This Is Our Legacy Endgame Marxism the U.S. Struggle for Hegemony

TheM AnglerONT H&L theY R Octopus:EVIEW Kim Jong-un’s Peace Offensive

MONTHLYVOL. 71 NO. 6

NOVEMBER 2019 RAN INDEPENDENTEVI SOCIALISTEW MAGAZINE The Trial of on Thomas Hardy IAN ANGUS fire Endgame Marxism ANDY MERRIFIELD

The U.S. Struggle this for Hegemony reprise: IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN time This is our legacy JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER a poem by MARGE PIERCY

70 YEARS OF SOCIALIST INSIGHT US$6 | CAN$6 | €4.50 | £4.00 monthlyreview.org | mronline.org NOVEMBER 2019 MONTHLY REVIEW VOL. 71 NO. 6 An Independent Socialist Magazine Founded in 1949 by Leo Huberman & Paul M. Sweezy

John Bellamy Foster, Editor ◊ Brett Clark, Associate Editor ◊ Camila Quarta, Assistant Editor ◊ Martin Paddio, Business Manager ◊ Gordon Beeferman, Circulation ◊ R. Jamil Jonna, Associate Editor for Communications & Production

Former Editors: Harry Magdoff (1969–2006) ◊ Ellen Meiksins Wood (1997–2000) ◊ Robert W. McChesney (2000–2004) 134 W. 29th Street, Suite 706 Editorial: [email protected] New York, NY 10001 Circulation: [email protected] tel: 212-691-2555 MR Online: [email protected]

REVIEW OF THE MONTH On Fire This Time John Bellamy Foster 1 The Angler and the Octopus: Kim Jong-un’s Ongoing Peace Offensive Tim Beal 18 The Trial of Thomas Hardy: A Forgotten Chapter in the Working-Class Fight for Democratic Rights Ian Angus 41 Endgame Marxism (and Urbanism) Andy Merrifield 47 REPRISE U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony Immanuel Wallerstein 54

POETRY This is our legacy Marge Piercy 61

REVIEW Race and Mystery in Cape Cod Nicholas Powers 62

Notes from the Editors Immanuel Wallerstein, the celebrated world-systems theorist and longtime contributor to Monthly Review and Monthly Review Press, died on August 31, 2019. Wallerstein first achieved international fame with the publication in 1974 of his The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (the first in a four-volume masterwork on the Modern World- System, which was to continue with volume II, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750 [1980]; volume III, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s–1840s [1988]; and volume IV, Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 [2011]). For those who encountered Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System when it first appeared in the 1970s, the effect was electrifying. It was here that he introduced his fundamental distinction between the two kinds of world-systems: world-empires and world-economies, with the latter playing a relatively minor role in most of world history, since almost inevitably absorbed by tributary-based world-empires. World-empires were conceptualized as a single political entity, like the Roman Empire, ruling over large parts of the world, exacting tribute, but lacking economic integration. A world-economy, in contrast, represented an integrated division of labor with divided political sovereignties. In this scheme, the distinctiveness of the capitalist world-economy, or the modern world-system, was that it constituted a single world-economy “ruled” over by competing nation-states, which had ex- isted for five hundred years without being transformed into a world-empire. The

DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_0 (continued on inside back cover) archive.monthlyreview.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_1 REVIEW OF THE MONTH On Fire This Time

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER

We are seeing today what appear to be the beginnings of an ecological revolution, a new historical moment unlike any humanity has experienced.1 As Naomi Klein suggests in her new book On Fire, not only is the planet burning, but a revolutionary climate movement is rising up and is now on fire in response.2 Here is a brief chronology of the last year, focusing on climate actions in Europe and North America—though it should be stressed that the whole world is now objectively (and subjectively) on fire this time3:

• August 2018: 15-year-old Greta Thunberg begins her school strike outside the Swedish Parliament. • October 8, 2018: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC pointing to the need for “systems transitions…unprecedented in terms of scale.”4 • October 17, 2018: Extinction Rebellion activists occupy UK Greenpeace headquarters demanding the staging of mass civil disobedience to address the climate emergency. • November 6, 2018: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat) is elected as a Con- gressional Representative on a platform that includes a Green New Deal.5 • November 13, 2018: Members of the Sunrise Movement occupy House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional office; newly elected Representa- tive Ocasio-Cortez joins them. • November 17, 2018: Extinction Rebellion activists block five bridges over the Thames in London. • December 10, 2018: Sunrise Movement activists flood key Democratic Party Congressional offices demanding the creation of a Select Commit- tee for a Green New Deal. • December 19, 2018: Members of Congress in support of a Select Com- mittee for a Green New Deal rises to forty. • January 25, 2019: Thunberg tells World Economic Forum: “Our house is on fire.… I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”6 • February 7, 2019: Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward Markey introduce the Green New Deal Resolution in Congress.7 • March 15, 2019: Nearly 2,100 youth-led climate strikes occur in 125 countries with 1.6 million participating (100,000 in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal).8 • April 15–19, 2019: Extinction Rebellion shuts down large parts of central London. • April 23, 2019: Speaking to both Houses of Parliament, Thunberg states: “Did you hear what I just said? Is my English okay? Is the microphone on? Because I am beginning to wonder.”9

1 2 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

• April 25, 2019: Extinction Rebellion protesters blockade the London Stock Exchange, gluing themselves across its entrances. • May 1, 2019: UK Parliament declares a Climate Emergency shortly after similar declarations by Scotland and Wales. • August 22, 2019: Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders un- veils the most comprehensive Green New Deal plan to date, proposing a public investment of $16.3 trillion over ten years.10 • September 12, 2019: The number of Congressional cosponsors of the Green New Deal Resolution reaches 107.11 • September 20, 2019: Four million people join the global climate strike, staging more than 2,500 events in 150 countries. 1.4 million protest in Germany alone.12 • September 23, 2019: Thunberg tells the United Nations: “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”13 • September 25, 2019: IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere is released, indicating that many low-lying megacities and small islands, especially in tropical regions, will experience “extreme sea level events” every year by 2050.14

The outpouring of climate change protests over the last year were largely in response to the IPCC’s October 2018 report, which declares that carbon dioxide emissions need to peak in 2020, drop by 45 percent by 2030, and reach zero net emissions by 2050 for the world to have a reasonable chance of avoiding a catastrophic 1.5ºC increase in global average temperature.15 Untold numbers of people have suddenly become aware that, in order to pull back from the edge of the cliff, it is necessary to initiate socioeconomic change on a scale commensurate with that of the Earth System crisis that humanity is facing. This has re- sulted in System Change Not Climate Change, the name of the leading U.S. ecosocialist movement, becoming the mantra of the entire global grassroots climate movement.16 The meteoric rise of Thunberg and the student climate strike movement, the Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion, and the Green New Deal, all within the brief span of a year, coupled with the actual protests and strikes of millions of climate change activists, the vast majority of them young, has meant a massive transformation of the environmental struggle in the advanced capitalist states. Virtually overnight, the struggle has shifted from its previous more generic climate action framework toward the more radical climate justice and ecosocialist wings of the movement.17 The climate action movement has been largely reformist, merely seeking to nudge business-as-usual in a climate-conscious direction. The 400,000-person climate march in New York in 2014, organized Review of the Month 3 by the People’s Climate Movement, proceeded to 34th Street and 11th Avenue, a nondestination, rather than to the United Nations where climate negotiators were meeting, with the result that it had more the character of a parade than a protest.18 In contrast, climate justice organizations such as Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement, and the Climate Justice Alliance are known for their direct action. The new movement is younger, bolder, more diverse, and more revolutionary in its outlook.19 In the present struggle for the planet, there is a growing recognition that the social and ecological relations of production must be transformed. Only a transformation that is revolutionary in terms of scale and tempo can pull humanity out of the trap that capitalism has imposed. As Thunberg told the UN Climate Change Conference on December 15, 2018, “If the solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself.”20

The Green New Deal: Reform or Revolution? What has made the struggle for an ecological revolution a seemingly un- stoppable force in the last year is the rise of the Green New Deal, or a program that represents the coalescence of the movement to arrest climate change with the struggle for economic and social justice, focusing on the effects on workers and frontline communities. However, the Green New Deal was not originally a radical-transformational strategy, but rather a moderate-reformist one. The phrase Green New Deal took hold in 2007 in a meeting between Colin Hines, former head of Greenpeace’s International Economics unit, and Guardian economics editor Larry Elliott. Faced with growing economic and environmental problems, Hines suggested a dose of Green Keynesian spending, labeling it a Green New Deal after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression in the United States. Elliott, Hines, and others, including British entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett, launched the UK Green New Deal Group later that year.21 The idea caught on quickly within environmental policy circles. Procorporate New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman began promoting the term in the United States at about the same time as a new capitalist ecomodernist strategy.22 Barack Obama was to advance a Green New Deal proposal in his 2008 campaign. However, he dropped the Green New Deal terminology along with what remained of its substance after the midterm elections in 2010.23 In September 2009, the UN Environment Programme issued a report entitled Global Green New Deal, consisting of a sustainable growth plan.24 That same month, the Green European Foundation published A Green New Deal for Europe, a Keynesian green capitalist strategy, today known as the European Green New Deal.25 4 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

All of these proposals, introduced under the mantle of a Green New Deal, were top-down combinations of Green Keynesianism, ecomodernism, and corporatist technocratic planning incorporating a marginal concern for promoting employment and eradicating poverty, while standing for a mildly reformist green capitalism. In this respect, the first Green New Deal proposals had more in common with Franklin Roosevelt’s First New Deal, from 1933 to 1935 in the United States, which was corporatist and heavily probusi- ness in character, than with the Second New Deal from 1935 to 1940, which was animated by the great revolt of industrial labor in the mid-late 1930s.26 In sharp contrast to these early corporatist proposals, the radical version of the Green New Deal that has gained traction in the last year in the United States has its historical inspiration in the great revolt from below in the Second New Deal. A key force in this metamorphosis was the Climate Justice Alliance that arose in 2013 through the coalescence of various primarily environmental justice organizations. The Climate Justice Alliance currently unites sixty-eight different frontline organizations, representing low-income communities and communities of color, engaged in immediate struggles for environmental justice and supporting a just transition.27 The critical concept of a just transition had its origins in the 1980s, in the efforts of ecosocialist Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union to build a radical labor-environmental justice movement and was later promoted by the United Steel Workers.28 Directed at over- coming the chasm between economic and ecological struggles, a just transition is now recognized as the main principle, beyond the safeguarding of the climate itself, in the struggle for a peoples’ Green New Deal. The Green New Deal first metamorphosed into a radical grassroots strategy—or a Peoples’ Green New Deal in the terms of Science for the People— during Jill Stein’s two successive Green Party presidential campaigns in 2012 and 2016.29 The Green Party’s Green New Deal had four pillars: (1) An Economic Bill of Rights, including the right to employment, workers’ rights, the right to health care (Medicare for All), and the right to tuition-free, federally fund- ed, higher education; (2) a Green Transition, promoting investment in small businesses, green research, and green jobs; (3) Real Financial Reform, including relieving homeowner and student debt, democratizing monetary policy, breaking up financial corporations, ending government bailouts of banks, and regulating financial derivatives; and (4) a Functioning Democracy, revok- ing corporate personhood, incorporating a Voter’s Bill of Rights, repealing the Patriot Act, and cutting military spending by 50 percent.30 There can be no doubt about the radical (and anti-imperialist) nature of the Green Party’s original Green New Deal platform. Its designated halving of U.S. military spending was the key to its plan to increase Review of the Month 5 federal spending in other spheres. At the heart of the Green Party’s Green New Deal was thus an attack on the economic, financial, and military structure of the U.S. empire, while focusing its economic policy proposals on a Green Transition that would provide up to twenty million new green jobs.31 The Green Transition part of the program was, ironically, the weakest component of the Green Party’s Green New Deal. The innovation of the Green Party, however, was to link vital environmental change to what it conceived as equally necessary social change. But it was not until the radical Green New Deal burst forth in Congress in November 2018, spearheaded by the newly elected Congressional Representative Ocasio-Cortez following the midterm U.S. elections, that it suddenly became a major factor in the U.S. political landscape. Ocasio-Cortez had decided to run for office after joining the hard-fought indigenous-led protest aimed at blocking the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota in 2016–17. In campaigning in New York’s 14th Congressional District (representing the Bronx and part of north-central Queens), she signed the Sunrise Movement’s No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, with the result that the Sunrise Movement canvassed for her, contributing to her surprise election victory against ten-term-in- cumbent Representative Joe Crowley.32 The Sunrise Movement’s sit-in in Pelosi’s office in support of a Green New Deal a week after the midterm elections was immediately joined by Ocasio-Cortez, who, together with Markey, was to introduce the Green New Deal Resolution in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign drew much of its inspiration from Sanders’ self-described democratic socialist campaign for president in 2016 that led to the revival of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which Ocasio-Cortez joined prior to her election. From the start, the people’s Green New Deal resolution thus took on what was in many ways an ecosocialist character.33 In the fourteen-page Green New Deal Resolution presented by Ocasio- Cortez and Markey in February 2019, the reality of the climate emergency is laid out along with the extent of U.S. responsibility. This is juxtaposed to “related crises” manifested in: the decline in life expectancy, wage stagnation, diminishing class mobility, soaring inequality, the racial di- vide in wealth, and the gender earnings gap. The solution offered is a Green New Deal that would achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a “just transition,” creating “millions of good, high wage jobs” in the process of securing a sustainable environment. It is designed to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of col- or, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated 6 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 rural communities, the poor, low income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’).” The Green New Deal Resolution is based on a “10-year national mobilization.” In this period, the goal is to achieve “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Other measures include opposing “domestic or international monopolies”; supporting family farming; building a sustainable food system; establishing a zero-emission vehicle infrastructure; promoting public transit; investing in high-speed rail; ensuring the international exchange of climate-related technology; creating partnerships with frontline communities, labor unions, and worker cooperatives; providing job guarantees, training, and higher education to the working population; ensuring high-quality, universal health care for the entire U.S. population; and protecting public lands and waters.34 Unlike the Green Party’s New Deal, the Democratic Party’s Green New Deal Resolution as introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey does not directly oppose financial capital or U.S. spending on the military and empire. Rather, its radical character is confined to linking a massive mobilization to combat climate change to a just transition for frontline communities, including redistributive economic measures. And yet there is no doubt about the radical nature of the demands put forward, which if carried out fully would require a mass mobilization of the entire society aimed at a vast transformation of U.S. capital and the expro- priation of the fossil fuel industry. Sanders’ thirty-four-page Green New Deal plan goes still further.35 It requires 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 (amounting to a 71 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions) and complete decarbonization by 2050 at the latest. It sets out to ac- complish all of this by devoting $16.3 trillion in public investment to the massive mobilization of resources to displace fossil fuels; insisting on a just transition for both workers and frontline communities; de- claring a climate change national emergency; reauthorizing the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal; and banning offshore drilling, fracking, and mountaintop removal coal mining. It would offer $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund to support necessary transformations in poor countries with the aim of helping reduce carbon emissions in less industrialized nations by 36 percent by 2030. To ensure a just transition for workers, Sanders proposes “up to five years of a wage guarantee, job placement assistance, relocation assistance, health care, and a pension based on their previous salary,” along Review of the Month 7 with housing assistance, to all workers displaced due to the switch away from fossil fuels. Workers will receive training for different career paths, including fully paid four-year college education. Health care cost would be covered by Medicare for All. The principles of environmental justice will be adhered to in order to protect frontline communities. Funding will be provided to impacted frontline communities, including the indigenous. Tribal sovereignty will be respected, with the Sanders plan including $1.12 billion offered for tribal land access and extension programs. In addition, the government “will set aside $41 billion to help large confined animal feeding operations” convert to “ecologically regenerative practices,” to be coupled with support to family farms. Funding would come from a number of sources including: (1) “mas- sively raising taxes on corporate polluters’ and investors’ fossil fuel income and wealth” as well as “raising penalties on pollution from fossil fuel energy generation” by corporations; (2) eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; (3) “generating revenue from the wholesale of energy produced by regional Power Marketing Authorities”—with the added revenue being used to support the Green New Deal to be collected until 2035, after which electricity would be provided virtually free to custom- ers aside from operations and maintenance costs; (4) cutting back on military spending directed at safeguarding global oil supplies; (5) collecting additional tax revenue resulting from the increase in employment; and (6) making corporations and the wealthy pay their “fair share.”36 Sanders’s Green New Deal is thus distinguished from Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s House Resolution in: (1) setting a definite timeline for greenhouse gas emission cuts (one far more ambitious for the United States, due to its unique responsibilities, than what is required by the world on average under the global carbon budget); (2) its direct confrontation with fossil capital; (3) explicitly basing its just transition on the needs of the working class as a whole, while focusing in particular on frontline communities; (4) specifying, like the earlier Green Party New Deal proposal, the creation of twenty million new jobs; (4) banning offshore drilling, fracking, and mountaintop removal coal mining; (5) confronting the role of the military in safeguarding the global fossil fuel economy; (6) stipulat- ing $16.3 trillion in federal government expenditures on the Green New Deal over ten years; and (7) relying on taxes on polluting corporations to help fund the Green New Deal itself.37 The Sanders plan, however, backs off from the Green Party’s bold proposal to halve military spending. The peoples’ Green New Deal strategies now being advanced constitute what in socialist theory is called revolutionary reforms, that is, reforms that promise a fundamental restructuring of economic, political, and ecological 8 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 power, and that point toward rather than away from the transition from capitalism to socialism. The scale of the changes envisaged are far greater, representing a more formidable threat to the power of capital, than those posed by the Second New Deal of the late 1930s. The complete disinvestment in fossil fuels, including fossil fuel reserves, constitutes a kind of ab- olitionism driven by sheer necessity that finds its closest analogy, in terms of its overall economic-scale effects, in the abolition of slavery in the United States. It has been estimated that in 1860, slaves constituted “the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all man- ufacturing and railroads combined.”38 Today, taking on the fossil fuel industry and related industries and infrastructure, including the entire financial structure, raises analogous conflicts over wealth and power in terms of the sheer scale involved, and is only conceivable as part of a general ecological and social transformation. Thus, the Inter-American Development Bank declared in 2016 that the energy companies were facing the potential loss of $28 trillion as a result of the world’s need to keep fossil fuels in the ground.39 As capital understood from the start, these changes would threaten the entire political-economic order, since once the population was mobilized for change, the entire metabolism of capitalist production would be chal- lenged.40 Energy corporations, Klein writes, will “have to leave trillions of dollars’ worth of proven fossil fuel reserves [which they count as assets] in the ground.”41 For the climate justice movement to take on fossil capital and the reigning capitalist system as a whole in this way requires social mobilization and class struggle on an enormous scale, with the major transformations in production-energy to be introduced in a mere handful of years. To be sure, none of the Green New Deal proposals are anywhere near to conceiving, much less tackling, the immensity of the task that the current planetary emergency demands. But they are sufficiently ground- ed in necessity that they could spark a global revolutionary struggle for freedom and sustainability, since the changes contemplated go against the logic of capital itself and cannot be achieved without a mobilization of the population as a whole on an emergency basis. Still, there are lingering contradictions to the radical Green New Deal strategies themselves, related to their emphasis on economic growth and capital accumulation. The constraints imposed by the need to stabilize the climate are severe, requiring changes in the underlying structure of production. Nevertheless, all of the current Green New Deal proposals largely eschew any mention of direct conservation of resources or cuts in overall consumption—much less emergency measures like rationing as an equi- table non-price-related means of reallocating society’s scarce resources (a fairly popular measure in the United States in the Second World War).42 Review of the Month 9

