderate party will also move right, keeping the gap as small as reasonably possible.

With little to distinguish the two parties, the importance of personality becomes more important, further blurring political ideas, and yet third choices are excluded because of the factors that continue to compel a vote for one of the two major-party candidates. In turn, such a system sends people to representative bodies on the basis of their personalities, encouraging those personalities to grandstand and act in an egocentric manner once they are seated. Yet even with the grandstanding, the unavoidable need to beg for dollars to be a viable candidate means keeping corporate benefactors happy. All the more do party leaders do what they can to see to it that only those already disposed to fulfill corporate wish lists get to be candidates. And in an era where wealthy industrialists and financiers are more frequently running for office themselves rather than backing someone to do their bidding, they naturally seek office through one of the two dominant parties, thereby transmitting corporate ideology back into them, while also bolstering them by linking their personal “credibility” to the parties.

The two parties do compete fiercely to win elections — they represent different groupings within the capitalist class who have a great deal of money at stake. This is a closed competition, however: They act as a cartel to keep corporate money rolling in and other parties out. Although real choice is blocked, the illusion of competition is maintained and there is enough room to allow safety valves to work when needed, such as the removal from office of an unpopular office-holder. All this makes for a remarkably stable system: One U.S. government has fallen in 230 years and on that one occasion, Richard Nixon’s vice president was seamlessly sworn in as president.

So is there any point to voting? That ultimately is a personal decision. But why not vote? It is what else we do that matters. If you spend one hour on one day a year voting and spend the rest of your year organizing, agitating and doing what you can to bring about a better world, then you have allocated your time well. That is true whether you vote for socialist or Green candidates, or whether you vote for Democrats as the lesser evil out of strategic reasons because getting a Democrat in office provides more maneuvering room for activist work than when a Republican is in office. We should be intellectually honest enough to recognize this; acknowledging that a Republican administration is worse than a Democratic one while having no illusions about Democrats should be no cause for condemnation as long as we remember that a lesser evil is still evil and social movements in the street, linking causes and aligning with people who don’t look like us or live where we do, is the only route to a better world. (I write this as someone who votes for socialists and Greens but I decline to condemn or mock others who vote otherwise for strategic reasons.)

Bring into being a better world — whether we choose to call that better world socialism or economic democracy — means putting an end to the capitalist economic system before capitalism puts an end to Earth’s ability to remain a fully habitable biosphere and completes the job of immiserating the world’s working people, the overwhelming majority of humanity. That will never be done in a voting booth. History could not be clearer on this. The hard work of organizing and building movements is the only thing that has ever made the world better and is the only thing that ever will make the world better. It will be a happy day when we can vote as we wish by voting for what we want. For now, voting for a greater evil or a somewhat lesser evil is what we are presented with, and although not voting for a lesser evil is understandable, sometimes a lesser evil means a difference between life and death; the women who will die because they can’t get an abortion and their families would surely see a difference. We ought to be able to tell the difference between a bourgeois formal democracy and the threat of outright fascism. 

Even with possessing that basic knowledge, better we oppose such a miserable choice with whatever means we have at our disposal rather than offering “more revolutionary than thou” platitudes.

Why should we give all our money to landlords?

Who decided we should give all our money to landlords? Did you vote for that? I didn’t. You didn’t, either. And if you have thoughts of leaving renting behind to buy, the costs of mortgages are, not surprisingly, rising dramatically as well.

As far as I know, no landlord has been recorded as holding a literal gun to the head of tenants to sign a lease. But then there is no need for them to do so, as “market forces” do the work for them. At bottom, the problem is that housing is a capitalist market commodity. As long as housing remains a commodity, housing costs will continue to become ever more unaffordable. To put this in other words: As long as housing is not a human right, but instead something that has to be competed for and owned by a small number of people, the holders of the good (housing) will take advantage and jack up prices as high as possible.

This is simply “market forces” at work. If there isn’t enough housing, and especially insufficient lower-priced housing, the owners of that commodity in short supply will raise prices. Several decades of allowing the “market” to handle the supply has led to the result of renters struggling with high rents and facing the impossibility of obtaining an affordable mortgage. Despite what judges have ruled, rents do not rise without human intervention. The “market” in housing are landlords and developers, and their interest is the maximum amount possible of profit, regardless of cost to everybody else. The magic of the market, indeed. 

^{A sign at Occupy Boston (photo by Tim Pierce)}

One new aspect of housing markets, at least in North America, is the entrance of financial speculators, a trend that appears to be gathering momentum. In both the United States and Canada, “investors” are buying up housing at an extraordinary pace, doing so to extract large short-term profits through raising rents and swift evictions. The gains of speculators are your losses — less housing is available and not only does the rent charged for these homes bought for speculation go up faster than they would have but fewer homes are available, thereby further driving up rents. Once again, Wall Street and Bay Street find a way to profit off a crisis. 

Increasingly unaffordable rents as the result of decades of housing costs rising much faster than inflation or wages over decades is not limited to North America, of course. Capitalism is a global economic system, and it is therefore no surprise that the cost of housing is similarly rising around the world, perhaps most acutely in Britain but certainly not only there. Nonetheless, financial speculation has added an accelerant to North American unaffordability.

As always, Wall Street profits off everybody else’s misfortune

In the United States, speculators are gobbling up multifamily apartment buildings in places such as New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area as well as single-family homes in the Southeast, the Midwest and elsewhere. The latter seems to be drawing most of the speculative money. Investors bought one-quarter of all U.S. single-family houses that sold in 2021 with five states — Arizona, California, Georgia, Nevada and Texas — seeing nearly one-third of sales made by investors. A lack of regulation is fueling this trend. And many a political officeholder wishes to keep it that way. In Georgia, for example, a bill introduced by Republican state senators would have made it illegal for local governments to enact any restrictions against predatory behavior. Strong pushback caused the bill to die in committee but it could be resurrected. Rising rents, mass speculator buying and faster evictions are intertwined problems in places such as Atlanta, to which we will return.

By 2030, by one estimate, 40 percent of U.S. single-family rental homes may be owned by institutions. Predatory investors did not appear out of the blue, but were encouraged by federal government policy, a development not independent of the 2008 financial collapse that led to massive foreclosures and evictions. Local Initiatives Support Corporation, an advocacy group that calls itself a “bridge” between government, foundations and for-profit companies on the one hand and residents and local institutions on the other, summarizes the factors leading to the current speculation-driven market. Julia Duranti-Martínez writes:

“While predatory investors aggressively capitalized on tenant and small landlord distress to increase their market share through the pandemic, their entry into the housing market was facilitated by financial and regulatory reforms from the 1980’s-90’s, and dramatically increased in the wake of the 2008 foreclosure crisis, when investors scooped up distressed homes in hard-hit communities through bulk sales. These acquisitions are part of a long history of displacement and wealth extraction targeting low-income and BIPOC communities—particularly Black and Latinx households, who suffered higher rates of foreclosure than white homeowners and lost nearly $400 billion in collective wealth during the Great Recession—who now find themselves excluded from homeownership and paying more in rent to corporate landlords for worse quality housing.”

^{Artwork by Jesus Solana from Madrid}

Although they would of course invert the moral signposts, investors themselves acknowledge that, for them, single-family homes are an “opportunity.” One institutional investor, based in Alabama, gleefully noted that scooping up single-family homes as rental properties “offers the potential for higher returns” and have become a target of institutional investors whereas these sorts of homes, prior to the 2008 financial collapse, were a “mom-and-pop asset class.” Computerization is also driving this: “[S]ophisticated real estate investors on Wall Street can partially or fully automate the process of appraising, acquiring, renovating, leasing, operating, and maintaining single-family rentals.” This report also, with a straight face, asserts that Wall Street ownership leads to “greater tenant satisfaction.” It surely does not, as we will presently see.

Seeking to unload foreclosed properties, the government-sponsored mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began a program to encourage institutional investors to purchase these properties. This was done in 2012. Reuters quoted the then acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Edward DeMarco, as saying, “This is an important step toward increasing private investment in foreclosed properties to maximize value and stabilize communities.” Maximizing value for Wall Street it certainly has done. Reuters at the time reported that the Obama administration sought to “shore up the housing market.” Given the proclivities of the Obama administration to see neoliberal austerity and “market” solutions as the answer to all problems while giving a thin moderating veneer to otherwise right-wing concepts, it should come as no surprise that leaving renters and distressed mortgage holders to the tender mercies of Wall Street was cooked up. Par for the course for the intellectual dead end of liberalism.

U.S. government tells speculators to get to work and they do

There appears to be no letup. In March 2023, 27 percent of single-family houses sold in the U.S. were bought by investors, and that figure was virtually unchanged at 26 percent for June 2023, the latest figures I can find. The number of non-institutional purchases of single-family houses, meanwhile, declined by half from July 2020 to January 2023, according to CoreLogic data. Years of such massive purchasing by institutional investors adds up: Urban Institute researchers found that large institutional investors (those owning at least 100 single-family houses) collectively owned 574,000 homes as of June 2022, and most of these by investors owning at least 1,000 single-family rentals.

This trend is occurring in metropolitan areas around the United States, but appears concentrated in the Southeast. How does this play out? One study, published by the Housing Crisis Research Collaborative, found that private-equity and other institutional investors seek not only profits but capital gains, which are notoriously taxed at lower rates than income. “The focus on capital gains is exemplified by purchases of distressed properties in low income, historically nonwhite neighborhoods that have suffered from disinvestment, but where gentrification or real estate cycle dynamics predict medium term price increases,” the Collaborative report states. The federal Opportunity Zone program, instituted as part of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act and described as “an uncapped, loosely targeted” policy that “provides capital gains tax shelters for investors that invest in low-income communities,” has seen “nearly all” of the funds generated by it go to real estate investment rather than business investment. 

Focusing their research on Atlanta, Miami and Tampa, the Collaborative researchers found that “large corporate single family rental and rent-to-own investors purchase in highly segregated, predominantly Black and non-White Hispanic areas, while avoiding high poverty neighborhoods and areas with low levels of owner-occupied housing stock.” This included areas “hit hard by Covid-19.” As a result: 

“Large corporate landlords are associated with high rates of housing instability due to frequent rental price increases and aggressive eviction practices. These firms have higher eviction rates than small landlords. Investor purchases of multifamily have been found to cause spikes in evictions-led displacement, and to accelerate displacement of Black residents at the neighborhood level.” [internal citations omitted]

This study found that large institutional owners of single-family rentals “have an established record of high hidden fees, aggressive rent increases, high eviction rates, and poor maintenance.”

