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On June 25, 2021, White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), a national organization of medical students, published its statement of vision and values. The dominant medical practice in the United States has been built on the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people, the document read, and WC4BL exists to rid the medical system of this allegedly pervasive racism. Doing so requires not only dismantling anti-Black racism, white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy, but also dismantling fatphobia, embracing Black queer feminist praxis, and unlearning toxic medical knowledge.

Terminology aside, WC4BL is no fringe organization. It boasts more than 70 chapters at medical schools across the country, including at such top institutions as the University of North Carolina, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin. In 2020, when physicians around the country participated in George Floyd protests, their rallies took the organizations name. Now the group hopes to keep the movement going by injecting the concepts of identity politics into the practice of medicine.

WC4BL seeks to transform the U.S. medical system. White supremacy, according to the statement, permeates every dominant American institution, including healthcare. Part of the reason is the current credentialing system for medical doctors. Physicians have utilized violence to oust women and femme healers primarily through the professionalization of the medical field, the statement reads. The power and prestige given to medical doctors in the U.S. today is not a direct result of scientific advancement or service to the larger community, but the intentional and often violent consolidation of power.

It can be easy to forget that the organization focuses on medical schools; evidently, equity in medicine also requires remaking society. Black queer feminists, it explains, have expanded socialism to further movements that critically approach class, gender, race, and sexuality. WC4BL is abolitionist, calling for the end of both prisons and police. Because prisons are associated with negative health outcomes, being dedicated to health requires us to abolish (not reform) prison and surveillance systems. The organization condemns fatphobia and cisheteropatriarchy, and proposes to destigmatize and decriminalize drug use, decriminalize sex work, offer universal access to abortion, end the use of BMI, and remove gatekeepers from gender-affirming healthcare.

WC4BL has every reason to play a strong hand. For more than a year, medical schools around the country have followed its lead. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recent guide to anti-racism planning highlights WC4BL by name, suggesting that universities develop a scorecard similar to the White Coats for Black Lives Racial Justice Report Card. Thats a significant endorsement. The AAMC cosponsors the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits medical schools.

WC4BLs other source of influence has come through direct pressure on medical schools. In June 2020, chapters of WC4BL around the country succeeded in effectuating change at medical schools. At UC Davis, WC4BL presented recommendations and its Racial Justice Report Card to the School of Medicine. The administration found them largely feasible and responded by creating the Administrative Action Plan to Address Racial Justice. The plan institutionalized, among other things, a clear system to ensure that perpetrators of racial microaggressions are required to complete corrective action. Meantime, the school of medicine at the University of Utah received demands from its chapter of WC4BL on June 12, 2020. By December 9, the School of Medicines Executive Committee had approved a long version of those demands, declaring that Racism is a Public Health Crisis and updating student evaluations to solicit feedback on the cultural humility of faculty.

At Columbia University, WC4BL played a part in inspiring the medical schools anti-racism initiative. One top recommendation in Columbias plan involves creating faculty development run by individuals grounded in critical race theory. At Michigan Medicine, the WC4BL chapter sent a letter demanding a curriculum redesign that employs an intersectional framework that incorporates critical race theory. Michigan Medicine adopted that demand almost verbatim, adding only that the new curriculum should draw from the work of Ibram X. Kendi.

These medical schools are being forthright about their new priorities. White Coats for Black Lives has already had much success in its mission to transform medical education. The next stop will be the medical field itself.

John Sailer is a research associate at the National Association of Scholars.

Photo by MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images

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'White Coats for Black Lives' and the Transformation of Medical Schools - City Journal

The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland, by Mark Kruger. 330 pages. October 2021. ISBN: 978-1-4962-2813-0

One of the most revolutionary events in American history is also one of the least known: In July 1877, the working class in St. Louis launched a general strike and seized power in the city, establishing a short-lived proletarian dictatorship. Led by the Workingmens Party of the United States (WP), a descendant of the First International, St. Louis workers elected an Executive Committee to direct the functions of government and oversee the economy for a brief day or two until the leadership vacillated and caved in the face of capitalist repression.

The St. Louis Commune of 1877 formed the revolutionary center of gravity of the spontaneous Great Railroad Strike, which started at the beginning of July and ended in September 1877. Ruthless wage cuts, unsafe working conditions, and unprecedented inequality triggered the uprising, which swept across the United States, coast to coast. Its scope and spontaneity rocked the very foundations of capitalist rule and ushered in a new epoch, with the working class stepping forward as a powerful force.

This rich history is found in a new book on the subject, The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland, written by Mark Kruger, a retired professor who lives in the city. Krugers book is valuable. Little has been written on the St. Louis Commune since David Burbanks Reign of the Rabble, published in 1966, a meticulous blow-by-blow narrative. The entire strike wave was covered by Robert Bruce in 1877: Year of Violence (1959) and Philip Foner in The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (1977).

Krugers book is a rebuke against the most basic lie of American history: that there has been no class struggle or socialism in the United States. Just one decade after the Civil War, socialism found fertile soil in America as workers were thrown into massive, and often bloody, struggle against the capitalists. The American working class, though ethnically and racially diverse, bitterly fought to raise its living standards, and for basic workplace rights, against the bourgeoisie.

But the Commune cannot be entirely understood separated from the international influence of socialism and the revolutionary uprisings of the mid-19th century. Krugers success is placing it within this broader context: the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the First International and the Paris Commune, all of which had profound influence on American politics and society.

Krugers book has valuable lessons. It should find a working class audience at a time when socialisms popularity is on the rise, capitalism is increasingly becoming a dirty word, and with the first strike wave in decades gathering force, uncorked by the COVID pandemic and the ruling classs criminal profit-over-lives policy which has killed over 800,000 people in the United States and millions across the world.

Out of the destruction of chattel slavery in the Civil War a new era emerged. Kruger sets the stage with discussion of the trends of industrial development and its depressions, the poverty and oppression of the working class, the vileness and corruption of the rich, and the growth of the massive railroad industry.

American capitalism entered into unprecedented expansion. Between 1865 and 1873, industrial production grew by more than 75 percent. The railroad industry would lead the way, linking city and country together, birthing andin objective termsuniting a restive working class.

All the growth was not the work of the invisible hand of the market. The government offered lucrative public land grants, contracts and subsidies, passing the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1863. With government largesse the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869. And with the anti-competitive fostering of state and federal government, the Pennsylvania Railroad would grow into the largest corporation in the world, Kruger writes.

