It’s all a big lie. There is no “Nobel Prize” in Economics.

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Yasha Levine

The fake Nobel economics prize was part of a ploy to de-democratize control over economic decisions.

Another year, another round of Nobel Prizes, and yet another opportunity to remind people that — unlike the other Nobel Prizes — there is no actual Nobel Prize in Economics. There never has been. 

The fake Nobel prize in economics was part of a propaganda ploy hatched in the 1960s by Sweden’s activist central bank to imbue neoclassical (aka neoliberal) economic theories with mainstream credibility and respect. The plan was to give what was in essence a radical political ideology the sheen of a real, hard science — in line with the Nobel prizes in chemistry and physics and biology.

That history is reflected in this year’s winners — two obscure economists working in a very narrow field: a subset of game theory that deals with optimizing auctions. Wow! Wait, auctions? Huh? 

We’re surrounded by oligarchy, austerity, corporate power over every aspect of our lives, environmental destruction on a global scale. And we’re talking designing slightly more efficient auctions? I don’t know about you, but it seems like some seriously narrow-minded accountant-type work given our dire apocalyptic times.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Economist Branko Milanovic explicitly criticized the award for highlighting fringe free-market tweekers, while passing over economists who are actually tackling important political questions and trying to make sense of our world and our time — things like China’s recent transformation and growth, or the political failure of Russia’s privatization, or the possible ties between slavery and capitalism, or the effect of monopolies on society. Instead, while the world burns, the prize was awarded to two narrowly focused technocrats whose only contribution to society has been to make markets more efficient. 

I agree with Branko. But the problem is that the fake Nobel prize in economics has always had a political objective — and a very particular institutional history. 

The prize was designed to take economics out of the realm of politics and thrust it into the realm of hard sciences. The point was to make people think economics ran on immutable and natural laws — kinda like physics. The larger agenda was to unshackle society from post-WWII Keynesianism. Specifically: to weaken democratic and state control over economic decisions. 

People forget that economics has historically been a synonym for politics and ideology — in fact, one of the early founders of the profession explicitly called economics “political arithmetic,” a term that describes what’s going on better than anything we use today. 

So the fake Nobel economics prize was part of a larger political movement among American and European corporate elites to depoliticize — that is, to de-democratize — control over economic decisions. The point was to take it out of the public realm and place it back into the hands of private interests. So it’s not surprising that this history continues to exert influence on the prize today. In that sense, the prize is part of the problem. By normalizing neoliberal economic ideology, it helped cause the very apocalypse we’re facing in our age of late industrial capitalism.

I wrote about this prize’s forgotten history years ago. Searching around for the article, I found it had all but been erased from the Internet. It’s almost impossible to find using Google. So I’m reprinting it below.

—Yasha Levine

PS: I just found out that a book came out on this very same topic — four or five years after I published my article. It’s called The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks great. 

As Branko described it in his review: 

Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg (“The Nobel factor: the prize in economics, social democracy and the market turn”) look at the strange death of social democracy at the hands of market liberalism. That death was accelerated by the role of the Nobel prize in economics that conferred to economics an allure of science and that was used to much greater profit by neoliberal economists to push for their version of economic policies.

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The Nobel Prize in Economics? There is no Nobel Prize in Economics

Yasha Levine • October 2012 

 

Austro-Hungarian Friedrich Von Hayek receiving the Nobel for economics. The Wikipedia notes: On 9 October 1974, it was announced that Hayek would be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics along with Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. The reasons for the two of them winning the prize are described in the Nobel committee's press release. He was surprised at being given the award and believed that he was given it with Myrdal to balance the award with someone from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Nobel Prize in Economics was established only in 1968 and Hayek was the first free-market, non-Keynesian economist to win it. During the Nobel ceremony in December 1974, Hayek met the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Hayek later sent him a Russian translation of The Road to Serfdom. He spoke with apprehension at his award speech about the danger the authority of the prize would lend to an economist, but the prize brought much greater public awareness to the then controversial ideas of Hayek and has been described by his biographer as "the great rejuvenating event in his life".

  

It’s Nobel Prize season again. News reports are coming out each day sharing the name of the illustrious winner of the various categories — Science, Literature, etc. But there’s one of the prizes that’s a little different. Well, that’s putting it lightly… you see, the Nobel Prize in Economics is not a real Nobel. It wasn’t created by Alfred Nobel. It’s not even called a “Nobel Prize,” no matter what the press reports say.

The five real Nobel Prizes—physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and medicine/physiology—were set up in the will left by the dynamite magnate when he died in 1895. The economics prize is a bit different. It was created by Sweden’s Central Bank in 1969, nearly 75 years later. The award’s real name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.” It was not established by Nobel, but supposedly in memory of Nobel. It’s a ruse and a PR trick, and I mean that literally. And it was done completely against the wishes of the Nobel family.

Sweden’s Central Bank quietly snuck it in with all the other Nobel Prizes to give retrograde free-market economics credibility and the appearance of scientific rigor. One of the Federal Reserve banks explained it succinctly, “Few realize, especially outside of economists, that the prize in economics is not an “official” Nobel. . . . The award for economics came almost 70 years later—bootstrapped to the Nobel in 1968 as a bit of a marketing ploy to celebrate the Bank of Sweden’s 300th anniversary.” Yes, you read that right: “a marketing ploy.”

Here’s a Nobel family member describing it: “The Economics Prize has nestled itself in and is awarded as if it were a Nobel Prize. But it’s a PR coup by economists to improve their reputation,” Nobel’s great great nephew Peter Nobel told AFP in 2005, adding that “It’s most often awarded to stock market speculators. . . .  There is nothing to indicate that [Alfred Nobel] would have wanted such a prize.”

Members of the Nobel family are among the harshest, most persistent critics of the economics prize, and members of the family have repeatedly called for the prize to be abolished or renamed. In 2001, on the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prizes, four family members published a letter in the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet, arguing that the economics prize degrades and cheapens the real Nobel Prizes. They aren’t the only ones.

Scientists never had much respect for the new economic Nobel prize. In fact a scientist who headed Nixon’s Science Advisory Committee in 1969 was shocked to learn that economists were even allowed on stage to accept their award with the real Nobel laureates. He was incredulous: “You mean they sat on the platform with you?”

That hatred continues to simmer below the surface, and periodically breaks through and makes itself known. Most recently, in 2004, three prominent Swedish scientists and members of the Nobel committee published an open letter in a Swedish newspaper savaging the fraudulent “scientific” credentials of the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics. “The economics prize diminishes the value of the other Nobel prizes. If the prize is to be kept, it must be broadened in scope and be disassociated with Nobel,” they wrote in the letter, arguing that achievements of most of the economists who win the prize are so abstract and disconnected from the real world as to be utterly meaningless.

The question is: Why would a prize that draws so much hatred and negativity from the scientific community be added to the Nobel roster so late in the game? And why economics?

   

To answer that question we have to go back to Sweden in the 1960s.

Around the time the prize was created, Sweden’s banking and business interests were busy trying to ram through various free-market economic reforms. Their big objective at the time was to loosen political oversight and control over the country’s central bank.

According to Philip Mirowski, a professor at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in the history economics, the “Bank of Sweden was trying to become more independent of democratic accountability in the late 60s, and there was a big political dispute in Sweden as to whether the bank could have effective political independence. In order to support that position, the bank needed to claim that it had a kind of scientific credibility that was not grounded in political support.”

Promoters of central bank independence made their arguments in the language of neoclassical market efficiency. The problem was that few people in Sweden took their neoclassical babble very seriously, and saw their plan for central bank independence for what it was: an attempt to transfer control over economic matters from a democratically elected government and place into the hands of big business interests, giving them a free hand in running Sweden’s economy without pesky interference from labor unions, voters and elected officials.

And that’s where the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic Sciences came in.