^{Atlanta skyline (photo by Paul Brennan)}

Similarly, a study led by Elora Lee Raymond of Georgia Tech found a “spatially concentrated evictions rate” in Atlanta. An incredible 20 percent of all rental single-family homes received an eviction notice in 2015; in some Zip codes, 40 percent received eviction notices with more than 15 percent being evicted. Institutional investors are much more likely to evict: “We find that large corporate owners of single-family rentals, which we define as firms with more than 15 single-family rental homes in Fulton County, are 68 percent more likely than small landlords to file eviction notices even after controlling for past foreclosure status, property characteristics, tenant characteristics, and neighborhood.”

Another research report reached similar conclusions. Stateline reports that “Institutional buying in Georgia has focused on a ring of middle-class Black suburbs south of Atlanta, according to research by Brian An, an assistant professor of public policy at Georgia Tech. An said buying since 2007 was concentrated in southern Atlanta suburbs with mostly Black populations, low poverty, good schools and small affordable houses considered good starter homes.”

Heads, Wall Street wins and tails, you lose

Although the process is further along in certain cities, financialization of housing is an economic phenomenon, not a geographically specific one. Under financialization, housing is seen as an asset class used to generate financial profits, similar to stocks and bonds. Benjamin Teresa, writing for the affordable-housing publication Shelterforce, sums this up: “The financialization of housing is part of a long-term transformation of the economy, and so it has to be understood and analyzed not as a phenomenon of specific markets, such as expensive cities or supply-constrained regions, but as an emerging set of investment strategies and management practices that present real challenges to affordable housing advocates, tenants, and community development organizations.”

U.S. government policy has facilitated financialization. The 1990s reversal of the separation of commercial and investment banking put into law during the Great Depression; elimination of caps on interest rates on loans, encouraging higher-risk speculation; bailouts of banks and Wall Street that reward high-risk behavior; and the government creating a corporation to allow banks to offload their foreclosed homes instead of stabilizing tenants and owners of single homes during the Savings and Loan crisis all contributed. The Shelterforce analysis concludes:

“Financialization of housing does depend on housing scarcity, but it’s important to recognize that housing scarcity is produced in multiple ways, including by financial actors themselves. It’s not an inevitable condition financial firms are merely taking advantage of. Indeed, creating and maintaining housing scarcity through hoarding housing, gatekeeping housing, and evicting people from housing is a central preoccupation of financial investors. State-imposed austerity measures that prioritize short-term deficit reduction over functional social programs consistently reduce state support for housing, which in turn increases housing scarcity. And an attitude toward financial risk that prioritizes support to the banking and financial system above keeping people housed also produces scarcity.”

All this adds to the upward pressure on rents, already long subject to increases well above the rates of inflation or increases in wages. A May 2023 report by Moody’s Analytics — a pillar of the economic establishment hardly likely to embellish anything that would reflect badly on capitalism — found that half of U.S. renters are rent-burdened, defined as those who spend 30 percent or more of their gross income on housing. That is the highest percentage that has been recorded. A housing study conducted by Harvard University researchers also found that half of U.S. renters are rent-burdened and that the number of homeless people is at a record high. It’s not only renters who are in difficulties: When including those carrying mortgages, the Harvard researchers found that 42 million U.S. households are cost-burdened, or one-third of all U.S. households.

Being rent-burdened is bad for your health, a separate study unsurprisingly found. The study, “The impacts of rent burden and eviction on mortality in the United States, 2000–2019,” published in Social Science & Medicine, found that higher rent burdens, increases in rent burdens and evictions resulted in measurably higher levels of mortality. Evictions with judgments resulted in a 40 percent higher risk of death.

And higher rent burdens are quite common. From 1980 to 2022, rent increases in the United States averaged 8.9 percent. That has accelerated, as average U.S. rent increases were reported as 18 percent for 2021, 14 percent for 2022 and 12 percent for 2023, according to Azibo, a financial services company for the real estate industry. 

Thus it comes as no shock that rents in the U.S. increased twice as fast as inflation from 1999 to 2022 while real wages were essentially unchanged during that time. If you want the numbers, rent growth in that period was 135 percent, income growth was 77 percent and inflation was 76 percent.

Canadian rents rise beyond too damn high

The housing situation in Canada is no better and may actually be worse than it is in the United States. Rents in Canada rose 4.6 percent in 2021, 12.1 percent in 2022 and 8.6 percent in 2023 from already high rates. As a result, an astounding 63 percent of Canadian renters are rent-burdened! Although inflation arose in Canada as it did in much of the world, rent far outstripped inflation: Canadian prices rose a total of 11.3 percent for the period of 2021 to 2023. Thus rents in these years rose more than twice the rate of inflation.

As it is south of the border, rents in large Canadian cities are higher than elsewhere. On a countrywide average, according to National Bank of Canada data, a Canadian needs half of a median income to be able to pay the median condo mortgage — well above the 30 percent mark at which a household is classified as cost-burdened. Condos, in turn, are less expensive than other owned housing and are often seen as “starter” homes in Canada. Overall, for all mortgages, 65 percent of a median income is necessary to pay for a median mortgage. In Vancouver, more than 100 percent of a median income would be needed. In Toronto, nearly 90 percent. How many can afford that?

Nor is any improvement on the horizon. The National Bank of Canada, in its housing affordability summary, said, “While homeownership is becoming untenable, the rental market offers little respite. Our rental affordability index has never been worse.” The bank concluded: “The outlook for the coming year is fraught with challenges. While mortgage interest rates are showing signs of waning in the face of expected rate cuts by the central bank, housing demand remains supported by unprecedented population growth. As a result, we expect some upside to prices in 2024. On the rental side, in a recently released report by the [Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation], Canada’s rental market vacancy stumbled to a record low of 1.5% which leaves little room for an improvement in rents.” The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is an unaffordable C$2,700 in Vancouver and C$2,450 in Toronto.

Mass investor buying of homes has also reached dangerous proportions in Canada. Investors bought 30% of Canadian homes in the first quarter of 2023, up from 22 percent in 2020. Investors already owned more than one-fifth of all homes in five Canadian provinces in 2020. There is no accident here — one-third of all new properties in metropolitan Vancouver were built specifically for investment. Marc Lee, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives speaking with CBC, said, “So much of the wealth ladder in Canada has been based around real estate. I think it’s come at the detriment of quality affordable housing for the majority of folks who are renters.”

_{Vancouver (photo by Andrew Raun)}

Rent controls are used on a wider scale in Canada than they are in the United States, but that hasn’t seemed to slow the dizzying rise in rents and the cost of housing in general. Ontario, for example, has instituted a province-wide cap on rent increases of 2.5 percent for 2024. That is the same cap as was promulgated for 2023. But there are catches. The conservative government of Doug Ford in 2018 enacted legislation that exempts from rent caps any home built or first occupied after November 15, 2018, nor when a tenant leaves. As a result, although tenants who remained in their rental in 2022 received an average 3 percent increase in rent, units in which there was tenant turnover saw an 18 percent increase. Preliminary calculations imply there was a 25 percent rise for units that saw tenant turnover in 2023.

Don’t wait for the “market” to correct this situation. At the same time as homelessness swells and prices rise beyond affordability, there are about 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada — about 9 percent of the country’s total. This is the fifth highest total of any Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member country. (The United States has the most vacant homes, 15.6 million, and among all OECD countries, 10 percent of homes are vacant.)

Rents increased seven and a half times faster than wages from 2000 to 2020 in Canada. In part this is due to Canadian housing prices not taking a hit as happened in the United States in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. But there is no downplaying the massive buying of homes, especially newer ones. And although cities such as Toronto and Vancouver draw the most attention, speculators are hungrily eyeing housing across the country. Better Dwelling, a housing news outlet, reported that investors own more than one-third of the housing and three-quarters of “recent completions” in the small northern British Columbia city of Fort St. John while snapping up more than half of new builds in another small B.C. city, Prince Rupert. “[I]nvestors are driving up home prices based strictly on the expectation home prices will always rise,” Better Dwelling said. “When this occurs, the market can become more vulnerable to an economic shock.”

“Free market” or with rent controls, European renters pay more

Across the Atlantic, rent is also too damn high. Perhaps nowhere in Europe is rent higher than in Britain. Half of all United Kingdom tenants are rent-burned with London tenants spending on average 41 percent of their income on rent. Although investors buying up homes appears to be becoming more common — investor borrowing is reported to have reached £18 billion in 2022 — it has not reached anywhere near North American levels yet. Nonetheless, British rents are up 25% since the start of the pandemic. Interest rates have been high the past couple of years, but not having a mortgage to pay seems to be no barrier to British landlords. A survey by Shelter, a tenants-rights advocate, found that two-thirds of mortgage-free landlords are raising rents anyway. It must be nice to let the money roll in while you sit with your feet on the desk: Average profits per tenant are now £800 per month.

I am unable to find any equivalent of the rent-burdened statistic for British tenants (that is, those paying at least 30 percent of their gross pay for rent) but there is no shortage of those paying too much. About one-quarter of U.K. renters are paying 40 percent or more for rent, the highest total in Europe. (Norway and Spain are next.) British rents are up 56 percent since October 2019, The Guardian reports. By comparison, real wage increase for British workers from 2019 to 2024 totals a paltry 5 percent.

One thing in common on both sides of the Atlantic is the crisis level of homeless people. Shelter reports that more than 300,000 were homeless in England at the end of 2022, nearly half of them children. That’s 14 percent more than a year earlier. So pervasive is this social problem that a separate Shelter report found that half of England’s teachers work at a school with homeless children. “For years, successive governments have failed to act on the ongoing and deepening housing emergency by failing to invest in enough social homes. The only alternative available to families is to rent privately. But rents for family homes have skyrocketed and have outpaced incomes, shutting off all options for many people,” the organization says.

