"the terrorist prince," raja anwar

take-home: an interesting, occasionally thrilling account of the twisted political adventures of murtaza bhutto, situated in an equally informative analysis of the political context of the time (the further fall of the PPP under the leadership of the Bhutto begums, the "communist" regime in Afghanistan, martial law in Pakistan, etc.). one is struck, in particular, by both the internal brutality and general impotency of Al-Zulfikar, quite in contrast to the snippets one occasionally hears.

the general argument is compelling, i think, insofar as it is clear that the failures of the organization reflect both (a) the pathological effects of the terrible toll their father's death took on murtaza and shahnawaz; (b) the failures of terrorism as resistance strategy, which celebrates propaganda of the deed over the hard work of grassroots organizing; (c) a unapologetically feudal sense of entitlement.

there is the question, as always, of whether this critique is too easy. it is, after all, somewhat obvious to declare that the failures of resistance or political work lie in the incomplete democracy of the respective endeavors. yet in this book raja anwar does carefully engage the strategic context (for example, he recommends, with hindsight, a different approach to the confrontationist strategy vis-a-vis zia that, he argues, cost Bhutto his life). in that sense it would be difficult to argue that raja anwar is taking refuge in textbook critiques--his engagement is very much soaked in the political history of the time.

and, after all, in the case of the Bhuttos and the PPP, who could argue against the thesis that their primary failure lay in their inability to be constituted by the authentic aspirations of those they claimed to represent?


--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(12): reasons for Zia's promotion by Bhutto--"no politician could hope either to get into power or to rule effectively without the good will, support, and indeed permissin of the army. Therefore he was looking for an army chief who would remain obedient to him, like Tikka Khan. Another factor was Zia's public persona... For Bhtutto, Zia's superficially weak personality was an asset."

(13): "Bhutto admitted after his removal that Zia's appointment had been his greates mistake."

(15-16): [popular mobilization to bring Bhutto down in 1977?] "The shame of the 1977 elections was that the PPP set out to rig them. The irony is that Bhutto allowed himself to be deprived of what would have been a genuine victory... The PNA had stood no chance of victory, but when it was announced on 8 March that in a national assembly of two hundred seats the PNA had won only 36, and the PPP 155, there was outrage at the scale of the illegalities committed.... The opposition exploited public anger by declaring a boycott of the 10 March elections to the provincial legislatures. Strike calls received tremendous support... Bhutto, having failed to quell the PNA movement through civilian law and order agencies, had increasingly begun to depend on the army for his political survivial. ON 21 April he had martial law proclaimed in Karachi, Lahore, and Hyderabad, but the army was not ready to shoot the people in order to keep a civilian in power..."

(18-on): Bhutto deposed on 4 July. Meeting in Murree with Zia on 12 July. On 29 July Bhutto released from protective custody, travels through Larkana, Karachi, Multan, Peshawar and Lahore, greeted by enthusiastic crowds. "The people had opted for Bhutto against martial law. Raja Anwar here writes of Bhutto's unwillingness to compromise with the army establishment as a strategic mistake. Bhutto arrested for the murder of Nawab Muhammad Ahmed Khan Kasuri on 3 September 1977.

(21): [JAMAAT-I-ISLAMI] "As soon as the October elections had been put off [Zia's promise of elections in 90 days, in other words], a witch hunt began. This was a shameful period in Pakistan's history. The mere mention of the word constitution, or election, or Bhutto, was enough for a person to be picked up and punished. The brazen manner in which General Zia used the Jamaat-i-Islami (Party of Islam) for his purposes has few examples in recent political history... The Jamaat now declared Zia the great Islamic defender, and lent its blind support to ever sinister martial law enactment and measure of his. Wherever people turend out on the streets to protest against martial law, the baton-swinging 'Danda Force' of the Jamaat would appear on the scene and beat up the demonstrators. If the day ever comes when the Jamaat can bring itself to examine its past conduct honestly, it will struggle to acquit itself of the charge of having acted as martial law's concubine. Scores of appeals to hang Bhutto were made by its members to General Zia."

(22): As for the PPP, it was more a rabble than a party. Bhutto had never encouraged party democracy, or a strong local structure with solid grass-roots links. He once claimed that, 'I am the People's Party and they are all my creatrues', a lesson that his heirs learned only too well. For most of the PPP's young members, a political act consisted of leaping in the air and dancing as their leader made his characteristic fire-breathing speeches. Because of its infantile chemistry..., the party was not equipped to deal with martial law in an organized and effective manner. With no tradition of local initiative, it was only natural that the rank and file would become the victims of Zia's brutal repression."

(24): "Bhutto never accepted until the end that he had been permanently deprived of power by the army. He believed that he would be able to outwit and outmanoeuvre Zia, calling his bluff."

(31): "while I fully supported Begum Bhutto's confrontationist strategy and bold stance towards the martial law regime, in my view her tactical mistake lay in trying to run a protest movement through a nominated central committee or relying mainly on former ministers and members of the defunct assemblies. The total number of such people at local, provincial and federal levels was at no time more than six hundred, hardly any of them willing to undergo the least personal inconvenience for the sake of Bhutto. Since it was a small and well-identified group, the government's intelligence agencies could easily keep watch on the activities of its members."

(35-37): discussion of author's own efforts to launch a campaign that would build up local and popular strength of PPP's anti-zia mobilization--the "Action Committee movement"

(42-43): Murtaza arrives in Kabul, May 1979

(48): "Murtaza was a perfect example of this juvenile adventurism. In 1969, he had a makeshift hut, such as you would find in a slum, constructed in the forecourt of his father's elegant house at 70 Clifton, Karachi. And now, ten years later, housed in a luxurious annexe to a former royal palace, he had hung out a sign saying 'People's Liberation Army' and dreamed of revolution."

(50): "It is ironic that while the political activists have often been able to win for the masses the right to vote freely because of their struggle against dictatorships, they have failed to gain the right to elect the office holders of the political parties they belong to."

(64-66): interesting bit about Afzal Bangash and Ajmal Khattak in Kabul after the MKP broke up into four factions following reforms in China. Raja Anwar critical of the former for looking for an alliance with Murtaza, whereas praising the latter for skillful and tactical pandering to the gallery in Kabul.

(70): meeting between Murtaza and Indira Gandhi (out of power in 1977; Janata Front only lasts two years; back in power by 1980)

(71): Zia on the constitution:

What is a constitution? It is a booklet with twelve or ten pages. I can tear them away and say that tomorrow we shall live under a different system. Today the people will follow wherever I lead. All the politicians including the once-might Mr. Bhutto will follow me with tails wagging.