St. Louis, like many other cities, grew by leaps and bounds. Situated at the westernmost industrial portion of the country, St. Louis marquee location made it a potential gatekeeper for westward expansion. Vast sums of capital fed into the city in an effort to propel St. Louis to first place in a no-holds-barred race over competitors such as Chicago. John OFallon and James Lucas, two of the citys richest capitalists, rushed to finance the Iron Mountain Railroad and adjacent industries such as passenger and railroad car manufacture, meatpacking and coal production. Notorious Robber Barons such as Jay Gould gobbled up railroad market share. Profits grew to stratospheric levels.

In the period known as the Gilded Agea double entendre coined by Mark Twain the bourgeoisie shamelessly pursued wealth and self-aggrandizement, flaunting status symbols. Kruger gives the example of William Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius, the tycoon of the New York Central Railway, who constructed a mansion in Midtown Manhattan mimicking the French Renaissance chateau. Its walls were decked out in Renaissance Italian tapestries depicting scenes from classical Greek and Roman mythology. A stained-glass window depicting King Henry VIIIs dtente with Francis I of France underscored the embrace by the emerging financial oligarchy in America of the blood-soaked, filthy-rich monarchies in Europe.

But this orgy of wealth was rudely interrupted by crises. In 1873, a global financial meltdown shocked the United States, and then the world, sending over half of railroad companies into receivership by 1876. Railroad stocks fell 60 percent. The depression lasted through the remainder of the decade, immiserating society and sharpening working class anger.

The considerable strength of Krugers book is his careful attention to international influences on American workers. The American working class, Kruger shows, has always been highly international.

An enormous share of the working class was comprised of first- or second-generation immigrants. Among them were thousands of radical German workers, many of them political refugees from the 1848 revolutions in Europe. They contributed a powerful and healthy impulse to American politics. Kruger shows that these immigrants contributed decisively to the victory of the Union in Missouri during the Civil Warthe Germans were overwhelmingly hostile to slaveryand he argues that these political exiles were indispensable to the general strike and Commune, providing the philosophy and leadership.

Sixty-three thousand Germans immigrated to the US in 1848, increasing to about 230,000 within six years. In St. Louis, one-third of the population had been born in Germany and the adult population consisted of 77 percent immigrants, mostly from Germany and Ireland. German newspapers proliferated, totaling 80 percent of all foreign-language newspapers by 1880. And St. Louis was not alone. Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati and other major American cities had large German populations.

The most renowned German immigrant in St. Louis was Joseph Weydemeyer, a friend of Marx and the founder of the American Workers League, who became colonel of the Forty-First Missouri Infantry for the Union army in the Civil War. Credited with introducing socialism into the city, Weydemeyer moved to St. Louis in 1861 by suggestion of Friedrich Engels, who thought socialist ideas would resonate in the large German population. He edited a German-language newspaper, Die Neue Zeit, and was elected auditor of St. Louis County, advocating for the eight-hour workday. Weydemeyer died in 1866 in a cholera epidemic.

The banner of scientific socialism then shifted to the American section of a new organization of socialists and militant workers: the International Workingmens Association, or the First International, which had held its first Congress the same year as Weydemeyers death.

Events with the First International in Europe impacted American developments. In 1872 at the Hague Congress of the First International, after the irreparable split between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on the one side and the anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin on the other, Engels introduced a motion to move the General Council to New York for fear of a Bakuninist coup. Friedrich Sorge, a German immigrant and leader of the German section of the International in New York, took on day-to-day management of the organization.

Saving it from a premature demise would pay historic dividends to the working class movement in the United States.

Kruger writes that at the First Internationals last Congress in 1876, dubbed the Unity Congress, 19 sections formed a new Marxist political party, the Workingmens Party USA. Albert Currlin, a baker and future leader of the Commune, marshalled the St. Louis delegation to this landmark achievement. WP members were elected to office in Chicago, Milwaukee and Cincinnati, publishing 24 newspapers in total.

Despite a short lifespan in the United States, dissolving in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July 1876, the First International sowed seeds in the young American labor movement. In 1871, it had a total of 19 sections, jumping to 35 by the end of the year. St. Louis had German, English, French and Czech language sections.

According to Kruger, the First International was the first time workers had organized on an international scale, disseminating radical ideas and spearheading the international fight for the eight-hour workday. The American branch, an eclectic mix of Marxists, anarchists, reformists and followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, supported strikes of over 100,000 workers in 32 different trades across the East and Midwest.

The Paris Commune, another seminal episode inspiring the international working class, germinated radical ideas among American workers. The First International, which had 17 members elected to the leadership of the Commune on March 28, 1871, brought this experience into its cadre and the international working class, notably in Marxs incisive pamphlet, The Civil War in France, which saw several editions within the first year and was translated into many different languages. Communist workers and members of the International supported the Commune and played an active role in its consummation, manning the barricades against the French army and the butcher Adolphe Thierswho would murder over 20,000 Parisians.

The Paris Commune also terrorized the American capitalists, sending them into panic and bloodlust. The pro-Democratic Party New York Herald ranted, Make Paris a heap of ruins if necessary, let its streets be made to run rivers of blood, let all within it perish, but let the government maintain its authority and demonstrate its power. In similar news articles and political speeches across the country, the American ruling class let workers know that it fully embraced Thiers methods.

The last chapters bring together these strands in 1877 St. Louis, where what started as a labor dispute against wage cuts and unsafe conditions transformed into a revolutionary uprising of the working class. In the authors words, the strike that began over bread-and-butter issues expanded its focus and took on the elements of class warfare.

American railroad magnates in May and June 1877 simultaneously slashed wages for the second or third time since the start of the depressionwage reductions totaling as much as 50 percentdespite raking in large profits and divvying up huge salary increases among managers and shareholders.

Railroad workers refused to be beaten into poverty. The Great Railroad Strike erupted in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and Baltimore, Maryland, on July 16. Alternatively called the Great Uprising, it still stands out for its spontaneity, massive scope and ferocious working class solidarity.

The strike snowballed, seemingly of its own volition. In Baltimore, box makers, can makers and sawyers joined the strike, demanding their own wage increases. Miners and boatmen stopped trains in West Virginia, unemployed workers snubbed overtures to scab, and railroad property such as the B&O fell into the hands of workers. Coal miners joined in Pennsylvania. The strike swept north and south, east and west, reaching as far as California. Massive eruptions took place in West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Missouri. Kruger says by July 22, over 1 million workers went on strike.

