Today's Axis (the fascist powers) are the heirs of Hitler’s failed Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union. After World War II, America’s CIA, along with Britain’s MI6 and other governmental agencies, plus the Vatican, produced “rat lines” for key Nazis (including their collaborators in other countries) to resettle in U.S., Argentina, and Canada (and in other countries, too...

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Today's Axis (the fascist powers) are the heirs of Hitler’s failed Operation Barbarossa to conquer the Soviet Union. After World War II, America’s CIA, along with Britain’s MI6 and other governmental agencies, plus the Vatican, produced “rat lines” for key Nazis (including their collaborators in other countries) to resettle in U.S., Argentina, and Canada (and in other countries, too, as the CIA-edited and written account at Wikipedia focused upon), and for these ‘former’ Nazis (who actually remained ideologically as nazis or racist fascists, and the CIA knew and welcomed this) to continue working to conquer the Soviet Union. These secret nazis carried out secret assignments not only for their new country’s military and against the Soviet Union, but also domestically against labor unions of all sorts, and against anything that the owners of the largest U.S.-and-allied international corporations wanted to be targeted. 

For example, as soon as Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, the Deep State (the controlling owners of the largest international corporations) started to take over, and not everything that it was doing was known at the time by the leaders of the official (elected) American government. Even U.S. President Harry S. Truman — though the sign on his desk said “The BUCK STOPS here!” and he meant it — was kept in the dark, and was occasionally deceived, about some things that the OSS (precursor to the CIA) and the CIA were doing. For example, Truman probably didn’t know that in 1948 the CIA perpetrated its first coup and this coup in Thailand established the off-the-books funding of the CIA from the international narcotics traffic, so that the CIA’s actual budget wouldn’t be restricted simply to the on-the-books funding, from U.S. taxpayers. This illegal funding-source has been crucial for many of the CIA’s operations, and makes bribes untraceable. 

A subversive right-wing coup, centered in the United States but operating throughout all U.S.-allied countries, thus gradually took over in the formerly anti-Nazi U.S.-allied non-communist countries. This slow coup was internationally coordinated amongst aristocrats (the controllers of international corporations) from all participating countries. But it was internationally led by America’s aristocrats, starting when FDR died. 

Some of the major operations of the international Deep State were courageously reported in a rare and classic BBC documentary, in 1992, shown in this video. As it makes clear, these agents of the Deep State considered themselves to be revolutionaries. They were heroes, in their own eyes. Here are two brief excerpts from that video:

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8:35-9:00: “As the [Nazi] Germans withdrew, they left secret agents in the countries they had occupied. … For the retreating Germans, they were the staunchest elitists. They were selected from the SS and the fascist Black Legions. They were to become the footsoldiers in the next war, about to begin. 

10:25-10:55: “Then [OSS second-in-command] Jim Angleton [James Jesus Angleton] appeared in August [1945]. He started recruiting fascists, because he said that the best way to control the communists was to hire fascists. One of the most tough ones was Prince Valerio Borghese, who ran what was known as the tenth flotilla. These are the guys that would execute partisans [anti-fascists] and hang them from lamp posts all over Italy.”

So: within just months of FDR’s 12 April 1945 death, The West’s Deep State was already in full start-up mode, to achieve ultimately a fascist victory, not only against the U.S.S.R., but also against Western countries themselves. This is the historical reality, about The West, after WW II.

“By the end of World War II, the X-2 had discovered around 3,000 Axis agents.” The alleged son (Jesus) was now harvesting his alleged father’s crops, who have flowered to what we have today. However, the official U.S. Government record of “Angleton, James H. Jr.” “Age: 28” Date: 4 Dec. 1945” (see page 4 there) indicates that he (Hugh) must have been born around 1917. And yet the official birth date of his alleged son, James Jesus Angleton, was 9 December 1917. The New York Times 7 March 1973 obituary, “James H. Angleton Dead at 84; National Cash Register Officer”, asserts that: 

As liaison officer between the O.S.S. and the Fifth Army he assisted the military‐government mission in Italy and captured codes, card files and documents important to American security.

After the war he returned to Italy and worked for the restoration of Italian business and industry and for a stable, democratic government.

He was for many years president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Italy.

Instead of his having been born in 1917, he had actually been born in 1889, which is believable.

So, one can reasonably infer that in 1945, the 56-year-old Hugh Angleton passed along to the 28-year-old Jesus Angleton, his contact list of approximately 3,000 secret operatives of Hitler and of Mussolini in Europe, and that this son (Jesus) proceeded promptly to recruit these secret Nazis and Fascists to work for the OSS. The father could retire rich, while the son went on to grow and harvest his crops, for America’s war against Russia (not actually against communism — which was the cover-story).