(71): "Men like Ayub Khan, Yahya Khan and Zia-ul-Haq did not rise to power because they were reformers or revolutionaries, or great heroes like de Gaulle and Eisenhower, but because they exploited the Cold War to grab power by toeing the American line"

(73): "The Western-educated Benazir did not take long to learn the golden rule of Pakistan's feudal politics, namely that a leader must not be answerable to his or her party. It was for the leader to issue orders, for the party to unquestioningly obey them. A leader might call for national elections in order to come to power, but elections within the party were out of bounds. Benazir though the safest course was to liquidate the old guard altogether, and in two years [1984-1986], she managed to purge the PPP..."

(78): "It is a tragedy of history that the Indian National Congress which once had in its ranks liberals such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, non-communal nationalists such as Abu Kalam Azad, revolutionaries such as Subhas Chandra Bose, and brilliant intellectuals of the stature of Jawaharlal Nehru, had become a handmaiden of the naive and brutally ambitious Sanjay Gandhi. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, 'the Frontier Gandhi', was once constrained to comment: 'The party which we had set up by giving it our blood, has been destroyed by this girl [Indira Gandhi]"

(84): "The only success I had before our split was that I did not let him commit any act of violence or terrorism. As he had failed to set up a working-class, revolutionary organization, I tried to convince him to go back to London, where he could set up an office to guide the movement for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan. Later, this suggestion provided his evidence to the Afghans that I had tried to persuade him to 'betray the revolution' and return to London."

(106): "[symmetry between Cold War Afghanistan and Pakistan] At the very moment when Karmal was talking so movingly about political prisoners in Pakistan, his own jails were packed with thousands of his countrymen whom he had locked up without any legal trial. While Karmal was bewailing the lot of the poor in Pakistan, General Zia was shedding tears over the privations of the Afghan masses. Both men had set up kangaroo courts to deal with their political opponents. In both countries, the mere mention of human rights amounted to treason. One was smothering the people in the name of socialism, the other in the name of Islam. One was in power by virtue of Soviet tanks, the other, by courtesy of American dollars. In a few years' time both would be disowned by their one-time patrons."

(116): "The hijack had happened at the height of the Cold War [March 1981], and the plane had landed in Kabul, so the world media but two and two together and declared that Al-Zulfikar was trained by the KGB. If Murtaza's dog Wolf was to be included, at the time there were only eight who could be called Al-Zulfikar.

(121): "Al-Zulfikar was neither a political party nor did it have a political, social, or economic programme. It was the manifestation of an emotional response by male members of the Bhutto family to the barbarity of martial law and the hanging of the deposed Prime Minister... There was a temporary increase in its membership after it managed to get some prisoners released from Zia's jails as part of the hijack's negotiated end, but even during those years 1981 to 1982 its total strength never exceeded ninety-six. "

(132): "The punishment awaiting Al-Zulfikar men was swift and merciless. Nothing can make up for the pain, fear, and mental torture they must have undergone. Instead of luxuriating in the safety of his fortress in Kabul, had the leader of ever joined his men on such a journey, he would have known something of the ordeals they endured. I doubt that it occurred to him."

(136): "By 1984, Al-Zulfikar, such as it was, had disintegrated."

(142): "Anjum had fallen a victim to Al-Zulfikar's back-handed logic which argued that the more people Al-Zulfikar blew up or shot, the greater would be the revulsion of the masses against the army. Finally, the masses would march out onto the streets and overthrow the regime. In life, it is the contrary that happens. Terrorism can never be popular because it destroys the very people in whose name it sets out to act."

(148): "The fact that the Bhutto brothers had settled in France in 1984 was not widely known. Not until Shahnawaz died there in 1985 did the world discover where he and his brother had been living. Why did the French government allow leaders of a terrorist organization to live in France?.... It is said that after Bhutto's hanging, the Americans decided to keep their lines open to the Bhutto family, and it was at their request that the French agreed to provide asylum and other facilities to Begum Bhutto and her sons..."

(155): "Afridi [entirely falsely accused, argues the author] was made to sit in a chair which had its back to a wall. He had no idea who was watching him, nor could he have been aware that Tipu and Shahnawaz, both of them toting Kalashnikovs, were hovering close by. Murtaza said in a loud voice: 'If you confess that you are an agent, I will release you and send you to Libya.' The simple Afridi did so. 'In keeping with my promise, I release you,' Murtaza announced. Eyewitnesses to this callous performance have described to me how, as signs of relief appeared on Afridi's face, Tipu and Shahnawaz both opened fire together, and blew his brains out. He died at once. Then his blood-splattered body was photographed and the pictures sent to General Fazle Haq..."

(156): "That he did not think twice about ordering a close companion killed on the basis of hearsay or minor differences, confirms that in Murtaza's book, the dividing line between friendship and enmity was either movable or non-existent. Having opted for the gun, he had convinced himself that therin lay the solution of every major and minor problem, as long as the muzzle was pointed at someone else, and by someone else's hand."

(186): story about Rashid Nagi, poet from Gujranwala, who set himself on fire for Zulfikar only to be sentenced to death by his son: "In February 1979, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had proudly told the Supreme Court of Pakistan that eight of his workers had set themselves on fire for his sake. Could any of them have imagined that only two years later, Bhutto's sons would humiliate one of them on a Kabul street and almost have him killed? Nagi had walked through fire, only to be beaten up and knifed by their henchmen..."

(193): "The new Prime minister of India, Morarji Desai, and the Pakistani dictator had one thing in common: their dislike of Mrs. Gandhi8 and Bhutto. Naturally, this brought them close, which was why the period from 1977 to 1979 brought the warmest ever interlude between the two countries."

(193): author arguing that Zia gives serious support to the Sikhs of East Punjab. but no real documentation of what actually was offered...

(194): as revenge for this, Indian backing for Murtaza to run a liberation movement in Sindh--therefore Al-Zulfikar reborn in January 1986. "Between 1986 and 1993, only Sindhi nationalist youths could join its ranks. Their optimal number can be said to have varied between three hundred and four hundred men. Every single Al-Zulfikar operation in the second phase was undertaken in Sindh."