^{The Palace of Westminster (photo by Andrew Dunn)}

Rents are high not only in England. Dublin, Paris and Oslo are reported to be the European cities with the highest rents. Despite a 3.5 percent cap on rent raises in Paris, Parisian rents rose 6.5 percent from mid-2022 to mid-2023. Reports Le Monde, “Non-compliance with rent controls is an open secret. Despite this measure, 30% of new rentals exceeded the maximum rent allowed in 2021, according to the latest available data from the Observatory of Rents in the Paris Conurbation. ‘It’s even worse for small spaces: 80% of studios don’t comply with rent control,’ said Ian Brossat, Paris’s deputy mayor for housing (Communist).” A recent city survey found that 35 percent of Paris rental properties are rented at prices higher than allowed under rent-control rules.

Rents in Dublin reached €2,102 per month in August 2022, with new tenancies 9 percent more expensive than a year earlier. The rest of Ireland appears to be catching up; although rents outside the capital are much less expensive the overall rent increase for Ireland as a whole was almost 11 percent for 2023. Rents in Oslo are reported to have risen 17 percent in a year with country-wide rents in Norway up 12 percent. Recent large increases in the price of buying a home have forced more Norwegians into the rental market, so much that a recent pause in real estate prices has not caused rent increases to slow.

Housing as a commodity rather than a human right

OK, I’ve likely provided more numbers than many readers might care to digest. So let’s ask why rents are too damn high and why they have risen much faster than inflation for so many years. As long as housing is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, housing costs will increase and we’ll remain at the mercy of landlords, who, under gentrification, decide who is allowed to stay and who will be pushed out of their homes. And as pristine markets exist only in the minds of orthodox economists, not in the real world, the wealth accrued by landlords and developers enable them to exert powerful influences on local, state and provincial political office holders, and thus push laws to their benefit. Rent controls are prohibited or not in existence in most places, especially in the United States, and often those that are in place have loopholes or weaknesses that allow landlords to raise rents anyway. And as luxury housing for the wealthy is more profitable than other housing, that is what developers will build when “markets” are left to determine what gets built.

Market forces are nothing more than the aggregate interests of the largest industrialists and financiers. Markets do not sit high in the clouds, dispassionately sorting out worthy winners and losers in some benign process of divine justice, as ideologues would have us believe. There is no magic at work here.

Neither housing, nor education, nor a clean environment are considered rights in capitalist formal democracies, and if you live in the United States, health care is not a right, either. Democracy is defined as the right to freely vote in political elections that determine little (although even this right is increasingly abrogated in the U.S.) and to choose whatever consumer product you wish to buy. Having more flavors of soda to choose from really shouldn’t be the definition of democracy or “freedom.”

That is because “freedom” is equated with individualism, a specific form of individualism that is shorn of responsibility. Those who have the most — obtained at the expense of those with far less — have no responsibility to the society that enabled them to amass such wealth. Imposing harsher working conditions is another aspect of this individualistic “freedom,” but freedom for who? “Freedom” for industrialists and financiers is freedom to rule over, control and exploit others; “justice” is the unfettered ability to enjoy this freedom, a justice reflected in legal structures. Working people are “free” to compete in a race to the bottom set up by capitalists.

Even in the United States, rent control has been used successfully in the past. In parallel with price controls on consumer goods and government guidance of the economy during World War II, the federal government established caps on rent to prevent profiteering that the government deemed a threat to civilian morale. After the war, when federal government controls were ended, rent control was devolved to state governments; not surprisingly denunciations of rent control went hand-in-hand with the anti-communist scare mongering that was quickly fanned to dampen political dissent. A brief wave of new rent-control measures was overturned in the 1980s, when Reaganism was instituted; this neoliberal turn was intended to restore corporate profits at the expense of working people. As to this latest turn, Oksana Mironova, writing in Portside, said:

“The anti-rent control push was part and parcel of a revanchist political turn that championed deregulation, austerity, and carceral solutions over measures that not only were of no benefit to marginalized people, but also dehumanized and actively harmed them. As the social safety net frayed, rent control became a convenient scapegoat for declining housing conditions, increased homelessness, and even increases in street crime.”

Housing reform is increasingly on the agenda, and there is no reason why such an activist upsurge can’t continue. Reforms advocated by housing activists such as much enhanced rent control laws and a massive increase in publicly funded housing would certainly be welcome, as would redirecting tax breaks to be used only for buildings that will have 100 percent affordable units. Any short-term solutions that can ameliorate the high cost of housing are welcome. Ultimately, however, unaffordable rent increases beyond inflation levels or wage growth will not be history until housing is no longer a capitalist commodity. Public intervention, not markets, is the solution. Why is housing not a human right?

So long, and thanks for all the hamburgers

It’s not true that humanity is committing suicide, as exemplified by the COP28 farce of a climate summit. The world’s industrialists and financiers are committing humanity to ecocide. More than ever, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Death by capitalism. That phrase has a certain catchy feeling to it. But it’s no joke, is it? No, no joke at all.

No joke, and no vote. You didn’t get a vote on whether greenhouse gas emissions should continue at a pace to unleash catastrophically rising seas, unbearable heat, droughts, environmental destruction and an increasingly erratic climate in a cascade of cause and effect that will trigger still more climatic instability. The world’s capitalists — in particular, those who control and profit from fossil fuel corporations — have voted, did vote and will continue to vote for profits today and indifference to human and animal life tomorrow. Hurray!

The financial industry mentality has always been to squeeze every dollar out of a stone today and the hell with tomorrow. The fossil fuel industry mentality is much the same. Tomorrow increasingly looks like it will be hell. Tomorrow may not come for a few more decades, perhaps, but it does seem that tomorrow will arrive and it won’t be a pleasant time.

No more than a brief recap of the 28th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (as COP28 is formally known) is necessary. Destined to be even more of a farce than previous climate change summits given it was hosted by the oil-reliant United Arab Emirates with the chief executive officer of the UAE state oil company, Sultan Al Jaber, serving as COP28 president. Laughter may often be better than crying, but laughter just doesn’t seem right for this level of irresponsibility and contempt for humanity and the environment.

Perhaps next year’s COP29 can be scheduled for the offices of ExxonMobil? Or perhaps the world’s oil majors can bid on which will host? I do know that Baku, Azerbaijan, has been designated as the site for COP29 and that Azerbaijan is a significant oil and gas producer, even if not as big as the United Arab Emirates. But we might as well take the final step toward making these annual climate summits a complete farce. It would at least be more honest.

They delivered empty talk

The official COP28 website is quite cheery and is headlined “We United/We Acted/We Delivered.” Beyond continuing oil and gas profits, it is difficult to say what was delivered. The official final statement declares “the Parties agreed a landmark text named The UAE Consensus, that sets out an ambitious climate agenda to keep 1.5°C within reach. The UAE Consensus calls on Parties to transition away from fossil fuels to reach net zero, encourages them to submit economy-wide Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), includes a new specific target to triple renewables and double energy efficiency by 2030, and builds momentum towards a new architecture for climate finance.”

When we look at the details, we find that the “UAE Consensus” is “An unprecedented reference to transitioning away from all fossil fuels to enable the world to reach net zero by 2050” and that “economy-wide emission reduction targets” are “encouraged.” In other words, nothing concrete. What does “transition away” mean? Not much. And that countries are “encouraged” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions means that, as with past climate summits, there are no mechanisms to ensure any promises are kept. And are environmental organizations seen as relevant to any process of reducing emissions? Certainly not! Instead, finance capital will save us: Another point is “Building momentum behind the financial architecture reform agenda, recognizing the role of credit rating agencies for the first time, and calling for a scale up of concessional and grant finance.”

Banks are not going to save us. From 2015, when the Paris Climate Accord was signed, through 2022, 60 of the world’s biggest banks have invested US$4.6 trillion in fossil fuel projects. And the amount of money the controllers of finance capital are investing is growing: $742 billion was invested in the industry in 2021 alone. Four United States-based banks were the worst offenders, according to a report by seven environmental organizations, and three Canadian banks are among the top dozen in the world for financing fossil fuels. Each of these are big contributors to fracking and tar sands production. It’s not only companies like Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

What was that about crying or laughing? So it’s more idle talk, the same as previous climate summits. Last year’s COP27 in Egypt established a “loss and damage” fund for Global South countries that remains voluntary and features an implementation plan that “requests” countries that have not yet done so “revisit and strengthen” their 2030 climate targets. Note that word: “requests.” Oh please consider stopping your environmental destruction if it’s not too inconvenient. That was preceded by COP26 in Glasgow failing to enact any enforcement mechanisms; COP25 in Madrid concluding with an announcement of two more years of roundtables; COP24 in Katowice, Poland, promoting coal; and COP23 in Bonn ending with a promise that people will get together and talk some more.

A vague declaration that countries will “transition away” in some unspecified and non-enforceable way is consistent with past climate summits. And what might be expected from a conference in which a record number of fossil fuel delegates were in attendance — more than 2,400 and four times more than were in attendance at COP27. For added fun, the COP28 president, Sultan Al Jaber, declared that a phaseout of fossil fuels would “take the world back into caves” and that there is “no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 [degrees] C.” The OPEC cartel of oil-producing countries declared its members should “proactively reject” any reduction target aimed at fossil fuels and ExxonMobil’s chief executive officer, Darren Woods, complained that climate talks focus too much on renewable energy.

The world was not impressed

Thus it is with less than surprise that independent assessments of COP28 are less than glowing. Here is the assessment of Climate Action Tracker: 

“Few of the sectoral initiatives announced during COP28 will meaningfully contribute to closing the emissions gap. Many of them lack either the ambition, clarity, coverage or accountability needed to really make a difference. We estimate that of the total emissions savings that could be achieved by the pledges, around a quarter is already included in government [nationally determined contributions], around a quarter is additional and achievable, and around half is unlikely to be achieved without further action to improve the initiatives. … The ‘Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Accelerator’ is a prime example of a greenwashing initiative by oil and gas companies. It only focuses on upstream emissions from oil and gas production — but the real change has to come from phasing out fossil fuels, where emissions are at least five times greater.”

The “Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Accelerator” is a promise by oil companies to reduce emissions that occur during the production of oil and gas, including a halt to “routine flaring” by 2030. Climate Action Tracker’s report states that “The initiative risks being a distraction that misses the woods for the trees.” That is because emissions from the combustion of oil and gas are nearly nine times greater than the emissions from oil and gas extraction. In other words, it is fossil fuels themselves that must be phased out because it is their use that is responsible for the lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions. But the likelihood of meaningful reduction of production emissions is “negligible” because China and Russia have not signed up to this initiative, while Canada, Norway and the United States “are way behind in meeting their 2030 emissions reduction targets,” and would need to fulfill this promise to make progress on overall reduction pledges.