Jefferson Morley’s trashy ‘biography’ of Jesus, The Ghost, fails even so much as to mention that Jesus’s father had been OSS, just like the son, and had passed his torch along to him, and that the son ran with his father’s torch. To Morley, that torch did not exist, and Jesus’ father was just a successful American businessman who happened to be living in Italy at the time of WW II. One can’t take seriously anything that’s published about such people, except that they recruited Fascists and Nazis into the CIA, and that Jesus continued on as a friend and supporter of Nazis and of pro-Nazis. This doesn’t necessarily mean (as superficial persons might think) that Jesus was against Israel. Israel itself is Jewish racist-fascist — nazi-Jewish, apartheid and all the rest of what racism and tribalism mean (just a different target for their racism, Palestinians, like Russians were the targets that the CIA hated), and, of course, it is capitalist. Jesus was out to conquer Russia, and he used nazis to the hilt, for that purpose. That’s the reality, which is fully consistent with all of the little that’s reliably known about him. More is reliably known about his subsequent boss, Allen Dulles, who was nazi through-and-through, and who relied heavily upon Angleton. As David Talbot wrote, in his excellent biography of Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard (page 29), “If their powerful enemy in the White House [FDR] had survived the war, the Dulles brothers would likely have faced serious criminal charges for their wartime activities.” FDR didn’t want Truman as his V.P., but the Party’s big donors were rabid against the person he did want. So, Truman got the nod. And the billionaires got what they wanted, which was someone who was almost as much of a fool for President as his successor, Eisenhower (who handed foreign affairs over to the Dulles brothers), turned out to be.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the Soviet Union broke up and ended its communism in 1991 and thereafter, their former Warsaw Pact military alliance became gradually absorbed into America’s NATO alliance — and now even a former part of the Soviet federation itself within the former Soviet Union (and which thus is no mere Warsaw Pact ally), Ukraine, is being invited into NATO, and is preparing for admission into the anti-Russia military pact — into the U.S. alliance against Russia — and hopes to conquer Russia totally. The name for the broader U.S. plan here (of which the takeover of Ukraine is only a part) is “Nuclear Primacy” — the U.S. Government’s goal is U.S. victory in a nuclear war against Russia, and this goal can be achieved only if the U.S. nuclearly blitz-attacks Russia, and if that blitz-attack eliminates Russia’s retaliatory weapons (sufficiently to meet the U.S. Government’s top-secret standard of what would constitute acceptable damage to the U.S. from a Russian retaliatory attack). This is the ultimate strategic plan (and all details of it are prohibited from being made public). 

“Nuclear Primacy” replaces the prior meta-strategy, which was called “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” — the belief that the purpose of nuclear weapons is to prevent a World War III, not to win a WW III. This new meta-strategy starts from the assumption that the number of people killed in the U.S. and allied countries by a counter-attack from Russia responding to a sudden and unannounced blitz nuclear invasion of Russia, by the U.S. and its allies, will be worth that (currently secret) cost.

Now that the ‘anti-Islamic-terrorist’ excuses for selling and buying their weapons and services are declining, the focus is, yet again, increasingly against Russia and its allies, in order that the owners of those corporations (the category of corporations that depend the most upon their Government) will continue to grow in wealth, and not to lose value of their investments. As the anti-Jewish writer Philip Giraldi said accurately (though I think he misunderstands how the Deep State, of which he used to be an operative, actually functions), "Defense contractors need a foe to justify their existence while congressmen need the contractors to fund their campaigns." He interprets the corruption in a tribal way, rather than as corruption itself and of any type, as being the reason why the United States continues to try to achieve 'Nuclear Primacy'. But that explanation would not explain why nuclear winter is not being discussed by the proponents of ‘Nuclear Primacy’.

control those firms and the U.S. Government, might suffer enormous losses. This assumes that the U.S. Government represents those owners and not the public. But in any case: marketing weapons that are suitable only for traditional, non-nuclear, wars, such as against regular jihadists, has apparently run its course and produced all of the sales-growth that that business-plan is likely to achieve; and, therefore, as has been the case since at least the time of the Obama Administration, the U.S. is actively gearing up for an invasion of Russia. The U.S. Government is behaving as if America’s weapons-producers own it. The weapons-producers (that is, the owners of the weapons-producers) seem to be in control of the U.S. Government.

increased that to $400 billion soon afterwards. His sale, to the Sauds, of U.S. weaponry, is overwhelmingly the largest military sale in all of world history. It is Trump’s major achievement thus far in his Presidency. (Trump can meet privately with King Saud, and with Netanyahu, but the Deep State calls him a ‘traitor’ for meeting privately with Putin. That Deep State hate Putin.) 

Furthermore, the people who would control Syria, if the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli war were to win and replace Bashar al-Assad’s secular, non-sectarian, Government, there, would be the Saud family — not Israel, and not the U.S. The American Government is fighting in Syria for the Sauds to take over that country, an ally both of Russia and of Iran. Israel is part of that alliance — the alliance for the Sauds. America’s proxy boots-on-the-ground in Syria have been trained and led mainly by Al Qaeda there. That has a long history going back even to before Al Qaeda existed — 1949. Occasionally, ISIS in Syria has also received American assistance in order to advance “regime-change” there. Sometimes, U.S.-backed ‘rebels’ in Syria have quit because U.S. forces were secretly transferring, to ISIS, weapons that the U.S. had originally supplied to less-fundamentalist groups.

Moreover, the Saud family have been (and perhaps still are) the chief funders of Al Qaeda, and maybe even of its spin-off organization, ISIS. 9/11 did great things for the military-contracting firms, the companies whose biggest foreign market is the Saud family. They’re on the same team. Though Israel has provided crucial assistance to both Al Qaeda and ISIS on some occasions, there is no publicly available evidence that Israel has been funding either group. But Israel provides, as its contribution, a huge portion of the team’s lobbying.