(198): "Certain parallels between the two political dynasties of Pakistan and India, the Bhuttos and the Gandhis, bear out the judgement that republican democracy in the whole subcontinent is still at war with an older, feudal tradition that requires latter-day kings and queens, princes and princesses, who sometimes pay with their lives for the scale and dominance of their political ambitions..."

(200-201): President Ghulam Ishaq Khan was the sacker of both the Benazir government, in 1990, and the Nawaz Sharif government, in 1993.

(201): "In the elections which followed in 1993, Murtaza, who was stilla broad, decided to run for twenty Sindhi constituencies, confident that the people of Sindh would vote for him rather than Benazir. He was mistaken: the election was a disaster, and he could barely manage to win from Larkana."

(202): incident at Al-Murtaza in 1994, Bhutto's birthday, when brothers' henchmen clash with sisters' policemen.

(202): Murtaza arrested upon arrival in Pakistan--"when Murtaza was finally released from prison in May 1994, the rivalry intensified between him and his sister. In 1995, Murtaza set up his own party, which he named the Pakistan People's Party (Bhutto Shaheed)..."

(203): Both Benazir and Asif did whatever they could do to liquidate Murtaza politically... In May 1996, Murtaza and Benazir met for the first time since his return to Pakistan. The meeting was not a success; the two failed to arrive at a mutually acceptable formula for sharing power..."

(204): "The law and order situation in Karachi was already catastrophic. In 1995 alone, three hundred policemen plus two thousand members of the public had died violent deaths."

(208): "Only time will tell who Murtaza's killers were. One cannot help observing though that his life dictated his death. He had started his political journey with a gun, and on 20 September 1996 it was a gun which brought it to an end."

(209): "When it came into being in 1967, it appealed at once to the deprived masses that constitute the bulk of Pakistani society though they exercise no power. In the PPP they saw the promise of hope and change for the first time... During the five and half years that it stayed in power, it only brought severe disappointment to the people... Massive street demonstrations mounted by the opposition against the PPP's misrule encouraged the army to take over. However Bhutto's trial and execution in April 1979 became a grand act of expiation, and the people forgave him all his excesses..."

(209): "Benazir twice came to power, first from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. On both occasions, her government failed to complete its term, dismissed on a host of charges by Presidents Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Sardar Farooq Leghari respectively... A party which started out in 1967 with a platform promising the abolition of feudalism, turned into its last outpost..."

This ‘red terror’ should nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs, Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. [4] Even in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech, they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list, but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped. For Stalinism, however, even such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors who are less than human.

Sluglett's main argument is that the circumstances of the mandate locked Britain and the Sunni ruling clique into a relationship of interdependence that lasted through 1958. It is an instructive insight, and the book details the working of that relationship and the odd and mostly unfortunate dividends it paid in central matters of government, including defense, education, land revenue, minority rights, and so on. This argument remains in tension with another red thread running through the book: the British effort to devise institutions through which they could exercise power discreetly enough to convince Iraqis and the world of Iraq's independence despite Britain's actual control. The end of the mandate in 1932 was thus a momentous non-event in Sluglett's shrewd assessment, since little changed in substance until the revolution of 1958. In 1976, this was a revisionist view of a mandatory government that many were still holding up as an exemplary experiment in international development.

part I:

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was the pride of the international socialist movement before the First World War. It was founded in 1875 in Gotha as a fusion between the Marxist Social Democratic Labor Party led by August Bebel and Willhelm Liebknecht, and the General German Workers' Association led by Ferdinand Lassalle, a critic of trade unions who looked to state-funded producer cooperatives as labor's panacea. Marx wrote a famous critique of the new party's program, which he believed made too many concessions to the Lassalleans. During its early years, the SPD faced harsh repression in the form of the Exceptional Laws (Bebel was twice imprisoned), and this pushed the party in a more radical and Marxist direction. Banned but not destroyed, the party managed to grow considerably in a period of boom accompanied by relatively little class struggle. From the 1880s right up to the war, strikes were uncommon and workers' living standards rose, even if they didn't keep pace with profits. The party's numbers grew steadily, reaching 1,085,905 members in 1914. Its vote increased from 311,900 in 1881 to 4 million in the 1912 elections, when it sent 110 deputies to the National Assembly (Reichstag), in addition to more than 3,000 other officials into lower bodies. The party maintained 90 daily newspapers, employed 267 full-time journalists and 3,000 manual and clerical workers, and led trade unions totaling 2 million members. In the absence of public institutions, the party created libraries, workers' schools, youth groups, women's groups, sports leagues, and entertainment venues. It was more than a political party-it was a way of life for many workers.
(...) [1905] From then on, Broué argues, the SPD leadership, both the Right and the Center, “categorically turned its back on the party's identification with revolution, and references to revolution in the ensuing debates were few and far between.” (19) This debate within the SPD was not simply a battle of ideas detached from social forces. The ideas of the Right were firmly rooted in the trade-union bureaucracy and the elected officials, whose jobs were most dependent on the political system that supervised German capitalism. The ideas of the Center tended to be strongest among the party officials, who were concerned primarily with holding the SPD together. The Left's positions tended to be championed by journalists or full-time party workers who were not directly responsible for any organizational questions. Of course, there were important exceptions to this description (such as Liebknecht), but Broué's discussion of the rise of the SPD bureaucracy is an important starting point to understand the outcome of the debate.
(...) [not enough Lenin, it seems] Why did it take four months for Leibknecht to break SPD discipline? Why was the Left so weak? According to Broué, despite their hostility to the growing bureaucracy within the SPD and the drift to the right, they never sought to systematically organize themselves as a coherent group to fight for leadership of the SPD. The theoretical basis of their passive attitude to the question of organization lay most clearly in Luxemburg's understanding of the relationship between the socialist party and the working class. She believed that the party bureaucracy was conservative and that it was an outgrowth of the excessive centralism of power in the hands of the full-time party apparatus. She argued that, while the Left should oppose this tendency toward bureaucracy, the spontaneous struggle of the working class would be the key factor in overcoming the bureaucracy's conservatism at the decisive moment. Her book about the 1905 Russian Revolution, The Mass Strike, argued that Russian workers had discovered that the merger of mass economic and political strikes were the means by which to fight capitalism and simultaneously overcome conservative or bureaucratic elements within their midst. Broué agrees with her emphasis on mass struggle. But he notes that her understanding of the Russian situation completely overestimated the role of mass action in overcoming reformism and underplayed the importance of organization, which, from her limited German experience, she assumed generally plays a retarding role in the struggle.
(...) Luxemburg consistently opposed Lenin's method of building up a principled and, crucially, organized group of revolutionaries, with its own press and system of communication that aimed to carry its positions into every party branch and every group of workers possible. She rejected as sectarian Lenin's practice of constructing a faction that had the common experience of working together over the course of years and submitting to a commonly agreed upon discipline. Broué believes that she incorrectly identified Lenin's insistence on limiting membership in the revolutionary group to those who agreed to work in a disciplined and centralized manner as the same tendency towards bureaucracy she was fighting against in the SPD. Paradoxically, her tenacious opposition to bureaucracy and centralism in general blinded her from taking any organizational measures to combat it in specific, as well as a fatalistic attitude towards new forms of organization.
(...) The 1917 February Russian Revolution overthrew the Tsar and raised the confidence of the working class and the Left in Germany. The Bolshevik Revolution in October ended the war with Germany in short order (although at great expense to Russia) and convinced millions of workers that socialist revolution was on the order of the day. 1918 was a year of devastating economic hardship for German workers and catastrophic killing of soldiers. The USPD grew by leaps and bounds at the expense of the SPD and the left wing of the USPD became radicalized under the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea of a Russian-type socialist revolution based on workers' councils became very popular among millions of workers and soldiers. In November 1918, sailors mutinied in Kiel and set into motion a rebellion in the army. Workers launched a general strike, quickly leading to the overthrow of the Kaiser, the collapse of the German government, and the proclamation of the German Republic. Workers' councils were formed in dozens of cities in imitation of the Russian soviets. The Spartacus leaders felt vindicated by the rush of events. “Yet the building of the revolutionary organization lagged behind the audacious political analyses and perspectives of the revolutionaries, and they were unable to take advantage…of the revolutionary ferment that was rising throughout 1918,” writes Broué.
(...) The chaos of revolutionary events allowed the disciplined apparatus of the SPD to gain positions of power all out of proportion to the political mood of the working class.
(...) Meanwhile, a sharp debate broke out within the USPD. The Right of the party favored throwing its weight behind the SPD-USPD government and pushing for new elections to the Reichstag, essentially an attempt to return to the prewar focus on parliamentary elections as the main socialist tactic. Luxemburg spoke for the Spartacus League and in favor of building up the power of the workers' councils as a dual power, aiming to eventually replace the Reichstag and the capitalist state bureaucracy with a Russian-type system based directly on the workers' councils alone. A vote of 485 to 185 at a mid-December conference in favor of the Right's perspective showed that with the war ending, the majority of the USPD leadership were opposed to a renewed wave of workers' struggle to usher in socialism.
(...) During the years 1914 to 1918, the Spartacus leaders never fully clarified the purpose of their work among themselves. Was it to prepare for the founding of a separate revolutionary party or simply to try to push the USPD to the left? At each crucial stage, they were left wondering who was with them and who was against them. Rather than setting the pace, they could only react to events-in August 1914, in January 1917, and again in November 1918. The USPD majority decision to turn away from the workers' councils finally forced the Spartacus leaders to found their own party, but not until after the first phase of the revolution was coming to a close. Broué draws the painful lesson that the Spartacus League's revolutionary ideas and ability to inspire outbursts of struggle proved to be no match for the organized parties of the SPD and USPD. The revolutionaries were pitifully unprepared for the revolution. By way of comparison, in January 1917, the Bolsheviks had roughly 25,000 members with a fifteen-year tradition of common party activity, the experiences of 1905 under their belts, and an impressive underground and legal press that was distributed to tens of thousands of workers. The Spartacus League had a few hundred members, did not have its own regular publication, and possessed very little experience of organized, common struggle against the other factions and parties, or in leading the day-to-day class struggle.But the KPD had no substantial organized base, with only around 3,000 members who had any notion of acting as an organized party. Compared to the national apparatus and mass membership of both the SPD and USPD (both had more than 100,000 members), the KPD was virtually powerless. Its forces were so meager that they struggled simply to communicate between cities and even between sections of Berlin. Compounding this problem was the party's infusion with the ultra-left enthusiasm that Levi described and the lack of an experienced leadership team that commanded the allegiance and respect of the party's rank and file. While Lenin hailed the party's founding, it was a party that could not yet coordinate events regionally or nationally.
(...) Despite their losses, the KPD and the revolutionary vanguard of the working class were not finished. They spent the next four-and-a-half years waging a bitter struggle to solve the riddles left unanswered by the martyrs of 1919. This period will be the subject of Part II of this review.

(...) [I.] First, the First World War confirmed that political ideas matter; indeed, they can lead people to different sides of the barricades. The debate between Bernstein and Luxemburg had real life consequences, even if it was not completely obvious at the time. Kautsky's attempt to paper over these fights, merely served to disorient the Left and gain time for the Right to consolidate its control of the party apparatus.
(...) [II.] Second, the capitalists are ingenious when it comes to patching up their system and passing on the costs of the crisis to the working class. Yet, the ruthless economic competition that lies at the heart of the capitalist system forces the capitalists, and the governments they control, to confront one another in the hopes that they will be the last man standing, even if it threatens their common ruin. Kautsky could not believe European capitalism would plunge into full-scale war. In fact, it did so twice between 1914 and 1945. Capitalism breeds war and that danger will only pass when it is replaced with socialism-a lesson with obvious lasting value in today's world.
(...) [III.] Finally, Luxemburg and Liebknecht were political giants Yet, lacking a powerful political party with clear Marxist ideas based in the working class they could not put their revolutionary principles into practice. Broué's book will help a new generation of revolutionaries learn these truths.