Overall, the world is nowhere near successfully limiting global warming to the Paris Climate Summit goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees C. above the pre-industrial level. Even if all current pledges were to be met, a temperature increase of 2.1 degrees by 2100 can be expected, and if current business as usual continues, the world is looking at an increase of 2.7 degrees by the end of the century. And of course if there is no serious mitigation, temperature rises will not stop in 2100.

None of this has gone unnoticed. More than 300 civil society organizations signed a letter calling for a phaseout of fossil fuels as part of an equitable global energy transition. Declaring that “The only way to achieve the ambition of the Paris Agreement is to substantially reduce the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels, starting now,” the letter states:

“COP28 must adopt a comprehensive energy transformation package with legal force – including a full, fast, fair, and funded fossil fuel phaseout, renewable energy and energy efficiency targets, real protections for people and nature, and massively scaled up public funding on fair terms. … By refusing to commit to address the emissions from oil and gas being burned and to end fossil fuel expansion, the proposed ‘Global Decarbonization Accelerator’ would serve as a smokescreen to hide the reality that we need to phase out oil, gas, and coal.”

Will there be enough to eat?

The world’s food supply is at stake in this environmental crisis as well. Representatives of small farmers, such as La Via Campesina, were drowned out by lobbyists for Big Agriculture. Large U.S.-based meat and dairy companies have “spent millions campaigning against climate action and sowing doubt about the links between animal agriculture and climate change,” according to New York University research. Speaking with Inside Climate News, Oliver Lazarus, one of the study’s three authors, said, “These companies are some of the world’s biggest contributors to climate change.” A report in DeSmog notes, “While big meat and dairy corporations have spent millions lobbying against climate action, smallholder farmers are disproportionately victims of the climate crisis.” The DeSmog report added, “While small farms feed most people in low- and middle-income nations, they are responsible for only a fraction of global farming emissions. Helping smallholders to adapt and respond to climate change is fundamental for climate justice.”

The world’s capitalist food system brings us inflation, hunger and waste — more than one-third of the world’s population did not have access to adequate food in 2020, according to a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization report.

Is it really necessary to restate the case? Another UN study, Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window, states that climate policies currently in place “point to a 2.8°C temperature rise by the end of the century.” The report adds, “only an urgent system-wide transformation can deliver the enormous cuts needed to limit greenhouse gas emissions by 2030: 45 per cent compared with projections based on policies currently in place to get on track to 1.5°C and 30 per cent for 2°C.”

As a final piling on, there is the Global Tipping Points report issued by a consortium of scientists and issued by Exeter University in Britain. “Harmful tipping points in the natural world pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity,” the report says. “Their triggering will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.” Five tipping points already at risk of breaching are the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, warm-water coral reefs, North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre circulation and permafrost regions. These would have catastrophic consequences:

“For example, the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean’s great overturning circulation combined with global warming could cause half of the global area for growing wheat and maize to be lost. Five major tipping points are already at risk of being crossed due to warming right now and three more are threatened in the 2030s as the world exceeds 1.5°C global warming. The full damage caused by negative tipping points will be far greater than their initial impact. The effects will cascade through globalised social and economic systems, and could exceed the ability of some countries to adapt. Negative tipping points show that the threat posed by the climate and ecological crisis is far more severe than is commonly understood and is of a magnitude never before faced by humanity.”

Nonetheless, the capitalist system’s industrialists and financiers, and the governments that cater to them and bend to their will, would like nothing more than to continue business as usual. That will soon be impossible. Once again, our descendants — living in a world of flooded cities, food shortages, resource depletion, mass species die-offs, unprecedented human migration and large numbers of people dying should business as usual continue — are not likely to believe that their ruined world would be a fair tradeoff for a handful of industrialists and financiers of the past getting obscenely rich. We live in a global economic system under which it is profitable for a handful of powerful people to profit from the destruction of the environment, and this behavior is richly rewarded. The end of capitalism is precisely what must be envisioned. Organize like your life depends on it, because it does.

If capitalism is ‘natural,’ why was so much force used to build it?

If capitalism is such a natural outcome of human nature, why were systematic violence and draconian laws necessary to establish it? And if greed is the primary motivation for human beings, how could the vast majority of human existence have been in hunter-gatherer societies in which cooperation was the most valuable behavior?

Cheerleaders for capitalism — who generate endless arguments that greed is not only good but the dominant human motivation — tend to not dwell on the origination of the system, either implying it has always been with us or that it is the “natural” result of development. Critics of capitalism, interestingly, seem much more interested in the system’s origins than are its boosters. Perhaps the bloody history of how capitalism slowly supplanted feudalism in northwest Europe, and then spread through slavery, conquest, colonialism and routine inflictions of brute force makes for a less than appealing picture. It is not for nothing that Marx wrote, “If money … ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

A correlation of this violence applied by the elites of those times and the governments that, then as now, served their society’s elites, was that peasants and the earliest wage workers must have resisted. Indeed they did. There is a long history of resistance to capitalist offensives, and although movements, those organized and the many more that were spontaneous, were not able to bring about a more humane and equitable world, these are histories well worth knowing. A new book from Monthly Review Press, The War Against the Commons, Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism by Ian Angus*, brings much of this history to vivid life.

Concentrating on the birthplace of capitalism, England, Mr. Angus is forthright about the violent details as they unfolded from the 15th century through to the Industrial Revolution, “focus[ing] on the first and most complete case, the centuries-long war against the agricultural commons, known as the enclosure in England and the clearances in Scotland.” At the dawn of capitalism (most commonly seen as arising in the 16th century although not firmly established until later), England and Scotland were overwhelmingly populated by farmers, much as the rest of the world. Although there was wage work, very few were dependent on it and only under capitalism did mass reliance on wage work occur.

Thus forced removal from the land, elimination of access to common lands and putting an end to the ability to live without working for others was essential for capitalism to develop, and that is the topic of War Against the Commons. In his introduction, Mr. Angus puts this forth in characteristically clear, unambiguous language:

“For wage labor to triumph, there had to be large numbers of people for whom self-provisioning was no longer an option. The transition, which began in England in the 1400s, involved the elimination not only of shared use of land, but of the common rights that allowed even the poorest people access to essential means of subsistence. The right to hunt or fish for food, to gather wood and edible plants, to glean leftover grain in the fields after harvest, to pasture a cow or two on undeveloped land — those and more common rights were erased, replaced by the exclusive right of property owners to use Earth’s wealth.”

Capitalism has only existed for a few centuries, while humans have roamed the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. This of course is not an argument that we should go back to a hunter-gatherer existence — quite impossible given the size of the human population even if it were desirable — but simply an acknowledgment that capitalism is not “natural”; it has existed for a blink of an eye in human history.

Flipping the tragedy of the commons onto its feet

Naturally, Mr. Angus has to first clear out well-propagated misconceptions. He first shoots down the “tragedy of the commons,” a much-traveled piece of neoliberal nonsense. The originator of the concept of the “tragedy of the commons,” an ideological argument for privatization of everything, is a biology professor whose textbook argued for “control of breeding” for “genetically defective” people. Mr. Angus notes this professor “had no training in or particular knowledge of social or agricultural history” when writing his article, published in 1968. But the “thesis” was politically useful, being used to justify stealing the land of Indigenous peoples, privatizing health care and social services, and much else. What the “tragedy of the commons” “thesis” asserts is that land held and used in common will inevitably be overused and destroyed because everybody will want to use more of the common resource, such as introducing more animals on a pasture, until “common ruin” is the result.

War Against the Commons points out that no evidence was presented in this article; its thesis was simply asserted. But commons-based agriculture lasted for centuries; this success on its own disproves the thesis. Those who have actually studied how commons were used and provide actual evidence for their works demonstrate that peasants had sophisticated systems for managing commons and regulating animals.

In the early 16th century, 80 percent of English farmers grew for themselves while only the remaining 20 percent sent some of their production to markets but few of these employed labor. Differentiations were beginning to be seen, however, as complaints about enclosures began to be heard in the 1480s and the process accelerated in the 1500s. King Henry VIII’s adviser condemned enclosures, Mr. Angus writes, and a series of laws against the practice were passed, none with any effect. (The king would not seem to have taken any such advice; tens of thousands were hung during his reign as “vagabonds” or “thieves” during a time of repeated peasant uprisings.)

Mr. Angus argues that the failure of Tudor anti-enclosure legislation was due to their targeting consequences rather than causes and that judicators were local gentry who consistently sided with their colleagues. Regardless, Henry VIII conducted a massive confiscation of church lands and then sold most of it to lords, needing to raise revenue for his wars. The consolidation of large farms means there would be space for fewer small farms. Opposition to private ownership of land and greed in 16th century England was often religious, but Protestant preachers would condemn greed in one breath and in the next condemn all rebellion.

Rebellion there was, nonetheless. The dispossessed fought wage labor, which was commonly seen as “little better than slavery” and the “last resort” when all other options had been precluded. In the late 15th and into the 16th centuries, most enclosures were physical evictions, often entire villages; after 1550, landlords often negotiated with their largest tenant farmers, by now inserted into capitalist markets, to divide the commons and undeveloped lands between them. The landless and smallholders got nothing; the number of agricultural laborers with no land quadrupled from 1560 to 1620. Economic pressures were supplemented by state coercion to force the dispossessed into wage labor. A series of brutal measures were passed into law. Although there were not enough jobs for those forced into wage work, those without unemployment were classified as “vagrants” and “vagabonds” and subject to draconian punishments.

A 1547 law, for example, ordered any “vagrant” who refused an offer of work to be branded with a red-hot iron and be “literally enslaved for two years.” The new slave was subject to having iron rings put around their neck and legs and to suffer beatings. A 1563 law mandated that any man or woman up to the age of 60 could be compelled to work on any farm that would hire them, anyone who offered or accepted wages higher than those set by local employers acting as judges could be thrown in jail, and written permission was needed to leave a job on pain of whipping and imprisonment. Other laws mandated “whippings through the streets until bloody” with repeat offenders put to death. Many of those convicted were increasingly sent to the colonies as indentured servants, completely at the mercy of their New World masters.