None consider the full level of waste built into the current accumulation system and how that could be turned to ecological advantage. Instead, all of the plans are based on the notion of promoting rapid, exponential economic growth or capital accumulation—despite the fact that this would compound the planetary emergency, and in spite of the fact that the real successes of the Second New Deal had much less to do with growth than economic and social redistribution.43 As Klein cautions, a Green New Deal plan would fail dismally both in protecting the planet and in carrying out a just transition if it were to take the path of “climate Keynesianism.”44

The IPCC and Mitigation Strategies None of this is to deny that a tectonic shift appears to be underway. The radical Green New Deal strategies now being advocated threaten to blow apart the IPCC-led scientific-policy process with respect to what can and should be done to combat climate change, which has hitherto interdicted all left-social perspectives. In sharp contrast to its careful scientific treatment of the causes and consequences of climate change, which have been relatively free from political intervention, the IPCC’s approach to the social actions necessary to mitigate the climate emergency has been dictated in large part by the current political-economic hegemony. Mitigation strategies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide have thus far been heavily impacted by the near total domination of capitalist relations of accumulation and the hegemony of neoclassical economics. The guidelines built into such mitigation scenarios heavily restrict the parameters of change under consideration via such devices as integrated assessment models (IAMs, large computer models that integrate energy markets and land use with greenhouse gas projections) and shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs, consisting of five different business-as-usual pathways based on largely technological frameworks, with substantial economic growth and the lack of climate policy implementation formally built into all the models). The result of such deliberately conservative models, which write off all alternatives to business as usual, is the proliferation of unrealistic assess- ments of both what can be done and what has to be done.45 In general, the mitigation scenarios incorporated into the IPCC process: (1) implicitly assume the need to perpetuate the current political-economic hegemony; (2) downplay changes in social relations in favor of technocratic change, much of it based on technologies that do not exist or are unfeasible; (3) stress supply-side, mainly price-related and technological factors, rather than demand-side factors, or direct reductions in ecological consumption so as to lower emissions; (5) rely on so-called negative emissions (capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and somehow sequestering it) so as to allow 10 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 the overshooting of emission targets; (6) leave the mass of the population out of account, assuming that change will be managed by managerial elites with minimal public participation; and (7) postulate slow responses, leav- ing out the possibility (indeed necessity) of ecological revolution.46 Hence, while the scale of climate change and its socioecological impacts are well captured by IPCC models and projections, the scale of the social change required to meet this challenge is systematically downgraded in the hundreds of mitigation models utilized by the IPCC. Magic bullets emanat- ing from market-price interventions (such as carbon trading) and futuris- tic technology involving inventions that are not feasible on the necessary scale and that rely on negative emissions are resorted to instead.47 Such models point to catastrophic outcomes for which the only defenses are presumed to be so-called market efficiency and nonexistent and/or irrational baroque technology, since these approaches supposedly allow society to proceed with its current productive mode largely unaltered. Thus, most climate mitigation models incorporate bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technology, which promotes growing plants (principally trees) on a massive scale to be burned to produce energy, while simultaneously capturing the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere and somehow sequestering or storing it, as in geologic and ocean sequestration. If implemented, this would require a quantity of land equal to one or two Indias and an amount of freshwater approx- imating that which is currently used by world agriculture despite world water shortages.48 Nor is the avid promotion of such purely mechanistic approaches an accident. It is deeply embedded in how these reports are constructed and the underlying capitalist order they serve. In the words of leading climatologist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the United Kingdom:

The problem is that delivering on the 1.5–2ºC commitment demands emissions cuts for wealthy nations of more than 10% each year, far beyond rates typically considered possible in the current economic system. It is in seeming to remedy this impasse that IAMs have an important and dangerous role. Behind a veneer of objectivity, the use of these leviathan computer models has professionalized the analysis of climate-change mitigation by substituting messy and contextual politics with non-contextual mathematical formalism. Within these professional boundaries, IAMs synthesize simple climate models, with a belief in how finance works and technologies change, buttressed by an [orthodox] economic interpretation of human behaviour.… Typically, IAMs use models based on free-market axioms. The algo- rithms embedded in these models assume marginal changes near economic equilibrium, and are heavily reliant on small variations in demand that Review of the Month 11

result from marginal changes in prices. The Paris climate agreement, by contrast, sets a mitigation challenge that is far removed from the equilibrium of today’s market economy, requiring immediate and radical change across all facets of society.49

The reality, Anderson stresses, is that current climate-scenario model- ing and projections provided by the IPCC and incorporated into national plans are based on assumptions drawn from the general equilibrium analysis of neoclassical economics, building in notions of gradualist changes, based on the requirements of the profit system. Such stipulations in mitigation scenarios are meaningless in the context of the current climate emergency and dangerous in that they inhibit necessary action—so that nonexistent technology is seen as the only savior. Of the numerous models considered by the IPCC in its 2018 report, all require carbon dioxide reduction (CDR) or so-called negative emissions, mostly by technological means but also including afforestation.50 The truth is that the whole mitigation approach within the IPCC, Anderson explains, has been an “accelerating failure,” guiding a process that is radically opposed to its projections, with the result that “annual CO2 emissions have increased by about 70% since 1990.” Since the effects of such emissions are cumulative and nonlinear, with all sorts of positive feedbacks, the “ongoing failure to mitigate emissions has pushed the challenge from a moderate change in the economic system to a revolutionary overhaul of the system. This is not an ideological position; it emerges directly from a scientific and mathematical interpretation of the Paris climate agreement.”51 Recognizing the accelerating climate emergency, the IPCC in its 2018 report departed from its previous reports in mildly encouraging the development of approaches to climate-change mitigation that include demand-side considerations. This means finding ways to reduce consumption, usually through increased efficiency (though typically downplaying the well- known Jevons Paradox, where increasing efficiency under capitalism leads to increased accumulation and consumption).52 A number of mitigation scenarios have been introduced that demonstrate that demand-side interventions are the fastest way to address climate change—and even, in one model, suggesting that the below-1.5ºC target can be met with only slight overshoot and without reliance on so-called negative emission technologies, but rather depending on improved agricultural and forestry practices (considered a nontechnological form of carbon dioxide reduction).53 These results are achieved, moreover, within the extremely restrictive assumptions of the IPCC mitigation models, which formally build in (via IAMs and SSPs) significant rapid economic growth while formally excluding all climate policy (or political) interventions. It has therefore been suggested 12 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 by some radical critics, such as Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, that a demand-side sociopolitical approach that emphasizes abundance and redistributive policies, while placing limits on profits and growth (which today mainly benefit the .01 percent), is demonstratively far superior in mitigation terms and constitutes the only realistic solution.54 A major virtue of the rise of radical or people’s Green New Deal strategies, therefore, is that they open up the realm of what is possible in accord with actual necessity, raising the question of transformative change as the only basis of human-civilizational survival: the freedom of necessity.55 Here it is important to recognize that an ecological and social revolution under present historical conditions is likely to pass through two stages that we can call ecodemocratic and ecosocialist.56 The self-mobilization of the population will initially take an ecodemocratic form, emphasizing the building of energy alternatives combined with a just transition, but in a context generally lacking any systematic critique of production or consumption. Eventually, however, the pressure of climate change and the struggle for social and ecological justice, spurred on by the mobilization of diverse communities, can be expected to lead to a more comprehensive ecorevolutionary view, penetrating the veil of the received ideology. Still, the fact remains that the attempt to construct a radical Green New Deal in a world still dominated by monopoly-finance capital will be constantly threatened by a tendency to revert to Green Keynesianism, where the promise of unlimited jobs, rapid economic growth, and higher consumption militate against any solution to the planetary ecological crisis. As Klein remarks in On Fire,

Any credible Green New Deal needs a concrete plan for ensuring that the salaries from all the good green jobs it creates aren’t immediately poured into high-consumer lifestyles that inadvertently end up increasing emissions—a scenario where everyone has a good job and lots of disposable income and it all gets spent on throwaway crap.… What we need are transitions that recognize the hard limits on extraction and that simultaneously create new opportunities for people to improve quality of life and derive pleasure outside the endless consumption cycle.57

The path toward ecological and social freedom requires abandoning a mode of production rooted in the exploitation of human labor and the ex- propriation of nature and peoples, leading to evermore frequent and severe economic and ecological crises. The overaccumulation of capital under the regime of monopoly-finance capital has made waste at every level integral to the preservation of the system, creating a society in which what is rational for capital is irrational for the world’s people and the earth.58 This has led to the wasting away of human lives on unnecessary labor spent on producing Review of the Month 13 useless commodities, requiring the squandering of the world’s natural-material resources. Conversely, the extent of this profligate waste of human production and wealth, and of the earth itself, is a measure of the enormous potential that exists today for expanding human freedom and fulfilling individual and collective needs while securing a sustainable environment.59 In the current climate crisis, it is the imperialist countries at the center of the system that have produced the bulk of the carbon dioxide emissions now concentrated in the environment. It is these nations that still have the highest per capita emissions. These same states, moreover, mo- nopolize the wealth and technology necessary to reduce global carbon emissions dramatically. It is therefore essential that the wealthy nations take on the larger burden for stabilizing the world’s climate, reducing their carbon dioxide emissions at a rate of 10 percent or more a year.60 It is the recognition of this responsibility on the part of rich nations, together with the underlying global necessity, that has led to the sudden rise of transformative movements like Extinction Rebellion. Over the longer run, however, the main impetus for worldwide ecological transformation will come from the Global South where the planetary crisis is having its harshest effects—on top of an already imperialist world system and a growing gap between rich and poor countries as a whole. It is in the periphery of the capitalist world that the legacy of revolution is the strongest—and the deepest conceptions of how to carry out such needed change persist. This is especially evident in countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia, which have sought to revolutionize their societies despite the harsh attacks by the imperialist world system and in spite of their historic depen- dence (in the cases of Venezuela and Bolivia)—itself imposed by the hegemonic structures of the global economy—on energy extraction. In general, we can expect the Global South to be the site of the most rapid growth of an environmental proletariat, arising from the degradation of material conditions of the population in ways that are equally ecological and economic.61 The role of China in all of this remains crucial and contradictory. It is one of the most polluted and resource-hungry countries in the world, while its carbon emissions are so massive as to themselves constitute a global-scale problem. Nevertheless, China has done more than any other country thus far to develop alternative-energy technologies geared to the creation of what is officially referred to as an ecological civilization. Remarkably, it remains largely self-sufficient in food due to its system of agriculture, in which the land is social property and agricultural production is mainly reliant on small producers with remnants of collective-communal responsibility. What is clear is that the present and future choices of the Chinese state, and even more the Chinese people, with 14 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 respect to the creation of an ecological civilization are likely to be key in determining the long-term fate of the earth.62 Ecological revolution faces the enmity of the entire capitalist system. At a minimum it means going against the logic of capital. In its full development, it means transcending the system. Under these conditions, the reactionary response of the capitalist class backed by its rearguard on the far right will be regressive, destructive, and unrestrained. This can already be seen in the numerous attempts by Donald Trump’s administration to remove the very possibility of making the changes necessary to combat climate change (seemingly in order to burn the world’s ships behind it), beginning with its withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and its acceleration of fossil fuel extraction. Ecological barbarism or ecofascism are palpable threats in the current global political context and are part of the reality with which any mass ecological revolt will need to contend.63 Only a genuine revolutionary, and not a reformist, struggle will be able to propel itself forward in these circumstances.