-------------

part II:

The futility of isolated uprisings, not coordinated by a centralized, revolutionary party was a lesson learned very dearly. This explains why anarchism never played an important role in the German workers’ movement during the height of the revolution. Paul Levi, who emerged as the principal KPD leader after the murders of Luxemburg and other KPD leaders in 1919, stated:

There is not a single Communist in Germany today who does not regret that the foundation of a Communist Party did not take place long ago, before the war…(453)

(...) The question then became how to build this party. At its founding convention in December of 1918, the KPD had only several thousand members. Although it did grow rapidly during the bloody repression of early 1919 to upwards of 90,000 members, it was shot through with ultra-leftism—recall at its founding conference that the majority opposed running candidates in parliament and refused to work inside existing trade unions—and hardly functioned at all as a coordinated national party. For the young, impatient activists inside the KPD, the question of how to reach the big battalions of the working class that still held illusions in the reformist SPD or the centrist Independent SPD (USPD), was not an issue. Most of the young party’s members refused to recognize the impact of the defeat of early 1919 on the working class. The dismantling of the workers’ councils in December 1918 led most workers to accept that the best way to defend their class interests was to vote for socialist candidates in the parliamentary elections. The SPD gained 11.5 million votes on January 19 and the USPD won another 2 million, together totaling 46 percent of the national vote, and constituting the overwhelming majority of the working-class vote. The KPD’s call for a boycott of the election was entirely ignored. Yet most young communists refused to recognize this reality, instead calling for the immediate overthrow of the newly formed SDP government, including SPD leader Friedrich Ebert, who was elected president of the republic by the new Reichstag in January 1919.
(...) By the fall of 1919, Levi had become convinced that the ultra-lefts had to be expelled at all costs in order to achieve unity with the revolutionary workers who remained in the left wing of the USPD. He reorganized the party from top to bottom and insisted that all members who did not agree to participate in the parliamentary elections and who refused to recognize the authority of the KPD’s central committee be expelled. Levi’s tactics lost the KPD well over half of its membership. Lenin and Radek agreed with Levi’s desire to transform the KPD, but they opposed the split. Lenin even publicly offered to mediate between Levi and some factions of the ultra-lefts.
(...) Levi, Lenin, and Radek, as well as all the principal leaders of Bolsheviks and the KPD, agreed that the only way to transform the KPD into a mass, revolutionary party, was to find a way to win over the hundreds of thousands of militant workers who had refused to join the KPD until then and remained inside the left wing of the USPD...
(...) But this political schizophrenia did not prevent the party from growing rapidly, from 100,000 in November 1918 to 300,000 in March 1919, and to 800,000 by the fall of 1920. The USPD had fifty-seven newspapers and could count on millions voting for it at the polls. It was perceived by millions of workers as the radical alternative to the SPD, while the KPD remained in the shadows.
(...) The radicalization of the USPD and the ongoing debate between Levi and Lenin received a jolt when right-wing army officers and a politician named Wolfgang Kapp launched a coup against the SPD government in March 1919. The coup threatened to install a military dictatorship, wiping out not only the KPD, but the SPD and the USPD as well. While Ebert and all his government ministers fled Berlin to find the safety of a loyal general, the workers of Berlin rose up in a general strike. They were led by left-wing members of the USPD and Carl Legien, who was the main leader of the SPD trade unions in Berlin. Legien was not himself a left-winger, but, unlike Ebert whose main power base was in the electoral apparatus, Legien’s power rested on his strength in the unions and he realized that Kapp and the coup makers intended to smash not only the extreme left wing, but also all workers’ organizations, so he threw his considerable authority into the struggle. On March 15, the coup makers’ government was paralyzed. “The general strike now grips them with its terrible, silent power,” described a Belgian socialist.
(...) The October 1920 USPD convention in Halle, Germany, was a showdown between the Right and the Left. Russian Bolshevik leader, Gregori Zinoviev, in his capacity as leader of the Communist International (Comintern) spoke at the convention, arguing for the USPD to join the Comintern. Broué describes the scene,

The battle really was to begin when Zinoviev mounted the platform. He was to speak for more than four hours, in German, with much difficulty and a certain apprehension at the beginning, and then with an authority which enabled him to win his greatest oratorical triumph in an already distinguished career. (439)