Caught off guard at first, governors rushed to dispatch militias to decapitate the growing movement, but some refused to fire on their class brothers or were overpowered by the sheer number and willpower of the masses. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in 3,000 federal troops to various locations. Violence rocked Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Hundreds were killed and wounded.

The bourgeois press smeared the workers as blood-thirsty communists, Ill-dressed, evil-looking, hard-featured, beetle-browed, grimy unkempt menscowling faces. And it warned that in St. Louis, a branch [the WPUSA] of the [Paris] Communeconspires for the overthrow of the Governments of the world.

The Workingmens Party, itself blindsided, had to catch up with events, throwing its weight behind the movement. On July 22, Philip Van Patten, the WP Corresponding Secretary, called on all sections of the party to support the strike, advocating demands such as an eight-hour day and nationalization of the railroad and telegraph industries.

It would be in St. Louis, however, where the 1,000-member-strong WP played the most consequential factor, as Krugers work shows.

The WP hurried to organize meetings to win over the movement and give it direction. At one meeting, Peter Lofgreen, financial secretary of the WPs English-speaking section, Albert Currlin, and Henry F. Allen, a utopian socialist and sign painter by trade, all members of the Executive Committee of the WP, demanded a return to the 1873 pay scale, amounting to a 50 percent raise, as well as nationalization.

On Monday, July 23, the WP called another mass meeting, bolstering its leadership credentials of the strike and steering the discussion to the crux of the problem, the capitalist system. Setting up three speakers stands so the enormous crowd could hear, WP members and workers called for revolution. Lofgreen asked, Why should we allow ourselves to be trodden upon by a few monopolists, who having the reins of government in their hands, are using the organized assassins to crush us? Cheers exploded.

The crowd roared when another speaker had said that the working class was taxed to sustain a standing army to be used to repel invasions by foreign powers, but the army is now used as a tool to oppress and slaughter innocent men, women, and children. Another decried, Why this state of things? Because its so, according to the law. Well, if thats law, then dn the law. [Prolonged cheers]. If that is the rule that governs society, then the sooner it is broken, the better.

Meanwhile the citys elite and two former Union and Confederate generals organized the Committee of Public Safety, whose new purpose was to put the working class under the jackboot of the bourgeoisie. Federal forces entered the city bringing manpower, arms and ammunition. A bloodbath was being prepared.

The high-water mark of the strike wave was Wednesday, July 25. The very next day the steam had dissipated. The Commune fell without much of a fight. Its leadership was rounded up and sent to jail in St. Louis and East St. Louis, located across the Mississippi River in Illinois. By Sunday, July 29, the ruling class regained the city. After the Communes fall, the citys elite created the Veiled Prophet organization, staging yearly parades celebrating the victory over the strike.

Kruger is somewhat speculative about the reasons for the St. Louis Communes defeat. The bulk of his analysis seems to imply that it was owed to a lack of decisiveness in the leadership, which never really attempted to conquer power. He also refers to the exploitation of racial and ethnic tensions among black, native white, German and Irish workers.

Though race and nationality divided the population, this was partly overcome during the strike, in opposition to the racist attitudes of some leaders such as Currlin. For instance, the Executive Committee of the WPUSA with several hundred multi-racial, multi-ethnic strikers and supporters, demanded that wages of boatmen, all of whom were black, be raised by 50 percent, the same amount railroad workers demanded. Black and white workers, armed with clubs, encouraged workers to join the strike, shutting down several workplaces. At one mass meeting a black worker asked the crowd whether or not white workers stand with him: the crowd responded, We will!

In hindsight, it seems too much to have asked of history that there should have been a successful proletarian revolution in the US in 1877. The class struggle was new and powerful, but workers had accumulated little experience. Across the country, powerful strikes erupted without political leadership. In this sense, the success or failure of the St. Louis Commune can be attributed above all to the insufficient political consciousness of the working class on a national scale, even though in St. Louis the WP attempted to elevate this consciousness and reveal the necessity in seizing political power from the capitalist class. Though St. Louis was an important city, it was by no means comparable to the role of Paris in French national life.

What is astonishing is how far things went in 1877, especially in St. Louis. At its conclusion, none of the demands that workers had been fighting for were met, but the revolutionary potential of the American working class, though immature in its theoretical and organizational development, was in perfect display.

Over 140 years have passed since the events of 1877, but the experience still holds crucial lessons for the working class today as it confronts a capitalist system in terminal decline. It is imperative that before the next revolutionary outbreak happens, which will be international in scale, that its lessons are assimilated. The events of 1877, and the St. Louis Commune, show the enormous industrial power of the working class. But they also reveal the decisive nature of prepared revolutionary leadership, the necessity of raising the political consciousness of workers against the false promises of the ruling class, and the need for class unity in opposition to all efforts to divide workers along racial and ethnic lines.

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Book Review: The St. Louis Commune of 1877: Communism in the Heartland by Mark Kruger - WSWS

WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) issued the following statement:

"I have consistently stressed that there is no place in our country for violence in politics on either side. I condemned those who broke into the Capitol last year, and I'm grateful for the heroic efforts of police and first responders who kept us safe that day, and who keep our communities safe every day. It's outrageous that the leftist rioters and looters who ransacked our cities in the summer of 2020 have not been held to the same standard and prosecuted with the same aggressive zeal for the violence and mayhem they caused.

"Unfortunately, rather than work to get to the bottom of the security failures that allowed the Capitol to be breached, Speaker Pelosi chose to politicize the January 6th Select Committee and undermine its credibility by taking the unprecedented step of unilaterally rejecting Republican members Jim Banks and Jim Jordan, who were selected to serve on the Committee. Instead, she has turned it into political theater designed to distract from the many crises and failures of the Biden Administration that are hurting American families like inflation, high gas prices, the border crisis, and COVID mismanagement.

"The damage created by less than one year of total Democrat control in Washington is staggering, and is devastating hardworking families across America. Coronavirus is surging again across the country. Due to President Biden's failed vaccine-only strategy, we have a severe testing shortage and a deadly lack of therapeutic alternatives. Despite promising to shut down the virus, President Biden now admits he has no federal solution, and is turning to the same failed lockdown strategies, like allowing teachers unions to shut down schools after giving them billions of taxpayer dollars earlier this year to stay open. Because liberal and progressive politicians refuse to take responsibility for their extreme policies like defunding the police, crime is soaring in Democrat-run cities. Fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death in Americans aged 18-45 as deadly drugs are inundating our open southern border. The price of everyday goods has skyrocketed because of Democrats' inflationary spending policies. Gas prices and home electricity costs are through the roof due to Democrats' anti-American energy policies like the Green New Deal. Our supply chain is broken, leading to empty shelves at the grocery store. Americans are suffering because of Democrats' broken promises and disastrous leadership. Big-government socialism has failed.