An Age of Transformational Change It is commonplace in the social science literature, representing the reigning liberal ideology, to see society as simply constituted by the actions of the individuals that make it up. Other, more critical, thinkers sometimes present the opposite view that individuals are the product of the overall social structure. A third generic model sees individuals as affecting society and society affecting individuals in a kind of back and forth motion, viewed as a synthesis of structure and agency.64 In contrast to all of these mainstream, mostly liberal approaches, which leave little room for genuine social transformation, Marxian theory, with its historical-dialectical approach, relies on what the critical-realist philosopher Roy Bhaskar has called a “transformational model of social activity” in which individuals are historically born into and socialized in a given society (mode of production), which sets the initial parameters of their existence.65 However, these conditions and productive relations change in unpredictable, contingent ways during the course of their lives, leading to unintended consequences, contradictions, and crises. Caught in historical situations not of their choosing, human beings, acting both spontaneously and through organized social movements, reflecting class and other individual and collective identities, seek to alter the existing structures of social reproduction and social transformation, giving rise to critical historical moments consisting of radical breaks and revolutions, and new emergent realities. As Karl Marx wrote, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it Review of the Month 15 under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”66 Such a transformational model of social activity supports a theory of human self-emancipation in history. Existing social relations become fetters on general human development; but they also give rise to fundamental contradictions in the labor and production process—or what Marx called the social metabolism of humanity and nature—leading to a period of crisis and transformation, threatening the revolutionary overturning of the social relations of production, or the relations of class, property, and power.67 Today we are presented with such severe contradictions in the metabolism of nature and society and in the social relations of production, but in a manner for which there is no true historical precedent. In the Anthropocene, the planetary ecological emergency overlaps with the overaccumulation of capital and an intensified imperialist expropria- tion, creating an epochal economic and ecological crisis.68 It is the overaccumulation of capital that accelerates the global ecological crisis by propelling capital to find new ways to stimulate consumption to keep the profits flow- ing. The result is a state of planetary Armageddon, threatening not just socioeconomic stability, but the survival of human civilization and the human species itself. For Klein, the core explanation is simple: noting that “Marx wrote about capitalism’s ‘irreparable rift’ with ‘the natural laws of life itself,’” she goes on to underscore that “many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depended.”69 And this is exactly what has happened in the period since the Second World War, through the great acceleration of economic activity, overconsumption on the part of the wealthy, and the resulting ecological destruction. Capitalist society has long glorified the domination of nature. William James, the great pragmatist philosopher, famously referred in 1906 to “the moral equivalent of war.” Though it is seldom mentioned, James’s moral equivalent was a war on the earth, in which he proposed “to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature.”70 Today, we have to reverse this and create a new, more revolutionary moral equivalent of war; one directed not at the enlisting of an army to conquer the earth, but directed at the self-mobilization of the population to save the earth as a place of human habitation. This can only be accomplished through a struggle for ecological sustainability and substantive equality aimed at resurrecting the global commons. In the words of Thunberg speaking to the United Nations on September 23, 2019, “Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.” The world is on fire this time. 16 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

Notes

1. Here, revolution is viewed as a complex Summary for Policymakers (Geneva: leading defender of a Peoples’ Green historical process, encompassing many IPCC, 2019), 22–24, 33. New Deal, incorporating a just transition actors and phases, sometimes nascent, 15. Nicholas Stern, “We Must Reduce for workers and frontline communities as sometimes developed, encompassing Greenhous Gas Emissions to Net Zero opposed to attempts to fold the Green a fundamental challenging of the state, or Face More Floods,” Guardian, October New Deal into its previous corporatist along with the property, productive, and 7, 2018; “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s form. See Science for the People, “Peo-� class structure of society. It may involve Speech to UN Climate Action Summit.” ples’ Green New Deal.” actors whose intentions are not revolu- Usually it is assumed that the world must 30. Jill Stein, “Solutions for a Country in tionary but who are objectively part of the stay below 2ºC in order to avoid a point Trouble: The Four Pillars of the Green New development of a revolutionary situation. of no return with respect to the human Deal,” Green Pages, September 25, 2012. For a historical analogue, see George Lefe- relation to the planet. But more and more 31. Green Party, “We Can Build a Better bvre, The Coming of the French Revolution science has pointed to 1.5ºC as the mark- (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Tomorrow Today, It’s Time for a Green er. Most IPCC-recognized climate mitiga- New Deal.” 1947). On the concept of ecological revo- tion schemes today assume a temporary lution itself, see John Bellamy Foster, The overshooting of the 1.5ºC boundary (or 32. Tessa Stuart, “Sunrise Movement, Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly the Force Behind the Green New Deal else the 2ºC boundary) with negative Rolling Stone Review Press, 2009), 11–35. emissions, then removing carbon from Ramps Up Plans for 2020,” , May 1, 2019. The founding Sunrise 2. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) the atmosphere before the worst effects Case for a Green New Deal (New York: have occurred. But such a strategy, it is Movement activists had cut their teeth on Simon and Schuster, 2019). increasingly recognized, is worse than the fossil-fuel disinvestment movement particularly in universities, which as of 3. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Russian roulette in terms of statistical odds—and more filled with illusions. December 2018 claims to have succeed- (New York: Dial, 1963). ed in facilitating $8 trillion in disinvest- 4. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5ºC (Gene- 16. http://systemchangenotclimat�- ments. However, activists realized that va: IPCC, 2018). echange.org. See also Martin Empson, the next step was to try to tackle the state ed., System Change Not Climate Change itself and to change the system through a 5. John Haltiwanger, “This Is the Plat- (London: Bookmarks, 2019). form That Launched Alexandria Oca- Green New Deal. Klein, On Fire, 22. sio-Cortez, a 29-Year-Old Democratic 17. On the distinction between climate 33. The Green Party has moved explic- Socialist, to Become the Youngest Wom- action and climate justice, see Klein, On itly in the direction of ecosocialism and an Ever Elected to Congress,” Business Fire, 27–28. sponsored an ecosocialism conference Insider, January 4, 2019. 18. The climate march was followed a in Chicago on September 28, 2019. See 6. Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small few days later by the Flood Wall Street Anita Rios, “Green Party Gears Up for to Make a Difference (London: Penguin, action, in which protestors engaged in Ecosocialism Conference,” Black Agenda 2019), 19–24. civil disobedience but lacked the force Report, September 10, 2019. of numbers. 7. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cor- 34. H. Res. 109, “Recognizing the Duty tez, 116th Congress, 1st Session, House 19. Klein, On Fire, 27–28. of the Federal Government to Create a Resolution 109, “Recognizing the Duty 20. Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Green New Deal.” of the Federal Government to Create a Make a Difference, 16. 35. Sanders is entirely alone among Green New Deal” (subsequently referred 21. Green Party US, Green New Deal the leading Democratic candidates to as Green New Deal Resolution), Febru- Timeline, available at http://gp.org; in the 2020 elections in promoting a ary 7, 2019, available at http://ocasio-cor- Green New Deal Policy Group, A Green genuine Green New Deal. Joe Biden’s tez.house.gov. New Deal (London: New Economics “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and 8. Klein, On Fire, 1–7. Foundation, 2008); Larry Elliott, “Climate Environmental Justice,” introduced in June 2019, avoids altogether the IPCC’s 9. Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Change Cannot Be Bargained With,” Make a Difference Guardian, October 29, 2007. insistence that carbon dioxide emissions , 61. have to be reduced by nearly 50 percent 10. Bernie Sanders, “The Green New 22. Thomas Friedman, “A Warning from New York Times by 2030 in order to stay below 1.5ºC and Deal,” April 22, 2019, available at http:// the Garden,” , January simply promises to promote policies berniesanders.com. 19, 2007. that will achieve net-zero emissions by 11. H. Res. 109, “Recognizing the Duty 23. Alexander C. Kaufman, “What’s the 2050, proposing to spend $1.7 trillion of the Federal Government to Create ‘Green New Deal’?” Grist, June 30, 2018. on combatting climate change over ten a Green New Deal,” list of cosponsors 24. UNEP, Global Green New Deal (Gene- years. Elizabeth Warren has signed on available at http://congress.gov; S. Res. va: UNEP, 2009). to the Green New Dean Resolution, but in her “Clean Energy Plan,” introduced 59, “Recognizing the Duty of the Feder- 25. Green European Foundation, A al Government to Create a Green New Green New Deal for Europe (Brussels: in September 2019, she does not go Deal,” list of cosponsors available at Green European Foundation, 2009). beyond saying that she supports a ten- http://congress.gov. year mobilization through 2030 with the 26. David Milton, The Politics of U.S. aim of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas 12. Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, Labor (New York: Monthly Review Press, emissions “as soon as possible.” She pro- “How Big Was the Global Climate Strike? 1982). 4 Million People Activists Estimate,” Vox, poses a $3 trillion investment over ten September 20, 2019. 27. Climate Justice Alliance, “History of years. Her plan excludes any mention of the Climate Justice Alliance.” a just transition for workers or frontline 13. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech 28. John Bellamy Foster, “Ecosocialism communities. to UN Climate Action Summit,” NPR, Sep- MR tember 23, 2019. and a Just Transition,” Online, June 36. Sanders, “The Green New Deal.” 22, 2019; Climate Justice Alliance, “Just 37. While the Green New Deal Reso- 14. IPCC, Special Report on the Ocean Transition: A Framework for Change.” and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, lution introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and 29. Science for the People has been a Markey does not address how it would be Review of the Month 17

financed, the emphasis has been on the 48. See John Bellamy Foster, “Making 60. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, creation of public banks, green quantita- War on the Planet,” Monthly Review 70, “Beyond ‘Dangerous’ Climate Change: tive easing, and deficit financing under no. 4 (September 2018): 4–6. Emission Scenarios for a New World,” current low capacity utilization—a view 49. Anderson, “Debating the Bedrock of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal supported by modern monetary theory. It Climate-Change Mitigation Scenarios.” Society 369 (2011): 20–44. deliberately swerves away from funding Global Warming of 1.5ºC 61. For a discussion of the current eco- by taxes on corporations. Ellen Brown, 50. IPCC, , 16, 96. logical situation in the Global South “The Secret to Funding a Green New and its relation to imperialism, see John Deal,” Truthdig, March 19, 2019. 51. Anderson “Debating the Bedrock of Climate-Change Mitigation Scenarios.” Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and 38. Historian David Blight, quoted in Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Anthropo�- Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Slavery Made Ameri�- 52. See John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Monthly Review The Ecological Rift cene,” 71, no. 3 (July–Au- ca,” Atlantic, June 24, 2014. and Richard York, gust 2019): 70–88. On the concept of the (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 39. Ben Caldecott et al., Stranded Assets: environmental proletariat, see Bellamy 169–82. A Climate Risk Challenge (Washington Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 53. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5ºC, 440–41. 15–16, 97; Jason Hickel, “The Hope at 2016): x. 62. The issue of China and ecology is the Heart of the Apocalyptic Climate 40. Naomi Klein, This Changes Every- Change Report,” Foreign Policy, October complex. See John B. Cobb (in conver- thing: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New China and 18, 2018. See also Arnulf Grubler, “A sation with Andre Vltchek), York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 31–63. Ecological Civilization Low Energy Demand Scenario for Meet- (Jakarta: Badak 41. Klein, On Fire, 261; J. F. Mercure et ing the 1.5ºC Target and Sustainable Merah, 2019); David Schwartzman, al., “Macroeconomic Impact of Strand-� Development Goals Without Negative “China and the Prospects for a Global Climate and ed Fossil Fuel Assets,” Nature Climate Emission Technologies,” Nature Energy 3, Ecological Civilization,” Change 8 (2018): 588–93. no. 6 (2018): 512–27; Joeri Rogelj et al., Capitalism, September 17, 2019; Lau Kin This Changes Everything “Scenarios Towards Limiting Global Mean Chi, “A Subaltern Perspective on China’s 42. Klein, , Monthly Review 115–16. Temperature Increase Below 1.5ºC,” Na- Ecological Crisis,” 70, no. 5 (October 2018): 45–57. On the concept Put to Work ture Climate Change 8 (2018): 325–32; 43. Nancy E. Rose, (New of ecological civilization and its relation York: Monthly Review Press, 2009). Christopher Bertram et al. “Targeted Policies Can Compensate Most of the to China, see John Bellamy Foster, “The 44. Klein, On Fire, 264. Increased Sustainability Risks in 1.5ºC Earth-System Crisis and Ecological Civili- 45. Kevin Anderson, “Debating the Mitigation Scenarios,” Environmental zation,” International Critical Thought 7, Bedrock of Climate-Change Mitigation Research Letters 13, no. 6 (2018). no. 4 (2017): 439–58. Scenarios,” Nature, September 16, 54. Hickel and Kallis, “Is Green Growth 63. Naomi Klein, “Only a Green New 2019; Zeke Hausfather, “Explainer: How Possible?” Deal Can Douse the Fires of Ecofascism,” ‘Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’ Ex- Intercept 55. J. D. Bernal, The Freedom of Neces- , September 16, 2019. plore Future Climate Change,” Carbon sity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 64. Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality Brief, April 19, 2018. 1949). (London: Routledge, 2011), 74–76. 46. These shortcomings are built directly 56. See John Bellamy Foster, “Ecology,” Reclaiming Reality, into the SSPs and even into the IAMs. See 65. Bhaskar, 76–77, in The Marx Revival, ed. Marcelo Musto Oliver Fricko et al., “The Marker Quantifi-� 92–94. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, cation of the Shared Socioeconomic Path- 66. Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of 2000), 193. way 2: A Middle-of-the-Road Scenario for Louis Bonaparte (1852; repr., New York: the 21st Century,” Global Environmental 57. Klein, On Fire, 264. International Publishers, 1963): 15. Change 42 (2017): 251–67. For a general 58. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. 67. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: critical evaluation, see Jason Hickel and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Penguin, 1976), 283. Giorgos Kallis, “Is Green Growth Possible?” Monthly Review Press, 1966). Facing the Anthropo- New Political Economy, April 17, 2019. 68. See Ian Angus, 59. John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of cene (New York: Monthly Review Press, 47. Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, Marxian Political Economy,” Monthly Re- 2016), 175–91. view “The Trouble with Negative Emissions,” 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1–16; On Fire Science 354, no. 6309 (2016): 182–83; 69. Klein, , 90–91; Karl Marx, Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Capital European Academies Science Advisory What Every Environmentalist Needs , vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), Council, Negative Emission Technologies: to Know About Capitalism (New York: 949. What Role in Meeting Paris Agreement Monthly Review Press, 2011), 123–44; 70. William James, “Proposing the Mor�- Targets, EASAC Policy Report 35 (Halle, William Morris, News from Nowhere and al Equivalent of War” (speech, Stanford Germany: German National Academy of Selected Writings and Designs (London: University, 1906), available at Lapham’s Sciences, 2018). Penguin, 1962): 121–22. Quarterly online. archive.monthlyreview.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_2

The Angler and the Octopus Kim Jong-un’s Ongoing Peace Offensive

TIM BEAL

Ever since the United States divided the Korean peninsula in 1945, North Korea has had to cope with the existential challenge of U.S. hostility. Korea marks the western boundary of the empire, a border area where the sea power of the United States adjoins the land power of Russia and China. North Korea has been able to utilize this liminality to create a sovereign state—the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK)—whose independence is not welcomed by either Moscow or Beijing but tolerated because the alternatives, a client of the other or absorption into the U.S. empire, are considered worse. Washington, as global hegemon, has been less willing to tolerate this independence but has faced constraints. The result has been a policy of hostility, of unrelenting diplomatic and economic war of varying intensity, stopping short of actual kinetic war, though never far from it. The United States is frustrated by this situation, which is an affront to its hubris, but is restrained by the consequences. For North Korea, the situation is far more serious. Kinetic war would mean its destruction while the prevailing diplomatic and economic war produces its impoverishment—it is claimed that its per capita gross domestic product is less than 4 percent of that of South Korea.1 For North Korea, the U.S. relationship is of paramount importance, the key to survival and prosperity.2 For the United States, North Korea is but one part of the theater of politics, colorful but more fantasy than substance. The so-called North Korean crisis occupies a special place in the U.S. political repertoire. Policy in the Middle East, and now Venezuela, is bed- ded in the strategic necessity of domination of oil supplies. The confrontation with the Soviet Union/Russia and China, whatever the distortions in the narrative may be, has a grounding in real geopolitical struggle against substantial adversaries. The North Korean crisis is different in that it is basically a domestically constructed political issue fueled by the spe- cific geopolitical needs for tension in East Asia supplemented by the generic hunger of the military-industrial complex. It is not a real security issue in itself: North Korea is far too small to pose any real threat to

Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic who has written extensively on Asia with a special focus on the Korean peninsula. His most recent work is the entry on Korea for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (Springer Publishing, 2019).

18 United States & North Korea 19 the United States, other than limited and suicidal retaliation if attacked. But politics are often not firmly tethered to reality. Additionally, over generations, especially in recent decades, the myth of the North Korean threat has been nurtured by politicians, the military and security sector, and the media to assume an unchallenged authenticity of its own. Most presidents have felt compelled to “do something” about North Korea and this has fluctuated between threats (coercive diplomacy and the military option) and negotiations. Talks, however, were always doomed and designed to probably fail because they came with preconditions or demands that were inherently unacceptable to Pyongyang. The U.S. state bureaucracy tolerated failure in negotiations because there was no danger, and secretly welcomed it because the real problems would start with a resolution of the supposed crisis. Peace on the Korean peninsula would erode the U.S. military presence and forward strategy in East Asia, and negotiated peaceful coexistence with a defiantly independent North Korea on the basis of its nuclear deterrent might well encourage other countries to follow that path and undermine U.S. global hegemony. Over the years, U.S. negotiations with North Korea have manifested this tension between the president’s desire to “do something” and the state’s desire to “do nothing” in order to preserve the status quo. But the Donald Trump presidency presents a new dimension to the drama with its distinctive level of dissonance, reaching public antagonism, between the president and the wider state apparatus. North Korea and the United States are so vastly different in historical experience, size, motivation, and governance that it is useful to see their relationship as a struggle between an angler, small but focused on the main task, and an octopus, gigantic and powerful but discordant and without a clear and unifying focus other than its voracious appetite.