Such were the tender mercies shown by nascent capitalists and the state increasingly oriented toward capitalists’ interests.

Might makes right as a foundation

With the simultaneous rise of the coal and textile industries, workers were needed — the draconian laws were the route to forcing people into jobs with low pay, long hours and sometimes dangerous conditions. Coal mining itself triggered more enclosures in the 16th century. Some landlords found that coal mining was more profitable for them than renting farmland, requiring dispossession of tenants, and remaining smallholders could be robbed of their land because they were prohibited from refusing access to minerals under their land. Early manifestations of current-day “property rights” where if you are big enough, might makes right.

Although much resistance consisted of spontaneous uprisings, there were organized campaigns. Two movements were the Diggers and the Levellers. The Levellers’ moniker comes from their “leveling” the hedges and stone fences landlords used to demarcate the lands they had enclosed; these organized groups repeatedly removed these demarcations. The Diggers were a collective movement founded by Gerrard Winstanley that sought to put theory into better practice. The Diggers created communes on common land, first on a hill near London. All members would receive a share of the produce in exchange for helping work the land. 

Winstanley produced a program that criticized the inhumanity of the wealthy and stated that the road to freedom was through common ownership of the land. Wage labor, private ownership of land, and buying and selling land were all prohibited in Digger communities. Everyone was to contribute to the common stock and take only what was necessary; any penalties for free riders were designed to rehabilitate rather than punish. Winstanley and the Diggers saw private ownership of land as the cause of poverty and exploitation, and one of their demands was that all land should be given to those who would work it, including land confiscated from the church. They, after all, were living through the early days of agricultural capitalism with so many around them experiencing poverty and exploitation.

^{Richard II meeting with the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Bibliothèque nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons)}

Remarkably, Winstanley’s concept, devised two centuries before Marx’s concept of communism as “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs,” bore significant resemblances to the latter’s ideas, although Marx could not have known of Winstanley as the Diggers’ ideas were ruthlessly stamped out and were only re-discovered late in the 19th century. State-directed violence against Digger communes was not long in coming. Landlords were determined to eliminate the Diggers. Local magistrates, themselves landowners, indicted Diggers for trespass and unlawful assembly, and imposed fines too large to pay; mobs organized by landowners destroyed crops and homes until the communes had to be abandoned.

By the latter half of the 17th century, “large landowners and merchants won decisive control of the English state,” Mr. Angus writes. “In the 1700s, they would use that power to continue the dispossession of commoners and consolidate their absolute ownership of the land.” And as the Industrial Revolution began to develop, new rounds of enclosures were initiated, this time through laws enacted by Parliament, to strip people of their remaining abilities to be self-sufficient and not be forced into wage work with low pay and long hours of drudgery.

A class state promotes class interests

From the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1689 to the 1832 Great Reform Act, Britain was controlled by agrarian magnates and merchant capitalists; the state existed to benefit the wealthy. The author writes:

“The very rich ruled Parliament through their unchallenged domination of the House of Lords, their effective control of the executive, and their strong influence on the slightly less-rich members of the House of Commons. The lower House was elected, but only about 3 percent of the population (all male) could vote, and high property qualifications ensured that only the wealthy could be candidates. In E.P. Thompson’s words, ‘The British state, all eighteenth-century legislators agreed, existed to preserve the property and, incidentally, the lives and liberties, of the propertied.’ ”

More than 4,000 enclosure acts were passed by Parliament from 1730 to 1840, laws that affected a quarter of all cultivated land. Laws were heavily skewed in favor of big estates and the aristocracy. Peasants resisted, but had too much force arrayed against them. The displaced, unless they emigrated, became wage workers in the new factories. Development in England had been built on slavery, with the huge profits from slave-grown agricultural products and the slave trade itself providing capital for industrial takeoff. And many of the big estate owners were in a position to buy up land because of the profits they directly accrued from slave labor. Abolishing the slave trade was simply another move of economic beneficiary. Mr. Angus writes:

“Defenders of British imperialism like to brag that Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, but that’s like praising a serial killer because he eventually retired. The ban came after centuries in which British investors had grown rich as human traffickers, and it did nothing for the 700,000 Africans who remained enslaved in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Britain’s vaunted humanitarianism is belied by the British army’s slaughter of rebellious slaves in Guyana — seventeen years after the slave trade was declared illegal.”

British parliamentarians, carrying out their class interests, were no less inclined to draconian legislation than had been their predecessors. From 1703 to 1830, 45 statutes were passed relating to banning all but elite landowners from hunting; these laws should be seen in the context of their time when small farmers and the landless needed to hunt to ensure they and their families had enough food to survive. The Black Act of 1723 saw 350 offenses made eligible for the death penalty; already, hanging, whipping and expulsion to Australia for hard labor were on the books for minor offenses. Even cutting down a tree could result in hanging.

That such draconian laws were repeatedly passed over long periods of time demonstrate that capitalism is not “natural” and indeed could only be imposed by force, War Against the Commons persuasively demonstrates. This is a book that is most useful for those already acquainted with this bloody history and wish to obtain more knowledge, including of the still largely unknown Winstanley and the Diggers movement, but also for those without this knowledge who wish to learn about the history of capitalism. The author writes in clear, understandable language without jargon, producing a work that requires no prior knowledge yet is useful for those who do have familiarity with the subject. Anyone who is interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism, and cares to approach the subject with an open mind, will benefit.

* Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons, Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism [Monthly Review Press, New York 2023]

Rational thinking versus conspiracy theories

I am writing an article I’d rather not write but feel compelled to do so. Amidst all the horror of Israel’s massacres and desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza in response to Hamas’ terror attack inside Israel, yet another conspiracy theory seems to have taken root among some people. Specifically, that Hamas’ attack was an “inside job.”

Shades of the 9-11 “truther” movement. The conspiracy theory here is that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency could not possibly have been unaware of what Hamas was plotting and either knew the attack was coming and intentionally let it happen or — this is the most common version that has been circulating by conspiracy theorists — Israelis carried out the attack themselves using Hamas as a cover because the Palestinian organization is an Israeli front group.

This conspiracy theory rests on two presumptions: That Mossad agents are supermen, incapable of not being the masters of any situation, and that Palestinians lack agency; that is, Palestinians are incapable of the organization necessary to pull off something on the scale of the October 7 attack. Could either of these presumptions be true? Surely not. Mossad, however lethally capable it may be as an institution, is staffed by human beings. The idea that not a leaf moves in the Middle East without Mossad being behind it is an extension of the idea some on the Left have that not a leaf moves anywhere in the world without the Central Intelligence Agency being behind it, such as the women’s uprising in Iran to pick just one example (to that we will return).

Mossad undoubtedly has a big budget, even if not as huge as that of the CIA, and a big budget provides the resources to do much damage. But no budget, no matter how big, guarantees omnipresence. The Hamas attack had to have been planned for many months, or maybe a couple of years. Those who believe that the October 7 attack was an Israeli “inside job” argue that Israel has agents who spy on Palestinians and soldiers guarding the fence; Mossad and the Israel Defense Force had to have known what being plotted (or used Hamas as its agents) and/or seen militants moving toward the border fence. The underlying idea here is that the terror attack gave Israel the excuse it wanted to bombard Gaza and drive Palestinians out of the enclave, and that Israeli officials had no problem seeing a thousand of their people die to achieve this political goal.

^{“A game of Illuminati” (photo by Miserlou)}

It is certainly true that Israeli officials, and plenty of Israeli citizens, not only fundamentalist West Bank settlers, are completely indifferent to Palestinian lives and well-being and are enthusiastic adherents of ethnic cleansing. The decades of Israeli apartheid speak to that clearly, imposed through draconian laws such as “Jews only” roads, streets on which Palestinians are banned even from walking (even if their home is on it), regular demolitions of homes and Palestinians being allotted as little as one-tenth the water that Jewish settlers use. But it does not follow that a similar depraved indifference to human life is equally applied to Israeli Jews. If Israeli officials really did sacrifice a thousand Jews to provide cover for a massacre, somebody would talk and that would be the end of the career of whomever was behind it, or likely imprisonment. A maneuver with that level of cynicism seems much too big of a risk, politically. 

But the real issue is of Palestinian capability. Again, Palestinians have to be incapable of organization if it is “impossible” for Hamas, or any other Palestinian organization, to have pulled off the October 7 attack. A sophisticated attack against their oppressor is beyond their abilities. Or intellect? This is going dangerously down a slippery slope of racism. However we judge October 7, there can be no conclusion other than Palestinians organized by Hamas are responsible and that Israel, despite all its technological advantages, was caught by surprise.

A New York Times report published on October 10 provided a comprehensive account of how Hamas was able to surprise Israeli military, intelligence and security agencies. Drones were used to disable cellular communications stations and surveillance towers along the border and to destroy remote-controlled machine guns. The Times report, citing Israeli sources, said there were failures to monitor Palestinian communications and “overreliance on border surveillance equipment that was easily shut down by attackers.” Hamas apparently also did all organizing without use of any electronic communications to evade Israeli notice. Electronic communications were used with misdirection in mind: “Hamas operatives who talked to one another also gave the sense that they sought to avoid another war with Israel so soon after a damaging two-week conflict in May 2021,” the Times reported.

Liars do lie but have no need to lie all the time

The corporate media lies, many readers will reply. Yes, the corporate media lies routinely, sometimes essentially all the time on a particular topic, such as Venezuela. But that doesn’t mean the corporate media lies all the time on every subject; that would be impossible and disregards the fact that corporate media outlets are perfectly fine with telling the truth when it suits their narrative. That newspapers print lies and the television broadcasts lies does not absolve us of the responsibility to think and analyze. Saying “I never believe anything I read in the media” is exactly the same as someone who says “I believe everything I read in the media.” Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaretz — where a reader can find more criticism of Israel than in mainstream U.S. newspapers — also reported on Hamas’ use of drones. So it would seem that Palestinians are capable of organizing.