The details of how the deal went down are still very murky. What is known is that in 1969 Sweden’s central bank used the pretense of its 300th anniversary to push through an  independent prize in “economic science” in memory of Alfred Nobel, and closely link it with the original Nobel Prize awards. The name was a bit longer, the medals looked a little different and the award money did not come from Nobel, but in every other way it was hard to tell the two apart. To ensure the prize would be awarded to the right economists, the bank managed to install a rightwing Swedish economist named Assar Lindbeck, who had ties to University of Chicago, to oversee the awards committee and keep him there for more than three decades. (Lindbeck’s famous free-market one-liner is:  “In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.”)

For the first few years, the Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economics went to fairly mainstream and maybe even semi-respectable economists. But after establishing the award as credible and serious, the prizes took a hard turn to the right.

Over the next decade, the prize was awarded to the most fanatical supporters of theories that concentrated wealth to the top .0001%.

In 1974, five years after the prize was first created, it was awarded to Friedrich von Hayek, the leading laissez-fair economist of the 20th century and the godfather of neoclassical economics. Milton Friedman, who was at the University of Chicago with Hayek, was not far behind…

 

Bush2 honoring libertarian zealot and capitalist evangelist Milton Friedman

  

This is a preview of a full letter that is only available to subscribers. To get the rest, sign up and read it here. 

Yasha Levine is a Russian-American investigative journalist and author. Levine, who was born in the Soviet Union, is a former editor of Moscow-based satirical newspaper The eXile. He has written the book Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet which was published in 2018.


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EMMA AND LESSER EVILS

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Paul Edwards


Time has come for life to imitate art in America...and improve on it.

With the Presidential election weeks away now and the country rigidly polarized—people violently divided on matters rooted deeply in their moral and cultural biases and unreconcilable—an urgent call is made from true believers in the democratic process, liberals mainly, to vote. 

 
While this is nothing new, the pressure this cycle is more intense than ever.  The mantra goes like this: if you don’t vote for their candidate, the other will win, and that will be the end of America.  By voting, you act to preserve our great democracy, hence not voting is unthinkable.  It would sully your citizenship and spurn your priceless birthright.

"Try to recall the last legislation that socio-economically benefited the American people at large.  Stumped?  That might be because it was before you were born.  Two bills have passed that were indisputably for the public good: Social Security, in 1935 under FDR, which also provided for unemployment and aid to mothers with dependent children; and Medicare/Medicaid, under LBJ in 1965.  That’s it. "
 
Two elements in the mantra need revision.  First, we don’t have, have never had, a democracy; at best, a hamstrung republic.  Second, not voting won’t end America and whatever you wish to call what we do have.  America is ending itself fine on its own, regardless of voting, campaigning, and all the Dada imbecile trappings of our polity.
 
So, what drives this persistent, passionate adjuration?  Why are so many so certain of its critical importance? The idea of democracy, at its origins, was to entrust governance to the Demos, the People.  It was a noble concept that, when implemented, was quickly subverted by brute economic power and has been, when tried, ever since.
 
Human history, as far back as we can trace it, has been a tale of the tyranny of economic power in various forms, and the struggle of the  people for equity, endlessly waged and endlessly defeated.  Until very recently, power had no need to disguise itself because its mandate was said to be divine.  Only in the last few hundred years has a rising tide of popular discontent forced power to camouflage its cruelty and corruption.  Democracy—the idea of it—has been its very best cover.
 
A rank simplification here… If I have an unstable power over you and your group while taking all that is yours by force, to obtain security I need you to accept my theft as justified.  So I create a system that lets you endorse me by voting.  If necessary, I allow a rival to oppose me.  If he’s a flunky, he loses graciously.  If not, my election bureau will find that he was beaten legitimately but your voice was heard.
 
That’s the primitive model of the “democracy” ruse, employed by all absolutists: caudillos, dictators, military capos.  Nations claiming to be democracies refined their methods to disguise their predatory nature.  The fact that every one is an exploitative Capitalist Tyranny obviously required a more subtle, persuasive masking.  
 
The method was creation of a multi-party system, each one founded on specific principles, theoretically presenting a range of options, left to right, with radical outliers at the extremes.  None, regardless of tint and tilt, could be seen to be acting against the interest of the people.  

Allowing choice conceals the fact that “democratic” government, just as all others, serves only its economic elite.  People have to be convinced this is not so, that they are sovereign, that by voting they control the policies of their nation.  Thus, the intense effort nations invest in sacralizing the vote, and the plea that we do our civic duty.  We are all enjoined to act in this barefaced, shopworn charade.
 

Goldman: No illusions about bourgeois democracy's rituals.


A century ago, battling the monstrous power of rampant Capitalism, Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”  She saw that the core purpose of “democratic” government had nothing to do with improving the lot of its people, and everything to do with maximizing profit for the Capitalist juggernaut.  No country on earth has greater government/Capitalism symbiosis than America. 
 
Most Americans, after life-long indoctrination, can’t believe they have been deceived about their government, bytheir government.  A short exercise can address that inability.  (If your net worth is $10 million, or your annual income $1 million, stop reading.  Nothing for you here.)
 
Try to recall the last legislation that socio-economically benefited the American people at large.  Stumped?  That might be because it was before you were born.  Two bills have passed that were indisputably for the public good: Social Security, in 1935 under FDR, which also provided for unemployment and aid to mothers with dependent children; and Medicare/Medicaid, under LBJ in 1965.  That’s it.  
 
Take that in.  Digest that.  There has been, in 55 years—the better part of a normal lifetime—no legislation to significantly socially and economically benefit 300 million ordinary American people.  None.
 
One would think that a raging flame from that titanic betrayal would burn great, ragged holes in the smothering blanket of propaganda under which our government hides its crimes.   One would think that, like the Finch character in Network, Americans would all be roaring, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” 
 
But, no.  Instead, the public—passive, deluded victim of this cynical abuse—is urged to vote, to preserve the desperately dirty, spiritually sick racket that has deceived, defrauded and impoverished them.
 
The indoctrination is being reinforced by the unity of most Deep State heavyweights appalled at the ludicrous, pants-dropping burleycue Trump has made of the presidency and, more importantly, desperate to regain control of what they regard as their very own ship of state.  With fronting by the Dem Politburo’s Crone and Geezer junta, and all media—visual and print—but Fox, they are all in on replacing their nightmare with the appalling ghost of the reprehensible Joe Biden.  
 
Apart from the fact that Joe is far past his sell-by date, Biden has been on the morally and ethically wrong side of every major policy issue that has arisen throughout his endless tenure as the Senator from MBNA.  The list is long.  Let it suffice that he shilled for mass jailing of black men, cheerled for the Iraq invasion, lauds the Zionist Nazism of Israel, and is a major War Machine flack baiting China and Russia.  Oh, and there’s the multi-million black bag job he and son, Hunter, pulled with Burisma in that hog’s nest of corruption, Ukraine.
 
When you live in a false, rotten Capitalist “democracy” in which there is no hope of reform; when the same vile crimes and depredations will continue at home and abroad under either contemptible phony; when nothing of value to people or the world is even considered by either dead soul, then engaging in fine gradations of imposed evils is a lunatic’s exercise.  Emma got it.  We keep hoping for a different result.  

PAUL EDWARDS, Senior Contributing Editor •  Paul  is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”


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A New Book Warns of the Imminent Danger of a Kamala Harris Presidency

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Love is here again. All is forgiven, Joe.


by MAX PARRY

With the 2020 U.S. presidential election less than a month away, there is widespread speculation concerning Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s mental and physical fitness at 77 years of age if he were to defeat incumbent Donald Trump on November 3rd. The former Vice President and Senator from Delaware would surpass his opponent as the oldest to ever hold the office of the presidency if victorious, while his generally acknowledged cognitive decline has led many to question whether he is even capable of serving a single term. Given the concerns about his health, the likelihood that Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, would become his successor has put the controversial former prosecutor and California Attorney General’s own politics under scrutiny, though not to a degree sufficient with the odds she could very well become commander-in-chief in the near future. Trump himself suggested it was the hidden motivation behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent introduction of a 25th Amendment commission on removing a “mentally unfit” president to enable the replacement of an incapacitated Biden with Harris after the election. Even Saturday Night Live recently joked about Biden’s poor first debate performance as a Harris term in-the-making — but as journalist Caleb Maupin explains in his new book Kamala Harris and the Future of America: An Essay in Three Parts, the prospect of her becoming president is no laughing matter.