The U.S. Octopus and the Child Emperor Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man battled with a marlin, a giant fish longer than his own boat. The United States, in contrast, can be better considered an octopus for one main reason. Marlins, fish, and animals in general (both human and nonhuman) all have brains that basically control the rest of their bodies. The octopus is different: “Like humans, they have centralised nervous systems, but in their case there is no clear distinction between brain and body. An octopus’s neurons are dispersed throughout its body, and two-thirds of them are in its arms: each arm can act intelli- gently on its own, grasping, manipulating and hunting.”3 The octopus has a decentralized intelligence and decision-making system, which makes it a better analogy for the United States than a marlin. 20 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

The Trump administration has a very soft center that exacerbates, though did not create, the dysfunctional, uncoordinated octopoid nature of the state. The tentacles of this particular octopus are not merely large in relation to the governing and guiding center, they are also fundamentally dispro- portional. The physical infrastructure arm is decrepit, the part representing social services such as health is enervated, while that of the military and the wider so-called national security apparatus is grossly bloated.4 This is, again, not unique to the United States and long precedes Trump, although he has markedly worsened the state of affairs. The State Department, long the poor relation of U.S. foreign policy compared to the military, has been eviscerated. So much has been written about Trump’s psychology that there is no need to repeat it here. He is like a child emperor who is managed by devious and more knowledgeable courtiers, any of whom he can (and often does) banish on a whim. No modern presidency has had as much opposition and pushback from the bureaucracy and the political elite in general, as articulated by much of the media and instrumentalized by Russiagate, as Trump. The fundamental, though unspoken, criticism of the foreign policy elite is that he does not understand that he is running an empire, not just a country. He does not value alliances and the soft power that is such an essential component of the empire. His knowledge is fragmentary and his strategy incoherent. He is not alone in that, but he takes these failings further than most. However, it is Trump’s very ignorance of his imperial role and his narcissistic, disheveled personality that paradoxically present a faint possibility of peace breaking out on the Korean peninsula. A cleverer president, such as Barack Obama, would not countenance peace, but Trump might just stumble across it. The chances are low but substantial enough to cause anguish across most of the foreign policy establishment. Nevertheless, there are indications that some, as we shall see, are looking for ways to mitigate the consequences so that, if Trump does succeed in “solving the North Korean crisis” and perhaps picking up a Nobel Peace Prize, the damage to U.S. hegemony in general and to geopolitical strategy in East Asia in particular will be limited.

Kim’s Peace Offensive and Its Main Driver The 2018 New Year’s Address by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ush- ered in remarkable new developments.5 He claimed that advances in North Korea’s 2017 nuclear deterrence meant that “in no way would the United States dare to ignite a war against [him] and [his] country.” It is likely that the confidence the deterrent provided formed the foundation that enabled him to launch the diplomatic peace offensive. The United United States & North Korea 21

States portrays matters quite differently, claiming that “maximum pressure” has compelled Pyongyang to sue for peace on U.S. terms. Clearly, which driver—confidence or desperation—offers the better explanation is of utmost importance. If it is maximum pressure, that is, the intensifi- cation of economic and diplomatic warfare and the military threat, then its continuance and escalation where possible will bring victory: North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear deterrent and whatever consequences might follow that. If the driver is confidence, both in the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent and the ability to withstand U.S. pressure, then things will turn out differently: a refusal to buckle to U.S. demands leading to a stalemate in U.S.-North Korea negotiations, decreasing Chinese and Russian compliance with U.S. demands, and possibly a crisis in South Korea as South Korean president Moon Jae-in gets squeezed between as- pirations for Korean détente and opposition to it from the United States. Eighteen months after the launch of the offensive, it is increasingly clear that, in the words of Ruediger Frank, “North Korea Is Not Desperate.”6 Confidence in its deterrent and resilience to withstand maximum pressure has led to a transformation of the diplomatic landscape, increasing support from China and Russia and continued disarray among U.S. ranks.

The Angler Casts the Lure, Outflanking Washington and Utilizing Seoul Kim unsuccessfully attempted a direct overture to Trump in 2017. In turn, this led to Trump’s bellicose threats. This time, however, Kim embarked on an outflanking maneuver, ignored Trump, and made the initial overture to Moon. Moon had been swept into power by the Candlelight Revolution but, despite his rhetoric, it soon became clear that he was not going to make much progress on promoting peace on the peninsula. He was not strong enough to stand up to the United States or to the domestic conservative/military bloc. Since they had no interest in peace, except perhaps for the peace that follows conquest, as long as he was subservient to them, he would achieve little.7 And so it turned out.8 Indeed, Kim made this point in his address though he diplomatically refrained from naming Moon. He then played the Olympics card, suggesting that the North participate because “it is natural for us to share their pleasure over the auspicious event and help them.”9 The Winter Olympics held in Pyeongchang in February 2018 were of great importance to South Korea. Kim’s offer was welcomed by progres- sives, and of course President Moon himself. The North’s participation was not something the United States or conservatives could publicly oppose, although they were clearly unhappy about it, hiding behind the argument that an excluded North Korea would somehow disrupt the games. 22 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

Thus began the diplomatic peace offensive of 2018. On February 10, 2018, Kim proposed a summit to Moon, who accepted. It took place at Panmunjom on the common border on April 27 of that year. While the relationship with the South is hugely important to North Korea, it is ultimately the United States that counts. The United States dominates South Korea—it is U.S. military power that threatens the independence of North Korea, and U.S. economic and diplomatic power that starves its people. Improving its relationship with the South, on its own, achieves little given Seoul’s limited freedom of action. Moon needs U.S. approval for virtually all aspects of the détente.10 Accordingly, Kim, like a boxer who jabs to the left then strikes on the right, made two overtures to the United States.

The Double Overture to the United States: Freeze and Summit The first attracted little attention but was in fact of great importance, containing the kernel of a possible peace accord. On April 21, 2018, the DPRK an- nounced, in a report given by Kim to the Central Committee of the Worker’s Party of Korea (WPK), a unilateral moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests.11 An earlier moratorium, entered into during the final days of Bill Clinton’s administration to promote dialogue, had been withdrawn in 2005 after the George W. Bush administration, having abrogated the Agreed Framework, showed little interest in meaningful negotiations.12 The earlier moratorium was in effect before North Korea had tested a nuclear weapon (and would not have been if Bush had stuck to the Agreed Framework) or long-range missiles. This time was different. Kim claimed that tests were “no longer necessary” and that the task of constructing a deterrent was complete. The rhetoric masked a couple of significant issues. All countries that have developed nuclear weapons have needed physical tests in the early stages. For example, the United States conducted over one thousand such tests. Israel is the only exception, presumably because the testing was done by those who provided the technology. The United States and other leading nuclear weapon states signed test-ban treaties because their technology had reached the stage where such tests were no longer necessary and testing could be conducted without an actual explosion in what are known as subcritical tests.13 On April 21, 2018, Kim declared that North Korea had conducted subcritical tests. While claims are not proof, they can establish a useful degree of ambiguity if they are credible, as this one seems to be.14 The second leg of the deterrent—long-range missiles—also offers un- certainty. The big issue is whether North Korea has mastered reentry technology. A warhead reentering the atmosphere needs to be protected against the extreme heat generated, otherwise it will be destroyed United States & North Korea 23 before it reaches its target. Although Kim has claimed that this has been achieved, some foreign experts are skeptical. Thus, the moratorium provides what might be termed an ambiguity buffer, which, as we shall see, may turn out to be highly significant in that it allows U.S. officials to accept a freeze on further tests and a cap on North Korea’s nuclear program because it has not yet developed a real capacity to retaliate against the U.S. mainland. The moratorium on tests also addresses a core component of the U.S. so- called North Korea crisis. As noted at the beginning of this article, North Korea does not pose a meaningful threat to the United States. This is irre- spective of issues such as reentry capability. North Korea is just too small and, even if it had a handful of fully functioning nuclear-tipped intercon- tinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), a unilateral attack is just not feasible. Nothing would be achieved—defeat, perhaps obliteration, would be inevitable. The threat of retaliation as a deterrent is one thing; an aggressive attack is quite another. The myth of the North Korean threat is a product of U.S. domestic politics generated over decades. It is a bogus fear accorded credibility partly by relentless propaganda, but also by the inevitable visi- bility of the development process. Nuclear and missile tests give politicians, officials, and the media a flag to wave; it is the testing of weapons rather than the weapons themselves that tends to attract political and hence public attention. This leads some to come up with what is called the Israel model of managing public perception, an issue to which we will return.15 However, it was the second overture that garnered by far the most attention. It was political theater pitched to a reality television host, and the bait was irresistible. Chung Eui-yong, Moon’s national security advisor, went from meeting Kim in Pyongyang to Washington, where he invited the United States to a summit on behalf of Kim, to which Trump—who sees himself as a superb negotiator who can dare to tread, and win, where his predecessors did not—agreed.16 Will Kim succeed in doing what his father and grandfather failed to, that is, hooking the U.S. president to haul him in for serious negotiations about peaceful coexistence? Only time will tell, but the metaphor of the fisher catching a large creature with patience, guile, and perseverance and bringing it to shore offers insights. The creature is large and strong, and the fishing line is relatively weak. If the fisher allows the prey to swim away, then eventually it will come to the end of the line and it will break. If the fisher hauls it in too impatiently, the creature will resist, again breaking the line. As Hemingway’s Old Man says: “I could make the line fast. But then he could break it. I must hold him all I can and give him line when he must 24 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 have it.”17 Hemingway’s target was a marlin, but Kim’s is an octopus, a much more complicated creature. The U.S. establishment reacted to Trump’s acceptance of the summit invitation with dismay, chagrin, frustration, and concern.18 Interestingly, disapproval was often couched in sexual terms as a homophobic delegit- imization device: it was variously described as “bromance diplomacy” and “improvisational flirtation.”19 Establishment disapproval is only one part of the problem. The octopoid nature of the U.S. state is compounded by Trump’s incoherent presidential management. He does, after all, personally appoint key staff and, in this context, that means Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Bolton’s recent replacement Robert O’Brien. No leader has a completely free hand and the pool of candidates is limited by various constraints. Nevertheless, the objective must be to have advisors who are broadly supportive of the leader’s vision—that is, if the leader has a vision at all, and it can be argued that Trump indeed does not. In this case, professed loyalty to Trump and a competitive disposition may be the most desired qualifications.20 O’Brien’s position on Korea is as yet unclear, but he is likely to take his lead from Pompeo. At the time, Bolton was independent and deeply hostile to negotiations with North Korea (and any other country for that matter), far preferring to bully and threaten. He thrived on antagonism toward most of the rest of the world and the resulting tensions. Negotiated peace was not in his lexicon. Pompeo, in contrast, is rather more difficult to pin down. His Middle East policy is clearly bedeviled by his evangelical Christianity, suggesting that God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran, but in respect to East Asia we might expect him to be more rational, pragmatic, and untroubled by any principles, as befits a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.21 Pompeo may entertain a deal if it were consistent with his strategy for preserving U.S. hegemony and, perhaps more importantly, his personal ambitions. Pompeo and Bolton reportedly had conflicting visions and were natural rivals.22 The foreign policy establishment, military or civilian, has no compelling reason to support a settlement and will oppose it, as overtly or covertly as needed. Thus, we have the U.S. octopus with the central brain exercising relatively little control over the tentacles, which are opposed to defusing tensions. Within the central brain, we have Trump: confused, narcissistic, and impulsive but also manipulable. And who better to manipulate him than advisors such as Pompeo, Bolton, O’Brien, and their ilk? It is often United States & North Korea 25 claimed that Kim is tricking Trump, and while there is some truth to that, it also draws on a deep well of racial stereotyping that bears little relationship to historical reality.23 All foreign leaders attempt to play the U.S. president—just think of Justin Trudeau, Theresa May, and Shinzō Abe—but with Trump success is ephemeral.24 Kim has to try to maneuver Trump into a deal, but ultimately his agency, as that of any foreigner, is limited. The real and decisive struggles are always in Washington.25 This is the key to understanding the political theater of the Trump-Kim summits.

Other Denizens in Korean Seas The various countries in or adjoining East Asia have a strong interest in the tussle between the angler and the octopus, although there is diversity between them and ambivalence within them. Japan, especially under Abe, is keen to keep tensions high (though perhaps not boiling over) because it advances remilitarization and distracts the Japanese electorate from scandals at home.26 China and Russia, despite the obvious differences between them, have an overarching commonality. They are both facing U.S. belligerence, desperate to avoid war with the United States or to put it off as long as possible, and willing to sacrifice North Korean interests for this strategic objective. However, as U.S./Western aggressiveness mounts— Russiagate, Skripal, South China Sea, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), trade war, Syria, Huawei, and so on—the case for appeasement in Korea or elsewhere is weakened and they are forced together.27 Nevertheless, their position on Korea remains ambivalent, reflecting their weakness relative to the United States. Instead of taking a firm line against U.S.-led sanctions against North Korea in the UN Security Council—sanctions that are a clear violation both of the UN Charter and of the norms of international law—they have compromised and horse traded, using a strategy of watering down resolutions and then not imple- menting them rigorously.28 This strategy has been employed in other conflict areas, especially in the Middle East, and the reasons are clear enough. Not merely are they much weaker militarily than the United States, but the Security Council is constructed in such a way that the United States is undefeatable. For instance, a Russian resolution condemning the April 14, 2018, missile attack on Syria by the United States, together with Britain and France, was easily defeated despite the attack being a blatant violation of international law and the UN Charter.29 However, compromise yields the legal and moral high ground to the United States, whose sense of entitlement and exceptionalism is thereby reinforced and its intransi- gence, not least regarding Korea, strengthened. U.S. commandeering of 26 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 the Security Council is one of the great triumphs of its foreign policy in that it greatly magnifies and legitimizes U.S. aggression. U.S. sanctions become UN sanctions and countries around the world reluctantly or en- thusiastically implement U.S. power to starve North Korea into submis- sion; some 40 percent of its people “struggle with food insecurity and undernutrition and lack of access to basic services.”30 This in the name of the United Nations and the so-called international community.

South Korea between Autonomy and Subservience South Korea is a very special case. It was created by the United States in 1945 as a client state, hewed from the detritus of the Japanese empire as a bulwark protecting subjugated Japan against contagion from the Eurasian mainland. As a linchpin of U.S. East Asia strategy, it benefited in many ways from its subservience to the United States, receiving massive aid and access to the U.S. market (to Trump’s later regret).31 But benefits can also be bonds. Despite considerable economic and social growth, it is still a long way from independence. Its military is under U.S. control during wartime, but does any other time really matter?32 The deployment of THAAD, whose radar provides surveillance of Chinese ICBM launch sites but whose interceptors provide little defense against North Korea in the event of war, is just one example of South Korea’s interests being sacrificed to U.S. strategic objectives.33 However, South Korea’s history can also be viewed as an ongoing struggle, with successes and setbacks, to wrest autonomy and eventual independence from the United States. Moon exemplifies this conflict, partly inner, partly public, between subservience and rebellion. And there are two ways in which Moon is seeking a path out of this di- lemma. After initial hesitation, he responded to Kim’s invitation for a summit. The meeting went well and others followed, but the limited power of the two Koreas to achieve much under the shadow of the United States suggests that the extravagant hope of observers such as David Kang that their initial summit “will be more important than any meeting between Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump” is fanciful.34 Moon is also seeking to be an intermediary between Washington and Pyongyang, but this pre- tension is becoming increasingly hollow despite much wishful thinking in South Korea, illustrated particularly by the liberal newspaper Hankyoreh.35

The Racist Trope of the Fiendishly Clever Oriental It is quite common to describe Kim, along with his father and grandfather before him, as fiendishly clever, in the way that “devious Orientals” are often portrayed in supposed contradistinction to Westerners, who are portrayed as forthright and honest. As Bruce Cumings, among others, has United States & North Korea 27 pointed out, “cunning and shrewd are standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians.”36 There are many variations on the theme and an extensive literature going back hundreds of years. The North Korean negotiating team is much more experienced, disci- plined, and focused than its U.S. counterpart. For instance, Kim Myong- gil, the current lead negotiator, has worked on negotiations with the United States since the Agreed Framework talks in the early 1990s and lives in New York, working at the DPRK mission to the United Nations. There is no one on the U.S. side that comes near to matching his experience. Nevertheless, the strategy is not devilishly cunning. For one thing, there are not many options for a small country trying to defend itself against the belligerent U.S. behemoth. Foreign analysts often construct fanciful justifications to explain away what is, essentially, a fairly obvious response to imperialist aggression. However, Pyongyang can make some choices and there are a number of ways in which it could do better. It could improve its communications. As Harold Pinter has pointed out, the “United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road” when it comes to propaganda, and while North Korea does not have the resources and power to match, it need not be as inept as it is.37 It could, for example, make better use of the UN Charter; the United States may be able to bully and bribe the United Nations as an institution but it cannot do so with the founding document. The Charter may be continually broached, but it is clear that North Korea is broadly compliant and the United States frequently in violation—a point that should be forcefully reiterated, pref- erably in liaison with countries in a similar position.38