In addition: the financial bag-man for Al Qaeda up to the time of 9/11, the person who privately travelled to pick up each of the million-dollar-plus cash donations to Al Qaeda, specifically named Saudi Princes Bandar, Turki, Waleed, and Salman, among those donors, and he said that no Saudi Prince who lacks the endorsement of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist clergy can be considered by the Saud family to appoint as the next King, and that the Wahhabist clergy requested and received from Osama bin Laden a letter with bin Laden’s recommendations before they advised the Saud family upon that matter (whom to select as the next King).

As the major historian of contemporary geopolitics, Michel Chossudovsky, documented in an article, "Secret Meeting on the Privatization of Nuclear War Held on Hiroshima Day 2003: Behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters”:

On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima.

The United States Government was already preparing for the time when the then-raging U.S. military buildup in order to deal with terrorism would need to be supplanted with a return to the major-power, strategic nuclear, weaponry, which could carry U.S. weapons-manufacturers back to the good old days of unlimited ‘defense’ spending, and unlimited war-profits to these firms. Dr. Chossudovsky continued:

The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage

The post 9/11 nuclear weapons doctrine was in the making, with America’s major defense contractors directly involved in the decision-making process.

The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had set the stage for the “privatization of nuclear war”. Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.

The nuclear weapons industry, which includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile delivery systems, etc., is controlled by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing in the lead.

Unlike regular corporations, whose markets are either consumers, or else other firms, the markets that these firms sell to are mainly the U.S. Government (the military part of it), and the foreign governments that are allied to it — the biggest of those foreign buyers being the Saud family itself (the owners of the Government of Saudi Arabia). So, this is a very exclusive team, of billionaires (trillionaires in the case of the Sauds), and of their agents throughout the world. 

Soviet exploitation 

See also: Soviet influence on the peace movement § Claims of wider Soviet influence

However, a 1984 US Interagency Intelligence Assessment expresses a far more skeptical and cautious approach, stating that as the hypothesis is not scientifically convincing.

Though the Wiki article discusses several studies that had been done in the 1980s modeling the consequences of an India-Pakistan nuclear war and comparably smaller ones, it mentions only dismissively the far-more-recent and inclusive study:

In a 2012 "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" feature, Robock and Toon, who had routinely mixed their disarmament advocacy into the conclusions of their "nuclear winter" papers,[18] argue in the political realm that the hypothetical effects of nuclear winter necessitates that the doctrine they assume is active in Russia and US, "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) should instead be replaced with their own "self-assured destruction" (SAD) concept,[200].

 

earlier periods) — summarily stated, as follows, all work that had been done on the subject, up till that time (and not since supplanted):

The new models show that a full-scale nuclear conflict, in which 150 million tons of smoke are lofted into the upper atmosphere [the minimum that a U.S.-Russia war would do], would drastically reduce precipitation by 45 percent on a global average, while temperatures would fall for several years by 7 to 8 degrees Celsius [13 degrees Fahrenheit] on average and would remain depressed by 4 degrees Celsius after a decade (Robock et al., 2007a). Humans have not experienced temperatures this low since the last ice age (Figure 2). In important grain-growing regions of the northern mid-latitudes [including both U.S. and Russia, as well as most of Europe], precipitation would decline by up to 90 percent, and temperatures would fall below freezing and remain there for one or more years.

The number of weapons needed to initiate these climate changes falls within the range of arsenals planned for the coming decade (Toon et al., 2008). For instance, the use of 4,000 weapons (the rough total for US and Russian arsenals in 2017 under New START), each with a yield of 100 kilotons (a typical yield for submarine weapons, but at the low end for most nuclear weapons), against urban or industrial targets would produce about 180 million tons of soot [30 million higher than that 150 million estimate]. A single US submarine carrying 144 weapons of 100-kiloton yield could produce 23 million tons of smoke if these weapons were used on densely populated Chinese cities. 

The effects of the nuclear contamination itself are in addition to that estimation of the smoke-damages.

The U.S. weapons-manufacturers and their agents might not want the public to know this (and so Wikipedia lies about it), but not only would both sides lose from a U.S.-Russia nuclear war, but the entire planet would lose — and drastically. The cigarette-manufacturers long hid the harms of their business, but today’s privatized weapons-manufacturing firms dwarf the corruption and harm that the tobacco-industry perpetrated. The liars get well-paid, but the truth is far grimmer, and far deadlier — especially in this matter.

Unlike the CIA-Wikipedia fictionalized version, M.A.D. wasn’t “Soviet exploitation” — it was instead the reality recognized by both sides, and is the reality even today, despite what the U.S. weapons-manufacturers and their enormous sales-forces have been deceiving their publics to believe since 2006.

Consequently, I infer, from the evidence, that the leaders, of the operation to conquer Russia, are the controlling owners of America’s large ‘defense’ contractors, and of those individuals’ largest non-U.S. customer, the Saud family. The Sauds’ biggest competitors in the international-energy markets (which are their own main markets) are: Russia and Iran. Those same two countries are also the main enemies that are targeted by the U.S. alliance. 

Where does the EU, and where does the anti-Russia NATO alliance, fit into this reality? Some of Europe’s aristocrats are benefiting from alliance with the U.S., but others are not. And, of course, America’s aristocrats benefit enormously from having their support — i.e., from buying their support, bribing them in the legal ways. However, Europe’s aristocratic nazis weren’t supposed to have been the winners of WW II. So: nazi Europeans are Europe’s enemies, not its friends — just as nazi Americans aren’t friends but instead enemies to the American people. That hasn’t changed, and can’t change. 