Maupin’s ambitious essay surpasses the redundant analysis of the vice-presidential nominee by placing her political success in a broader historical context while forewarning the unique danger of a budding Harris administration waiting in the wings. The majority of the critical examinations of Harris during the campaign have critiqued her rebranding as an outwardly “progressive” figure in stark contrast with the reality of her career as a ruthless criminal prosecutor turned establishment politician. While that is true, Maupin’s analysis takes an important step further by formulating the rise of Harris, who is the first Jamaican and South Asian-American nominee on a major party ticket, as the culmination of the U.S. left’s failures in the last several decades resulting in its present deteriorated state preoccupied with liberal identity politics. More specifically, a result of the defeats suffered by the so-called New Left of the 1960s and 70s which had long-term consequences for progressive politics in America today.

Although not a biography, Maupin does link Harris’s psychological profile, personality traits and upbringing with her political career which he parallels with the life stories of previous presidents and other political figures. Born in 1964, Harris was raised in a hub of the organized left in the Bay Area by immigrant parents who were politically active during her early childhood in Northern California. While not a communist, her estranged Jamaican-American father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University professor and Marxian economist whose work influenced the progressive domestic reforms in his native island country during the administration of Prime Minister Michael Manley, a democratic socialist who introduced land redistribution, socialized medicine and free education until Jamaica’s neocolonization by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) decimated the Carribean nation with enormous debt, as explored in the documentary Life and Debt (2001). Young Kamala grew up attending civil rights protests in Berkeley with her parents until their bitter divorce which resulted in her Indian-American mother gaining sole custody. Maupin dares to ask — is her chosen career path as a criminal prosecutor and top legal officer disproportionately locking up black men unconsciously motivated by a vendetta against her father? Could it even explain her thinly-veiled contempt for the progressive politics she now pretends to uphold as a politician?

Maupin also argues that Harris was likely groomed for her present role as Biden’s running mate by the Clintonite wing of Democratic Party once it became apparent Hillary was not in a position to run again in 2020, citing a 2017 closed door meeting in the Hamptons with elite party donors and apparatchiks. Despite her own early exit from the primaries after a knockout blow in the debates delivered by Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii who sharply criticized her record as a prosecutor, Harris was already vetted by the party leadership to be Biden’s heir apparent. For the Democratic establishment, she is the perfect choice to derail the emerging progressive faction of the party led by Bernie Sanders which champions a similar brand of the social democratic politics championed by her father. This could also hold disastrous geopolitical implications, as the world is still reeling from the four years spent ravaged by the foreign policy of Hillary Clinton’s State Department which oversaw the wholesale destruction of several nations in the global south. We can only expect the same regime change policies from Harris if she is cut from the same cloth.

Maupin then uses Harris and her Berkeley upbringing to explore the history of leftism in the United States, tracing the New Left’s ceding of leadership roles to students and marginal groups while discarding labor rights and the class struggle back to the influence of the Frankfurt School of Social Theory. The philosophical movement of intellectuals and academics associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, otherwise known as ‘critical theory’, put forward that both capitalist societies and Marxist-Leninist states like the Soviet Union were equally rigid “totalitarian” systems. The interdisciplinary sociological school viewed Marx’s prediction of revolutionary emancipation in the 20th century as an evident failure and rejected the historical materialism of orthodox Marxism, arguing that forces of economic change were undermined by the dominant ideology of the ruling class represented in mass media which produced false consciousness in the working class. Theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse attempted to reformulate Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis and other disciplines while critiquing mass consumer culture and modern technology.

As the impact of the Frankfurt School gave rise to the New Left in the U.S. and Western Europe, mass social movements became housed in the universities instead of the factories. This was favorable to the ruling class, as student-led counterculture revolts were much easier to control in comparison with a revolution organized by the workers. If any authentic revolutionary leaders did emerge, they were quickly neutralized. After the student protests of 1968, the New Left withdrew further to its comfort zone in the realm of ideas and out of the streets, which was perfectly alright with the powers that be since they were intellectuals who denounced Marxism-Leninism. Soon the academy would be dominated by an even more pessimistic and “anti-authoritarian” ideology, postmodernism, which rejected the value of all universal truths and grand narratives. How did this all happen?

Maupin emphasizes that the intelligentsia of the New Left were actively supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through its clandestine Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) program during the Cold War, which sought to subvert the sympathies of liberals and the non-communist left with the Soviet Union through the covert funding of prominent literary magazines, journals, international conferences, modern art exhibitions, and other cultural activities. The objective was to promote an intellectual consensus on the Western left that the Soviet Union was to be opposed as much as capitalism and it was indisputably successful. Meanwhile, the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commissions of the 1970s exposed how in the previous decade the CIA had played an enormous role in introducing drugs to the counterculture as part of its domestic espionage against the anti-war movement in Operation Midnight Climax, a sub-program of Project MK-Ultra, where the Bay Area became a petri dish for its human experimentation. With the drug culture came the popularization of eastern mysticism and eventually, the New Age movement.

 
As it happens, the relationship between the CIA and the New Left’s intellectuals goes back to its origins. One of the most prominent idealogues of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse — often referred to as the “father of the New Left” — spent almost a full decade during the 1940s working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, and as an anti-Soviet intelligence analyst in the U.S. State Department. This was not just during wartime but continued well after WWII was over in West Germany until 1951 when Marcuse immigrated to the United States to work as a professor at universities on the east coast, the same year that the CCF was founded. However, one interesting fact that Maupin overlooks is that while Kamala Harris was growing up in Oakland in the 1960s, Marcuse relocated his teaching career out to the west coast at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where his work continued to be cited as an influence by the middle-class student activists and radicals of the counterculture as the left drifted further away from the socialist countries and the working class. The documentary Herbert’s Hippopotamus: Marcuse and Revolution in Paradise examines Marcuse’s time in Southern California in the late 60s.

Prior to his work in the OSS, in Weimar Germany the young Marcuse had been a pupil of philosopher Martin Heidegger even as his mentor infamously joined the ascendant Nazi Party, though the relationship came to an end once Marcuse’s own academic career was obstructed by the Third Reich in the early 1930s. One of the major thinkers associated with the New Left promoted by the CCF was a former lover of Heidegger’s, Hannah Arendt, who penned one of the most seminal and harmful works in equating the Soviet Union with Nazi Germany as twin pillars of authoritarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism. In particular, Maupin takes aim at Arendt’s essay Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil where she famously observed Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s thoughtless conformism and ministerial disposition in his lack of remorse for his atrocities while covering his trial. Maupin interprets her notion as implicitly concluding that lurking underneath the surface of every ordinary hardworking person is a potential fascist, therefore anyone who would try to organize them for a collective cause is a threat to society. This cynical, psychoanalytic definition of fascism as rooted in what Adorno called the “authoritarian personality” replaced the Marxist economic understanding. Yet in spite of her work, Arendt controversially participated in the shameful post-war apologia and rehabilitation of Heidegger’s reputation.