"Yet Democrats are not holding a town hall on CNN in the Capitol today with American families devastated by crime, overdoses, high cost of living, and an unstable economy. Instead they are engaging in political theater, talking about themselves and their singular obsession with a President who hasn't been in office for nearly a year. They have no plan, they have no agenda: they only want to politicize January 6th.

"If Democrats are ever interested in working in a bipartisan way with Republicans on real solutions to ensure the safety of our Capitol, we welcome that, and have called on Speaker Pelosi to embrace many of the recommendations by the Capitol Police Inspector General's report that have mostly been ignored by the Democrats running Congress. Until then, Republicans will continue to focus on the things that are affecting the hardworking Americans who are struggling under the failures of big-government socialism: being able to raise and support their families in safe and healthy communities with equal opportunities for all. We would encourage Democrats to join us and start focusing on these problems as well."

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Scalise Statement on the One-Year Anniversary of January 6th - Congressman Steve Scalise

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trumps attempt to reverse the 2020 election, overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.

Two events will be held to mark the anniversary of January 6, one organized by the Democrats at the US Capitol, the other by Trump at a rally in Arizona the following week. The content of the speeches that will be given by both Biden and Trump is thoroughly predictable.

Biden will deliver a series of bromides about the sanctity of American democracy without giving any actual account of what took place in the coup attempt, who was involved and how close it came to succeeding. He will paper over the seriousness of January 6 and the ongoing threat to democracy with empty appeals for unity with a Republican Party that is deeply implicated in the coup itself.

Trump will cover his brazen plan to seize power, establish a dictatorship and kill thousands of people in the process with his standard fascistic lies. He will claim Biden stole the election through mail-in ballots and will warn of the danger of socialism. In preparation for the event, Trump and his co-conspirators like Stephen Miller and Steven Bannon will be poring through Mein Kampf and the writings of Goebbels for inspiration.

On the anniversary of January 6, five main points must be emphasized:

By January 6, Trump had been broadcasting his plans for dictatorship in public for more than one year. He attempted to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to popular protests against police violence over the course of 2020. In the lead-up to the election, he said he would not accept the outcome if he lost. When he was defeated, he blamed mail-in ballot fraud and urged his supporters to support his bid to remain in power.

In the past year, information relating to the preparations for January 6 has come to light establishing the plotters aims beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In the weeks leading up to January 6, 2021, Trump and aides Stephen Bannon and Peter Navarro organized over 100 Republican members of Congress in a bid to delay the certification of the Electoral College. Navarro himself recently told the Daily Beast, We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., [Representative Paul] Gosar and [Senator Ted] Cruz did exactly what was expected of them. It was a perfect plan.

The brazenness with which the plotters acknowledge their aims is itself a testament to the weakness of opposition from the Democrats. Navarro explained in his recent memoir, In Trump Time, that the plan, nicknamed the Green Bay Sweep after the football play, was hatched by Bannon in coordination with Trump himself. Its aim was to delay certification and provide time for paramilitary forces and pro-Trump demonstrators to follow Trumps orders to seize Congress and trap the members inside.

The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this, Navarro wrote. By law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress. The first person who Navarro communicated with on the morning of January 6 was Bannon. I check my messages and am pleased to see Steve Bannon has us fully ready to implement our Green Bay Sweep on Capitol Hill. Call the play. Run the play. Trump, Navarro wrote, was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day.

Fascist organizers of the protests held in Washington that day have told congressional investigators that they participated in dozens of planning meetings with members of Congress who were involved in the putsch plan.

Rolling Stone reported in October, Some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies that took place in Washington, D.C., have begun communicating with congressional investigators and sharing new information about what happened when the former presidents supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and detailed explosive allegations that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trumps efforts to overturn his election loss and the Jan. 6 events that turned violent.

Paramilitary and far-right groups brought forward earlier in 2020 to support the deadly policy of the ruling class over the course of the pandemic were called into action, some forming quick response teams with guns stashed should street fighting break out. These far-right groups were promoted by big business and the media in the spring of 2020 as the spearhead of efforts to rescind temporary lockdown measures imposed in March after a wave of strikes in the US and internationally forced an initial shutdown of production. The social layers to whom Trump and Wall Street appealed to liberate states from lockdowns at state capitals in April and May 2020 cultivated close ties with Republican leaders and answered Trumps call to descend on Congress less than a year later.

As more and more details come to light, it is now recognized on an international scale that what took place brought the US to the immediate precipice of dictatorship.

In his book Peril, journalist Bob Woodward reported that Chinese General Li Zoucheng spoke to Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was very worried that the United States was actually going to collapse. Woodward reported that after January 6, the Chinese military went on military alert, as did the Russians, as did the Iranians.

Canadian academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published an article in the Globe and Mail titled, The American polity is cracked, and might collapse. Canada must prepare. The December 31 article warns that the United States is becoming increasingly ungovernable and could descend into civil war. Homer-Dixon warns that a second Trump presidency could be totally unconstrained, nationally and internationally and that it is not inaccurate to use the F wordfascism. Similar articles are appearing in leading publications worldwide.

Trumps plot almost succeeded. Over 120 Republican congressmen and six senators supported baseless objections to the certification of the Electoral College. A short time later, after Trump directed the crowd at the Ellipse to march on the Capitol building, members of Congress escaped the angry mob with seconds to spare. Vice President Mike Pence was whisked away to safety as the crowd called for his hanging. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer were hidden in a bunker beneath the Capitol and called the Pentagon, begging them to clear the grounds and protect their lives.

Had the mob succeeded in taking members of Congress captive, the Democratic Party would have negotiated for their release in exchange for an arrangement that kept Trump in power.

The plots failure was due entirely to tactical mistakes and inexperience on the part of the mob and its organizers. At times the plot appeared to fall short due to pure chance. Upon breaking into the building, the mob followed a police officer who led them away from where congressmembers were huddled a short distance away. At another point, the mob walked past a door that would have led them to another group of representatives.

The plot did not fail because it encountered opposition from within the political establishment and the state. Not a single institution of bourgeois politics took action to stop the coup attempt.

The police were understaffed, and many officers welcomed protesters into the Capitol building. The military stood by for 199 critical minutes as the crowd occupied the Capitol and broke into congressional offices in search of Congress members and their staff.