Only Europeans can decide what to do regarding nazi Europeans. And only Americans can decide what to do regarding nazi Americans. (One idea might be to refuse to vote for nazis, but, under existing circumstances, how would that even be possible?) Without constant deceit, this situation couldn’t exist anywhere. And if people are constantly deceived, they are powerless. Deceit is the chief weapon of Operation Barbarossa II, the American aristocracy’s war, not the German aristocracy’s war (which was more overtly physical — military — and was only secondarily based upon deceiving the public).

Incidentally, any secret treaty (including the Quincy Pact) is unConstitutional. None of this happened democratically. It was a slow coup. That’s what created today’s alliances, and today’s targets. 

Thus, though Hitler lost, his cause (except for his anti-Jewish fixation) has been moving slowly and methodically toward victory, and it’s being led by the aristocracies of U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

Shia Islam denies the right of hereditary rule. (This is also why in Syria, Bashar al-Assad claims no hereditary right to rule; if he were to do otherwise, he’d violate Shia Islam and he would be rejected by Iran.) The main reason why America’s aristocracy wants to conquer Russia (other than the latter’s natural-resources wealth, which has always been a reason) is that Vladimir Putin insists that only the residents in a land should possess sovereignty there, but the U.S. and British aristocracies insist upon the right to conquer foreign lands. As an ideology, nazism totally affirms both the hereditary principle, and the imperialist principle. This is what the U.S.-Saudi alliance likewise affirms. And that is why, for example, the CIA has always favored monarchies and opposed democracies (or at least authentic ones, which the U.S. aristocracy cannot control).

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So: what is Big Brother? It is the billionaires who own controlling interests in these companies. And that is why the most-respected of all institutions, in the United States (and by a substantial margin above any other) is the military. That is Big Brother, in the real world.

Big Brother consists of a highly networked few extremely wealthy individuals, the majority of whom cannot be individually identified, because the ownership of these corporations is hidden behind layers of “street name accounts” and especially offshore accounts, but all being private financial entities whose profits are derived from sales to governments, instead of from sales to consumers, or to businesses whose customers are consumers. These firms function together like a highly networked cartel of secret arsonists who also make and sell the firefighting equipment. They thus secretly produce the market for their services. That’s the best type of business to be in. But it is also the most harmful type of business to be in. And they own that business — and newsmedia and many other types of businesses that likewise are essential to the success of their core business, the one that accounts for the lion’s share of their real profits, the sales to governments.

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[dropcap]I[/dropcap]mran Khan won yesterday's elections in Pakistan. He is an unusual politician and his political program is laudable. The task he is taking on is difficult and fraught with danger:

Imran Khan has claimed victory for his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) in an historic election for Pakistan. The PTI represents a populist swing away from the legacy mainstream parties PML-N and PPP that both fared poorly during the election. Additionally, religious extremist parties fared particularly poorly compared to the previous two elections and also when contrasted with the expectations that many theocratic parties set for themselves prior to polling day. Lastly, the deeply controversial MQM ended up losing both seats and electoral momentum in its Karachi heartland, surrendering its erstwhile momentum to PTI.Likewise, the incumbent PML-N not only fared poorly in the national vote in their traditional Punjab stronghold but even in the Punjab assembly election, Imran Khan’s PTI has proved formidable. Finally in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which since 2013 has been governed by a PTI led provincial council, women were able to cast their votes for the first time. As was expected PTI heavily dominated throughout Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Imran Khan is an interesting character. He was born in 1952 into an affluent Pashtun family with an anti-colonial tradition. He was educated in Britain. After graduating from Oxford he excelled as a professional cricket player. In 1992 he won the Cricket World Cup for Pakistan as captain of the team. That made him a national hero but the high life also gave him a reputation as womanizer and playboy.

His 2012 talk with Julian Assange (vid) demonstrates that he is way more than that. In 1996 he founded his political party and slowly moved it into a winning position. The PTI rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the poor and war-torn Pashtun state next to Afghanistan, was surprisingly successful.

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RT
Published on 19 Jun 2012

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[dropcap]P[/dropcap]akistan was long ruled by the military and several rich clans which used their political parties to enrich themselves. There is no evidence that Imran is of such a type.

The losing parties claim that the elections were rigged by the Pakistani military. During the campaign the military somewhat put its finger on the scale. It allegedly pushed some candidates into changing their party affiliation and interfered with some media. But the elections themselves went off mostly peaceful, the EU observer mission seems largely satisfied with the process and the result is consistent with earlier polls and predictions.

Imran campaigned on a social-democratic and anti-corruption platform. His victory speech  (scroll down) emphasized his concern for the poor:

Pakistan should have that kind of humanitarian state, where we take responsibility for our weaker classes.  The weak are dying of hunger. I will try my best – all of my policies will be made to raise our weaker classes, for our labourers … for our poor farmers, who work all year and get no money … 45 percent of children have stunted growth, they don’t reach the right height, or their brains don’t develop.
...
No country can prosper when there is a small island of rich people, and a sea of poor.