Critics might say that Maupin’s diagnosis of the Western left as the manipulated brainchild of Western intelligence agencies is oversimplistic, conspiratorial or risks espousing a form of vulgar Marxism. Indeed, it is a touchy subject for those too personally connected to the artistic and intellectual milieu of the time to accept the undeniably significant role played by the CIA in subverting leftist politics, arts and culture in the second half of the twentieth century. Some on the left will inevitably try to dismiss his analysis by likening it to the right-wing canard of “cultural Marxism” spoken of by paleoconservatives simply because of the overlap in mutual subjects of criticism. Nonetheless, there is a small kernel of truth at the heart the right’s mostly fictitious narrative of Western Marxism’s control of academia but unfortunately, what they misinterpret as a plot to “subvert Western culture” was hatched at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia — not the former Soviet Union. Today’s pseudo-left which recoils working people is truly an imposter generated by the CIA’s cultural cold war program to replace actual Marxism, the real casualty of the pervasiveness of Western Marxism in universities.

Others may find Maupin’s assessment of the Frankfurt School and thinkers of the New Left to be too dismissive of their contributions. Ironically, Adorno’s worthwhile conception of “actionism” applies to the left-wing anti-intellectualism and leaderless, spontaneous voluntarism of the very movement to which the Frankfurt School gave birth and is even more relevant per Maupin’s thorough description of what he calls the “synthetic left” today. Look no further than the 'propaganda of the deed’ which dominates Antifa and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests this year. In Thesis on Feuerbach, Karl Marx articulated the predicament of revolutionary politics in his day being restrained by the gap between thought and action, or “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” One could say the mantra of the Western left now seems to be taking action without any thought whatsoever. Or as Lenin wrote in What is to be Done?, “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”

If the idea that Kamala Harris represents an apotheosis of the New Left’s failures feels like a bit of a stretch, it is only because the examination warrants further inquiry which Maupin should continue in his work, regardless of the outcome of the 2020 election. Nevertheless, in just a little over 125 pages he manages to comprehensively piece together the trajectory of the Western left from the end of WWII to what can only be described as its “stinking corpse” today, a term once used by Rosa Luxembourg to describe the treacherous Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) after it voted to support the imperialist bloodbath of WWI in 1914. Maupin’s use of Harris and the environment she grew up in as a springboard to investigate the shortcomings of the Western left generally is a formidable exploration that is desperately needed at a time where the American people are faced with the probability of enduring yet another destructive administration and no authentic left to represent it.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media. Max may be reached at maxrparry@live.com


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MUMIA ABU-JAMAL’S AUDIO INTERVIEW. HE IS A TOWER OF REVOLUTIONARY RESISTANCE AND AN INEXHAUSTIBLE INSPIRATION FOR US ALL

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Jeff J. Brown
SPECIAL INTERVIEW

MUMIA ABU-JAMAL’S AUDIO INTERVIEW. HE IS A TOWER OF REVOLUTIONARY RESISTANCE AND AN INEXHAUSTIBLE INSPIRATION FOR US ALL, IN THE FACE OF SEEMINGLY INSURMOUNTABLE ODDS. PARTS I OF II. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND 201003

Originally posted on October 3, 2020
Pictured above: political prisoner of conscience, Mumia Abu-Jamal. He is a freedom fighter, intellectual and global hope for social and economic justice demanded by humanity’s 99%.

Downloadable SoundCloud podcast (also at the bottom of this page), Bitchute, Brighteon, YouTube videos, as well as being syndicated on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, RUvid and Ivoox (links below),

Note before starting: This post’s audio and video podcasts are in two parts. Part I is our 25-minute interview. Part II is a reading of my Prologue, Mumia’s Biography and Epilogue.

Part I: 25-minute audio/video interview

Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZbAqRojUwr6T/

Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/dashboard/videos/906cbaa6-288a-4cc7-a35d-516e9d682680

Part II: Prologue, Mumia’s biography and Epilogue

Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/video/3fkAHv3FA5vn/

Brighteon: https://www.brighteon.com/dashboard/videos/13b0392f-6c11-422f-8a3b-5656fad864c7

 
Please download, share and distribute Mumia’s full interview PDF file:
 

Prologue

It is hard to describe what has transpired with Mumia Abu-Jamal, since 6 June 2020, when I sent him my first message via his prison’s for profit “email” system.

Like an uninformed goober, I sent him hyperlinks to my website and books, only to learn that Mumia is completely cut off from the internet. This “Prison Connect Network” is the only way I could communicate with him, and to stifle the exchange of information, you can only send 2,000 characters – not words – characters per message. That’s like three paragraphs at a time, and it costs money for each message.

Not only that, but it’s crap quality, like using Microsoft DOS 30 years ago. I learned quickly to copy and save all my messages, since half the time I have to start over, as the system crashes frequently. The vendor, GTL must pay some handsome sunshine bribes to get this contract for concentration camps all over the USA, charging monopoly rates for prisoners to telephone and be called by loved ones. For friends and family members struggling to put food on the table and pay the rent, it’s a vexing situation.

Thus, our now four-month long journey to work together through this dog-end messaging system began and continues. Including our interview below, I have 25 pages of communication between us.

Through it all, I am humbled and inspired by Mumia’s infectious good humor and unswerving optimism. He reminds me of one of those tall, inflatable figures that have rounded, sand-filled bottoms. No matter how hard you push, hit or kick them, they always pop right back up. For me, that’s a perfect metaphor for Mumia. He frequently puts a music note symbol at the end of his messages, likes he’s singing a happy song.

Yet, here is a man who has sacrificed his freedom for a cause – the revolutionary ideals of the Black Panther Party (BPP), his support for Philadelphia’s MOVE and their collective fight for socialism’s vanguard party, all power to the people, self-determination and to serve the people. He is a political prisoner trapped in the USA system of private concentration camps. Framed for a shooting that appears to have been a set-up, Mumia has been on death row, held in solitary confinement for many years, has to hire lawyers to get lifesaving medical care, and other than this aforementioned messaging system, phones calls and prison visits across thick plate glass, he has been cut off and incarcerated since 1982, when he was only 28 years of age. Today, he is 66, six days older than me.

I feel lucky to have lived and worked with the Chinese people for 16 years. It taught me a lot and changed my life. However, at Mumia’s same age, I feel just as fortunate to have recently learned about the Black Panther Party, its amazing history of courage, conviction, and the countless members who have been government assassinated and illegally held in USA concentration camps, since its founding in 1966. As a result, all this knowledge and understanding has changed my life’s perspectives, just as much as my time living in China.

At the same time, over the last four months of struggling to communicate via the rinky-dink prison messaging system, through it all, across the oceans and continents, I feel like I’ve made a friend and revolutionary comrade. Since we are the same age, we can stay in touch into our senior years, wherever we may be – hopefully Mumia finally being liberated from the USA concentration camp system. My next return back, I would be honored to go meet him in Frackville, Pennsylvania, USA, to talk across that thick sheet of glass, and eventually share a good Chinese meal upon his liberation!

It is a great honor and privilege to introduce Comrade Mumia Abu-Jamal to all the friends, fans and followers of China Rising Radio Sinoland across Planet Earth. I hope you will share this post and its audio/video podcasts widely, (I will also include a downloadable PDF file for easy distribution) to bring more pressure on the USA injustice system to liberate him from his illegal incarceration, as a political prisoner of conscious. Sadly, there are many like him (https://operamundi.uol.com.br/politica-e-economia/40718/a-list-of-54-political-prisoners-in-the-united-states).

After our interview, there is Mumia’s biography. It has instructions to support his legal defense, as well as how to send him mail and books – and be forewarned – there are two different addresses and systems. I hope you will contribute to his cause. I sent him my China Trilogy, my father’s book about Civil War slavery and one hundred pages of off-the-internet articles. For the future, I have decided to help him overcome being cut off from the internet, by staying registered and sending him via the messaging system, texts of articles he might not otherwise see.

Finally, there is also an epilogue with some extracts from Huey P. Newton’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, which really resonate from all my experiences with Mumia.