More details have recently emerged about the role played by the military on January 6. Newsweeks William Arkin reported on January 2 that Trump planned to call the military into the streets on the day of the putsch, and that Pentagon leadership was concerned that a split would take place in the armed forces.

The Democratic Party made no appeal to the population to oppose the putsch, even though 700,000 people live within the Washington D.C. city limits, where 95 percent of ballots cast were against Trump. Not a single Democratic member of Congress took out his or her cell phone and posted a video appeal on social media calling every opponent of dictatorship into the streets of American cities. Not a single Democratic governor or mayor called for mass protests.

President-elect Joe Biden, whose administration Trump was attempting to prevent from taking office, took hours to address the nation. When he ultimately spoke, Biden took the remarkable step of inviting Trump to deliver a televised address to the nation in the midst of his unfolding coup. In a 10-minute speech delivered the evening of January 6, Biden said, Our democracy is under an unprecedented assault and declared: Therefore, I call on President Trump to go on national television, now, to fulfill his oath and defend the Constitution and demand an end to this siege.

Bidens appeal to Trump set the tone for the response of the Democratic Party in the year that has followed.

The congressional investigation moves in fits and starts, largely behind the backs of the population, but Trump has not been criminally prosecuted for his role in attempting to overthrow the Constitution and establish a dictatorship. He is currently living at his compound in Mar-a-Lago. None of the congressional representatives who supported the coup attempt have been removed from Congress or charged with crimes. A ruling class which locked up thousands of impoverished people from Central Asia on suspicion of terrorism after September 11 and jailed and deported countless communists and socialists in the red scares of the 20th century has taken action only against the flotsam and jetsam of January 6, the low-level participants, while leaving those who directed the mob largely untouched. Even the rotting Weimar Republic took more action against Hitler, who was in jail a year after the Beer Hall Putsch failed in 1923 (albeit under comfortable conditions).

The Democrats response to January 6 is dictated above all by fear of social opposition from below. Their main role is to chloroform discontent, to shore up the two-party system, to use racial and gender politics to divide the working class, and to block the development of a movement against the threat of dictatorship. Their response to January 6 has been to do everything possible to minimize what took place in order to prevent the population from becoming aware of how close the country came to dictatorship.

Over the course of Trumps term in office, the Democrats ignored Trumps attacks on democratic rights and opposed him on foreign policy grounds, alleging that he was an inefficient steward of the interests of American imperialism. Brought to power on a wave of opposition to Trump, the Democrats have continued the COVID-19 policies of his administration, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives to fuel the speculative bonanza on Wall Street.

Their endless references to race and gender and sexual orientation are aimed entirely at enriching privileged sections of the wealthiest 10 percent of society and have nothing to do with defending the democratic rights of the population. In the most flagrant example, the Democrats have continued the worst aspects of Trumps attacks on immigrants, deporting record numbers to countries devastated by decades of imperialist war and US-backed dictatorship. The fight against Trump and dictatorship will not take place through this party.

It is widely understood that Trump and the Republicans are planning another takeover. Columns in the corporate press noting the anniversary of January 6 acknowledge that dictatorship is an imminent possibility and ponder the likelihood of civil war.

The Republican Party has transformed itself into a fascistic party that is not prepared to accept the result of democratic elections. As Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky recently told AP, Its not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore.

Following Trumps lead, the Republican Party has legitimized vigilante violence as a part of the political process. Its own congressional representatives routinely threaten Democratic opponents with violence in order to secure their right-wing political ends. Threats of violence against Democratic congressmembers have increased by 107 percent in the last year. The Republican Party is engaged in naked efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters through illegal voting restrictions and is installing local election officials who will overturn future elections. It is preparing its next authoritarian moves in plain sight.

Officials from within the military now warn that Trump is attempting to solidify his support within the Pentagon in preparation for his next conspiracies. In December, the Washington Post published a statement by ex-generals titled, The military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection which warns:

As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, weall of us former senior military officialsare increasingly concerned about the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk. In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.

The Post statement warns of the potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command within the Pentagon and concludes that in the 2024 election, With loyalties split, some [commanders] might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

Even the editorial board of the New York Times recently acknowledged that the Democrats inaction is paving the way for future putsch attempts. The Times January statement, entitled Every Day is Jan. 6 now, concludes:

We should stop underestimating the threat facing the country. Countless times over the past six years, up to and including the events of Jan. 6, Mr. Trump and his allies openly projected their intent to do something outrageous or illegal or destructive. Every time, the common response was that they werent serious or that they would never succeed. How many times will we have to be proved wrong before we take it seriously? The sooner we do, the sooner we might hope to salvage a democracy that is in grave danger.

This is an acknowledgment that the entire corporate media has been engaged in a systematic effort to downplay the seriousness of the events of January 6 and that, in doing so, the media establishment has objectively facilitated Trumps plotting. The Times itself has played a critical role in not only downplaying the events of January 6, but elevating those responsible for carrying it out. In October 2021, the Times published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, one of the most prominent coup plotters in the Senate, and later praised his sage proposals for addressing the supply chain crisis.

The events of January 6 were foreseeable. This is proven by the coverage on the World Socialist Web Site, which was warning on a daily basis for over a year leading up to the election that Trump was preparing an attempt to overturn the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.

The Times editorial statement is an indictment not only of the newspaper of record itself, but also of the left publications around the Democratic Party and representatives of libertarian tendencies who continue to downplay the importance of January 6 or who now openly sympathize with Trump.

In a January 26, 2021, article, The Meaning of January 6, historian Bryan Palmer adopts the haughty tone of an academic who is above it all. Palmers conclusion is that the events of January 6 were not an insurrection, and that the left must reject the notion that it posed a threat to democratic rights. In a section headed Insurrection as hyperbole, Palmer summarizes his argument, deriding those who call January 6 a coup attempt: Hyperbole flowed as the trail of tears grew to a tidal wave.

Palmer speaks with total indifference at the prospect of fascist dictatorship. He even commends the fascist mob for interrogating and scrutinizing critically the state institutions, as though individuals wearing Camp Auschwitz shirts defaced the Capitol because they oppose the criminal historical record of American imperialism. For Palmers denunciations of bourgeois democracy, he only serves to justify and apologize for the Democratic Partys efforts to downplay the danger.