Pakistan has long been a puppet state of the U.S. and its Saudi wallet. It was abused for the U.S. proxy war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and never recovered from that. The corruption and religious fanaticism that came with that war did not leave when it was over. Since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan the country's military used it as a racket. It demanded large payments for enabling the necessary U.S. transports through Pakistan while at the same time supporting the Taliban resistance against the U.S. occupation. In the end the U.S. lost the war. Imran Khan has led protests against the U.S. war of terror and its drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere. In his victory speech he touched on the unequal relation:

Then there is Afghanistan, a country that has suffered the most in the war on terror. Afghanistan’s people need peace. We want peace there. If there is peace in Afghanistan, there will be peace in Pakistan. We will make every effort to achieve peace there.  We want to have open borders with Afghanistan one day.

With the US, we want to have a mutually beneficial relationship … up until now, that has been one way, the US thinks it gives us aid to fight their war … we want both countries to benefit, we want a balanced relationship.

The Trump administration will probably be okay with Imran's position, after trying to sabotage him. Already U.S. media describe the election as 'disputed'.  Trump demanded that Pakistan stops to "destabilize Afghanistan" and held back some money it was to receive. But Trump also wants to leave Afghanistan. Yesterday a State Department official met with Taliban representatives in Qatar to restart peace negotiations. The Trump administration, like others before it, will soon learn that no peace can be found in Afghanistan without Pakistan's acquiescence.

During the last few years Pakistan allied more and more with China. Large Chinese infrastructure investments are reshaping the country. Imran supports the relation:

China gives us a huge opportunity through CPEC, to use it and drive investment into Pakistan.  We want to learn from China how they brought 700 million people out of poverty … The other thing we can learn from China is … the measures they have taken against corruption, how they have arrested more than 400 ministers there.

Pakistan's most fragile relations are with its neighbor India, specially over the Muslim majority Kashmir valley over which India harshly rules and which is also the source and weak point of Pakistan's lifeline, the Indus river. The two nuclear states have fought each other several times. The always fraught relations with India are used by the Pakistani military to justify the perks of its officer corps and its oversized role in Pakistan's politics.

Imran Khan offered new negotiations with India: "If India’s leadership is ready, we are ready to improve ties with India. If you step forward one step, we will take two steps forward." But the question is if the military will let him do that. Indian analysts are skeptical:

Imran can contribute neither to the improvement nor the deterioration of Pakistan’s relations with India. Pakistan’s prime ministers have long lost influence, what little they had three decades ago in the immediate aftermath of Gen Zia-ul-Haque’s death, over the direction and shape of Islamabad’s foreign policy. Over these decades, Pakistan Army has gained absolute control over important national security issues relating to Afghanistan, United States, China, Jihadi forces and India.

Imran Khan cannot take on the Pakistani military - at least not now. To clean up the endemic corruption and to solve the basic economic problems of his country are already huge tasks. If he proves to be successful with those he may get a chance to slowly wrestle back control over foreign policy from the military's oversized power.

The election of Imran Khan is a break with Pakistan's oligarchic past. As he wants to implement his anti-corruption and social programs he will have to fight an entrenched establishment that does not mind playing dirty. He may well win that fight but only if he continues to receive support from the military. For that he will have to follow the Generals' demands on foreign policy. Only a second term in office would give him the standing to tackle that relationship.

For now he is Pakistan's best chance. I wish him luck.

Posted by b on July 26, 2018 at 01:19 PM | Permalink

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium NewsAt the Times HQ on Eighth Ave:
Quietly realizing the consequences for itself.

A dispatch from RT.com

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By Nick Beams, WSWS.ORG

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David Harvey’s Jacobin interview on Marx’s Capital

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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Jacobin magazine, which functions as a kind of house journal for the middle class pseudo-left milieu, in particular the Democratic Socialists of America, has published an interview with the academic David Harvey, purporting to show why Marx’s Capital is “still the defining guide to understanding—and overcoming—the horrors of capitalism.”

Harvey, variously described as a social theorist, a historical-materialist geographer and sometimes a Marxist, has attracted a wide following over the past decade in the wake of the global financial crisis due to his online lectures on Capital and a number of books critical of capitalism and its irrationalities.

The interest in his writings and lectures, particularly from among younger people and students, is an expression of the growing hostility to capitalism, increasingly regarded as having failed, and the growing receptiveness towards socialism, coupled with a turn to Marx in the search for answers to the mounting problems and crises caused by the ongoing breakdown of the capitalist order.

But as with all of Harvey’s work, this interview does not provide a clarification or guide to Marx but serves to prevent an understanding of his masterwork, seeking to render him suitable to the political and life-style sensibilities of a middle class “left” audience.

This emerges from the very outset of the interview. Asked to give an overview of the three volumes of Capital, Harvey says: “Marx is very much into detail and it’s sometimes hard to get a sense of exactly what the whole concept of Capital is about.” This has been a recurring theme virtually since the day Capital was published—that it is too difficult and too dense to be comprehended.

Capital is certainly no easy work but that difficulty arises not from Marx but from the fact that capitalism is the most complex form of socio-economic organisation in the historical development of mankind.

However, as Harvey well knows, Marx provided a very clear explanation of the essential thread of his theoretical labours.

In the postface to the second edition of Capital, Marx favourably cited a Russian reviewer of the first edition published in 1867 who had set out the objective logic of his analysis.

The reviewer had begun by citing Marx’s famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, published in 1859, in which he set out the materialist basis of his method.