As if to highlight the interwoven nature of the Russian and German Revolutions, Julius Martov, the main leader of the Mensheviks, replied to Zinoviev’s speech, beseeching the USPD militants not to join with the KPD. In the end, Kautsky, Bernstein, and Rudolph Hilferding could not prevent the majority of the USPD delegates from voting in favor of Zinoviev’s proposition, and the right-wingers walked out of the convention. They exacted their revenge on Zinoviev by having him expelled from Germany twelve days later.
(...) Having achieved the prerequisites of mass size, clear principles, and organizational independence, and operating in a field of acute capitalist crisis, it seemed that the KPD and the German working class were finally on the road to revolution. However, very quickly, two closely related problems emerged. First, could the leadership of this new party function effectively as a guiding force for the hundreds of thousands of party members; and, second, what strategy and tactics would help the party win the decisive section of the working class over to revolution?
(...) The most remarkable thing about the Bolshevik leadership is that, despite the immense pressure that was brought down upon it in 1917, it did not split, but expanded. Even Zinoviev and Kamenev’s leaking of the plans for the October insurrection did not lead to its fragmentation. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of why this was the case, but some factors that account for the Bolshevik success were: the shared experience of revolution and repression in 1905; Lenin’s appreciation of the role of leading cadre; and the existence of a long-standing leadership team that was accustomed to carrying out sharp debates but then acting in unison. The united KPD Zentrale certainly had shared the experience of revolution and repression, but they had not done so in a common party. Even within the core of the historic Spartacus leadership, Heinrich Brandler and Wilhelm Pieck did not have much experience working with Levi, and even less so with Clara Zetkin. Worse, within three months of the party’s formation, Levi, Däumig, Brass, and Hoffman all resigned from the party and Geyer left shortly thereafter. Zetkin did not quit the party, but she resigned from the Zentrale along with Levi. In other words, six of twelve of its elected leaders, including its two co-chairmen were gone entirely from the party or its leadership soon after its founding.
(...) Broué goes to great lengths to trace the impact of the Comintern on the KPD, which he gives as the third reason for the KPD leadership’s split.
(...) During this crisis, Lenin and Trotsky were absorbed with the work of keeping the revolution afloat and the leadership of the Comintern fell more and more exclusively on Zinoviev and a small group of doubtful international “commissars” whom he dispatched to carry out his orders. Increasingly, the International retreated from the ideal of democratic debate into bureaucratic fiat. In the context of the KPD, this meant that Zinoviev’s agent in Germany pounded away at Levi’s supposed opportunism, insisting on driving him out of the Zentrale. Broué points out that it is certainly possible that at least part of Zinoviev and Radek’s attacks on Levi had to do with a desperate attempt at “artificially accelerating the speed of the revolution” in order to break Russia out of its isolation. (532) However, even if this is entirely true, it only goes to point out that the KPD leadership was not strong enough to stand up to this type of intervention, and was easily picked apart.
(...) The KPD Zentrale launched an irresponsible attempt to “provoke” a strike and armed insurrection, even though the working class was in a passive and demoralized mood. In other words, to embark upon the type of action that the KPD had done in January of 1919 and which Levi and Radek and Brandler had fought against for the proceeding two years. Indeed, it was this type of action that had repelled the left wing of the USPD from joining the KPD back in December of 1918. Frölich was ideologically predisposed to ultra-leftism, but it is more difficult to understand why Brandler, who had always supported Levi against the ultra-lefts, went along with it, and in fact, was the lead organizer of it. In the end, the so-called March Action was an unmitigated disaster. The KPD call for a general strike was met with indifference by the mass of workers, so party leaders ordered unemployed members to attempt to physically stop workers from going to work. This provoked fist fights and even gun fights between communists and other workers. (501) In the aftermath of the fiasco, the party was driven back underground and lost over 200,000 members, reducing the party to some 150,000 members. Hundreds of party activists were jailed, four were sentenced to death, and Brandler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. (506)
(...) the French army occupied the main coal- and iron- producing region of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, in order to extract war debts mandated in the Treaty of Versailles. Ebert’s SPD government and the German ruling class tried to use the invasion to win German workers, especially in the Ruhr, to unite with them against the French. The KPD agreed that the French should be resisted, but refused to agree to ally with the SPD or the bosses.
(...) On January 23, 1923, the dollar was worth 8,000 marks; by September 7, it was worth 60 million, and a miner had to work for an hour to buy one egg. Hyperinflation wiped out wages and savings, and led to a dramatic rise in unemployment and homelessness. By the summer of 1923, the crisis was laying bare the uselessness of the reformist socialists’ belief in the sanctity of capitalism and the trade union bureaucracy’s reliance on negotiating pay raises once a year. The KPD’s influence grew quickly and 20,000 factory and workers’ councils sprang up all over Germany in the desperate struggle for food. These councils were not the same as the soviets that grew up in November of 1918 because they organized only within individual workplaces. And, unlike the Russian soviets in 1917, they did not represent the rank and file of the army. However, the massive surge of rank-and-file organization at the factory level, surpassed no more than a handful of times in the international history of the working class, was clearly once again raising the question of the potential for dual power. Furthermore, the KPD became the leading force in the workers’ council movement, gaining the allegiance of millions of workers beyond their membership. To defend workers from the police and from the far Right, the KPD initiated a militia called the “proletarian hundreds.” By May 1, 1923, 25,000 of these men marched through downtown Berlin with red armbands, a “real workers’ militia,” says Broué.
(...) To Brandler’s credit, he realized that the KPD had to show that it could lead a nationwide movement to coordinate the disconnected strike waves rolling across Germany as well as give leadership to the brewing civil war between the police and the fascists on the one hand and the workers’ councils and militias on the other. If the KPD did not lead, then the danger loomed of useless and scattered resistance burning itself out across the country, as it had done in 1919. He proposed an “Anti-Fascist Day” on July 29, 1923.
(...) Unable to decide for themselves, they sent a telegram to Moscow asking what to do. Lenin was incapacitated by a series of strokes. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Bukharin were all on vacation. Radek received the telegram and warned against the mistakes of 1921. Zinoviev and Bukharin, by telegraph, argued to defy the ban. Stalin disagreed. In the end, Radek telegraphed to Brandler, “We fear a trap,” and the Anti-Fascist Day was called off. (741) Certainly it was not a crime in asking the Bolsheviks for their advice, but canceling what might have been the start of the fight for power in Germany on the strength of a telegram once again exposed the weaknesses of the KPD’s leadership.
(...) It is clear that within weeks of calling off the protest, the government of conservative Prime Minister Cuno collapsed under the pressure of a wave of mass strikes. The fall of the Cuno government in mid-August finally jarred the KPD and the Communist International into realizing that the crisis in Germany was analogous to Russia in the months of September and October 1917, that is to say, a pre-revolutionary situation was maturing and the KPD would soon be faced with a fight for power.
(...) In October 1917, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led the insurrection through the Soviets, that is, in alliance with the extreme left wing of several other parties, but at no time did they give the leadership of those other parties, who were caught between reform and revolution, the opportunity to veto their actions. Unfortunately, in Germany, Brandler, with Zinoviev’s blessing, publicly proposed in late October to the leadership of the left wing of the SPD to start the revolution together. When the SPD minister refused to go along with a KDP-proposed general strike at a conference of factory committees, Brandler called off the insurrection. To add insult to injury, in Hamburg, the KPD did not receive the news that the insurrection had been canceled. There, the party proceeded with its plan and was isolated and wiped out. Twenty-one were killed, and hundreds were wounded or taken prisoner.
(...) Now, having raised the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file KPD members and millions of radicalized workers to the point of the fight for power, the sudden, and chaotic letdown destroyed the party as a fighting force. For some weeks, Zinoviev tried to pretend that everything was fine and that the insurrection was simply delayed. But as time wore on, the German bourgeoisie took the opportunity to impose martial law and it became obvious that the revolution was defeated.

(...) Broué’s conclusion must be the starting point for Marxists to come to grips with the defeat in Germany. The objective economic circumstances of prewar German capitalism dialectically conditioned the political forms of organization adopted by the working class and this history, in turn, shaped the ideas and experiences of the leading socialist revolutionaries. Looking back on it, Levi was certainly correct to conclude that they should have begun in 1903 to build an independent revolutionary party, but that presupposes Luxemburg and Liebknecht drawing lessons from circumstances that did not occur in Germany (as they did in Russia) or had not yet occurred in Germany. Having realized their error too late, the political leaders most capable of correcting it (Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Mehring, Jogiches) were all gunned down in early 1919. What they left behind was not an organized Bolshevik Party, but the idea of a party, supported by Lenin to be sure, but populated by unstable and impatient ultra-lefts, hostile and separate from the working-class revolutionary leaders who remained in the USPD until 1920.
(...) But if the KPD failed to lead the revolution, the peaceful, reformist capitalist democracy that Bernstein and Kautsky had dreamed of turned out to be a cruel joke. It ended in the victory of Hitler’s Nazis in 1933 and the total liquidation of the workers’ movement in Germany, and in much of Europe. The defeat also doomed the Russian Revolution to permanent isolation, creating the desperate conditions upon which Stalin built his bureaucratic state capitalist monstrosity, which politically and physically negated the core of Bolshevik theory and practice. At a terrible price, Rosa Luxemburg’s warning that either socialism or barbarism would prevail proved prophetic. But only those who believe that capitalism is humanity’s highest and final product can fail to appreciate the heroics, alongside the follies, of the generation of men and women of the KPD who gave their lives for a better world.