The lack of agency on the part of an Arab nation parallels the conspiracy-theory narrative that the September 11, 2001, terror attacks were an “inside job” on the part of the Bush II/Cheney administration, assisted by Mossad. The 9-11 “truther” movement is one riddled by anti-Semitism; it is not out of the question that similar anti-Semitic manifestations may arise around Hamas’ October 7 attack. It is of course completely reasonable to question the official government narrative of 9-11. Why the Air Force took so long to scramble planes from the Andrews Air Force base outside Washington is only one question that has never been satisfactorily addressed. Scientific inquiries into the physical properties of the World Trade Center materials that were destroyed is another reasonable avenue of research.

The “truther” narrative, for many, however, consists of assertions without proof that 9-11 was an inside job because the U.S. government does evil things. The U.S. government is responsible for a vast array of horrific actions and the Bush II/Cheney administration was even more inclined than the average White House administration to destroy human life for the sake of advancing geopolitical goals and enhancing corporate profits. But that does not mean that every evil thing that happens in the world is due to the White House. It is not as if Arabs don’t have plenty of reasons to hate U.S. foreign policy, and that a few of them, lacking a political or moral compass, would lash out in a spasm of violence on a symbol of commerce, killing thousands in the World Trade Center who had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy. (Not dissimilar to the Hamas spasm of violence being directed against young people at a rave who had nothing to do with Israeli government policy.)

^{Gaza City after a 2009 bombing (photo by Al Jazeera English via Wikimedia Commons)}

Many a “truther” (including some I personally know) repeat the preposterous argument that (depending on the version) two, or five, Mossad agents were “jumping up and down with joy” as the World Trade Center towers came down. This, sadly, seems to be widely believed among “truthers.” Were these agents the same ones who called 2,000 Jews the night before to tell them not to go to work? What a busy day. Maybe the conversation went like this: “Yitzhak, Shlomo here. The family is fine, thank you. Listen, Yitzhak, I can’t stay on the phone; I’ve got another 500 to call tonight, but please stay home tomorrow because we’re taking out the towers. Oy, I better get time and a half for all these hours.”

Did the Mossad agents identify themselves to onlookers? Were they wearing Mossad name tags? (Maybe the tag read, “Hi, my name is Shlomo. I’m a Mossad assassin. How can I help you?”) Can anybody imagine one of the most professional (and thus deadly) spy agencies on Earth being so ham-fisted and obvious? No. Why would such a preposterous story gain traction for even a second? Because of belief, even if held unconsciously, that Jews constitute some sort of cabal, and when that arises on the Left it is among those who are unable to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.

I suppose that is not completely separable from a belief that because the U.S. government, or the Bush II/Cheney administration (take your pick), is capable of evil acts, all evil acts are done by them and thus 9/11 has to be an “inside job.” This is reductionist thinking. The irony of inside-job belief is that it actually lets U.S. foreign policy off the hook! Maybe people in the Middle East really are pissed off about the oppression they’ve endured thanks to U.S. imperialism. Maybe Palestinians really are pissed off about the oppression they endure at the hands of Israel.

Perhaps Iranian women have reasons to revolt

One more troubling example of conspiracy theory thinking on the Left is the idea floated by some that there is no resistance in Iran to the murderous religious fundamentalist government in Tehran and its misogynistic oppression. It’s really the CIA stirring up trouble. And thus Iranian women have no agency and are incapable of seeing their oppression or acting upon it. That’s sexist thinking.

Women in Iran are subject to draconian laws forcing them to wear hijabs under punitive laws backed by state and vigilante violence and which subject them to prohibitions on accessing public institutions, including hospitals, schools, government offices and airports. One-sided Iranian laws heavily favor men in marriage and divorce. Women also face systematic discrimination in the workplace. “Under the Islamic Republic, physical violence against women starts in the home and extends into the society,” writes Haleh Esfandiari on the Middle East Women’s Initiative’s Enheduanna blog. Pardis Mahdavi, writing for Ms. magazine, notes that Iranian laws set a woman’s worth as half that of a man; women are prohibited from working, obtaining a passport or traveling outside of Iran without her husband’s consent (or her father’s consent if she is single); and polygamy is permitted for men.

So it would seem that Iranian women might have something to complain about. And the uprising of women began after the murder of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini at the hands of Iran’s “morality” police on September 16 while in custody. A Kurdish-Iranian woman murdered by the state because her hair was showing. Rather disproportionate, yes? But “it’s their culture,” apologists for Iranian fundamentalism assert. In reality, it took massive, systematic violence backed by the state, and a violent crushing of the Iranian Left, to impose Iran’s misogynistic laws against the will of women. Of course Left apologists for Iran would not stand for such laws in their own country. Human rights are called that because they belong to all humans, not only selected ones in selected countries. Are Iranian women human or not? Are Iranian women capable of agency or not?

^{YPJ fighter helping maintain a position against Islamic State (photo by BijiKurdistan)}

Reductionist thinking that all governments that are enemies of the U.S. government must be defended as the embodiment of goodness and that nothing could possibly be wrong with countries like Iran is easy. Conspiracy theories are popular with some people because latching on to an all-purpose narrative, or doing nothing more than switching the labels of “good” or “evil” that U.S. governments and the media apply, relieves the believer of having to analyze or study. It is not impossible to oppose a repressive government and sanctions against said country at the same time.

When right-wingers denigrate popular uprisings in countries that are aligned with the U.S., no matter how oppressive, as communist plots because people ground into dust by U.S.-backed dictatorships couldn’t possibly have a reason to complain, we laugh. As we should. That completely robs peoples in subaltern countries of all agency and whitewashes U.S. atrocities. When some folks on the Left declare that people staging uprisings in U.S.-targeted countries, no matter how oppressive, couldn’t possibly have a reason to complain, it is a mirror image of those right-wingers and just as ridiculous. And in the case of denying Iranian women agency, it is sexist as well.

Neither the CIA or Mossad are agencies staffed by supermen. And the Bush II/Cheney administration was the most incompetent in U.S. history until the Trump gang set up shop in the White House. Pulling off 9-11 as an “inside job” would have been a conspiracy involving hundreds of people masterfully pulling off a heavily detailed job without anyone talking, even two decades later. A thoroughly incompetent administration, full of blustering ideologues, did that? We should laugh at the idea. And that brings us to the final example of conspiracy thinking: That Covid-19 is a hoax. That one is bound up with anti-vaccine sentiments, and although there are some people who took Covid-19 seriously and took precautions but were afraid to take the vaccine, Covid deniers frequently are anti-vaxxers.

Could millions be involved without talking?

If we were to believe this one, Covid is harmless or kills only older people (that would be OK?), the vaccine doesn’t work and the vaccine has killed more people than Covid. Here, the conspiracy theory is particularly absurd. For such a vast conspiracy to have taken root, it would have required hundreds of thousands, or more likely millions, of doctors, nurses, medical technicians, hospital administrators and other medical-industry employees to be in on the conspiracy, across almost every country on Earth, spanning almost all cultures, and not one of these millions of people has ever spilled the beans. Seven million deaths, recorded in every country on Earth, would have had to have been faked or falsely classified with nobody talking. Is this not ridiculous? I had three friends die from Covid in the first months of the pandemic; perhaps they were in on the conspiracy as well.

On top of all that, vaccines used to inoculate against Covid would have to be faked and the supposed deaths from them suppressed, again with health care workers everywhere in on the conspiracy, along with all employees in any company involved in the vaccines. Big Pharma sometimes makes bad products, so therefore the Covid vaccines must be bad. Again, reductionist thinking. Big Pharma does indeed sometimes profit off bad products that hurt people. That is true. But is Big Pharma some sort of evil machine determined to harm people or is it a group of top-down capitalist enterprises determined to profit to the greatest extent possible? Obviously, the second of these two choices represents reality.

Let’s think about it rationally. Big Pharma wants big profits, and gets them. Pharmaceuticals constitute one of the highest-profit industries; its wildly over-priced medications and medical devices can be a license to print money, one of the most important reasons that the U.S. has by far the world’s highest health care costs. Health care in the U.S. is designed to deliver corporate profits, not health care. The first companies to successfully produce an effective vaccine against Covid-19 that is reasonably safe would make unprecedented profits, especially with the vast sums of government money thrown at them. The entire world would be watching, so this is one time that Big Pharma would not be able to get away with producing bad products. 

Thus, if we use logic and a basic understanding of how capitalism operates, the pandemic was a golden opportunity for Big Pharma to earn record profits at the expense of governments. And profit they have. Moderna, which had never produced a product before its Covid vaccine, has minted multiple billionaires. That wealth was created thanks to an estimated $2.5 billion of government subsidies, and Moderna’s thanks was to refuse to share the drug’s rights with the government that subsidized it.

One does not have to be a vaccine cheerleader to see all this. I am not; skepticism is often warranted and I personally am usually reluctant to take a vaccine and have seldom done so. But blanket condemnations are useless; in this as all other matters a case-by-case assessment of the particular circumstances should be made. For example, I am of the opinion that eliminating polio and smallpox were welcome developments. Vaccines eliminated those scourges. Vaccines against Covid-19, although certainly not perfect, did get the pandemic under control. That was accomplished through unconscionable profiteering — better that we aim our fire at real outrages rather than conspiracy theories. Better we drop the conspiracy theories when it comes to geopolitical topics and instead analyze, however much more difficult analyzing is than to fall back on ready-made ideas that purport to explain everything in simplistic narratives.

The prioritization of human health, development and self-activity in Chavez-era Venezuela

The Bolivarian Revolution, led by Hugo Chávez until his death in 2013, has undergone multiple phases since President Chávez’s first election in 1999. Twenty years ago, a new form of social services, the mission, was created to bypass recalcitrant bureaucrats and to enable the participation of those receiving social services. Another initiative, the commune, was conceived as a way of enabling people to organize for, and create solutions, to problems at the grassroots level. In this excerpt from What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy, the beginnings of these two programs are discussed.

Begun in 2003, the [Venezuelan government created] missions [that were] social-welfare programs organized through mass grassroots participation and funded by the national government. Achieving more control over the state oil company and the sharp increases in oil prices enabled the government to generously fund the missions. Given the corruption and inertia of the state bureaucracy, and the unwillingness of many professionals to provide services to the barrios, the missions were established to provide services directly while enabling participants to shape the programs. Political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero explained the decision to go around established institutions:

“The memory of the [pre-Chávez] Fourth Republic* was too intense, and the sociological fourth republicanism pervaded the state apparatus in an absolute way. The intentions to use the public administration to pay the social debt in education and sanitation were answered by civil servants long established in the state structures with a resounding no. If Venezuelan doctors were not willing to go up the hills (of the shanty towns), it was necessary to resort to other formulae. If the economic administration organs had no answers for over half the population, it was necessary to find other mechanisms. A sort of parallel state with people’s participation was put in motion. The answers required were found by resorting to the organization of the people and in some cases to help from Cuba (which, like any other country, exported what it was competitive in). Around 18 thousand Cuban medics as well as a strong social impulse began to fill in the traditional holes of the Venezuelan state.”