Denuclearization: The Confucian Albatross The main problem with North Korea’s diplomatic strategy, and one for which lack of power and resources is no excuse, is the centrality of the term denuclearization. What North Korea wants is peaceful coexistence with the United States. It needs, as it has frequently stated, the United States to drop its hostility policy, cease economic and diplomatic warfare, remove the military threat, live in regular diplomatic and economic intercourse with the DPRK, and recognize, as a member of the United Nations should, its legitimacy and sovereignty. Denuclearization does not address any of these issues but rather diverts attention from them. Denuclearization plays into U.S. hands because however much North Korea might talk about “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula,” of turning the Korean peninsula “into a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats,” and indeed of bilateral or global disarmament, the United States has a much louder megaphone.39 However many 28 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 times North Korea may reiterate that it will not countenance unilateral disarmament, for most people that is what the negotiations are all about.40 The North Korean proposal for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula is confusingly vague, at least in public discourse. Does it just cover land-based weapons or also those of the sea? If so, how far away? Does it include the U.S. nuclear umbrella?41 Moreover, does a geographical limit make any sense in a world where nuclear weapons have been a strategic weapon to be delivered from a great distance and, since the 1960s, from the U.S. mainland itself? Here, the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula suffers from the same yawning fallacy as proposals for a Northeast Asia Nuclear Weapon Free Zone: if the major nuclear power involved, the United States, can strike targets within the zone from anywhere in the world, then the nuclear-free zone offers no protection.42 The North Korean emphasis on nuclear weapons is also misplaced. If the United States does invade North Korea, it will be by using what is now the standard procedure—U.S. airpower, local ground troops, and special forces for decapitation and asset seizure—not nuclear weapons, which are primarily a deterrent or, if used aggressively, would be employed only against large, indigestible countries such as Russia and China. Furthermore, and with deep irony, there has been a transformation of the nuclear weapons calculus since 1945. Then, nuclear weapons were the sole prerogative of the richest of the rich: the United States. They have since become a great leveler, potentially protecting the weak against the powerful, which is why the United States is so concerned about proliferation.43 For all these reasons, North Korea allowing denuclearization to occupy center stage of negotiations is very unwise. How has it come to pass? The answer would seem to lie in an undue Confucian deference to Kim Il-sung, who was particularly concerned about the nuclear threat. In the late 1970s, the United States had about seven hundred tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea.44 And in the 1970s it was South Korea, not North Korea, that was developing nuclear weapons.45 Changing circumstances should produce new, appropriate strategies, but North Korean thinking is still trapped in the past.

The Political Theater of Summitry and Pushback Kim Jong-un’s diplomatic offensive unleashed a flurry of summits: three with Trump, three with Moon, five with Xi Jinping, and one with Vladimir Putin.46 These attracted a huge amount of media attention, especially because of their rarity and theatricality. The leader of North Korea had met with counterparts in the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and to a lesser extent South Korea over the years, but the Singapore summit was a historic first. United States & North Korea 29

Summits are, by their nature, theatrical and imbued with symbolism. Summits within the imperial framework, such as those between the United States and South Korea, carry little weight, although the minor power naturally attempts to inflate their importance. A summit with an independent, even adversarial, leader is quite another matter. Since the United States is the global hegemon and far more powerful than any other country, there is always opposition to presidential meetings with other leaders, even of large countries such as the Soviet Union/Russia and China. To have such a meeting with a small, defiant country such as North Korea was unthinkable until Trump came along. A summit accords legitimacy to a foreign leader, the argument goes, and legitimacy should only be bestowed on the obedient, or in the cant phraseology, a “member of the international community,” not a rogue regime. Bolton spoke for many when he said: “There’s no way we should give North Korea a peace treaty. They’re lucky to have a meeting with the president of the United States.”47 Bilateral summits are worth more than multilateral ones or those that take place as an adjunct to an international meeting, and the location has great significance. The host gains added stature and if neither side gives way, then a third location—Singapore or Hanoi—is a compromise solution. Summits are choreographed and scripted, with the substantive discus- sions remaining private and, if things go according to plan (which they did in Singapore but not in Hanoi), a joint statement, usually anodyne, is crafted by officials from both sides and signed by the leaders. Leaking is very much in the U.S. tradition, but leaks are done for a purpose and may well present a distorted version of what has been agreed in private. Much of the importance of summits is the reaction of power elites to what was agreed, and what is thought to have been agreed, or to the very fact that the meeting took place at all. This has been particularly the case in the Trump-Kim summits, where pushback from the establishment has dominated the media coverage and hence public awareness. The difficulty of ascertaining the significance of these summits is compounded by the indecipherability of Trump himself. When Kim described a letter from Trump as “excellent” and is reportedly “appreciating the political judging faculty and extraordinary courage of President Trump,” it is clear, despite the stilted translation, that he is encouraging Trump to continue the dialogue despite opposition from the elite. Trump’s un- scripted words and his tweets display, on the surface at least, an astound- ing lack of understanding of the issues. He is like a 5-year-old, wandering through a conference of weapons manufacturers and generals, admiring the baubles, dazzled by the toys, but not really comprehending what the adults are talking about. 30 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

The Washington Post reported thus on Trump’s comments about Kim in May 2019, after North Korea had tested some short-range missiles and just after the Department of Justice (with or without his approval) seized North Korea’s second largest ship, the Wise Honest, as it traveled toward Indonesia:

But Trump portrayed the North Korean dictator as a leader who believes, as the president himself said he does, that his country has “tremendous economic potential,” but who understands he can’t develop it while still pursuing his nuclear ambitions. “He knows that with nuclear, that’s never going to happen, only bad can happen,” Trump said. “He understands. He is a very smart man; he gets it.” The president—a former real estate developer—also cast Kim’s opportunities through the lens of his previous passion. North Korea, the president said, is “located between Russia and China on one side, and South Korea on the other. It’s all waterfront property. It’s a great location, as we used to say in the real estate business.”48

The downside of great locations, as Trump’s father exemplified, is that they attract predators. Korea’s location has been the prime reason that it has attracted the attention of imperialists over the years, be they Mongolian, Japanese, or American. And unilateral disarmament is not the solution to that problem.49 However, it seems that behind the clichés many of the adults, if we take the Washington Post as representing them, do not understand much either. The Singapore Summit successfully brought together, for the first time, the leaders of the United States and North Korea. It produced a joint statement that was suitably aspirational and vague, with the potential to peacefully defuse tension in East Asia. So successful was it in this regard that it unleashed a torrent of back- lash as the various tentacles of the octopus signaled their disapproval. The military, current and former officials, the security industry incorporating the intelligence community, and most think tanks all prophesized doom if peace broke out.50 Various state agencies, notably the Treasury and Department of Justice, did what they always do in such circumstances—they took action in an attempt to derail any peace process.51 In South Korea, the conservatives were particularly worried by the prospect of a U.S. rapprochement with Pyongyang allowing Moon’s détente to move forward and perhaps establish a peace regime that would erode their power.52 The mainstream media, in the United States and the West generally, acted as a cheerleader, collator, and disseminator of the pushback process. Perhaps the most prominent and flagrant ploy was to accuse North Korea of not honoring commitments that it had not actually made given that the Singapore statement was intentionally vague. Naturally, no mention was made of U.S. failure United States & North Korea 31 to promote the peace process, nor of its attempts to hinder and prohibit, through its control of the so-called United Nations Command (not in fact a UN body), inter-Korean détente.53 There were, however, occasional chinks in the propaganda curtain. For instance, CNN’s Will Ripley demolished the cheating accusation and injected a dose of reality—U.S. demands for “complete denuclearization” upfront was “a nonstarter for a nation that remains deeply suspi- cious of the outside world and would never leave itself strategically vulnerable simply for the promise of economic gain.”54 So much for Trump’s real-estate fantasies. However, Ripley was very much a lone figure in the media landscape. The campaign to demolish Trump’s idiosyncratic and confused peace negotiation had a natural, if unexpected, culmination in the Hanoi Summit. It was widely and reasonably supposed that this would follow the Singaporean format of happy photos and a joint statement of vague promise. It would be the calm before the storm and the real battle would be in Washington.55 That a further attempt to derail negotiations would be made was no surprise, but the fact that it happened in Hanoi and not later in Washington was. It is generally supposed that the botching was deliberately engineered by Bolton with possible assistance from Pompeo. According to Japanese analyst Kuni Miyake:

When Trump was scheduled to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Vietnam, Bolton seems to have been successful in convincing—probably with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—him that he should walk out of the negotiation room unless Kim agreed to the so-called big deal based on the Libyan nuclear agreement of 2004.56

Trump’s incomprehension about the issues, in particular what would be acceptable to the Koreans, and his susceptibility to being manipulated is clear enough, but it remains a mystery why he allowed himself to be publicly shafted. Perhaps he saw it as part of his unpredictability shtick and confirmation, in his eyes at least, that he was a smart negotiator who could walk away from a deal today to get a better one tomorrow. The bungled summit at Hanoi led to a stalemate. It seemed that the establishment had won, that the octopus would be untrammeled by the dangers of reducing tension in Korea and invigorated by the rapidly dete- riorating relationship with China, Iran, Venezuela, and Russia.

Shards of Hope in the Detritus of Hanoi Gearing up for the 2020 presidential election, Trump needed something to tout as a foreign policy success. The confrontation with China was, pre- dictably, producing all sorts of unwelcome consequences. The attempted coup in Venezuela had stalled. Fulminating against Iran was all very well, but Trump had a healthy fear of being dragged into another land war in 32 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 the Middle East, and with a much more formidable adversary than Iraq or Afghanistan. When he was nearly maneuvered into an attack on Iran, he blinked. He became increasingly wary of Bolton and his penchant for war.57 Kim took various steps to rescue the situation, attempting to draw the United States into meaningful negotiations but also continuing to prepare for the likelihood that the line would be broken and that the octopus, rather than being drawn into peaceful coexistence, would break free and resume the attack. On April 13 of this year, he gave a major policy speech before the Supreme People’s Assembly, in which he said, inter alia:

At the second DPRK-U.S. summit, we expressed our decision to take more prudent and trustworthy measures after setting stages and courses indispensable for the implementation of the June 12 DPRK-U.S. Joint Statement and expected a response from the U.S. to it. But the U.S. came to the talks, only racking its brains to find ways that are absolutely impracticable.… But as President Trump keeps saying, the personal ties between me and him are not hostile like the relations between the two countries and we still maintain good relations, as to be able to exchange letters asking about health anytime if we want. If the U.S. adopts a correct posture and comes forward for the third DPRK-U.S. summit with a certain methodology that can be shared with us, we can think of holding one more talk. However, what I feel now is if there will be any need to keep an attach- ment to the summit with the U.S. just because of the issue of sanctions relief. Anyway, we will wait for a bold decision from the U.S. with patience till the end of this year but I think it will definitely be difficult to get such a good opportunity as the previous summit.… Only when…written content favorable for the interests of both sides and acceptable to each other [is provided], I will sign the agreement without reserve.58

While he set December 31 as an ultimatum date, Kim did not specify exactly what measures the DPRK would take if the United States did not return to negotiations in good faith and agree to a mutually acceptable compromise, merely warning of “another path.”59 He cautioned that sanctions relief, though welcome, was not the essential issue. As a subsequent Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement reiterated, the hostility policy was “the root cause that pushed [North Korea] into a nuclear state.”60 In early May, after the beginning of the first round of joint U.S.-Republic of Korea military exercises labeled Dong Maeng (Alliance), North Korea tested some short-range ballistic missiles. These did not violate the self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range missiles but were a warning that the moratorium was contingent on U.S. movement toward peace.61 If that was a stick, then maintaining and developing the personal relationship with Trump was the carrot. This was done by an exchange of letters: United States & North Korea 33 on June 11, 2019, Trump received what he described as “a beautiful letter” from Kim and, in return, Kim received “an excellent letter” from Trump containing “interesting proposals.” These were not specified, but Kim com- plimented the U.S. president for his “political judging faculty and extraordinary courage.”62 This strange and surprising bonhomie between what not so long ago were the “Rocket Man” and the “dotard” remains a fascinating mystery. On the Korean side, it is clearly instrumental, for all foreign leaders must try to cultivate a good relationship with U.S. presidents, whatever they might privately think of them. For Trump, it is probably more psychological than political, reflecting his sense of insecurity.63 Perhaps now that Trump has a new best friend as British Prime Minister—he describes Boris Johnson as “Britain[’s] Trump,” and there can be no higher accolade—the relationship with Kim will become less significant.64 As the veteran Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has pointed out, personal relationships can be important but they are subsidiary to political imperatives.65 North Korea’s recently promoted First Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui has described the Trump-Kim relationship as “mysteriously wonderful.”66 Mysterious it certainly is, but given Trump’s volatility and the underlying thrust of U.S. policy, how long it will remain wonderful and to what effect is another matter. Kim meanwhile has continued his campaign to improve relations with Russia and China to considerable success, at least in terms of political theater and symbolism. These visible aspects are very important, but the longer-term impact can be difficult to ascertain and the vital private dis- cussions, agreements, and, more crucially, disagreements are below the surface and we can only speculate about them. For instance, the long-awaited summit between Putin and Kim that finally took place in Vladivostok from April 24 to 26 produced talk about “international security guarantees” with Russia as one of the guarantors.67 This sent a warning to Washington— which unfortunately has a propensity not to hear, and certainly not to heed, advice—that the security of the DPRK was the key issue in which Russia, and by implication China, were vitally interested. However, security guarantees, Nuclear Weapons Free Zones, and peace treaties are ultimately only scraps of paper whose validity is contingent on political power and interest—and “a piece of paper is not going to do it.”68 The United States can give a reasonably dependable security guarantee to the likes of Japan and South Korea because it is so much stronger than any possible challenger, and would usually quite relish the opportunity to go to war. But neither Russia nor China is in that position in relation to the United States. The credibility of their guarantees would depend on the degree to which U.S. action, say against the DPRK, directly threatened them. However, Putin and Kim no doubt also discussed how U.S. and U.S.-led Security Council 34 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 sanctions could be circumvented, especially in relation to Korean migrant workers in Russia, though their economic importance is debated.69 Xi’s visit to Pyongyang on June 20 and 21 was a diplomatic coup for Kim, being the first with President Xi on Korean soil. It was also a snub to South Korea, which had been talking for some time of a visit from Xi, only to have it postponed. Again, the symbolism of the public event was important, giving increased domestic prestige to Kim and putting pressure on the United States to move forward with negotiations. Presumably, both leaders discussed in private how to deal with the U.S. problem, which for the Chinese has greatly increased in virulence with attacks on Huawei and the trade war, though it has not reached the existential level felt by North Korea. The summit was yet another reminder that U.S. Korea policy must be analyzed within the context of the struggle to retain hegemony against China.70 The North’s relationship with the South remained in a state of suspended animation. Moon’s inability to stand up to the United States and implement the Panmunjom Declaration was manifested in numerous ways. Continued joint military exercises, the deployment of F-35s (aimed more at China than North Korea), the failure to reopen the inter-Korean Kaesong Industrial Park, and the decision to build an aircraft carrier—an offensive weapons system par excellence—all added to the souring of the relationship.71 Although there was no formal break, Pyongyang made its displeasure known most tellingly in advising Seoul to stay out of its negotiations with Washington because its subservience had invalidated its role as intermediary, suggesting that “it’s better for the South Korean authorities to mind their own business at home.”72 One of South Korea’s recurring nightmares is being sidelined in the U.S. treatment of Asia, which was one reason that Moon was so keen to assume the role of intermediary between Trump and Kim. But, again, South Korea was shunted to one side, in this case because of its failure to assert independence. Moon was not an honest broker, respected by both sides, but merely a messenger disdained by both. The most pressing political problem for Moon at the moment is the dispute with Japan over reparations for forced labor during the colonial period, which has led to Abe retaliating by imposing export controls on inputs vital to South Korea’s electronics industry.73 South Korea knows full well that, as in the past, if the United States has to choose between its two Northeast Asian clients, it will choose Japan.74 Whether these travails will break Moon or steel him to take a more independent role rather than just courting Trump is as yet unknown. While developments with respect to Russia, China, and South Korea, and Kim’s perseverance and angling skill are important, Washington’s decisions are ultimately what count. Moreover, as previously mentioned, the U.S. “North Korea crisis” is primarily a domestic political issue. It has United States & North Korea 35 little military importance in itself (since the North Korea threat is bogus), but it does have serious implications for U.S. global hegemony and its forward strategy against China and Russia.