Left Voice, a publication associated with the Argentinian Socialist Workers Party (PTS), recently wrote that January 6 was not a fascist coup or even an attempted coup. According to Left Voice, January 6 was a sign of the strength of the political establishment. Left Voice calls January 6 a moment that provided an opportunity for the establishment of the political regime and the mediaincluding politicians in both partiesto begin to reestablish legitimacy through their rejection of the right-wing rioters.

After January 6, the political crisis has diminished. In broad strokes, this is the political scenario we find ourselves in, they conclude: the crisis has receded to latency. Left Voice reaches this conclusion by declaring that the working class is passive. On January 6 and its aftermath, The masses who had been mobilized against Trump for the past four years looked to Biden and the regime to respondthey were trusted to take care of it, and there was no response from the working class and oppressed.

Paraphrasing Trotsky, these attorneys of the Democratic Party deny the responsibility of its leaders in order thus to escape shouldering their own responsibility. Although Left Voice presents itself as a critic of the Democrats, in actual fact it provides justification for the fecklessness of the Democrats by blaming the working class for the Democrats refusal to mobilize the population against the coup!

A third section of the radical middle class, comprised of anarchist and libertarian elements like Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore, were impressed by the coup attempt and have become apologists for the putsch. Deeply disoriented, they have whiplashed from supporters of the Democratic Party into defenders of fascist killer Kyle Rittenhouse and opponents of mask and vaccine mandates. Such individuals personify the worst traits of American radical politics: pragmatism, pessimism, nationalism, anti-communism and extreme individualism. Their professed concern that health restrictions infringe on individual rights coincides entirely with the interests of Wall Street and eviscerates the social rights of billions of workers to protection from sickness and death.

January 6 is not a historical accident, it is the outcome of the protracted decay of the American political system. For decades, the two parties have worked together to enforce massive cuts to social programs, to wage permanent imperialist war, to facilitate unbridled financial speculation and to abolish democratic rights. The corporate media and political establishment have deliberately cultivated far-right elements as a bulwark against the working class. The Democratic Party has replaced any prior association to social reforms with an obsession with race and identity that feeds and strengthens the far right.

In 2000, amid the crisis surrounding the US presidential election, the International Committee of the Fourth International explained that bourgeois democracy could not survive on the rotten foundations of Americas increasingly oligarchic society. In December, as the Supreme Court deliberated over whether to halt the counting of votes in Florida, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North said:

What the decision of this court will reveal is how far the American ruling class is prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional norms. Is it prepared to sanction ballot fraud and the suppression of votes? Is it prepared to install in the White House a candidate who has attained that office through blatantly illegal and anti-democratic methods? A substantial section of the American ruling elite, and perhaps even a majority on the Supreme Court, is prepared to do just that. This is because, among this social layer, there has been a dramatic erosion of support for traditional forms of bourgeois democracy.

The disastrous development of the coronavirus pandemic over the course of the last year has enormously intensified the social contradictions that gave rise to the events of January 6. The forces of political reaction mobilized by Trump have proved critical in the ruling classs murderous policy to reopen business and schools and infect as many people as possible with COVID-19.

None of the economic and social issues giving rise to the events of January 6 have been addressed. The Democratic Party has proven itself totally opposed to implementing policies required to raise living standards and stop the spread of the pandemic because it represents the interests of the same financial aristocracy that prioritizes profits over life.

But the last years have seen a historic global increase in strikes and mass protests against inequality. The working class, more internationally interconnected and urban than ever before, is the social force that has the power to crush fascism and the threat of dictatorship.

Opposition is growing daily to the unbridled spread of the pandemic at workplaces and schools across the world. Protecting society from mass infection and the specter of fascism requires attacking both at their common source: the capitalist system. The dizzying celebration of parasitism and speculation that is the Dow Jones, Nasdaq and S&P 500 is driving the spread of the pandemic, and the massive growth of inequality requires the adoption of ever more ruthless and anti-democratic methods of rule. The wealth of the financial aristocracy must be expropriated, trading must be suspended, the major corporations must be nationalized, and Wall Street must be closed down.

The movement in the working class can recognize its immense potential only through the struggle to democratize every aspect of political, social and economic life, including democratic workers control over production and COVID-19 safety. This means freeing the worlds productive forces from the dictatorship of capitalist profit and placing production under the democratic, social control of the working class.

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Trump and the danger of fascism in America

The fascist insurrection in Washington DC is a turning point in the political history of the United States.

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One year since the fascist coup attempt of January 6 - WSWS

Joseph Alois Schumpeter was one of the most prominent political economists during the first half of the twentieth century. He published prolifically in both German and English on questions of economic theory, economic sociology, economic and social policy, and the history of ideas. A phrase Schumpeter coined to describe the essence of capitalism as he understood it, creative destruction, has become one of the most familiar terms in the economic lexicon.

In politics, Schumpeter was a liberal conservative or perhaps a conservative liberal but he was also deeply influenced by his Marxian contemporaries. As a student at the University of Vienna, Schumpeter was a member of Eugen von Bhm-Bawerks legendary graduate seminar, along with three leading Austro-Marxists Rudolf Hilferding, Otto Bauer, and Emil Lederer and the free-market liberal Ludwig von Mises.

This experience no doubt encouraged Schumpeter to explore many of the same questions that his Marxist contemporaries had posed, although the answers that he formulated differed sharply from theirs. He disagreed with the Marxist view of capitalisms inner contradictions while believing that the ultimate victory of socialism was inevitable anyway. For Schumpeter, the drive toward imperialism and war that was so evident in his own time stemmed from precapitalist social forces that were still at work in European society rather than the logic of capitalism itself.

Schumpeter was born into a prosperous middle-class family in the Moravian town of Triesch on February 8, 1883, a month before the death of Karl Marx. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on January 7, 1950. Schumpeters father, a merchant, had died in 1887, and his mother soon remarried. His new stepfather was a general in the Austro-Hungarian army, so the young Joseph grew up in a distinctly upper-class environment.

He was educated in Vienna at the prestigious Theresianum Academy of Knights of Vienna. Schumpeter went on to spend five years at the University of Vienna between 1901 and 1906, where he studied law, mathematics, and philosophy in addition to economics. His first publication came in 1906, when he was only twenty-three years of age.

From 1909 to 1911, Schumpeter was professor of economics at the University of Czernowitz, moving first to the University of Graz (19111921) and then to the University of Bonn (19251932). In addition to these academic posts, he worked as a lawyer and a financial speculator not to mention a brief stint as minister of finance in the new post-Habsburg Austrian republic between March and October 1919 and spent some time in Britain and the United States.