There Marx had written: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. … At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing social relations of production … From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”

Basing himself on this explanation, the Russian reviewer concluded that Marx “concerns himself with one thing: to show, by an exact scientific investigation, the necessity of successive determinate orders of social relations, and to establish, as impeccably as possible, the facts from which he starts out and on which he depends. For this it is quite enough if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over.”

In other words, Capital was the application of the theory of historical materialism, worked out by Marx and Engels in the late 1840s, to the analysis of capitalist society in which the central social relation of production was the buying and selling of the labour power of the new social force, the working class, which this society had brought into being. It was aimed at demonstrating how the very development of the productive forces to which this new social order had given rise inevitably came into conflict with the social relations on which it was based, leading to social revolution and the transition to a new and higher form of society.

While Capital was grounded on a thorough-going scientific analysis of capitalist society, it was not an academic treatise. It was written with the aim of providing the working class, its historical gravedigger, with the theoretical weapons necessary for its overthrow and the transition to a higher socio-economic order, international socialism.

It is highly significant, therefore, that in Harvey’s interview on Capital and its significance, the words “social revolution” and “working class” never appear.

What then is the essential content of the interview? It is the dressing up in Marxist-sounding terminology of the politics of the middle class pseudo-left, focusing on protests against some of the irrationalities and outrages of the capitalist system, concerned not with its overthrow but “life-style changes.” Its role is to seek to divert those seeking answers away from a real grappling with and understanding of Marx’s masterwork.

Harvey presents the three volumes of Capital as something of a jumble, that Marx was saying “in volume one, I deal with this, in volume two I deal with that and in volume three I deal with something else.”

Harvey goes on to say that Marx has in mind “the totality of the circulation of capital” but then points to a problem because Marx did not complete volumes two and three (they were edited by Engels from Marx’s drafts) and so they “aren’t as satisfactory as volume one.”

The upshot of this focus on circulation is twofold. First, it leaves the impression that there is no inherent logic to Marx’s presentation. Second, it downplays the centrality of capitalist production, dissolving it in the process of circulation, a move which, as we shall see, forms a key foundation of Harvey’s political perspective.

Contrary to Harvey, Marx is very clear on the logic of the three volumes, which he sets out at the beginning of volume three.

There he explains that the investigation in volume one concerns the process of capitalist production itself, leaving out the external secondary influences on this process. But as he notes, the analysis does not complete the life cycle of capital and so in volume two he considers how the process of production is supplemented by the process of circulation.

In volume three the issue is to “discover and present the concrete forms which grow out of the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole.”

“The configurations of capital, as developed in this volume,” he writes, “thus approach step by step the form in which they appear on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals on one another, i.e., in competition, and in the everyday consciousness of the agents of production themselves.” [1]

The materialist method employed by Marx is to ascend from the most abstract forms to the concrete. Capital, therefore, begins with the cell-form of the capitalist economy, the commodity, in which the product of human labour—the basis of all society—presents itself in the social form of a product produced for exchange.

The significance of this starting point was noted by Lenin:

“In his Capital, Marx first analyses the simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois (commodity) society, a relation encountered billions of times, viz. the exchange of commodities. In this very simple phenomenon (in this ‘cell’ of bourgeois society) analysis reveals all the contradictions (or the germs of all the contradictions) of modern society. The subsequent exposition shows us the development (both growth and movement) of these contradictions and of this society in the summation of its individual parts, from its beginning to its end.” [2]

From the analysis of the commodity and its value, Marx reveals the origin of money as the material expression of value. The analysis of money discloses the nature of capital as self-expanding value.

The most decisive breakthrough made by Marx was to discover the source of this self-expansion. The issue which had tortured the minds of Marx’s classical predecessors in the science of political economy, in particular its two leading representatives, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, was how, on the basis of market relations in which equivalents exchange for equivalents, could a surplus arise? In particular, how out of the most important exchange in commodity-capitalist society, could profit rise, if equivalents were exchanged for equivalents according to the laws of the market.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]arx established that the commodity that the worker sold to the capitalist was not his or her labour, as had previously been maintained, but the capacity to work, or labour power.

Like every other commodity its value was determined by the time taken to reproduce it, that is, it was determined by the value of the commodities needed to sustain the worker and enable the raising of a family to produce the next generation of wage workers.

The surplus value appropriated by the capitalist owner of the means of production, to whom the worker sold his or her labour power, arose from the fact that the value of labour power was less than the value created by the worker in the course of the working day. That is, while it may take, say three hours, for the worker to reproduce the value of labour power, the working day extended for much longer and this additional, or surplus, value fell to capital.

This epoch-making discovery had vast political implications. Marx was by no means the first socialist. Others before him had trenchantly criticised the operations of the capitalist system and pointed to its irrationalities, the increasing exploitation of the working class and widening social inequality. But as Engels explained:

“The socialism of earlier days certainly criticised the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. It could not explain them, and, therefore could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad.” [3]

It was necessary, Engels continued, to present the capitalist mode of production as necessary during a given historical period and also to present the inevitability of its downfall and to lay bare its essential character. The critics had attacked its evil consequences rather than reveal the secret of the thing itself. This was revealed by the discovery of surplus value.

With these two great discoveries, he concluded, the materialist conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalist production, socialism became a science. The next step was to work out the details.

Marx’s discoveries revealed that not only was the working class an exploited class but, in laying bare the source of that exploitation in the social relations of capitalism itself, established that it was a revolutionary class. That is, to secure its own emancipation the working class had to overthrow the entire system of social relations, deriving from wage-labour—on which capitalism was grounded.