The American Octopus: Surface Convulsions, Internal Machinations The octopoid nature of the U.S. state has manifested in various ways. To begin with, there have been continued rogue actions by state organs. In particular, a New York Federal District Court allowed the sale of the North Korean ship Wise Honest, which had been seized by the United States in May on the grounds that it had infringed Security Council sanctions. The U.S. court decreed that it could be sold and the proceeds given to the U.S. Warmbier family.75 Otto Warmbier was a student given an inordinately long sentence for a petty but symbolic crime in North Korea, in a mecha- nism somewhat similar to the U.S. plea bargaining system.76 He died, probably as the result of a botched suicide attempt, after being repatriated to the United States.77 The unfortunate Warmbier became a cause célèbre much seized upon, not least by Trump. The actions of different parts of the U.S. state in the Wise Honest affair were clearly in violation of international law, but politically were somewhat different. The seizure might be seen as part of a deep state maneuver to derail U.S.-North Korea negotiations, while the District Court decision was probably more an expression of ar- rogant, exceptionalist extraterritoriality. The octopus has many tentacles. The thing that naturally captured the most attention was Trump’s invitation to Kim to meet at Panmunjom—a stratagem very much in the Trump style. He outmaneuvered his minders (Bolton was sent to Mongolia for the day) and asserted his presidential authority, securing much media coverage in the process.78 He became the first sitting U.S. president to stand in North Korea, a joke which no journalist should resist.79 The pundits shook their heads and the Democratic Party presidential candidates were apoplectic.80 On the face of it, Trump had broken the logjam and broken through the stalemate. There is some truth to this, including that the renewed contact with Kim (not quite a formal summit) opened up possibilities that Bolton’s derailing of the Hanoi summit had seemed to close off. But perhaps more important than this glittering, newsworthy, and theatrical spectacle, is a New York Times article entitled “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” which appeared on the same day, June 30. In it, authors Michael Crowley and David Sanger claimed that in the weeks leading up to the demilitarized zone meeting,

a real idea has been taking shape inside the Trump administration that officials hope might create a foundation for a new round of negotiations. 36 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

The concept would amount to a nuclear freeze, one that essentially en- shrines the status quo, and tacitly accepts the North as a nuclear power, something administration officials have often said they would never stand for.… While the approach could stop that arsenal from growing, it would not, at least in the near future, dismantle any existing weapons, variously estimated at 20 to 60. Nor would it limit the North’s missile capability.81 The article was important not merely because of what it said, but also because of who wrote it and for whom. Sanger earned his nickname Scoop Sanger in the 1990s from his success in publishing journalistic scoops deriving from his role as a mouthpiece for elements of the intelligence community that wanted to influence government policy.82 It was Sanger who coauthored what was probably the most influential 2018 article—“In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception”—as part of the pushback against the Singapore Summit.83 The obvious inaccuracies in the article and its agenda were so egregious that the executive editor of the Hankyoreh, South Korea’s leading liberal newspaper, wrote a personal open letter to his New York Times counterpart in protest.84 The freeze proposal elaborated in “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea” has been around for some time, stretching back to the 1990s. In 2015, North Korea proposed a freeze on nuclear testing in exchange for a U.S. suspension of its huge military exercises with South Korea.85 The Chinese took this up in their peace proposal of 2017.86 The United States constantly rebuffed the proposal, presumably regarding the exercises not merely as an indispensable preparation for a possible invasion of the North but also presenting the most opportune time to do so when troops were mobilized, tensions were high, and an incident could easily be manufactured to blame North Korea for the outbreak of hostilities.87 The idea of a freeze on testing overlaps with the concept of capping North Korea’s nuclear deterrent so it would continue to exist but not be expanded or exported. The main proponent of this has been Siegfried Hecker, the U.S. nuclear scientist who coined the term three nos—no more bombs, no better bombs, and no export.88 The suggestion has been taken up by, among others, William Perry and James Mattis.89 Hecker claims that it was first proposed to him on a visit to North Korea in 2006 by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.90 The capping proposal could form the basis for a resolution of the issue. From the North Korean side, it has the drawback that it probably leaves the deterrent program incomplete and not thoroughly tested. However, certainty is a luxury that North Korea can forgo in the circumstances. Since the country is, unlike China or Russia, a low-value target, it merely has to attain a level of perceived risk that would deter a U.S. attack. U.S. destruction of China would leave the world at its feet and would, in United States & North Korea 37 some eyes, justify considerable risk; the conquest of North Korea would achieve little and would remove a rationale for its forward position in Asia. Even the possibility that the Koreans might be able to retaliate with an ICBM would, in rational calculation, militate against attack. The U.S. position on capping is more complex. As noted, the so-called North Korean crisis is essentially a domestic political issue (with some international implications) of perception rather than a military threat. However, this is not how it is usually portrayed, to a large degree because the officials, generals, politicians, and experts whose opinions dominate the media are dependent on the perception of external threat for their income. As a domestic political issue, it becomes a battleground between Democrats and Republicans, and those within the parties jostling for power. Crowley and Sanger’s article is so important because it looks like kite-flying by powerful forces within the Trump administration. The run-up to the 2020 presidential election has begun. Russiagate has had a slow death, but even the Democrats have acknowledged that the Mueller investigation has failed to deliver.91 In his bid for reelection, Trump will face fierce opposition from the Democrats. Although he has the advantages of incumbency and the im- migration issue, the state of the economy over the next year is uncertain and he is beset by numerous foreign policy problems. To appear to solve the North Korean crisis where his predecessors failed would be very welcome. Where Obama left the country in peril, Trump could point out that, on his watch, there have been no more North Korean nuclear and missiles tests, none will happen in the future, and the country is now safe. The fact that the United States was not in danger and that his predecessors did not fail because their policies produced desirable tension in East Asia, kept Japan and South Korea in line, and bolstered the containment of China is of no relevance and those consciously responsible would not admit it. It would be a variant of the Israel model of management of perception rather than reality. With no tests, people would forget today the weapons they had been so frightened about yesterday.92 Trump would also claim that the deal with North Korea proves that he is a great negotiator and that building a relationship with Kim was something that only a person with his qualities could achieve. He ventured where lesser presidents feared to tread. In reality, the freeze/capping proposal has been around for decades, but the United States had not responded. Times have changed and, in this very unequal contest, in North Korea’s favor. North Korea has achieved a sufficiently credible deterrent, with the ambiguity buffer allowing some maneu- vering within the U.S. military establishment. North Korea’s relationships with the South, Russia, and especially China have greatly improved. It has shown reliance in the face of vicious economic and diplomatic warfare. 38 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

Kim has played the angler’s role with skill. North Korea has engaged with the U.S. octopus in a way that has evaded it in the past. What happens now depends on struggles within the octopus. Korean overtures are contingent on U.S. reciprocity and, if Washington does not begin address- ing the key issues of security and sanctions, privately if not publicly, then Pyongyang will disengage, probably seeking sanctuary within the bosom of China and Russia as the new Cold War intensifies. Convulsions in the Trump administration in September 2019 may signal a possible breakthrough in Korea policy in the run-up to the 2020 elections. The defenestration of the independent-minded Bolton and his replacement by O’Brien is significant not so much in terms of policy but in relationships. O’Brien shares Bolton’s enthusiasm for bellicose imperialism and has worked under him, but he is reportedly less personally abrasive and less adventurist.93 Bolton’s dismissal was widely welcomed in much of the establishment (not least in the Pentagon, where “there were cheers”). Although O’Brien is a firm advocate for strengthening the U.S. Navy to counter China, he has shown no inclination to precipitate war.94 He has published little on Korea and his book, While America Slept, while an attack on the Obama administration, contains little beyond standard clichéd references.95 Bolton and Pompeo were often in dispute and, in fact, O’Brien was one of Pompeo’s suggestions for a replacement. The rumored promotion of Stephen E. Biegun, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea, to Deputy Secretary of State, replacing a Rex Tillerson appointee, also strengthens Pompeo’s hold on U.S. foreign policy.96 This leaves U.S. Korea policy essentially unchanged but subtly different. If Pompeo decides that a capping deal will improve Trump’s reelection prospects, and if he decides that will advance his own personal ambitions, then he is in a stronger position to make this happen. The Biegun appointment suggests a focus on Korea, which makes sense. The Trump administration is beset with problems at home with threatened impeachment and falling polls, and abroad with multiple challenges to hegemony. Despite all the brouhaha about the difficulty of negotiating with North Korea, it is in fact the most manageable of U.S. foreign policy issues. North Korea is strategic, flexible, would probably accept a “capping” compromise, and poses no military threat. With the rise of China and increased hostility, it is no longer as important as it used to be as a pretext for further- ing military presence in Asia. It is essentially a matter of domestic political infighting and perception management. The establishment might be unhappy to cede a perceived success to Trump, but might cede one to Pompeo if he is seen as the best restraint on Trump and as a future “safe” president. However, whether such a peace settlement will prevail against hostility in the mass of the wider octopus remains unlikely and, at best, uncertain. United States & North Korea 39

Notes

1. Yang Mo-deum, “N.Korea’s Per-Capita 19. Victor Cha and Christian A. Katz, on the Pyongyang Trail: North Korea and GDP Is Less Than 4% of S.Korea’s,” Chosun “What to Expect at the Second North the United States,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Ilbo, September 30, 2016. Korea Summit,” Foreign Affairs, February Japan Focus 3, no. 12 (2005). 2. For an extended historical survey 22, 2019; William J. Burns, “The Lost Art 37. Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and Poli-� and analysis of this issue, see Tim Beal, of American Diplomacy,” Foreign Affairs, tics,” Nation, December 7, 2005. The Palgrave March 27, 2019. “Korea and Imperialism,” in 38. “Venezuelan Foreign Minister An-� Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Im- 20. Stephen Costello, “Time to Interna-� nounces Group to Protect UN Charter’s perialism, 2nd ed., ed. Immanuel Ness tionalise Diplomacy with North Korea,” Principles,” Telesur, February 14, 2019. and Zak Cope (New York: Springer, 2019). East Asia Forum, June 17, 2019. 39. Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, 3. Amia Srinivasan, “The Sucker, the 21. “Pompeo Says God May Have Sent “Pyongyang Joint Declaration of Septem�- Sucker!,” London Review of Books, Sep- Trump to Save Israel from Iran,” BBC, ber 2018,” ROK Government, September tember 7, 2017. March 22, 2019. 19, 2018; Nicholas L. Miller and Vipin 4. Jessica T. Mathews, “America’s Inde�- 22. Thomas Wright, “John Bolton and Narang, “The Year of Living Dangerously fensible Defense Budget,” New York Re- Mike Pompeo Are Headed for a Clash,” with Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Affairs, view of Books, July 18, 2019. Politico, May 9, 2018. January 11, 2019. 5. Kim Jong-un, “New Year Address 23. Michael J. Green, “Pyongyang Is 40. Jung E-gil, “Kim Jong-un Says He 2018,” Rodong Sinmun, January 1, 2018. Playing Washington and Seoul,” Foreign Has No Plans for Unilateral Denucleariza- Policy Hankyoreh 6. Ruediger Frank, “North Korea Is Not , April 27, 2018. tion,” , September 11, 2018. Desperate: The New Geostrategic Environ- 24. Tsuneo Akaha, “Abe’s Gamble on 41. Simon Denyer, “Confusion over ment in East Asia,” 38 North, July 11, 2019. Trump Threatens to Backfire,” East Asia North Korea’s Definition of Denuclear- Forum Washington Post 7. Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy,” Asia-Pacif- , July 8, 2019. ization Clouds Talks,” , ic Journal: Japan Focus 15, no. 16 (2017); 25. Jeffery Lewis, “The Real North Korea January 16, 2019. Tim Beal, “A Korean Tragedy: Update,” Summit Is Inside the Trump Administra- 42. Morton Halperin, Peter Hayes, and Zoom in Korea, September 12, 2017. tion,” Foreign Policy, February 26, 2019. Leon Sigal, “A Korean Nuclear Weap�- 8. Seong Yeon-cheol and Kim Ji-eun, 26. Tim Beal, “Abe Pulls It Off, but It Will ons-Free Zone Treaty and Nuclear Extend- “President Moon Reiterates Commitment End in Tears,” Zoom in Korea, October 24, ed Deterrence: Options for Denuclear- NAPSNet to Intense Sanctions and Pressure on North 2017. izing the Korean Peninsula,” Hankyoreh Special Reports, April 12, 2018. Korea,” , December 1, 2017. 27. James Griffiths, “Chinese Defense 9. Kim Jong-un, “Kim Jong Un’s New Chief Says His Trip to Russia Is a Signal to 43. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Year Address,” Rodong Sinmun, January the US,” CNN, April 4, 2018. Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Foreign Affairs 1, 2018. Mean Stability,” 91, no. 4 28. Tim Beal, “The United Nations and the (2012). 10. Yonhap, “South Korea Seeking Sanc-� North Korean Missile and Nuclear Tests,” tions Waiver for Road Survey in North NZ Journal of Asian Studies 9, no. 2 (2007). 44. Franz-Stefan Gady, “How the ‘Deep Korea Times State’ Stopped a US President from With- Korea” , January 22, 2019. For a superb analysis of the role of the Diplo- United States in establishing the United drawing US Troops From Korea,” 11. “Third Plenary Meeting of Seventh mat, June 15, 2018. C.C., WPK Held in Presence of Kim Jong Nations and its strategic ambivalence to it, Un,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs DPRK, see Peter Gowan, “US : UN,” New Left Re- 45. Peter Hayes and Moon Chung-in, view 24 (2003); Joby Warrick, “How Rus-� “Park Chung Hee, the CIA & the Bomb,” April 21, 2018; Yonhap, “North Korea De�- Global Asia cides to Suspend Nuclear, Missile Tests, sia Quietly Undercuts Sanctions Intended 6, no. 3 (2011). Shut Down Atomic Test Site,” Korea Times, to Stop North Korea’s Nuclear Program,” 46. For a chronology of summits and April 21, 2018. Washington Post, September 11, 2017. key events, as well as a bibliography to accompany this article, see Tim Beal, “The 12. “False Analogies: North Korea’s His�- 29. “Security Council Rejects Russian 38 North Request to Condemn Airstrikes in Syria,” Angler and the Octopus: Supplementary tory of Missile Test Moratoria,” , Month- May 6, 2019. UNSC, April 14, 2018. Documents to Article Published in ly Review,” available at http://timbeal.net. 30. Tapan Mishra, “2019 DPR Korea 13. Kyodo, “US Conducts Subcritical Nu-� nz under the “Asian Geopolitics” section. clear Test,” ABC, February 24, 2006; Ian Needs and Priorities,” UN Resident Co- Sample, “Is Britain Conducting Nuclear ordinator for DPR Korea, March 6, 2019. 47. John Bolton, “Interview: Trump- Kim Talks to be ‘A Very Short Meeting’ if Tests?,” Guardian, February 25, 2006. 31. Philip Rucker, “Trump: ‘We May Terminate’ U.S.-South Korea Trade Agree- Pyongyang Won’t Discuss Denucleariza- 14. Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “North tion,” Radio Free Asia, March 23, 2018. Korea’s Nuclear Program Isn’t Going Any- ment,” Washington Post, April 28, 2017. 48. Ashley Parker and Simon Denyer, where,” Foreign Affairs, August 13, 2018. 32. Yu Yong-weon, “U.S. Halts Process of “Still Angling for a Deal, Trump Backs Kim 15. Jeffrey Lewis, “‘Your Mission Is to Keep Returning Full Troop Control to S.Korea,” Chosun Ilbo, September 18, 2017. Jong Un over Biden, Bolton and Japan,” All This from Collapsing into Nuclear Hell- Washington Post, May 27, 2019. fire,’” Foreign Policy, September 18, 2018. 33. Gregory Elich, “THAAD Comes to Counterpunch 49. Beal, “Korea and Imperialism.” 16. Mark Landler, “North Korea Asks for Korea, But at What Cost?,” , Direct Nuclear Talks, and Trump Agrees,” August 16, 2016. 50. Yonhap, “Mattis: N. Korea Is Most Ur�- gent Threat to US,” Korea Herald, December New York Times, March 8, 2018. 34. David Kang, “The Moon–Kim Sum�- 4, 2018; Lim Min-hyuk, “U.S. Ambassador mit Is the Main Event,” East Asia Forum, 17. Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man Urges Caution in Ending Korean War,” April 8, 2018. and the Sea (New York: Charles Scribner’s Chosun Ilbo, August 3, 2018; Christopher Sons,‎ 1952). 35. “Blue House’s Potential Role of Me�- Hill, “The U.S. Needs a New North Korea 18. Jennifer Rubin, “Damage Control at diator in NK-US Deadlock Is Significant,” Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, September 5, White House to Reverse Trump’s Stunning Hankyoreh, March 19, 2019. 2018; Alexander Smith, “Experts Dismiss Blunder,” Washington Post, March 9, 2018. 36. Bruce Cumings, “Fear and Loathing North Korea’s Latest Concession to U.S.,” 40 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