(Credit: J. Griffin)

Interview (text of its 25-minute audio podcast)

Question and Answer #1

Jeff J. Brown:  First, I would like to thank John Potash, who inspired me to contact you (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2019/12/16/john-potash-talks-about-his-explosive-book-the-fbi-war-on-tupac-shakur-and-black-leaders-u-s-intelligences-murderous-targeting-of-tupac-mlk-malcolm-panthers-hendrix-marley/ and https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/02/28/john-potash-talks-about-his-explosive-book-drugs-as-a-weapon-against-us-cia-murderous-war-on-musicians-and-activists/), and in the interim, having interviewed Chairman Fred Hampton, Jr (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/05/27/chairman-fred-hampton-jr-the-black-panther-pantha-cubs-their-revolution-for-self-determination-to-serve-the-people-and-fight-the-us-governments-ongoing-program-of-domestic-genocide-on-china/).

Comrade Mumia, friends, fans and followers around the world are always seeking courage to stand up to global capitalism, oligarchic control of the world’s non-communist, non-socialist peoples and the tyranny and genocide of Western empire. They are hesitant to step outside the oppressive conformity of the Matrix.

They really get inspired hearing stories of others who have taken these steps along their arc of awareness, towards freedom of conscious and liberation of the soul. Some learn sooner than others. I didn’t get it until 2010, when I was 56 and having moved back to China for the second time. You are six days older than me. Better late than never!

Now, thanks to reading John Potash’s two outstanding books and doing hundreds of hours of reading and research, my arc has recently been raised to another critical level, in learning about the Black Panther Party. (BPP), its unexpected nexus with Comrade Mao Zedong and other great international heroes of socialism and solidarity (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2020/06/08/protests-in-usa-land-of-marlboro-man-will-come-to-nothing-because-there-is-no-solidarity-no-vision-nor-guiding-ideology-to-unite-the-people-in-common-struggle-against-the-1-just-ask-the-black-pan/).

Comrade Mumia, please share with us your arc of awareness growing up in the United States as a Black man, and what inspired you to fight for social and economic justice for the 99%. Your encouragement is invaluable to those who are hesitating to join the cause.

Mumia and his wife


Mumia Abu Jamal: Dear Jeff: I greet you–and yours. When I think of the 60s, I remember times of vast movement across many communities for national independence, for freedom, for self-determination, against state repression and against imperialist wars like Vietnam. This period, in retrospect, was one of convergence of many social movements coming together with a broad, deep vision of another country, one tied not to slavery and oppression, but to a liberating vision that ignited a generation or seemed to the system, used all of its tentacles to pull people apart, chiefly racism, and muddy that vision to one of cool acquiescence.

Remember that movie The Big Chill? Such times as these are visionary eras when and where people look over the walls of their prisons for a brief glance at freedom, the freedom offered by possibility. Because Fred Hampton not only had this vision and acted to craft it into being. He was killed in his bid by the state to dock in the eyes of a generation. Movements are made by collectives of people who have hope for social transformation or as anthropologist Margaret Mead said, you paraphrase, never doubt that a small group can change the world if the only thing that ever has to grow up in such a time was truly remarkable and a wonderful thing.

Question and Answer #2

Jeff: These days, Black Lives Matter (BLM), a non-governmental organization (NGO) is splashed all over the global mainstream media and has broad, popular support. However, it’s not all such a rosy, revolutionary picture. Soon after forming, it took $100 million in donations via the Ford Foundation and affiliate NGOs. Just recently, George Soros’ foundations have pumped $220 million into Black justice groups, as well as Antifa and many others. These are astronomical sums of money.

It is widely known that Ford Foundation and left-wing philanthropists are largely fronts for the CIA and deep state, hiding behind their liberal image. This strongly suggests that BLM, Antifa and their ancillary groups are being used as managed opposition to satisfy the ambitions of our oligarchic 1% and are likely fully infiltrated by agents and fifth columnists. Occupy Wall Street was another prime example of this happening.

What to do? If you were handed the BLM movement, what would you do to try to right the ship? Was MOVE infiltrated? I’ve read the Black Panthers also had, and I assume still fight the same problem.

What recommendations do you have for anti-imperial, anti-capitalist people who want to organize and take their movement to the next level, without becoming managed opposition?

Mumia: Dear Jeff: Ona Mover! Greetings! As I contemplated your last question, I remembered a book I read several years ago entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. It illustrated how the right used its excess capital to build and sustain think tanks, which intellectually supported the system of capitalism, the wealth of the left had no quarrel, for its excess capital went to social services, but not the erection of ideological structures. The authors essentially instructed activists to not get caught in these weapons of the wealthy. But when you think about it, doesn’t it make sense? Why should it surprise us that the system perpetuates the system? Who expects capitalism to build revolutionary structures that are inherently anticapitalist? BLM is not the BPP except in the mind of Rudy Giuliani, perhaps. The BPP was nominally politically independent because its newspaper funded its operations. When poor, black people organize, the wealthy seek to control and moderate them. When that doesn’t work, it unleashes its “hidden” to extinguish such movements. Hence the ferocity of the attacks on groups like the BPP and MOVE. It unleashes its corporate media to demonize those who resist the forces of exploitation.

Remember this? American revolutionaries were invariably rich guys who fought to preserve a system of slavery, captive labor. George Washington was one of the richest men in the colonies, owning hundreds of people and vast tracts of land. Thomas Jefferson also owned hundreds of black captives, but had the decency to write that one hour of slavery’s misery was worse than wages of British rule over America that sparked a revolution. Oppressive systems continue to buy off people so that those systems can continue to function. There’s an old saying. He who takes the Kings coin dances to his tune.

If BLM were mine. I’d institute an intense study of history to show how systems try to show how systems try to defang popular movements. I develop an independent economic stream to support organizational frameworks, they teach COINTELPRO efforts to destabilize social change movements. That said, BLM or Smart inform young folks who may not want nor need anything from an old head like me. That’s because the youth movements must be youth movements, that is their essence, that is who they were born to be. alla best, maj♪

Question and Answer #3:

Jeff: Dear Mumia, History seems to repeat itself across our Pale Blue Dot.

In 1962-1964, the leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) in the Republic of South Africa were rounded up. They were convicted for their political activities and beliefs, including Nelson Mandela. The Apartheid government wanted to put them to death, but international pressure forced them into sentencing them to prison for life. Apartheid eventually fell, due to years of internal and global pressure, as well as economic sanctions. Starting in 1985, these freedom fighters began to be released from incarceration, with Mandela being the last in 1990.

In 1966, the Black Panther Party was founded. In 1972, MOVE was founded in your hometown of Philadelphia, also becoming a primary target of the CIA-FBI genocidal war on all Black liberation movements. In 1978, nine MOVE members were rounded up and sent to prison for life for their political activities and beliefs. You actively supported MOVE and in 1981-82, also became a political prisoner and given the death penalty, which was later commuted to life. Starting in 2018, the MOVE 9 who were still alive behind bars began to be released from prison, with the last one set free in February 2020. You are still in prison for life and trying to get out.

Question: how do you compare the ANCs liberation movement and Nelson Mandela’s cause to eventually be released from political prison, to that of the Black Panther Party, MOVE and your efforts to gain your freedom?

Question and Answer #4:

Jeff: This was in the alternative media today, which you might find interesting,

Get the f**k out!: WATCH Chicago residents confront BLM protesters in tense standoff

Residents of Chicago’s Englewood community angrily accosted a group of Black Lives Matter protesters who showed up to demonstrate at a police station, where hostilities between locals and activists nearly boiled over into a brawl.

A BLM protest march from Englewood to Chicago’s 7th District police station on Tuesday ended in a showdown with community members, at times devolving into shouting matches as locals insisted the demonstrators were giving their neighborhood a bad name.

If you ain’t from Englewood, get the f**k out of here! longtime south side resident Darryl Smith was heard shouting at the protesters, who he said were not from the community.

They were… gonna come to Englewood, antagonizing our police, and then when they go back home to the north side in Indiana, our police are bitter and they’re beating up our little black boys, Smith told reporters on the scene, adding that we don’t need any outsiders coming and antagonizing.