Schumpeter spent the last eighteen years of his life at Harvard University, where he was president of the Econometric Society (in 1942) and the American Economic Association (in 1948). Were it not for his unexpected death, Schumpeter would also have served as the founding president of the International Economic Association in 1950.

Although there is a substantial literature on Schumpeters life and work, no comprehensive edition of his works has yet been published, whether in English or in German. Richard Sturn suggests that this may reflect the absence of a specific Schumpeter school of economics. Probably best known today as a historian of economic thought, Schumpeter was the author of two hundred journal articles and several influential books, two of which ran to more than a thousand pages: the two-volume Business Cycles and the posthumously published History of Economic Analysis.

However, those interested in Schumpeters thinking, especially from the left, will probably turn first to his most celebrated work, 1942s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which is a mere 425 pages in length. The book consists of five parts, respectively titled The Marxian doctrine, Can capitalism survive? Can socialism work? Socialism and democracy, and A historical sketch of socialist parties.

It would be impossible in the space of a short article to give a satisfactory account of this complex, scholarly, and highly opinionated work. I will concentrate instead on Schumpeters analysis of the economics of imperialism, which provides an entry point into his broader approach to the capitalist mode of production, its history, and its prospects.

Twenty-three years before the appearance of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter published a lengthy article on The Sociology of Imperialism in a German-language academic journal, which did not appear in English until just after his death. In the version that I have consulted, there are ninety-six pages of text, amounting to perhaps 35,000 words.

Schumpeter began with a brief introductory section outlining the nature of the problem, in which he argued that aggressive attitudes on the part of states need not be a simple reflection of the populations concrete economic interests. Indeed, in the case of imperialism, we might say that nations and classes seek expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling. In this spirit, he defined imperialism as the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion.

The author did acknowledge that neo-Marxist theory had attempted to provide an economic explanation for imperialism, reducing it to the economic class interests of the age in question (emphasis in original, and hereafter). Although he conceded that the Marxist view was by far the most serious contribution that had been made to the analysis of imperialism and agreed that there was much truth in it, Schumpeter proceeded to criticize it at some length.

He began by describing the strongly anti-imperialist sentiments that had prevailed in mid-nineteenth-century Britain in a section with the strange title Imperialism as a catchphrase. After a lengthy account of the way imperialism had operated in ancient times, the medieval period, and the age of absolute monarchy, Schumpeter devoted the final third of the essay to discussing the relationship between imperialism and capitalism.

At the start of this concluding section, Schumpeter returned to the prevalence of non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations towards war and conquest. He believed that many and perhaps most wars throughout history had been waged without any adequate reason. According to Schumpeter, this in turn was strong evidence that psychological dispositions and social structures acquired in the dim past . . . tend to maintain themselves and to continue in effect long after they have lost their meaning and their life-preserving function.

On the strength of this analysis, Schumpeter rejected the argument of Vladimir Lenin and other Marxist thinkers that there was a necessary link between imperialism and capitalism. Imperialism was in fact atavistic in character and stemmed from the living conditions, not of the present but of the past put in terms of the economic interpretation of history, from past rather than present relations of production. In political terms, we should see imperialism as the product not of capitalist democracy but rather of the earlier stage of absolute autocracy.

Schumpeter insisted that under capitalism, there was much less excess energy to be vented in war and conquest than in any pre-capitalist society. In a capitalist society, the pursuit of profit absorbed the energies of the population, with wars of conquest rightly seen as troublesome distractions, destructive of lifes meaning, a diversion from the accustomed and therefore true task.

The economist cited what he considered to be strong evidence of the powerful anti-imperialist tendencies at work in capitalist society. Those tendencies included deep opposition to militarism, military expenditure, and war, which were most powerful among industrial workers but also manifested in large sections of the capitalist class.

It was no accident, he suggested, that of all the capitalist nations, the United States was the one least inclined toward imperialist adventures and also the least burdened with pre-capitalist elements, survivals, reminiscences, and powerful factors. We should look upon the imperialist tendencies that could indeed be found within capitalism as alien elements, carried into the world of capitalism from the outside, supported by non-capitalist factors in modern life.

Schumpeter then directly addressed the neo-Marxist claim that imperialism was the product of a new, dangerous stage of monopoly capitalism. He acknowledged that some sections of the capitalist class do indeed benefit from imperialism most obviously entrepreneurs in the war industries. However, Schumpeter argued, where free trade prevails no class has an interest in forcible expansion as such.

In a lengthy discussion of the economic effects of tariffs and the broader political implications of protectionism, Schumpeter cited Otto Bauer and Rudolf Hilferding favorably, crediting them with having been the first to recognize and describe the importance of what was happening in this field. He also praised Hilferding for having taken his distance from a pessimistic view about the prospects of capitalism that he found in the work of Marx:

It is not true that the capitalist system as such must collapse from imminent necessity, that it necessarily makes its continued existence impossible by its own growth and development. Marxs line of reasoning on this point shows serious defects, and when these are corrected the proof vanishes. It is to the great credit of Hilferding that he abandoned this thesis of Marxist theory.

A footnote to this passage anticipated one of the most striking arguments that Schumpeter later made in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:

Capitalism is its own undoing but in a sense different from that implied by Marx. Society is bound to grow beyond capitalism, but this will be because the achievements of capitalism are likely to make it superfluous, not because its internal contradictions are likely to make its continuance impossible.

Schumpeter was much closer to the neo-Marxist position on the role of financial capital in the growth of monopoly. He drew an interesting distinction between (financial) capitalists and (industrial) entrepreneurs: Although the relation between capitalists and entrepreneurs is one of the typical and fundamental conflicts of the capitalist economy, monopoly capitalism has virtually fused the big banks and cartels into one. This process had created a social group that carries great political weight, and which possessed

a strong, undeniable, economic interest in such things as productive tariffs, cartels, monopoly prices, forced exports (dumping), an aggressive economic policy, an aggressive foreign policy generally, and war, including wars of expansion with a typically imperialist character.

He also identified further motives for this group to support imperialism, including an interest in the conquest of lands producing raw materials and foodstuffs, with a view to facilitating self-sufficient warfare, and the profits to be derived from rising wartime consumption. While unorganized capitalists would at best reap a trifling profit from these activities, organized capital is sure to profit hugely.

And yet, Schumpeter warned, the final word in any presentation of this aspect of modern economic life must be one of warning against over-estimating it. The only capitalists with a real material interest in what he termed export monopolism were the entrepreneurs and their ally, high finance. Small producers and workers had nothing to gain.