NBC, October 8, 2018; Hayley Miller, “Leon 25, 2019. Foreign Policy, March 3, 2015; Jeffrey Lew- Panetta Says Trump’s ‘Failed’ North Korea 68. Gregory Elich, “How Real Is the is, “David Sanger: Two Time Loser on Kilju Summit Was ‘Doomed’ from the Start,” Trump Administration’s New Flexibility and Kumchang-ri?,” Arms Control Wonk, Huffington Post, September 2, 2018. with North Korea?,” Counterpunch, July May 21, 2005. 51. Jacqueline Thomsen, “DOJ Charges 12, 2019. 83. David E. Sanger and William J. North Korean National in Sony, WannaCry 69. Andrew Salmon, “Kim in Russian Far Broad, “In North Korea, Missile Bases Hill Attacks,” , September 6, 2018; “US Im�- East for Putin Pow-Wow,” Asia Times, April Suggest a Great Deception,” New York poses Sanctions on Three Top North Korean 24, 2019. Times, November 12, 2018. Officials,” Guardian, December 10, 2018. 70. Ellen Nakashima, Gerry Shih, and 84. Kim Jong-gu, “An Open Letter to the 52. “Seoul, Washington Need to Stop John Hudson, “Leaked Documents Re�- NY Times,” Hankyoreh, December 4, 2018. Talking up N.Korea Deal,” Chosun Ilbo, veal Huawei’s Secret Operations to Build 85. Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Offers July 9, 2018. North Korea’s Wireless Network,” Wash- U.S. Deal to Halt Nuclear Test,” New York 53. Kim Myong-chol and Pak Chol-gu, ington Post, July 22, 2019. Times, January 10, 2015. “DPRK Perspectives on Ending the Ko�- 71. Yu Yong-weon, “N.Korea Threatens 86. Chris Buckley and Somini Sengup- rean Armistice,” NAPSnet Policy Forum Seoul Over Purchase of Stealth Fighters,” ta, “U.S. and South Korea Rebuff China’s Online, May 7, 1997. Chosun Ilbo, July 12, 2019; Yi Whan-woo, Proposal to Defuse Korea Tensions,” New 54. Will Ripley, “When It Comes to North “North Korea Criticizes Seoul over Military York Times, March 8, 2017. Korea, Who’s Really Being Deceptive?,” Korea Times Drills with US,” , July 16, 2019; 87. David E Sanger, “Rex Tillerson Rejects CNN, November 14, 2018. Yu Yong-weon, “Korea to Build Light Air-� Talks with North Korea on Nuclear Pro- Chosun Ilbo 55. Lewis, “The Real North Korea Summit craft Carrier,” , July 23, 2019. gram,” New York Times, March 17, 2017. Is Inside the Trump Administration.” 72. Kim Hyung-jin, “North Korea Urges 88. Siegfried S. Hecker and Beth Duff- 56. Kuni Miyake, “Is John Bolton Our South to Stop Mediating between North, Brown, “Interview with Siegfried Hecker: AP Last Hope?,” Japan Times, July 8, 2019. US,” , June 27, 2019. North Korea Complicates the Long-Term 57. Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, 73. Seong Yeon-cheol, “Moon Meets Picture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea with S. Korea Business Community for April 5, 2013. and Iran,” New York Times, May 28, 2019. Ways to Respond to Export Controls,” Hankyoreh 89. Geoffrey Fattig, “How the U.S. Could 58. Kim Jong-un, “Supreme Leader Kim , July 11, 2019. Provoke a New Korean War,” Foreign Policy Jong Un Makes Policy Speech at First Ses- 74. Lee Min-hyung, “Washington Unwill-� in Focus, December 11, 2017; William Per- sion of 14th SPA,” Rodong Sinmun, April ing to Actively Mediate Seoul-Tokyo Trade ry and Yi Yong-in, “Former US Secretary of 13, 2019. Friction,” Korea Times, July 17, 2019; “Ko-� Defense Favors “Three Nos” on North Ko- 59. Lee Je-hun, “Kim Jong-un Sets Time-� rea Cannot Hope for U.S. Support in Spat rean Nukes,” Hankyoreh, October 3, 2016. with Japan,” Chosun Ilbo, July 16, 2019. line for Third Summit with US,” Hankyo- 90. Siegfried S. Hecker et al., “Report on reh, April 15, 2019. 75. Lee Je-hun, “US Federal Court Ap�- North Korean Nuclear Program,” Center 60. “U.S. Secretary of State Slammed,” Min- proves Request to Sell Seized N. Korean for International Security and Coopera- istry of Foreign Affairs DPRK, April 18, 2019. Cargo Ship,” Hankyoreh, July 22, 2019. tion, November 15, 2006. 61. Ankit Panda and Vipin Narang, “Why 76. The Sigley affair, where an Australian 91. Dan Balz, “Democrats Are Now Left North Korea Is Testing Missiles Again: Is a student was expelled rather than impris- with One Option to End Trump’s Presi- Much Larger Escalation on the Horizon?,” oned over some misdemeanor, suggests dency: The 2020 Election,” Washington Foreign Affairs, May 16, 2019. that the North Korean authorities have Post, July 24, 2019; Marc Fisher, “On learned a lesson. Choe Sang-hun, “North 62. Simon Denyer, “North Korea’s Kim Mueller’s Final Day on the National Korea Accuses Expelled Australian Student Receives ‘Excellent Letter’ from Trump, Stage, a Halting, Faltering Performance,” of Spying,” New York Times, July 6, 2019. State Media Says,” Washington Post, June Washington Post, July 24, 2019. 23, 2019; Lee Je-hun, “The Resumption of 77. Doug Bock Clark, “The Untold Story 92. Crowley and Sanger, “In New Talks, Trump and Kim’s Correspondence Diplo- of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage,” U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by macy,” Hankyoreh, June 24, 2019. QC, July 23, 2018. North Korea.” 63. Isabel Oakeshott, “Britain’s Man 78. David Nakamura, “Beyond ‘Free-� 93. Peter Baker, “Trump Names Robert in the US Says Trump Is ‘Inept’: Leaked dom’s Frontier,’ Trump Scores His Biggest O’Brien, a Hostage Negotiator, as Na- Secret Cables from Ambassador Say the Live Show Yet in North Korea,” Washing- tional Security Adviser,” New York Times, President Is ‘Uniquely Dysfunctional and ton Post, June 30, 2019. September 18, 2019. Mail His Career Could End in Disgrace,’” 79. Seung Min Kim and Simon Denyer, 94. Karen DeYoung, Josh Dawsey, and on Sunday , July 7, 2019. “Trump Becomes First Sitting President to John Hudson, “John Bolton’s Turbulent 64. David Smith, “Trump Hails ‘Good Man’ Set Foot into North Korea,” Washington Tenure Comes to a Trumpian End,” Wash- Boris Johnson and Says of UK: ‘They Like Post, June 30, 2019. ington Post, September 10, 2019; Robert Me Over There,’” Guardian, July 23, 2019. 80. Rachel Siegel, “Democratic Presiden-� O’Brien, “The Korean Crisis Demonstrates 65. “Sergey Lavrov’s Interview with the tial Contenders Slam Trump for His Meet- the Need for a Strong United States Newspaper Argumenty i Fakty,” Saker, ing with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un,” Navy,” Daily Caller, November 29, 2010. July 17, 2019. Washington Post, June 30, 2019. 95. Robert C. O’Brien, While America 66. Simon Denyer and Carol Morello, 81. Michael Crowley and David E. Slept (New York: Encounter, 2016). “North Korea Threatens to Suspend Denu�- Sanger, “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for 96. John Wagner and John Hudson, clearization Talks with the United States,” a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” New “Trump Taps Robert C. O’Brien to Replace Washington Post, March 15, 2019. York Times, June 30, 2019. John Bolton as National Security Adviser,” 67. Amie Ferris-Rotman and Simon De- 82. Bruce Cumings, “Wrong Again,” Lon- Washington Post, September 18, 2019; nyer, “Putin: Kim Jong Un Needs Inter�- don Review of Books 25, no. 23 (2003); Josh Rogin, “Trump Is Expected to Tap North national Security Guarantees to Give Up Jeffery Lewis, “That Secret Iranian ‘Nuclear Korea Envoy for Deputy Secretary of State,” Nuclear Arsenal,” Washington Post, April Facility’ You Just Found? Not So Much,” Washington Post, September 17, 2019. archive.monthlyreview.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_3

The Trial of Thomas Hardy A Forgotten Chapter in the Working-Class Fight for Democratic Rights

IAN ANGUS

November 5, 2019, is the 225th anniversary of the acquittal of Thomas Hardy on charges of High Treason. Hardy is nearly forgotten today, but for decades workers and democrats in England celebrated November 5 as the anniversary of a major victory, a triumph over a powerful state that had deployed immense resources to crush working-class organizations and suppress popular demands for democratic rights. Hardy was born in Scotland on March 3, 1752, the son of a sailor who died at sea when Thomas was eight. He moved to London in 1774, where he worked as a shoemaker, a trade he had learned from his grandfather. Only a tiny minority of working people in the 1790s worked in anything we would recognize as a factory. As Marxist historian E. P. Thompson writes, “the characteristic industrial worker worked not in a mill or factory but (as an artisan or ‘mechanic’) in a small workshop or in his own home.”1 Hardy was one of these artisans. After working for others for seventeen years, he opened his own small shop in Piccadilly in 1791. As he later wrote, the experience of trying to set up a shop during economically hard times forced him to think. The country was rich and the people worked hard—so why was it so difficult to make ends meet?

It required no extraordinary penetration, once the enquiry was begun, to be able to trace it to the corrupt practices of men falsely calling themselves the representatives of the people, but who were, in fact, selected by a com- paratively few influential individuals, who preferred their own particular aggrandizement to the general interest of the community. The next enquiry naturally arose – Was the cause of the people hopeless? Must they and their posterity for ever groan under this intolerable load? Could not the nation, by a proper use of its moral powers, set itself free?2

England in the eighteenth century was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a democracy. Large landowners were firmly in charge and the entire system was grossly corrupt. It was a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.

Ian Angus edits the website Climate and Capitalism and is the author, most recently, of A Redder Shade of Green: Intersections of Science and Socialism (Monthly Review Press, 2017). An earlier version of this article was published in Socialist Voice in November 2009.

41 42 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

There were a few constituencies where perhaps 10 per cent of the male electorate could vote, but these were easily outnumbered by the “rotten boroughs,” where the Member was effectively nominated by his patron, a lord or a landowner or both. The quarter of the population which lived in urban areas was entirely unrepresented – the franchise was still based on voting in counties and in rural areas. No more than 4 per cent of the male population was entitled to vote, and most of those either didn’t vote, or voted according to how much they were bribed or patronized.3

“Another Class of People” There had been many middle-class and even aristocratic societies for political reform in England before, but Hardy proposed something different: “A Society of another class of the people, to effect that most desirable and necessary Reform, which had baffled the united associations of men of the greatest talents, worth, and consequence in the nation.”4 The result, formed on January 25, 1792, by “eight plain, homely, and ob- scure citizens,” was the London Corresponding Society (LCS). Hardy was elected secretary and treasurer at the first meeting. The LCS was to be an organization for and of working people. Dues were just one penny a week. Branches—limited to thirty members each in order to encourage full participation and discussion—met weekly in working-class pubs in various parts of London and the surrounding towns. When a sympa- thetic member of parliament joined, he was welcomed but not allowed to chair a meeting, lest the LCS be seen as allied with the Whigs. Hardy wrote: “We were so scrupulous about the admission of any of those of the higher ranks that when any of them offered to pay more than we usually demand- ed on the admission of a new member we would not receive it.”5 The Society grew to twenty-five members in two weeks, and to two thousand in six months. Its office, in Hardy’s shop, became the hub for communication and coordination among similar organizations of artisans, “mechanics,” and small tradesmen throughout England, Scotland, and Wales, all devoted to campaigning for universal suffrage and annual elections. They saw those objectives not as ends in themselves, but as steps toward ending poverty and hunger. For the rest of the decade, until it was formally outlawed by an Act of Parliament, the LCS was the largest, best-known, and (to the ruling class) most notorious working-class organization in England. At its peak in 1795, its public meetings in London were attended by one hundred thousand people and it was in communication with similar groups in over one hundred cities and towns. Although the LCS focused on parliamentary reform, it also campaigned against the war that Britain was waging, in alliance with Europe’s worst despots, to overthrow France’s revolutionary government. Members of Thomas Hardy 43 the LCS and other reform groups across the country were also actively involved in the nascent trade-union movement and in widespread protests against high food prices during the famine of 1794–95.

Repression The British ruling class was outraged at the very idea that the “swinish multitude,” as conservative ideologue Edmond Burke called them, might play any role in politics. In the House of Lords, a Bishop sputtered that “he did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them.”6 Such gross class prejudice was not limited to reactionaries. Christopher Wyvill, a Yorkshire landowner and prominent advocate of limited parliamentary reform, warned in 1792 that “the right of Suffrage communicated to an ignorant and ferocious Populace would lead to tumult and confusion.” Referring to the popularity of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man among the radicals, he wrote: “If Mr. Paine should be able to rouze up the lower classes, their interference will probably be marked by wild work, and all we now possess, whether in private property, or public liberty, will be at the mercy of a lawless and furious rabble.”7 Early in 1792, the government embarked on a campaign that combined antidemocratic propaganda with outright repression in order to force worker democrats off the political stage. It financed mass distribution of antiradical newspapers and pamphlets, accused the radicals of being paid agents of France, and (through Anglican Bishops, who owed their lucra- tive posts to the Cabinet) instructed the clergy to preach that supporters of the democratic movement would surely go to hell. At the same time, it encouraged “Church and King” mobs to attack or intimidate radical meetings, denied licenses to pub owners who rented meeting rooms to radicals, and sent spies and provocateurs into radical societies. In June 1792, Paine was charged with seditious libel for the views expressed in Rights of Man. He escaped to France, but was tried and convicted in his absence, and Rights of Man was banned. In Edinburgh in 1793, three men, including LCS chairman Maurice Margarot, were charged with sedition—consisting of arguing for parliamentary reform and opposing the war with France. After a trial before an openly hostile judge, they were sentenced to fourteen years of “transportation”—exile and compulsory labor in Australia.

A Show Trial at Old Bailey On May 12, 1794, Hardy and eleven other leading figures in the reform movement were arrested. The police ransacked Hardy’s home while 44 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 his pregnant wife lay in bed. They took him first to jail and then to the Parliament buildings, where he was interrogated for several days by a committee that included the prime minister and several senior cabinet ministers. Two weeks later, Parliament passed a bill suspending habeas corpus, thus allowing the government to imprison the twelve in the Tower of London without charge for several months. While he was in prison, a reactionary mob (Hardy believed they were paid and organized by the government) attacked Hardy’s home, breaking the windows and threatening to set the building on fire. His wife escaped through a small back window, but the physical and emotional strain had fatal effects: on August 27 her baby was stillborn and she died a few hours later. On October 6, a handpicked grand jury charged the twelve men with “High Treasons and Misprisions of Treasons, against the person and authority of the King.” If convicted, each would be “hanged by the neck, cut down while still alive, disemboweled (and his entrails burned before his face) and then beheaded and quartered.”8 Hardy was the first in the dock, because he “was supposed to be the most helpless of this band.”9 The government threw unprecedented resources into prosecuting him.