These missions brought positive results, concurs Margarita López Maya, a political scientist and historian who has taught at the Central University of Venezuela since 1982. They enabled access to services and assistance previously denied under the austerity of previous governments, she wrote:

“Missions (programs bypassing uncooperative or ineffective state agencies), such as Barrio Adentro (free 24 hours a day primary health care and disease prevention for low income groups), Mercal (state distribution of food at subsidized prices), Robinson 1 and 2 (literacy and primary education for adults), Ribas and Sucre (secondary and university education for those who had missed or not finished these), Vuelvan Caras (training for employment), and the Bolivarian schools, where a full day schedule has been restored, with two free meals and two snacks a day, plus free uniforms and textbooks: all these undoubtedly had a positive political impact. The government has also invested in the social economy, as in the ‘ruedas de negocios,’ in which the creation of cooperatives is encouraged in order to supply goods and services to the state sector. The government has also created a system of micro-financing with the Women’s Bank, the Sovereign People’s Bank, and so on, which make small loans to lower income borrowers.”

Neoliberal conceptions of micro-finance are based on attempts to put a “human face” on World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural-adjustment programs and designed to accompany the forced opening of Global South economies to predatory multinational financial-service corporations and impose market “solutions” to poverty stripped of all references to relations of power and domination — and not only fail to ameliorate poverty but sometimes make it worse. In contrast, the Women’s Development Bank holds dialogues with recipients to understand what their needs are, and then provides training based on community needs and expectations to go with the credit, and helps women organize themselves and to help them learn to monitor the bank’s performance.

Human health and development become the priorities

Improvements in health care were helped by Cuban doctors, who were assigned to 1,600 medical offices around the country, and eventually trained Venezuelan doctors to replace the Cuban doctors. The Barrio Adentro mission sought to create an integrated health care system including clinics and hospitals. Two other missions related to health are José Gregorio Hernandez (named in honor of a “people’s doctor” known for his dedication), which provides a census of all people with a genetic deficiency or illness, and Milagro, which provides free ophthalmologic pathology services, a program that began to be expanded elsewhere in Latin America.

Among the approximately two dozen missions are Alimentación, which incorporates the Mercal network that provides food at subsidized prices and a distribution system; Cultura, which seeks the decentralization and democratization of culture to ensure that all have access to it and stimulate community participation; Guaicaipuro, intended to guarantee the rights of Indigenous peoples as specified in the constitution; Madres del Barrio, designed to provide support to housewives in dire poverty and help their families overcome their poverty; Negra Hipólita, which assists children, adolescents and adults who are homeless; Piar, which seeks to help mining communities through dignifying living conditions and establishing environmental practices; and Zamora, intended to reorganize land, especially idle land that could be used for agriculture, in accordance with the constitution.

The missions have “permitted poor Venezuelans especially to overcome the effects of two decades [prior to Chávez’s first election] of economic stagnation, political apathy and pessimism about the future,” according to López Maya. The first years of the missions were years of strong economic performance. From 2003 to 2008, unemployment fell by more than half, to 7.8 percent; gross domestic product increased by more than 50 percent; inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient (the standard metric), although still high, noticeably decreased; the human development index strongly increased; and poverty rates strongly declined.

^{A photographic exhibition “Hugo Chávez: Precursor of the multipolar world” inaugurated at the National Assembly of Ecuador in 2013 (photo by Hugo Ortiz Ron / Asamblea Nacional)}

An important factor in these gains was the high price of oil, which doubled from 2003 to 2006. The ability of the government to retain more of the revenue from oil sales also helped. But the dangerous dependency on a single export had not changed, López Maya wrote:

“It is important to emphasize that these advances are almost exclusively based on oil revenues. According to the Venezuelan Central Bank, in 2006, 89 per cent of our exports were oil. We are as dependent on oil as in the past, if not more so. If we examine the current relationship between the state and PDVSA (the state-owned oil corporation) in terms of the hard currency earned by the firm, in 2006 the state received 68 per cent while 32 per cent remained in the hands of PDVSA. The oil sector represents 14 per cent of the [gross national product].”

Concurrent with capturing more revenue from oil, the government sought to make tax collection more efficient. Tax collection had been a traditional weakness in the past. Some success in getting foreign multi-national corporations to pay taxes increased government revenue, although in 2009 what was collected remained below the Latin American average. Because of the strong increase in revenue from oil, that resource became more important to the government’s ability to fund social programs — the percentage of government revenue from oil increased from 25 percent in 1998 to 40 percent in 2008.

Then there is the question of the sustainability of the missions, a question that arises not only because of downturns in the price of oil, but whether they will be institutionalized. The missions represent a parallel government, seen as necessary because of the need to provide immediate relief to large, long-standing problems and a lack of time to dismantle bureaucratic obstructions. Continued mass participation is a crucial element that can guarantee the sustainability of the missions in the long term, but some formality is necessary if the state bureaucracy isn’t to reassert itself in the future. This is an issue that must be resolved, Monedero argues:

“Essential public goods which the Fourth Republic had denied for decades reached the poorest sectors of the citizenry. The novelty of the initiative, the initial success, the people’s mystique which followed the first moments of this parallel state made their recognition most ample. Nevertheless, once that period was over, everything seemed to indicate that the missions need, in order to be consolidated, some sort of institutionality which integrates them in a more stable political realm so that it is not sustained by volunteer labor nor by abstract motivation. The role of the state here appears to be relevant and like a guarantee to complete that process (which does not mean it be the traditional liberal state). Nevertheless it has yet to be resolved what the role of the state apparatus in the discourse and the practice of the so-called socialism of the twenty-first century is.”

Advancing ‘constituent power’ through communal councils

Similar to the establishment of the missions to provide services by going around a recalcitrant bureaucracy, communal councils and communes were established to bypass local and state governments sometimes unresponsive to grassroots demands and in some cases opposition strongholds hostile to the democratizations of the Bolivarian process. The communal councils have their roots in the assemblies that barrio residents created following the Caracazo [a massive 1989 revolt triggered by a new government’s sudden implementation of a severe International Monetary Fund austerity program and the deadly indiscriminate force used against protestors].

The Barrio Assembly of Caracas emerged in 1991 as something of a general assembly representing local groups, coming into being after demonstrations marking the first and second anniversaries of the Caracazo were dispersed by soldiers firing on them from rooftops. Later versions of these assemblies organized on the eve of the 2002 coup attempting to overthrow Hugo Chávez; among their accomplishments were distributing 100,000 fliers calling for a march on the presidential palace to defend the government. With these grassroots organizations in mind, local participation was enshrined in the 1999 constitution. The constitution, through several articles, codifies public participation in municipal budgeting and established local public planning councils to facilitate that participation.

^{Hugo Chávez swearing in as president in 2013 (photo by AVN, Prensa Presidencial/Venezuelanalysis)}

The public participation in formulating the budget of the city of Porto Alegre in Brazil was the model, although the Venezuelan version was intended to go further by authorizing the direct financing of community programs through access to a special national fund set up to finance local projects and for citizens to be directly involved in local development plans. But these local planning councils generally didn’t function. Local mayors either found ways to control them or ignored them; in many cases they and other officials sat on them. Their failure is attributed to being organized across municipalities with populations as large as hundreds of thousands, far too large for direct democracy to work, and that these were bodies decreed from above rather than formed as grassroots initiatives and thus lacking a methodology for communities to elect genuine representatives.

In the wake of the failure of the local planning councils, the communal councils were created. These are the basic building blocks of the communal system but in contrast to the citywide structure of the former, the communal councils operate at a neighborhood level and are direct-democracy bodies, with no seats for municipal office holders. In essence, the communal councils are the base of an alternative government structure, one intended to bypass municipal and other local governments and to eventually replace them. This was an attempt to provide a concrete form to the concept of “constituent power,” the idea that people should be direct participants in the decisions to affect their lives and communities, as distinct from “constituted power,” under which decision-making is ceded to elected officials and business elites.

Those most affected are best positioned to make decisions

Legislation passed in 2006 formally recognized the communal councils and the form quickly gained popularity — there were an estimated 30,000 in existence by 2009. These councils are formed in compact urban areas containing 200 to 400 households in cities and 20 or so in rural areas. All residents of the territory are eligible to participate. In turn, communal councils organize into larger communes, and communes into communal cities, to coordinate projects too large for a neighborhood or to organize projects necessarily on a larger scale, such as improving municipal services.

Article 1 of the law governing communal councils states:

“Within the framework of a participative and protagonist democracy, the Communal Councils represent the means through which the organized masses can take over the direct administration of the policies and projects which are created to respond to the needs and aspirations of the communities in the construction of a fair and just society. The organization, operation and action of the Communal Councils are governed by the principles of co-responsibility, cooperation, solidarity, transparency, accountability, social responsibility, fairness, justice, social controllership and economic self-management.”

The communal councils are described in Article 3 as a “system for participation and protagonis[m] of the people” and that, as codified in Article 4, participants have the obligations of “social co-responsibility, accountability, as well as the transparent, timely, and effective management of the monies allocated to them.” All inhabitants of the area encompassing a communal council above the age of 15 are members of the council’s assembly, which is the highest decision-making body. The day-to-day work of the communal council is conducted by committees focused on whatever issues the local community deems a priority. Spokespeople are elected by the assembly for each committee; these are not representatives but are directly accountable and subject to recall. They do not make decisions by themselves. They can be elected for a maximum of two two-year terms. Financial and “social control” (public-audit) committees are also elected.

^{Supporters of the Venezuelan government demonstrate in 2017 (photo by Rachael Boothroyd Rojas/Venezuelanalysis)}

At least 20 percent of the inhabitants older than 15 must be in attendance for an assembly to achieve quorum. The communal council is required to propose three projects that will contribute to development in the community; funding for approved projects will usually come from national-government bodies. About 12,000 communes received a total of one billion bolívares (out of a national budget of 53 billion) in 2006, and in 2007 about six billion bolívares were provided.