One of the most important “details” to which Engels referred, was the way in which the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces under capitalism and the social relations based on wage-labour—the contradiction that was the driving force of social revolution—manifested itself in the capitalist economy.

This was discovered by Marx in his analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. He demonstrated that this tendency—the nemesis of the capitalist mode of production whose driving force is profit—arose from the very development of the productive forces to which it gave rise.

The sole source of surplus value and profit, the basis for the self-expansion of capital, is the living labour of the working class. But the more capital grows the greater must be the extraction of surplus value from the working class in order to expand it yet again. To the extent that the extraction of surplus value fails to keep pace with the growth of capital, the rate of profit tends to fall. This leads to a crisis to which capital responds by reorganising production, in order to intensify exploitation in order to continue. But the very development of these crises, growing ever more serious, drives the working class into struggle against the capitalist system and its ruling class.

This is the source of the realities of “everyday life,” as Marx put it, in which we see the vast accumulation of wealth and an enormous growth in the productive forces and the social productivity of labour on the one hand and the growth of poverty, misery and degradation, accompanied by ever widening social inequality on the other.

The discovery of the secret of surplus value as the basis of the capitalist accumulation process and the contradictions arising from it, had, as we noted, far-reaching political implications. It concretised, as Marx had set out in in his early writings, the revolutionary role of the working class.

“It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation, as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society.”[4]

The key to Harvey’s politics is his rejection of and outright hostility to the analysis made by Marx of the revolutionary role of the working class which is central to Capital. Therefore, as far as his “socialism” is concerned it is clouded in the mists of pre-Marxist conceptions.

“Capital has built the capacity, technologically and organisationally, to create a far better world,” he says in the Jacobin interview. “But it does so through social relations of domination rather than emancipation. This is the central contradiction. And Marx keeps saying, ‘Why don’t we use all of this technological and organisational capacity to create a world which is liberatory, rather than one which is about domination?”

Here Harvey follows the road taken by previous “social theorists” who, while identifying some of the irrationalities of the capitalist mode of production, separated Marx’s scientific analysis of capitalism from its central purpose, that is, the arming of the working class for the revolutionary struggles in which it is driven by the crises of the profit system.

The Frankfurt School, for example, sought the agency for social transformation—insofar as it had not completely abandoned such a perspective—in the “cultural criticism” of the irrationalities of capitalism and “consumerism.”

Paul Sweezy, the “independent Marxist”, writing in the 1960s, wrote off the working class in the advanced capitalist countries and glorified the national liberation movements in what was then known as the Third World.

Herbert Marcuse, the darling of the New Left in the 1960s, maintained that the working class had been completely integrated into advanced capitalist society—and was even a potential basis for fascism—and found the agency for social change in the marginalised sections of society.

On the basis of his historical materialist analysis, Marx was well aware of the fact that the advancement in the productive force under capitalism had created the basis for socialist society, free of class exploitation and domination “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

But he rejected as utopian any perspective which sought to bring about this transformation by drawing out the contrast between what was possible under a different form of social organisation and what presently existed in capitalist society. Such a perspective made the socialist transformation a question of the criticism of capitalist society by so-called enlightened individuals.

The crucial question for Marx was what was the social material force—the class—created by capitalist society itself, which would be the agency, the driving force, of this transformation. Today, the point at issue is not that socialism will somehow be more advantageous for humanity—that was already clear in Marx’s day—but that it is an historic necessity if human civilisation is to survive and progress.

The contradictions of capitalism are not, as Harvey attempts to portray them, the contrast between what would be possible under socialism as compared to present reality but are rooted in the inexorable drive of the profit system towards the impoverishment of the working class, the development of authoritarian forms of rule and war, threatening the very destruction of human civilisation, and a relapse into barbarism. For socialism to become a reality and not simply a dream of human advancement, there must be a social force in capitalist society whose material interests drive it forward to its realisation. That force is the working class, that is, the class separated from the control and ownership of the productive forces which is compelled in order to sustain its existence to sell its labour power.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the most significant historical developments of the past three decades has been the transformation of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population into proletarians, forced to sell their labour power. Hundreds of millions of peasants in China, India and elsewhere have been transformed into wage workers while in the advanced capitalist countries hundreds of millions of people, employed in what were once considered secure “middle class” occupations, have discovered, through relentless job cuts, downsizing and cuts in their incomes, that they are proletarians with nothing to sell but their labour power, no less than the millions engaged in the factories.

In his criticism of the utopian socialists of his day, Marx pointed to their dreams of experimental realisation of their social utopia as they opposed all political action by the working class.

It is therefore significant that Harvey says nothing in his interview about the resurgent movement of the working class, manifested in the widespread teachers’ strikes in the US, the strike movements in Europe and in countries such as India after decades of suppression by the trade unions and the social democratic and labour parties, and focuses attention on “life-style” movements.

“Now, there are revolts against certain things that are happening,” he writes. “People are beginning to say, ‘look, we want something different.’ I find little communities all around the place in urban areas, and in rural areas, too, where people are trying to set up a different lifestyle. The ones that interest me most are those which use new technologies, like cell phones and the internet, to create an alternative lifestyle with different forms of social relations than those characteristic of corporations, with hierarchical structures of power, that we encounter in our daily lives. To struggle over a lifestyle is rather different than struggling over wages or conditions of labour in a factory.”