His conclusion was that export monopolism, contrary to the arguments of Marxist thinkers, did not arise from the inherent laws of capitalist development. Capitalism remained intensely competitive, and it was a basic fallacy to describe imperialism as a necessary phase of capitalism, or even to speak of the development of capitalism into imperialism.

So what did explain the rise of imperialism? Once again, Schumpeter emphasized the survival of precapitalist interests, methods, and ways of thinking: Established habits of thought and action tend to persist, and hence the spirit of guild and monopoly at first maintained itself, even where capitalism was in sole possession of the field. In its everyday life, its ideology, and its politics, Europe remained greatly under the influence of the feudal substance . . . while the bourgeoisie can assert its interests everywhere, it rules only in exceptional circumstances, and then only briefly.

Schumpeter summarized what he considered to be the historical and sociological sources of modern imperialism, which he saw as

a heritage of the autocratic state, of its structural elements, organizational forms, interest alignments, and human attitudes, the outcome of pre-capitalist forces which the autocratic state has reorganized. It would never have been evolved by the inner logic of capitalism itself.

According to Schumpeter, the pro-military interests within the capitalist class joined up with these precapitalist forces in an alliance which kept alive war instincts and ideas of overlordship, male supremacy, and triumphant glory ideas that would otherwise long since [have] died. He finished off the article by affirming the ancient truth that the dead always rule the living.

Discussion of imperialism was rather limited in Schumpeters subsequent work. There were three references to the subject in his Business Cycles. They included a lengthy footnote on Rudolf Hilferding in which he stated that the rule of the financier over industry, still more over national politics, is a newspaper fairy tale almost ludicrously at variance with facts. The index of History of Economic Analysis did not contain the word imperialism, but Schumpeter used the term in his one substantial reference to the neo-Marxists, which largely consisted of an apology for the authors inability to deal with their ideas in any great detail.

However, Schumpeter did devote six and a half pages to the question in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where he summarized the Marxian theory of imperialism and commended its strong points before proceeding to offer some sharp criticism. While this analysis came in the chapter titled Marx the teacher, it also acknowledged the later contribution of neo-Marxist theorists such as Bauer, Hilferding, Max Adler, Rosa Luxemburg, and Fritz Sternberg. All of these writers drew on Marxs account of the falling rate of profit as articulated in volume III of Capital.

According to Marxs presentation, a rising organic composition of capital combined with a declining rate of exploitation in the advanced capitalist countries put constant downward pressure on the profit rate and created a powerful incentive for the export of capital to less developed parts of the world. If this framework was valid, Schumpeter observed, imperialism would have a strong economic basis, with colonization used to safeguard overseas investment and internecine war between rival bourgeoisies, an inevitable consequence. As he noted, the Marxists regarded this as a stage, hopefully the final stage, of capitalism.

This Marxian synthesis, Schumpeter conceded, did seem to follow beautifully from two fundamental premises . . . the theory of classes and the theory of accumulation, and also appeared to display a close alliance with historical and contemporaneous fact. Yet on closer inspection, he insisted, this was not the case. In fact, the heroic time of colonialism had been precisely the time of early and innovative capitalism when accumulation was in its beginnings. Such expansion benefitted the proletariat more than the capitalists, and it was never under the control of the latter:

As a matter of fact, very little influence on foreign policy has been exerted by big business. Capitalist attitudes towards foreign policy are predominantly adaptive rather than causative, today more than ever. Also, they hinge to an astonishing degree on short-run considerations equally remote from any deeply laid plans and from any definite objective class interests.

For Schumpeter, the Marxist theory of imperialism was ultimately a superstition, comparable to the conspiracy theories about Jewish influence propagated by antisemites. Continuing his practice in Business Cycles, Schumpeter pulled no rhetorical punches, referring to the neo-Marxian theory as a horrible platitude that consisted of nursery tales.

What do Schumpeters rather sparse writings on imperialism tell us about his attitude toward Marxian political economy as a whole? First, while Schumpeter viewed the capitalist system as being quite unstable, he did not think it was destined to collapse, still less to stagnate. In his perspective, capitalism was subject to cyclical fluctuations, but the upswings were every bit as strong as the downturns, with depressed conditions never lasting for very long.

In spite of this, Schumpeter still believed the triumph of socialism to be inevitable in the long run, although this was not a political prospect that he welcomed. However, this would be due to the victory of anti-capitalist ideology rather than the objective economic contradictions of the capitalist system.

Second, he argued that successive waves of intense innovation would ensure that competitive forces remained strong enough to prevent the emergence of a late stage of monopoly capitalism, as the Marxists claimed would happen. Moreover, the ability of many entrepreneurs to finance their innovations out of retained earnings would keep the power of the banks in check.

These two propositions led to a third: for Schumpeter, there was no irresistible pressure for imperialist expansion on narrowly economic grounds. Capitalist countries might or might not benefit from a particular instance of imperialism. But imperialism as such was not, contrary to the Marxist view, a necessary condition for the survival of the capitalist system.

In fact, according to Schumpeter, the mutual gains to be made from trade and international investment were so large that capitalism was in fact an innately peaceful system, as nineteenth-century liberals such as Richard Cobden had maintained. It was a fundamental mistake to identify twentieth-century capitalism with aggressive militarism and the annexation of overseas territories.

For Schumpeter, imperialism was thus an atavism: a survival of the precapitalist, feudal mode of production that was not motivated by any rational demand for the preservation of the capitalist one, which could survive and indeed fare much better without it. Even in predominantly capitalist states, it was noncapitalist, aristocratic social forces that largely determined foreign policy, with the same irrational elements that had prevailed in precapitalist societies serving as an ideological justification.

Finally, Schumpeter considered the entire Marxian approach to the capitalist mode of production to be deeply flawed on several levels. For him, the most crucial Marxist error was the assertion that the forces of production dominated everything else in society, including class relations, institutions of government, and political ideologies. Schumpeter insisted that society was much more complicated than that, even in its capitalist phase.

His encounter with the Austro-Marxists certainly had a heavy influence on Schumpeter, prompting him to ask many of the same questions. However, he came up with some very different answers, and would surely have been equally skeptical toward the economic, political, and social theories that are prevalent among Marxists today. A serious engagement with Schumpeters work can thus be an important and stimulating challenge for those who still identify with the Marxist critique of capitalism.

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Joseph Schumpeter and the Economics of Imperialism - Jacobin magazine