Under the original Bretton Woods system, IMF loans were aimed at preventing devaluation and propping up demand. U.s. capital accepted these Keynesian measures when the U.S. was the major world exporter, ran large trade surpluses and the rest of the world depended on its currency to pay for those imports. But in the 1980s, the IMF turned all of its previous policies on their heads: It now deliberately imposed devaluation and forced reductions in national income and demand in order to limit imports—all as a means to guarantee repayment of debt to international finance capital.
(...) In the 1980s, 187 structural adjustment loans were negotiated. They were the bitter medicine that only a seemingly objective, nonprofit multilateral organization like the IMF could get away with politically. Structural adjustment led to hunger, malnutrition, poverty, disease and death throughout the Third World. Under IMF surveillance and enforcement, virtually every nation in sub-Saharan Africa entered a structural adjustment program. In every case, they were a disaster for the people of Africa and did nothing to restore growth. In the 1980s, GNP in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 2.2 percent per year, and per capita income fell below pre-independence levels. To pay back the debt, government health expenditures were cut by 50 percent and education by 25 percent. In Tanzania, debt repayment was six times the expenditure for health costs—which is all the explanation one needs to understand why 40 percent of the population of Tanzania dies before age 35.12 Flood-ravaged Mozambique—whose debt was $8.3 billion in 1998—pays $1.4 million per week in debt repayment. It will pay out in less than one year more than it has been promised in flood relief.
(...) In IMF-“adjusted” countries, government spending per capita was reduced yearly from 1980 to 1987 and diverted to ever-increasing payments on debt interest. In Latin America, the portion of government budgets allocated to interest payments increased from 9 percent to 19.3 percent. Under IMF auspices, the 1980s were a lost decade for Latin America. In Chile, IMF loan conditions cut real wages by 40 percent. The IMF loan to Mexico in the debt crisis of 1982 cut real wages in half in the next decade, while investments in health, education and basic physical structure were also halved. Infant deaths in Mexico due to malnutrition nearly tripled in the same period.
(...) Yet, at the end of the decade, the debt of Third World countries was greater than when the structural adjustment programs began. Rather than “saving” these countries, the IMF had enmeshed them in an endless debt trap.
(...) The IMF rationale was that loans would stimulate the economic growth that would allow for debt repayment. In truth, most existing international debts were serviced only by increasing international borrowing. From 1976 to 1982 Latin American foreign borrowing doubled. Seventy percent of new loans went to interest payments on old loans.
(...) The IMF Asian loan conditions went far beyond the needs of stabilizing the situation and repaying debt. The IMF demanded that foreign banks (primarily U.s.) be allowed in immediately—in the depths of the crisis—so that they could acquire existing banks at fire-sale prices. This piece of U.s. robbery was justified in the U.s. press on the grounds that the Asian banking crisis grew out of Asian corruption, or “crony capitalism,” an unholy alliance of corporations, banks and government—something apparently different than the alliance between the U.S. government, U.S. corporations and the IMF.
(...) The human impact of IMF loan conditions on the countries that became its wards was (and continues to be) horrendous. In Korea, the IMF imposed mass layoffs, leading to the joke that IMF stood for “I’M Fired.” Children abandoned by destitute parents were called “IMF orphans.” In Thailand, large numbers of children were thrown into child prostitution. In Indonesia, school enrollment dropped by a quarter. IMF loan conditions for Argentina demanded that labor laws be altered to eliminate national bargaining and grant employers the right to fire workers at will. The IMF program that was imposed on the Suharto dictatorship raised the price of rice by 38 percent, cooking oil by 110 percent and fuel by 70 percent This provoked the rioting that led to Suharto’s fall in 1998. IMF austerity conditions were now becoming dangerous to the health of local ruling classes. The IMF was forced to backtrack; loan conditions had to be less draconian for fear that no local ruling class, no matter how corrupt and subservient to Western capitalism, could carry them out without provoking a major upheaval.

It wasn’t only his desire to restore the health of capitalism that set Keynes apart from Marx. His theory of crisis was also fundamentally different. Where Marx saw the driving force of capitalism as accumulation for accumulation’s sake—the constant drive toward profit—Keynes continued to assume that “consumption…is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” The lack of “effective demand” in Keynes’ theory of crises is another way of saying that capital is not being invested; it does not, however, explain why. In short, whereas for Marx the possibility of the separation of purchase and sale that makes crisis a possibility is the starting point for understanding capitalist crisis, for Keynes it is the endpoint. Keynes’ theory of crisis—the lack of aggregate demand—is merely a description of the effects of crisis, not an explanation of why crises take place.
(...) The appeal for some, then, of Keynesian policy is that it calls for some redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom, and that he pushes for “full employment.” However, Keynes’ perspective on this was strictly a ruling-class one. He supported not higher wages, but rather “the maintenance of a stable general level of money-wages” in order to maintain “equilibrium.” Keynes also thought it important that wages not become too high. In fact, though Keynes criticized the neoclassical theory of wages, he did not completely reject its premises, writing, for example, that, “A reduction in money-wages is quite capable in certain circumstances of affording a stimulus to output, as the classical theory supposes.”
(...) What Keynes added to this understanding was that at times, capitalists might view all other options as money-losing prospects and no matter how low the state moved interest rates, capitalists may still save. Keynes called this a “liquidity trap” and this is exactly the scenario that befell Japanese capitalism in the 1990s. For this reason, Keynes saw manipulating interest rates as only one tool for encouraging investment. The theory is that interest rates can be used to stimulate investment if real interest rates—that is interest rates adjusted for inflation—are cut to a point that they are negative. However, the Japanese experience illustrates that even if interest rates are negative, capitalists won’t invest if there is not a perceived avenue for investment. A similar dynamic is currently playing out within the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has reduced the target for the Federal Funds rate from 5.25 percent to 1 percent. This has failed to induce lending or investment because there is little for capitalists to invest in that is profitable. Furthermore, central banks only have control of the economic policies within their own countries. It makes the system unstable, because central banks can end up working at cross purposes based on national needs as opposed to having a cohesive view of fiscal policy within the global economy as a whole.
(...) Keynes conceptualized something called the “multiplier” effect. That is, by pumping $100 into the system at the right place, it could generate significantly more activity. Giving $100 to a worker might mean they immediately spend it at the local grocer. The grocer might then turn around and spend $90 of it himself on something else and so on and so on. On the flip side, giving $100 to a billionaire might not accomplish the same thing because the billionaire has no immediate need for the $100 and is only to going to spend if he sees investment opportunities with high rates of return.
(...) Neoliberal ideology, for its part, rejects the role of fiscal stimulus and puts greater emphasis on monetary policy, which accounts for the predominant role of the Federal Reserve Bank over the past thirty years in dealing with economic problems. In practice, however, neoliberals do have a fiscal policy—cutting taxes on the rich and increasing defense spending. As a result, during the neoliberal era government spending as a percent of GDP and per capita has risen, not fallen. Theoretically, neoliberalism is opposed to state intervention. In practice, military spending and corporate welfare are not only accepted but welcome. Now that the system is in crisis, ideology is discarded, and those who may have crowed loudest for the state to leave the market alone demand that the state intervene to save it.
(...) A key linchpin in this agenda was the dollar policy. Coming out of Bretton Woods every currency was pegged to the dollar, which, in turn, was pegged to gold. The fixed exchange rate put a dollar at $35 for an ounce of gold. Currencies would move against the dollar based on whether individual nations had balance of payments problems. If you had a deficit, you had to cut imports or else be forced to devalue. This arrangement more or less held until 1971 when the United States pulled the plug on the gold standard.
(...) The Bretton Woods institutions eventually took on much broader mandates than rebuilding capitalism in Europe and Asia, and after the crisis of the 1970s, adopted neoliberal loan conditions requiring nations to privatize and deregulate their economies. As Joel Geier writes,