A photojournalist with the Chicago Sun-Times (Tyler LaRiviere) tweeted some of the march’s more tense moments, including when a heated argument nearly escalated into a physical confrontation.

Tweet: From earlier Daryl Smith an Englewood resident of 51 years, and community activists tells reporters why he doesn’t want protesters in his neighborhood.

Tweet: Tensions between community members are growing, community activists aren’t tolerating these folks here.

Tweet: Community members continue to ask protesters to leave and ask where are you when a baby’s shot.

Tweet: Some community members and protesters are getting into arguments here at the 7th district police station, many community members are demanding that these protesters leave their community and protest somewhere else.

An organizer of the protest, which was put together by members of Black Lives Matter and advocacy group Good Kids Mad City, told a local news outlet that some demonstrators decided to leave following conflict with residents, saying they felt unsafe. Other organizers maintained they were from the local area, but they said they decided not to participate in the rally due to agitators.

The protest came days after the police shooting of a 20-year-old suspect who reportedly opened fire on officers, which kicked off a spree of looting in downtown Chicago over the weekend. Smith said the unrest had been unfairly blamed on Englewood, and that the protesters were only feeding that perception.

A lot of people are saying the looting downtown sparked from Englewood. We’re not having that. It didn’t spark from Englewood, he said. Those looters were opportunists, and we’re tired of Englewood getting a black eye for any and everything that happens.

Some 400 officers were deployed to the downtown shopping district to quell the looting on Sunday, making over 100 arrests amid what Mayor Lori Lightfoot dubbed an assault on our city.

What do you think, Mumia?

Question and answer #5

Jeff: If someone asks me what are the three favorite books that I’ve written, it not a hard question, since I’ve only published four! You, however, have been a fairly prolific author, with 10 books published, by my count.

I’m going to have to ask you to brag on yourself a little here, so friends, fans and followers of China Rising Radio Sinolandcan learn more about you and your mission:

  1. What are your three favorites amongst your body of work?
  2. Please briefly describe each one.
  3. Then tell us what you like about each one and why it’s a good choice for us to read.

Written works

  1. Have Black Lives Ever Mattered? City Lights Publishers, (2017) ISBN 9780872867383
  2. Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal. City Lights Publishers (2015) ISBN 978-0872866751
  3. The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America. Third World Press (2011) ISBN 978-0883783375
  4. Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners in the U.S.A. City Lights Publishers (2009) ISBN 978-0872864696
  5. We Want Freedom: A Life In The Black Panther Party. South End Press (200 ISBN 978-0896087187
  6. Faith Of Our Fathers: An Examination Of The Spiritual Life Of African And African-American People. Africa World Press (2003) ISBN 978-1592210190
  7. All Things Censored. Seven Stories Press (2000) ISBN 978-1583220221
  8. Death Blossoms: Reflections From A Prisoner Of Conscience. Plough Publishing House (1997) ISBN 978-0874860863
  9. Live from Death Row. Harper Perennial (1996) ISBN 978-0380727667
  10. Mumia Speaks (pamphlet)

In revolutionary solidarity, Jeff

Mumia: Dear Bro. Jeff: How are ya?

When I getta question like this (about my faves), I recall a conversation I had years ago w/ the sci-fi award-winning writer, Terry Bisson. He said, ‘It’s like asking a father to say who is his favorite child–it’s impossible!’. That’s my answer, Jeff. I dig all the works I’ve ever written; because they spoke for the time they were written. Plus, it really doesn’t matter what my fave is: it matters to the Reader(s), for they really decide this question. That’s my answer, man. — maj♪

Question and answer #6

Jeff: Dear Comrade Mumia, I loved your answer to Question 5. As they say in the sport of fencing, touché.

We’ve got a good set of Q&A. Here is a final one:

Over the last four months, we’ve spent time getting to know each other as revolutionary friends and comrades.

You know I lived and worked in China for 16 years.

What would you like to ask me about this amazing nation, its people, 5,000-year civilization and communist-socialist revolution, to close out this interview?

Sino-best, Jeff

Mumia: Ah, flip the script, huh? Actually, I would, for 16 years is a considerable amount of time to dwell in a place, specifically a foreign nation. I wonder, based on that long, 5,000-year history of Chinese civilization that You mentioned, what are the continuities that You see that have survived the 1929 revolution? allá best, maj♪

Jeff’s answer: This is really an excellent question, Mumia, because Mao Zedong worked really hard to create a “New China”, to be people-powered by “New Chinese”, not the ones and their leaders who let Western and Japanese imperialists rape, plunder and ply them with illegal drugs, from 1839 to 1949, which is known as China’s “Century of Humiliation”.

For sure, Mao succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination at these two goals. If he hadn’t, China would have already been suborned to Western, oligarchic capitalism, only to be turned into a continent-sized, balkanized resource whore like Indonesia, or an occupied narco-state like Columbia. I always say that half the Chinese like Deng Xiaoping’s market oriented reforms and opening up – the urbanites – the rural folk less so, but 95% of them agree with Mao’s geopolitical worldview: that is, imperialism, colonialism and global capitalism are the enemy of China and its communism and socialism. For this reason, the Chinese are some of the most aware and savvy people, about history and current events.

That being said, Mao could not undo five millennia of continuous civilization. Confucism, Daoism and Buddhism are a very powerful and influential guiding force in the mentality, spirituality and daily conduct of the people, and always were after 1949, even when the official and public focus was on the revolution. While Mao’s “Little Red Book” is among the most sold titles in history, the Chinese people continued to and still love their ancient literature, poetry, paintings, calligraphy, sculpture, dance, acrobatics, opera, music and their version of Vaudeville.

From the very start in 2012, President Xi Jinping’s administration began to synthesize this vast cultural and historical repository with the Communist Party of China as the vanguard party. This was to protect the people from Western sabotage of their highly successful Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and communist way of life, thus making it possible for the nation to prosper, develop and progress in its own interests, not those in Eurangloland.

It all comes full circle. This is similar to the Black Panthers establishing their vanguard party to protect and empower the people to provide for themselves and prosper, while drawing on global and national Black cultural and historical reserves to help maintain the spirit of solidarity.

End of audio interview. 

Mumia Abu-Jamal biography

The state would rather give me an Uzi than a microphone.  — Mumia Abu-Jamal

Mumia Abu Jamal is an award-winning broadcast journalist, essayist, and author of 12 books. Most recently, he’s completed the historic trilogy Murder Incorporated, its third volume Perfecting Tyranny coming out this fall to follow Dreaming of Empire and America’s Favorite Pastime.

Prophet, critic, historian, witness . . . Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of the most insightful and consequential intellectuals of our era. These razor sharp reflections on racialized state violence in America are the fire and the memory our movements need right now.  — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

In the late 1970s, Abu-Jamal worked as a reporter for radio stations throughout the Delaware Valley. He was a staff reporter for WUHY (now WHYY), the NPR flagship station, and he filed nationally for All Things Considered and the Morning Report. Along with his team at Philadelphia’s WUHY, he won the prestigious Major Armstrong Award (1980) from Columbia University for excellence in broadcasting. In 1981, Abu-Jamal was elected president of the Association of Black Journalists’ Philadelphia chapter. For the past 38 years, Abu-Jamal has lived in state prison. 28 of those years were spent in solitary confinement on death row. Currently, he’s serving life without parole at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, PA. Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial and its resultant first-degree murder conviction have been criticized as unconstitutionally corrupt by legal and activist groups for decades, including Amnesty International and Nobel Laureates Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, and Desmond Tutu. Abu-Jamal has earned overwhelming international support. His demand for a new trial and for freedom is supported by the European Parliament. He has been made an honorary citizen of Paris, France. Abu-Jamal earned his BA at Goddard College in 1996; his MA from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 1999; and an honorary Doctorate of Law from the New College of California in 1996. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

Legal Team:

Sam Spital, Legal Director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Judith Ritter, Professor of Law Widner University.
Common Pleas Court ruling 3/27/2020

Medical Legal Team:

Bret Grote, Legal Director Abolitionist Law Center
Robert Boyle, Esq.
Abu-Jamal v. Wetzel 2017 “Mumia Long Distance Revolutionary”

www.mumia-themovie.com
www.prisonradio.org
www.freemumia.com
www.bringmumiahome.com

International Concerned Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal

Books: – Live from Death Row (Harper Perennial, 1995) – Death Blossoms (Common Notions, 1996) – All Things Censored (Seven Stories, 2000) – Faith of Our Fathers (Africa World Press, 2003) – We Want Freedom (Common Notions, 2004) – Jailhouse Lawyers (City Lights, 2009) – The Classroom and the Cell (Third World Press, 2011) – Writing on the Wall (City Lights, 2015) – Have Black Lives Ever Mattered (City Lights 2016) – Murder Incorporated, – Volume One: Dreaming of Empire (Prison Radio, 2018) – Volume Two: America’s Favorite Pastime (Prison Radio, 2019) – *Soon-to-be-released:* Perfecting Tyranny (Prison Radio 2020). His work has been published in French, Japanese, German, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian.

Info from Black Philly Radical Collective

Mumia Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner from North Philadelphia. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in North Philadelphia and joined the Black Panther Party in 1968. As the spokesperson for the BPP, Mumia was targeted by the Philadelphia Police Department and the FBI for his activism. After the Black Panther Party dissolved, Mumia settled down and started a family. He became an award-winning journalist whose reporting on police brutality led then mayor Frank Rizzo to threaten him. In 1981, Mumia was driving a cab in order to make extra money to care for his family. As he approached 13th and Locust, he noticed his younger brother involved in an altercation with the police officer. The police officer was killed during the altercation and Mumia was shot in the stomach. In 1982, Mumia Abu Jamal was convicted of the murder of the Philadelphia police officer and sentence to death after a trial that international observers say was unfair, unconstitutional, and racist. The judge presided over his case was famously quoted as saying, “I’m going to help them fry the n-word.” Mumia spent close to 30 years on death row and came close to being executed in 1995 before an international outcry prevented it. The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police actively campaigned for his death. Mumia’s death sentence was overturned in 2011 and he is currently serving life without parole. Mumia has always maintained his innocence. He is currently suffering from multiple medical ailments including cirrhosis of the liver caused by the prison’s delay in treating his Hepatitis C. He is 66 years old. He is presently imprisoned in State Correctional Institute Mahoney (SCI-Mahoney).

USPS MAIL

Here is the “how to send a letter” to Mumia. They scan and copy and give him the copies of all mail, pictures, cards etc. No original paper goes into him. Books are different see below re books.

Mail: takes 10-20 days to reach him:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335
SCI Mahanoy
PO Box 33028
St Petersburg, FL 33733

BOOKS

Books must be sent directly from vendor with no letters included.

Security Processing Center
Mumia Abu-Jamal AM 8335
268 Bricker Road
Bellefonte, PA 16823-1667

Epilogue
HUEY NEWTON—THE LEGACY

Huey's mugshot—rite of passage for most black males in the US.

Huey P. Newton echoed much of what Mumia Abu-Jamal has said, written about and how he conducts his life. This is taken from Newton’s autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide,

My prison experience is a good example of revolutionary suicide in action, for prison is a microcosm of the outside world. From the beginning of my sentence, I defied the authorities by refusing to cooperate. As a result, I was confined to lock up in a solitary cell. As the months passed and I remained steadfast, they came to regard my behavior as suicidal. I was told that I would crack and break under the strain. I did not break, nor did I retreat from my position. I grew strong. If I had submitted to their exploitation and done their will, it would have killed my spirit and condemned me to a living death. To cooperate in imprison meant reactionary suicide to me. While solitary confinement can be physically and mentally destructive, my actions were taken with an understanding of the risk I had to suffer through a certain situation.

By doing so, my resistance told them that I rejected all they stood for, even though my struggle might have harmed my health, even killed me. I looked upon it as a way of raising the consciousness of the other inmates as a contribution to the ongoing revolution. Only resistance can destroy the pressures that cause reactionary suicide.

The concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic, on the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope-reality, because the revolution must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change. Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death and his life as one piece. Chairman Mao says that death comes to all of us, but it varies in its significance. To die for the reactionary is lighter than a feather. To die for the revolution is heavier than Mount Tai.

(Our mother) helped us see the light side in even the most difficult situations. This lightness and balance have carried me through some difficult days. Often when others expect to find me depressed by difficult circumstances and especially by the extreme condition of prison, they see that I look at things in another way. Not that I am happy with the suffering. I simply refuse to be defeated by it.

Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (autobiography)

###

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Punto Press released China Rising - Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations (2016); and for Badak Merah, Jeff authored China Is Communist, Dammit! – Dawn of the Red Dynasty (2017).
Jeff can be reached at China Rising, jeff@brownlanglois.com, Facebook, Twitter and Wechat/Whatsapp: +86-13823544196.

• check this page on his special blog CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND

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Will Confucius marry Marx?

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Pepe Escobar

 

Philosopher Xiang: asking uncomfortable questions about the path for true legitimate governance.

The Quest for Legitimacy in Chinese Politics, that is arguably the most extraordinary effort in decades trying to bridge the East-West politico-historical divide.

It’s impossible in a brief column to do justice to the relevance of the discussions this book inspires. Here we will highlight some of the key issues – hoping they will appeal to an informed readership especially across the Beltway, now convulsed by varying degrees of Sinophobia.

Xiang delves right into the fundamental contradiction: China is widely accused by the West of lack of democratic legitimacy exactly as it enjoys a four-decade, sustainable, history-making economic boom.

He identifies two key sources for the Chinese problem: “On the one hand, there is the project of cultural restoration through which Chinese leader Xi Jinping attempts to restore ‘Confucian legitimacy’ or the traditional ‘Mandate of Heaven’; on the other hand, Xi refuses to start any political reforms, because it is his top priority to preserve the existing political system, i.e., a ruling system derived mainly from an alien source, Bolshevik Russia.”

Ay, there’s the rub: “The two objectives are totally incompatible”.

Xiang contends that for the majority of Chinese – the apparatus and the population at large – this “alien system” cannot be preserved forever, especially now that a cultural revival focuses on the Chinese Dream.

Needless to add, scholarship in the West is missing the plot completely – because of the insistence on interpreting China under Western political science and “Eurocentric historiography”. What Xiang attempts in his book is to “navigate carefully the conceptual and logical traps created by post-Enlightenment terminologies”.

Thus his emphasis on deconstructing “master keywords” – a wonderful concept straight out of ideography. The four master keywords are legitimacy, republic, economy and foreign policy. This volume concentrates on legitimacy (hefa, in Chinese).

When law is about morality

It’s a joy to follow how Xiang debunks Max Weber – “the original thinker of the question of political legitimacy”. Weber is blasted for his “rather perfunctory study of the Confucian system”. He insisted that Confucianism – emphasizing only equality, harmony, decency, virtue and pacifism – could not possibly develop a competitive capitalist spirit.

Xiang shows how since the beginning of the Greco-Roman tradition, politics was always about a spatial conception – as reflected in polis (a city or city-state). The Confucian concept of politics, on the other hand, is “entirely temporal, based on the dynamic idea that legitimacy is determined by a ruler’s daily moral behavior.”

Xiang shows how hefa contains in fact two concepts: “fit” and “law” – with “law” giving priority to morality.

In China, the legitimacy of a ruler is derived from a Mandate of Heaven (Tian Ming). Unjust rulers inevitably lose the mandate – and the right to rule. This, argues Xiang, is “a dynamic ‘deeds-based’ rather than ‘procedure-based’ argument.”