Of course Harvey does not leave matters there. He would rapidly lose all credibility in the eyes of those who consider him to be an interpreter and a guide to Marx if he did. And so he maintains that those who are struggling over lifestyle issues, or race, or the environment need to recognise from the standpoint of the totality of capital the relationship between those struggles and how they are related to the forms of production. Putting them all together provides a picture of what a capitalist society is all about “and the kinds of dissatisfactions and alienations that exist in different components of the circulation of capital, which Marx identifies.”

Harvey recognises the struggle of the working class, though it is not so much as mentioned in the interview, but he identifies it as purely the struggle over wages and conditions within a given factory, and thus purely within a trade union perspective.

But as workers are coming to realise, on the basis of their experiences, even struggles which begin on this limited basis rapidly extend to embody broader, political, issues. Workers fighting for improved wages and conditions are immediately confronted not just with the management of the individual corporation or firm within which they work but the apparatuses of the trade union bureaucracy and behind them the capitalist government and the state.

Every struggle of the working class, whether it begins over wages, social conditions, health, pensions or today the increasing use of internet censorship to try to prevent them organising themselves, places them more and more directly in conflict with the entire capitalist organisation of society and raises the question of political power, that is, which class is to rule. As Marx put it, every class struggle is, therefore, a political struggle.

The political aim of Harvey’s work now comes into clearer focus. It is aimed at subordinating the struggles of the working class to the politics of the pseudo-left and middle classes concerned with questions of sexual orientation, life style and individual, not class, identity.

This political orientation makes clear why Harvey, insofar as he deals with questions of political economy and the structure of Capital, seeks to downplay the centrality of production and dissolve it into the question of the circulation of capital.

He maintains that if one really wants to understand Marx’s conception of capital, “then you can’t just understand it as just being about production. It’s about circulation. It’s about getting it to the market and selling it, then it’s about distributing the profits.”

The issues related to circulation and the distribution of profits are, of course, vital to an understanding of the capitalist economy, its movement and contradictions. But the key point at issue is this: what is the essential determinant of the structure of society, its political relations and state apparatus and the driving force of its development.

In volume three of Capital, Marx directly addresses this question as follows:

“The specific economic form in which the unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production and hence also its specific political form.”

It is in the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers, Marx continues, “in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.”[5]

As Marx goes on to point out, the same economic forms can display variations and gradations in the political forms of rule, depending on a series of external factors and historical circumstances. But there is no question that the essential content of these various political forms is the mode in which surplus labour is pumped out of the immediate producers.

Volume one of Capital is concerned with the way in which under capitalism, a specific historical mode of production, this unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the immediate producers, the working class, through the system of social relations based on wage labour to yield surplus value.

Harvey wants to de-emphasise or outright dissolve this fundamental structural foundation by pointing out that there is more to capitalism than simply the production of surplus value—there is also the process of realisation, detailed in volume two and distribution in volume three.

However, the essential foundation of capitalism is in production—not the production of commodities as such, or the means of production, the production of the material needs of society as a living organism—but the production of surplus value which forms the essential driving force of this society.

Volume two is concerned with the relationships pertaining to realisation. But this, it must be emphasised, is the realisation of the surplus value, its transformation from the commodity form back into money so the process of surplus value extraction can begin again. Likewise, volume three is concerned with the distribution of this surplus value among the various owners of property in the form of profit, interest and rent.

In his recent writings, Harvey has drawn out the connection between his focus on the process of circulation and realisation and his downplaying of the centrality of the production of surplus value and his political perspective.

In his latest book, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, Harvey writes:

“Struggles at the point of valorisation inevitably have a class character … Those at the point of realisation focus on buyers and sellers and trigger fights against the predatory practices and accumulation by dispossession in the market place … Such struggles are not well theorised. In the field of social reproduction issues of social hierarchy, gender, sexuality, kinship and family and the like become much more predominant and the primary political focus shifts to the qualities of daily life rather than the labour process. These struggles have often been ignored in the Marxist literature.”

What follows from this dissolving of the centrality of the production of surplus value within the capitalist system is that “the social and political struggles against the power of capital within the totality of capital circulation take different forms and call for different kinds of strategic alliances if they are to succeed.”[6]

There is no question what kind of “strategic alliances” Harvey has in mind—alliances with sections of the radical petty bourgeoisie and its concern for life-style politics and even sections of the bourgeoisie itself.

This is done on the basis of a misrepresentation of Capital, implying that it was not directed to politically and theoretically arming the working class for social revolution but was aimed at merely drawing out the irrationalities of capitalist society.

By this means, Harvey is seeking to misdirect those who are turning to Marx and have followed his own work in the hope that it might provide a guide. He seeks to divert them away from a struggle in the working class, to mobilise it as an independent revolutionary force, and channel them into the milieu of pseudo-left and middle-class radical politics and there to fight for “strategic alliances” that ensure the continued domination of the bourgeoisie and capital.

Notes:

[1] Marx, Capital Volume 3 (London: Penguin, 1991) p. 117
[2] Lenin, Collected Works Volume 38 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961) p. 360
[3] Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969) p. 38
[4] Marx, The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975) pp. 44–45
[5] Marx, Capital Volume 3 (London: Penguin 1993) p. 927
[6] David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) p. 48