Under the original Bretton Woods system, IMF loans were aimed at preventing devaluation and propping up demand. U.S. capital accepted these Keynesian measures when the U.S. was the major world exporter, ran large trade surpluses, and the rest of the world depended on its currency to pay for those imports. But in the 1980s, the IMF turned all of its previous policies on their heads: It now deliberately imposed devaluation and forced reductions in national income and demand in order to limit imports—all as a means to guarantee repayment of debt to international finance capital.

(...) The Great Depression played out in two acts. There was an initial drop to the depths in 1932, a recovery from 1933 to 1936, and then a second drop in 1937 and 1938, even after the initial Keynesian salves had been applied. The economy only decisively recovered in 1939, when the United States began war production for the Allies.
(...) The war effort created the rise in effective demand—in reality, government war spending, not consumer demand—that Keynesian measures failed to produce. As a result, employment and production, especially of arms, helped stimulate economic growth and an end of the Depression. Keynes himself saw the stimulating effects of the war effort as a vindication of his theories, having commented before the outbreak of war, “It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment that would prove my case—except in war conditions.”29 Of course, the cost of this method of recovery—fifty-five million dead—was a brutal price to pay. Moreover, the war played an important role in helping to wipe out and devalue capital and drastically reduce wages, both of which contributed to the restoration of profit rates after the war, but which were not part of Keynes’ remedies for crisis.
(...) Moreover, in adopting these state-led measures, nations were simply returning to the same policies of “war socialism”—“forced savings, controls on money, credit, prices and labor, priorities, rationing, government-borrowings”—that they had put in place during World War I, “despite the ‘orthodox’ approach to economics that prevailed at that time.”30 It was a sleight of hand for Keynes to now promote war—a product of the unplanned, competitive character of the world system—as proof of his theories.
(...) Yet there was never a point, except during the war itself, where the United States, or any European country, reached full employment. Though the term full employment was thrown around, in practice it was adjusted to mean, in the words of the American Economic Association in a 1950 report, the “absence of mass unemployment.” Proceedings of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs in 1946 defined full employment as “avoiding that level of unemployment, whatever it may happen to be, which there is good reason to fear may provoke an inconvenient restlessness among the electorate.”
(...) It was only well into the 1960s that they started to face competitive pressures that unearthed the contradictions. The U.S. was spending huge sums on its arms industry while its most dynamic competitors—Germany and Japan—were reinvesting in new plant and equipment. Those competitors began to outpace the U.S. in the 1970s. In order to retain economic power, the U.S. needed to lower its labor costs relative to Japan and Germany, a difficult task especially important given that it was saddled with heavy arms expenditures when those nations were not. It was this crisis, in which stagnation was accompanied by inflation, that ultimately paved the way for the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism.

(...) In practice, neoliberalism did not produce a full break from Keynesianism; and in some important respects the limitations of a return to full Keynesian economic policy are already clear. First of all, interest rate reductions—the first line of defense recommended by Keynes—have already been used under the Fed chair Alan Greenspan (when the economy was in boom) and now by Ben Bernanke (in response to the financial crisis). In the first instance, easy money helped create the housing bubble that formed the basis of the current crisis; and the more recent cuts aimed at lifting the financial crisis have not unfrozen bank lending. Second, the government has already run up large deficits for the past two decades—the federal debt now stands at $10.6 trillion, and the current deficit is set to go up to a $1 trillion next year as new stimulus plans are brought on line. The question is how far can this go? The government can print more money, as it has already begun to do now that the dollar has rebounded; but there is a long-term danger of runaway inflation, which could force them to raise interest rates that put a halt to growth.

(...) It is a sign of just how much the economic literacy of the left has deteriorated that Keynesianism—born as a reforming ruling-class economic program—today may become the default position when calling for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet socialists must make a distinction between those measures of state intervention—such as the bank bailouts—that are measures of state monopoly capitalism designed to save the bankers to the detriment of the working-class taxpayer; and those measures of state intervention that will come as a result of popular demands. Socialists are not indifferent to the reforms—or the struggles to achieve them—that will be necessary to reverse the three decades of capitalist assault on the working class.

What makes Malcolm different from every signature Black figure in American history is that he combines the two central characters of Black folk culture. He is both the trickster and the minister. He’s both. That’s “Detroit Red”—the hustler, the gambler, the outlaw. And, he is also the minister who saves souls, who redeems lives, who heals the sick, who raises the dead. He’s both. King is one. Jesse Jackson is one. Malcolm’s both and he understood the streets and the lumpen proletariat. I hate that phrase, but it comes from Marx. As well as, he saw himself as a minister and an Amun, a cleric. He was always this. And he embodied the cultural spirit of Black folk better than anyone else. When I asked one student about a decade ago, “What was the fundamental difference between Malcolm and Martin?” He said, “Dr. Marable, that’s easy. Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs to the entire world. Malcolm X belongs to us.”