Essentially, the Mandate of Heaven is “an ancient Chinese belief that tian [ heaven, but not the Christian heaven, complete with an omniscient God] grants the emperor the right to rule based on their moral quality and ability to govern well and fairly.”

The beauty of it is that the mandate does not require a divine connection or noble bloodline, and has no time limit. Chinese scholars have always interpreted the mandate as a way to fight abuse of power.

The overall crucial point is that, unlike in the West, the Chinese view of history is cyclical, not linear: “Legitimacy is in fact a never-ending process of moral self-adjustment.”

Xiang then compares it with the Western understanding of legitimacy. He refers to Locke, for whom political legitimacy derives from explicit and implicit popular consent of the governed. The difference is that without institutionalized religion, as in Christianity, the Chinese created “a dynamic conception of legitimacy through the secular authority of general will of the populace, arriving at this idea without the help of any fictional political theory such as divine rights of humanity and ‘social contract’’.

Xiang cannot but remind us that Leibniz described it as “Chinese natal theology”, which happened not to clash with the basic tenets of Christianity.

Xiang also explains how the Mandate of Heaven has nothing to do with Empire: “Acquiring overseas territories for population resettlement never occurred in Chinese history, and it does little to enhance legitimacy of the ruler.”

In the end it was the Enlightenment, mostly because of Montesquieu, that started to dismiss the Mandate of Heaven as “nothing but apology for ‘Oriental Despotism’”. Xiang notes how “pre-modern Europe’s rich interactions with the non-Western world” were “deliberately ignored by post-Enlightenment historians.”

Which brings us to a bitter irony: “While modern ‘democratic legitimacy’ as a concept can only work with the act of delegitimizing other types of political system, the Mandate of Heaven never contains an element of disparaging other models of governance.” So much for “the end of history.”

Why no Industrial Revolution?

Xiang asks a fundamental question: “Is China’s success indebted more to the West-led world economic system or to its own cultural resources?”

And then he proceeds to meticulously debunk the myth that economic growth is only possible under Western liberal democracy – a heritage, once again, of the Enlightenment, which ruled that Confucianism was not up to the task.

We already had an inkling that was not the case with the ascension of the East Asian tigers – Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea – in the 1980s and 1990s. That even moved a bunch of social scientists and historians to admit that Confucianism could be a stimulus to economic growth.

Yet they only focused on the surface, the alleged “core” Confucian values of hard work and thrift, argues Xiang: “The real ‘core’ value, the Confucian vision of state and its relations to economy, is often neglected.”

Virtually everyone in the West, apart from a few non-Eurocentric scholars, completely ignores that China was the world’s dominant economic superpower from the 12th century to the second decade of the 19th century.

Xiang reminds us that a market economy – including private ownership, free land transactions, and highly specialized mobile labor – was established in China as early as in 300 B.C. Moreover, “as early as in the Ming dynasty, China had acquired all the major elements that were essential for the British Industrial Revolution in the 18th century.”

Which brings us to a persistent historical enigma: why the Industrial Revolution did not start in China?

Xiang turns the question upside down: “Why traditional China needed an industrial revolution at all?”

Once again, Xiang reminds us that the “Chinese economic model was very influential during the early period of the Enlightenment. Confucian economic thinking was introduced by the Jesuits to Europe, and some Chinese ideas such as the laisser-faire principle led to free-trade philosophy.”

Xiang shows not only how external economic relations were not important for Chinese politics and economy but also that “the traditional Chinese view of state is against the basic rationale of the industrial revolution, for its mass production method is aimed at conquering not just the domestic market but outside territories.”

Xiang also shows how the ideological foundation for Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations began to veer towards individualist liberalism while “Confucius never wavered from a position against individualism, for the role of the economy is to ‘enrich people’ as a whole, not specific individuals.”

All that leads to the fact that “in modern economics, the genuine conversation between the West and China hardly exists from the outset, since the post-Enlightenment West has been absolutely confident about its sole possession of the ‘universal truth’ and secret in economic development, which allegedly has been denied to the rest of the world.”

An extra clue can be found when we see what ‘economy” (jingji) means in China: Jingji is “an abbreviate term of two characters describing neither pure economic nor even commercial activities. It simply means ‘managing everyday life of the society and providing sufficient resources for the state”. In this conception, politics and economy can never be separated into two mechanical spheres. The body politic and the body economic are organically connected.”

And that’s why external trade, even when China was very active in the Ancient Silk Road, “was never considered capable of playing a key role for the health of the overall economy and the well-being of the people.”

Wu Wei and the invisible hand

Xiang needs to go back to the basics: the West did not invent the free market. The laisser-faire principle was first conceptualized by Francois Quesnay, the forerunner of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”. Quesnay, curiously, was known at the time as the “European Confucius”.

In Le Despotisme de la Chine (1767), written 9 years before The Wealth of Nations, Quesnay was frankly in favor of the meritocratic concept of giving political power to scholars and praised the “enlightened” Chinese imperial system.

An extra delicious historical irony is that laisser-faire, as Xiang reminds us, was directly inspired by the Taoist concept of wu wei – which we may loosely translate as “non-action”.

Xiang notes how “Adam Smith, deeply influenced by Quesnay whom he had met in Paris for learning this laisser-faire philosophy, may have got right the meaning of wu wei with his invention of “invisible hand”, suggesting a proactive rather than passive economic system, and keeping the Christian theological dimension aside.”

Xiang reviews everyone from Locke and Montesquieu to Stuart Mill, Hegel and Wallerstein’s “world system” theory to arrive at a startling conclusion: “The conception of China as a typical ‘backward’ economic model was a 20thcentury invention built upon the imagination of Western cultural and racial superiority, rather than historical reality.”

Moreover, the idea of ‘backward-looking’ was actually not established in Europe until the French revolution: “Before that, the concept of ‘revolution’ had always retained a dimension of cyclical, rather than ‘progressive’ – i.e., linear, historical perspective. The original meaning of revolution (from the Latin word revolutio, a “turn-around”) contains no element of social progress, for it refers to a fundamental change in political power or organizational structures that takes place when the population rises up in revolt against the current authorities.”

Will Confucius marry Marx?

And that brings us to post-modern China. Xiang stress how a popular consensus in China is that the Communist Party is “neither Marxist nor capitalist, and its moral standard has little to do with the Confucian value system”. Consequently, the Mandate of Heaven is “seriously damaged”.

The problem is that “marrying Marxism and Confucianism is too dangerous”.

Xiang identifies the fundamental flaw of the Chinese wealth distribution “in a system that guarantees a structural process of unfair (and illegal) wealth transfer, from the people who contribute labor to the production of wealth to the people who do not.”

He argues that, “deviation from Confucian traditional values explains the roots of the income distribution problem in China better than the Weberian theories which tried to establish a clear linkage between democracy and fair income distribution”.

So what is to be done?

Xiang is extremely critical of how the West approached China in the 19th century, “through the path of Westphalian power politics and the show of violence and Western military superiority.”

Well, we all know how it backfired. It led to a genuine modern revolution – and Maoism. The problem, as Xiang interprets it, is that the revolution “transformed the traditional Confucian society of peace and harmony into a virulent Westphalian state.”

So only through a social revolution inspired by October 1917 the Chinese state “begun the real process of approaching the West” and what we all define as “modernization”. What would Deng say?

Xiang argues that the current Chinese hybrid system, “dominated by a cancerous alien organ of Russian Bolshevism, is not sustainable without drastic reforms to create a pluralist republican system. Yet these reforms should not be conditioned upon eliminating traditional political values.”

So is the CCP capable of successfully merging Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism? Forging a unique, Chinese, Third Way? That’s not only the major theme for Xiang’s subsequent books: that’s a question for the ages.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pepe Escobar-nova-menor

Distinguished Collaborator Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. Born in Brazil, he’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of “Globalistan” (2007), “Red Zone Blues” (2007), “Obama does Globalistan” (2009) and “Empire of Chaos” (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is “2030”, also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015. 

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