Communal councils had already been in formation, and those organizing pushed for the law codifying them. As explained by a Caracas activist, Eduardo Daza:

“It’s not that the president said, ‘here’s a new law, from now on it’s going to be like this.’ It wasn’t like that, we went all the way to the National Assembly [the federal legislature] to fight for the law of communal councils and though many of the demands we made were not incorporated into the law, nevertheless the law let us take the first step.”

Projects for infrastructure and basic services tend to be the priorities for communal councils. Improvements to sewage and water systems, road building and repair, fixing or building housing, and electrical-grid projects were common needs that were addressed. Community activist groups often supported the creation of the councils, and activists and councils tend to work together. Building the councils is also seen by many activists as a route to building socialism. According to a manifesto issued after a meeting of communal council members:

“We as communal councils believe that the most expeditious way to build the communal state is to assume power at the local level, from an economic, political, military, social and cultural perspective; therefore, we must act in a bloc, giving us higher levels of organization and coordination, it being essential that we constitute a movement that gives us voice, body and face as communal power, throughout the process of building socialism in Venezuela.”

An interesting development is that many (in the case of councils studied by researchers, a majority) who have taken active roles in the communal councils were not politically active before the 2002 failed coup. Generally, women outnumber men among the active participants, and it is often older women taking the lead. The culture of participation that the councils encourage and that the Bolivarian government is paying vastly more attention to solving social problems and the needs of the poor than prior governments has facilitated the organizing of women, and the new activity of women in turn is breaking down traditional macho attitudes. Health committees tackling problems of illness, access to contraception and motherhood are often where participation begins. Once involved, women sign up for training programs, with more women than men taking advantage of these.

In turn, increased participation leads to more community involvement in solving social problems that were previously kept behind closed doors. As a communal activist in Caracas, Petra Rivas, a hairdresser who sat on her council’s social-audit committee, said: “My life has changed 100%, … I have changed much. … More than anything, we have humanized, because before it was from the front of your door to inside your house. You didn’t know what was happening with your neighbor, or to that neighbor woman whose husband you saw drinking all night while she had no food. And we integrated ourselves, we spoke with the woman, look, we’re going to bring you in here, look at your husband, speak up, don’t let him mistreat you, this is the woman’s house, go to the prosecutor.”

* Venezuela’s Fourth Republic was the constitutional structure of the country’s government from 1961 to 1999. With the voter approval and institution of a new constitution in 1999, Venezuela’s new constitutional setup is the Fifth Republic.

This is an excerpt from What Do We Need Bosses For?: Toward Economic Democracy, a study of nations that have attempted to construct post-capitalist societies published by Autonomedia. Citations omitted. Sources cited in this excerpt, in the book, are Tom Malleson, “Cooperatives and the ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ in Venezuela,” Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, summer 2010; Juan Carlos Monedero, “The Social Economy in Venezuela: Between the Will and the Possibility,” anthologized in Beyond Capitalism: Building Democratic Alternatives for Today and the Future; Margarita López Maya, “Venezuela Today: A ‘Participatory and Protagonistic’ Democracy?,” Socialist Register, 2008; Heloise Weber, “The global political economy of microfinance and poverty reduction,” anthologized in Microfinance: Perils and Prospects; Duncan Green, “The backlash against microfinance,” From Poverty to Power Oxfam blog, August 19, 2009; Jason Hickel, “The microfinance delusion: who really wins?,” The Guardian, June 10, 2015; Global Women’s Strike, Creating a Caring Economy; Özgür Orhangazi, “Contours of Alternative Policy Making in Venezuela,” Review of Radical Political Economics, June 2014; George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution; Dario Azzellini, Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below; Roger Burbach and Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, “Venezuela’s Participatory Socialism,” Socialism and Democracy, November 2007; “The Special Law on Communal Councils,” Global Exchange web site; Matt Wilde, “Contested spaces: the communal councils and participatory democracy in Chavez’s Venezuela, Latin American Perspectives, January 2017.

It’s a capitalist world: No country on Earth respects labor rights

Conditions for working people continue to get worse. The right to strike, or to join a union, is denied by increasing numbers of the world’s governments. The 2023 Global Rights Index report issued by the International Trade Union Confederation makes for grim reading, as has consistently been the case for the decade that the ITUC has issued its yearly reports.

Once again, there is no country on Earth that fully protects workers’ rights, the Global Rights Index report informs us. Nothing new here, as this was the case in the 2022 report, and all the reports before that. Neoliberalism does not have a human face.

Noting that “the foundations and pillars of democracy are under attack,” the report opens with a sobering summary:

“Across both high-income and low-income countries, as workers have felt the full force of a cost-of-living crisis, governments have cracked down on their rights to collectively negotiate wage rises and take strike action against employer and government indifference to the impacts of spiralling inflation upon working people. From Eswatini to Myanmar, Peru to France, Iran to Korea, workers’ demands to have their labour rights upheld have been ignored and their dissent has been met with increasingly brutal responses from state forces.”

Living in the Global North does not exempt you from repression. The report, in finding that 87 percent of the world’s countries violated the right to strike, noted that Belgium, Canada and Spain are among the countries in which working people have faced criminal prosecution and dismissals following a decision to strike. In South Korea, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering filed a lawsuit against leaders of the Korea Metal Workers’ Union for alleged financial losses incurred due to a strike, demanding 47 billion won (US$35.3 million).

Nearly as many countries — 79 percent — violated the right to collective bargaining, with workers in the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia reporting collective bargaining rights have been severely reduced. Almost three-quarters of countries — 73 percent — impeded the registration of unions through government legislation, including Canada.

Overall, the ITUC said, “The past 10 years have seen a consistent increase in the violation of workers’ rights across the regions. … The line between autocracies and democracies is blurring and workers are on the frontlines as governments and business attempt to obscure it further.” Although the ITUC doesn’t mention capitalism in its report, this trend, which goes back much longer than the past decade in which the confederation has issued its reports, is are symptomatic of the ongoing one-sided class war being fought by industrialists and financiers against working people. It should always be borne in mind that profits come from the difference between the value of what we produce, whether those be tangible goods or services, and the exchange value of those goods or services.

We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that some of the worst governments for upholding worker rights are the gendarmes of the world capitalist system. The United States and Britain are among the worst-ranked countries despite the finger-wagging those governments like to aim at other countries. The British government, for example, “brought new primary legislation before parliament in January 2023 that would enforce the unilateral imposition of Minimum Service Levels on railway workers, ambulance workers and fire service workers,” with provisions for such laws to be extended to several other job descriptions. That bill became law in July. Across the Atlantic, U.S. President Joe Biden, despite his claims of being “the most pro-union president,” imposed a contract on railroad workers, a majority of whom had voted against accepting, that left them with no sick days and other harsh working conditions.

The Global Rights Index ranks the world’s countries from 1 to 5, with 1 the best category, denoting “sporadic violations of rights,” defined as where “Violations against workers are not absent but do not occur on a regular basis.” Only nine countries were given a rating of 1 — the same nine as in 2022. Those nine are Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Sweden. (These are green on the report’s maps.)

Rating 2 countries are those with “repeated violations of rights,” defined as where “Certain rights have come under repeated attacks by governments and/or companies and have undermined the struggle for better working conditions.” Countries with this rating include the Czech Republic, France, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland and Uruguay. (These are yellow on the report’s maps.)

Rating 3 countries are those with “regular violations of rights,” defined as where “Governments and/or companies are regularly interfering in collective labour rights or are failing to fully guarantee important aspects of these rights” due to legal deficiencies “which make frequent violations possible.” Countries with this rating include Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Mexico and South Africa. (These are light orange on the report’s maps.)

Rating 4 countries are those with “systematic violations of rights,” defined as where “The government and/or companies are engaged in serious efforts to crush the collective voice of workers, putting fundamental rights under threat.” Countries with this rating include Britain, Greece, Peru, the United States and Vietnam. (These are dark orange on the report’s maps.)

Rating 5 countries are those with “no guarantees of rights,” defined as “workers have effectively no access to these rights [spelled out in legislation] and are therefore exposed to autocratic regimes and unfair labour practices.” Countries with this rating include Brazil, China, Colombia, Ecuador, India, the Philippines, South Korea and Turkey. (These are red on the report’s maps.) In addition, there are countries with a 5+ rating, those with “No guarantee of rights due to the breakdown of the rule of law.” Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria and Yemen are among the 10 counties listed in this category, and are colored deep red.

That conditions for working people — who, after all, are the overwhelming majority of the world’s population — continue to deteriorate is consistent with other economic trends. About US$20 trillion (€18.7 trillion) have been given out just to prop up financial markets since the 2008 economic crash. Five of the world’s biggest central banks — the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, Bank of Japan, Bank of England and Bank of Canada — handed out about US$10 trillion to artificially prop up financial markets in the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic on top of the US$9.36 trillion that was spent on propping up financial markets in the years following the 2008 global economic collapse.

We could cite the corporate greed that kept the Covid-19 pandemic alive, with that greed being facilitated by most of the world’s governments who failed to prioritize health care over money as exemplified by the ongoing failure to make vaccines available to the Global South. The European Union, with its obstinate refusal to waive any intellectual property rule because of fealty to Covid-19 vaccine makers, has been the biggest roadblock. Maintaining intellectual property rights was deemed more important than human life. We could also cite so-called “public-private partnerships” in which governments sell off public infrastructure below cost to corporations, which then raise costs, reduce services and eliminate jobs in the pursuit of extortionate profits.

The one-sided nature of class warfare is further illustrated by the World Bank’s “solution” to deteriorating wages and working conditions: calling for further lowering labor standards because current regulations are “excessive.” In other words, it’s work until you drop! And you’ll be expected to work longer hours until you drop as regulations on excessive working hours are frequently breached; as a result employees are forced to work more hours either because of fear of losing a job if they refuse or to survive because wages steadily fall behind inflation and living costs. And those living costs are especially subject to increases because the cost of housing is skyrocketing, rising far faster than inflation and wages in countries around the world.

How long until the world’s working people link together and defend themselves in what has been a one-sided war for half a century?