The trial of Thomas Hardy was the longest and most expensive trial for high treason that had ever been heard in Britain. The prosecution case was conducted by no less than eight barristers, led by the Attorney-General Sir John Scott and the Solicitor-General Sir John Mitford.… Four judges sat with [Chief Justice] Eyre on the bench.… The trial began on Tuesday 28 October 1794, and continued, with a break on Sunday, until Wednesday 5 November; no previous trial had lasted more than twenty-four hours, from the reading of the indictment to the delivery of the verdict.… Scott’s opening speech, 100,000 words long, took nine hours to deliver.10

But despite all the money and time they devoted, the prosecution’s case was weak. They had masses of documents and the testimony of spies and turncoats, but none of it demonstrated treason. In essence, their argument was that campaigning for political reform was equivalent to plot- ting to overthrow and murder the king. The prosecutors seem to have hoped that the conservative biases of a jury of property owners would prejudice them against a working-class radical who was challenging the right of property to rule. The strategy failed. Shortly before the trial, noted political philosopher William Godwin published an essay that effectively demolished the legal basis for equating political reform with treason. It was so widely read Thomas Hardy 45 and influential that one of the lawyers for the prosecution denied in court that the case depended on any such argument. Hardy’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine, was devastating in his cross-examination of government witnesses and his address to the jury. On November 5, after nine long days of trial, the jury took only three hours to decide unanimously that Hardy was not guilty. Hardy tried to leave the building quietly, but a huge crowd of supporters surrounded his carriage, released the horses, and pulled him through the streets cheering. At his request, they took him to the cemetery, where they waited quietly while he visited his wife’s grave for the first time. Apparently believing that the Hardy verdict was a fluke, the government proceeded with treason charges against Hardy’s colleagues. The trial of John Horne Tooke, a longtime moderate reformer, lasted five days; that of John Thelwall, the best-known and most popular LCS speaker, lasted three. Both were acquitted. Humiliated, the government withdrew all charges against the remaining nine radical leaders. The show trial was part of a deliberate plan to crush the reform movement and to deny working people any role in politics. Hardy was told by a source he trusted that the government had eight hundred other warrants prepared—three hundred of them already signed—that it planned to ex- ecute as soon as it won guilty verdicts. That plan was defeated—a major setback for reaction in England. Hardy’s acquittal was a victory for the radical movement, but it was devastating for him personally. His wife had died while he was in prison; his shop and home had been destroyed; the defense had cost him every cent he had. Reading between the lines in the memoir he published years later, it seems that the experience left him emotionally drained, if not shattered. For over thirty years, Hardy was a regular participant in the annual dinners celebrating the acquittals of 1794, but he never again played an active role in politics.

The First Worker Revolutionaries Hardy and his comrades were not socialists. Socialist ideas did not yet exist, nor did the social forces that would make socialism possible. The radicals of the 1790s drew inspiration from the French Revolution, from the century-old traditions of the Levellers, and above all from Paine, whose Rights of Man sold an unprecedented two hundred thousand copies between 1792 and ’93. Socially, the radicals favored something akin to the twentieth-century welfare state. Politically, they were radical democrats. Many of their demands were not won until well into the twentieth century, and some still are not on the books. 46 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

In their time, they were revolutionaries. As historian Roger Wells writes:

In the context of England’s socio-economic and political structures in the 1790s, democratic ideology pivoting on manhood suffrage had revolutionary implications. How could a society which so ostentatiously hinged on the very unequal distribution of wealth, bolstered by a political system excluding all but the very rich, survive the implementation or impo- sition of democracy?11 After the acquittals of 1794, it took the government several years to suppress Britain’s first authentic working-class movement. It was able to do so only by passing draconian laws that greatly expanded the grounds for charges of treason, outlawed any meeting of more than fifty people, suspended habeas corpus, and finally banned all trade unions and the LCS itself in 1799. Even then, the radicals were only driven underground. As Thompson showed in his monumental study The Making of the English Working Class, the tradition of working-class resistance to oppression remained strong. When mass protests broke out between 1815 and ’19, they built on the traditions and ideas of the 1790s and were led by many of the same people.

Throughout the war years there were Thomas Hardys in every town and in many villages throughout England, with a kist or shelf full of Radical books, biding their time, putting in a word at the tavern, the chapel, the smithy, the shoemaker’s shop, waiting for the movement to revive. And the movement for which they waited did not belong to gentlemen, manufacturers, or rate-payers; it was their own.12 Those radicals kept the spirit of 1794 alive in the hardest times of ruling-class repression and working-class retrenchment. In tribute to them, the victory of November 5, 1794, should be remembered today, and Hardy surely deserves to be restored to his rightful place in the pantheon of working-class heroes.

Notes

1. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the En- and How It Was Undermined (London: 8. Thompson, The Making of the English glish Working Class (1963; repr., London: Penguin, 2005), 46. Working Class, 21. Penguin, 1991), 259. 4. Hardy, Memoir, 103; emphasis add- 9. Hardy, Memoir, 110. 2. Thomas Hardy, Memoir of Thomas ed. Imagining the King’s Hardy, Founder of, and Secretary to, the 10. John Barrell, 5. Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of London Corresponding Society, for Dif- Papers of the London Corresponding Soci- Regicide, 1793–1796 fusing Useful Political Knowledge Among (Oxford: Oxford ety 1792–1799 the People of Great Britain & Ireland, and (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 318, 324. for Promoting Parliamentary Reform, University Press, 1983), 8. 11. Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Fam- from Its Establishment, in Jan. 1792, Until 6. R. A. Soloway, Prelates and People: ine in Wartime England, 1793–1801 His Arrest, on a False Charge of High Trea- Ecclesiastical Social Thought in England, (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 133. 1783–1852 son, on the 12th of May, 1794: Written (London: Routledge, 1969), 12. Thompson, The Making of the En- by Himself (London: James Ridgeway, 63. glish Working Class, 201. A kist was a 1832), 10. 7. Thompson, The Making of the English chest, usually used for storing clothes or 3. Paul Foot, The Vote: How It Was Won Working Class, 26. linen. archive.monthlyreview.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_4

Endgame Marxism (and Urbanism)

ANDY MERRIFIELD

I love the old questions. [With fervour] Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them! —Hamm in Samuel Beckett, Endgame

One of the inspiring things about the Marxist tradition at the bicente- nary of Karl Marx’s birth is its resilience, its capacity for seemingly endless spinoffs and interpretations, innumerable adaptations and provoca- tions. It is an innovative body of thought that has given people plenty to work with and think about when the world itself has been less inspiring. Marxism has kept people going when it has been hard to keep going. A while back, the late Eduardo Galeano advocated a Marxism that “celebrates continuous birth.” He had one of his rummy characters call it Magical Marxism: “one half reason, one half passion, and a third half mystery.” “Not a bad idea!” his drinking buddies agree, toasting this new school of Marxism, which has always seemed like a good idea to me too, even if I would fill that third half with hope. But keeping hope alive is never straightforward. Sometimes you need a sense of humor. So there is another strand of Marxism that inspires— at least it has inspired me—an ironic variety, a Groucho Marxism, drawing sustenance from comedian Groucho Marx, who, declining an invitation to join an exclusive Hollywood organization, said he cared not to belong to any club that accepted his type as a member. Of course, what Groucho meant was that he would rather keep sacred his own individuality, affirm his own free will, beyond the grasp of any collective. All of which might seem antithetical to Marxism. Yet, perhaps those sensibilities—collectivity and individuality—express two different aspects of Marxism’s humanist tradition, of how they ought to go together. It is another way to frame the dialectic of justice and jouissance, a radical hope for equality on the one side, plus a diversity of self-expression on the other. In a sense, this is not only what Marxism should offer; it is what any city should offer, too. Cities should reconcile problems of freedom

Andy Merrifield is an independent scholar and the author of numerous books, including Dialectical Urbanism (Monthly Review Press, 2002), Magical Marxism (Pluto Press, 2011), and, most recently, The Amateur (Verso Books, 2018) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities (and Love) (OR Books, 2018).

47 48 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 and necessity, ought to provide affordable housing and a decent quality of life, alongside novelty of experience and scope for expansive individuality. Alas, a stroll around a lot of our cities today is not likely to reveal too much intrigue or novelty, nor much democracy. Our cities are invari- ably unfair and uninteresting. They are flattened by familiarity, even as different skyscrapers go up. Their ubiquity is in their sameness, in the predictability of their function. Everywhere the same insipid chain stores commandeering prime locations; everywhere the same kinds of spectacular glass and steel architectural structures, catering to famil- iar financial services and high-tech activities, dispersed among famil- iar multinational corporations, the same accountancy firms, the same banks and management consultancies, the Googles and the Amazons, the Facebooks and the Microsofts. The glitter belies the banality. Texture and diversity have gone. In the urban mix, there is little mix. Boredom and disconnect prevail. For the ordinary person, it is hard not to feel that disconnect the way Jean-Paul Sartre’s protagonist Roquentin felt it in Nausea: a human being encoun- tering cold inanimate objects, objects everywhere around you, that tower over you, that provide the context of your life—objects you must live with yet are somehow cut off from you, beyond you, against you. They make you shudder with that feeling, with the nausea that overcomes you, that alienated subjectivity. These days, we are living in a world that has undergone colossal urban expansion. At the same time, the parameters for human expansion, for the expansion of the self, have diminished, dwindled for many denizens just as those city lights shine evermore brilliantly. Our urban system is superdynamic yet wreaks dullness for the bulk of people. Cities are exploitable commodities, their land a pure financial asset, an evermore frackable spatial unit. They gorge on capital and wealth, on labor power and resources. They have vast appetites that chew up what they need, only to spit things out afterward. Cities expel a residue of the unwanted, the no-longer-necessary, the used and abused. Marx saw this residue as a “relative surplus population,” as workers “set free” from the whole world of work; nowadays, it is people set free from the whole totality of urban life. It is an exclusion process that creates a massive urban ban- lieue on the periphery, where residues reside: the evicted and displaced, the downsized and degraded, the expelled and exhausted. Residues are workers without regularity of work. They are refugees rejected and rebuked, profiled and patrolled no matter where they wan- der, victims of war and economic collapse, of environmental devasta- tion, of drought and deforestation, of wildfires and wild regimes. A lot Endgame Marxism & Urbanism 49 of refugees end up somewhere on the city fringes. Residues are other displacees, people forced off the land, tenants thrown out of housing, people land grabbed, space deficient, victims of impersonal land markets and property booms—and busts. Residues come from the city as well as the countryside, and congregate in a space that is often somewhere in between, neither traditional city nor traditional countryside. Residues are not merely the city’s secretion: they are now the very substance of the global city itself, an urban default position. Thus, the question: When the rich have displaced all the poor from the urban core, banished them from its neoliberal isotropic plane, from its plane of business immanence, have we not reached a strange apo- theosis? Have we not reached a sort of endgame, when the game is really up, even as we still feign the moves? When, after the pawns have finally gone, have been sacrificed, when little is left on the urban check- erboard besides kings, kings playing off against other kings, square by square, is there nothing left to win and no possibility of ever winning? Endgame. Fin de Partie. Maybe there is another strand of Marxism we ought to explore today. Let’s call it Beckettian Marxism—the kind of Marxism needed to confront this endgame urbanism, a Marxism that engages with a Samuel Beckett mise-en-scène, honing in on the Irish writer’s peculiar specialty: claustro- phobic confinement. In our case, it is the confinement engendered by a space-hungry, market-driven urban expansion. As buildings go up, par- tition walls move in for millions of people. Speculative space opens up, dwelling space closes down, gets sliced up, and is subdivided. Richness for the few resonates as cramped emptiness for the many. Public space itself resembles a scene from Waiting for Godot—a street, a tree, a few vagrants hanging around. Accommodation hunting is as depressing as the microdesolation of Hamm and Clov in Endgame—“you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that”; or maybe the chamber of horrors in Beckett’s extraordinary short work, The Lost Ones, is more apt, with “one body per square metre or two hundred bodies in all round numbers. Whether relatives near and far or friends in varying degree many in theory are acquainted. The gloom and press make recognition difficult.” Is this a vision of the death camps, or refugees in a transit camp? Or is it just a vision of ordinary everyday madness, of multioccupancy in an unafford- able city, in which rents have skyrocketed? An abode “where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one.” Beckett himself was a displaced person, displaced by choice, of course, but displaced nonetheless. A native English speaker who wrote his best works in French, in Paris; an atheist Protestant in an aggressive Catholic 50 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019

Irish state; an alien Irishmen in France, an uprooted Frenchman in Ireland, never living in his country of citizenship, never a citizen in the country in which he chose to live. He was said to be nonpolitical, yet he fought for the French Resistance. He earned the Croix de Guerre for brav- ery and later went on to write a literature of rights from the standpoint of people who never knew they had any. In 1945, sitting at his mother’s deathbed, Beckett had a revelation. It prompted a change of heart and inspired a new mission for him as a writer. For years, he had been trying to shrug off the shadow of mentor James Joyce. “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could,” said Beckett, “in the direction of knowing more. He was always adding…I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting.” Henceforth, his work would focus on poverty and loss, on failure and exile, on destitution and despair. It would strip away words, unearth the silent tragicomedy of bare life, its lessness. If Joyce’s universe was the kaleidoscopic expanse of Finnegans Wake’s chaosmos, Beckett’s was the dim bedsit room, within its narrow four walls, bleak and bereft of anything, soon bereft of the lodgers themselves, of tenants expelled, like Murphy, or like the anonymous antihe- ro of “The Expelled,” flung out onto the boardinghouse’s front steps. “As I fell I heard the door slam,” the evictee says. “That meant they were not pursuing me down into the street, with a stick, to beat me.… So, for once, they had confined themselves to throwing me out and no more about it. I had time, before coming to rest in the gutter, to conclude this piece of reasoning.” From Murphy and Watt, and Molloy and Malone, to Mercier and Camier, and onward to the Unnamable one—who had to express himself with words yet eventually chose silence—Beckett’s literary imagination is populated by clochards and vagabonds, by the wretched of the earth. “Did they beat you?” Vladimir asks Estragon in Waiting for Godot. “Where did you spend the night?” “Don’t touch me!” Estragon re- sponds. “Don’t question me! Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!” Earlier, Estragon had lamented: “We’ve no rights any more.” “We’ve lost our rights,” he says. “We got rid of them,” Vladimir rejoins. Waiting for Godot, first performed in Paris in 1952, marked a turning point for Beckett as a writer and existentialist. Maybe it is no coinci- dence that 1952 was also the year of Jean-Paul Clébert’s Paris Insolite, a book about the postwar Parisian poor, about their efforts to stay warm, to eat and drink in the zone, in a no-man’s land of homeless panhandlers and rag-and-bone men, prostitutes and scrap-metal dealers. It was war’s aftermath; yet another war had commenced. Clébert himself took to Endgame Marxism & Urbanism 51 streets, lived with these destitute souls, recounted their tales as one of them. It was a bedraggled realism, an insider reportage. They were Beckett’s people, looking and sounding like his dramatis personae, right down to their dress sense, their wiles, their visions of who they were, and how they got there. Yet Beckett’s genius was not only to dramatize this zeitgeist; he heard what went on inside these peoples’ heads too, he voiced their stuttering broken words, their private language, their lack of language. He still hears this lack today, what goes on inside our bedsits and basement flats. For Beckett, to shrink vistas was to glimpse bare life. You could understand more by figuring out less. If flows of global capital at the high end of Financial Times life resemble a giant Jackson Pollock canvas, then maybe it is the minuscule world of Paul Klee that comes closest to a Beckett bedsit. (“Burdened Children,” Klee’s crayon-and-ink composi- tion from 1930, with two interlocking human figures, made up of boxes, stick legs, and dots for eyes, seems a perfect visual analogue of Beckett’s How It Is.) Beckett’s darkest evocation of bare life is surely Endgame, from 1957. Stark interior. Gray light. Left and right back, two small windows, curtains drawn. Four characters, Nagg and Nell, living in two ash bins; Hamm, blind, infirm, in a wheelchair; Clov, younger, lame, Hamm’s helper, a kind of adopted son. “Clov,” Hamm asks, in a question many might pose today, if only to oneself, “Have you had enough?” “Yes!” Clov answers—then, pausing, wonders, “Of what?” “Of this…this…thing,” says Hamm. “I always had,” Clov adds. Have you had enough? Of what? Of this…this…thing? Brexit?…Trump?…Capitalism? “Outside of here it’s death,” says Hamm. “Beyond is the other hell.” Looking through his telescope, at the outside, Clov says, “nothing stirs. All is—” “All is what?” demands Hamm. “What all is? in a word? corpsed,” says Clov. Hamm and Clov’s dialogue here is razor sharp, pure gallows humor, full of Groucho Marxist flourishes. It is existential slapstick, a theater of the absurd, like real life. At one point, Hamm declares—“with fervour”—in Beckett’s italics: “I love the old questions. Ah the old questions, [and] the old answers, there’s nothing like them!” This declaration seems vital somehow, profound, more than a few throwaway lines. What does it mean, what could it mean…the old questions, and the old answers—that there is nothing like them? Maybe there are some old questions in the Marxist tradition, time im- memorial questions, and regardless of the particular forms they take, there is, as Hamm says, nothing like them. One old question might be, What Is to Be Done? Lenin asked it in 1901. Since then, it has usually provoked an old response: class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, the founding and 52 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 organization of a Party, a Party of and for this proletariat, including its lumpen variant. Perhaps there still is not anything like it. The old Party was there to represent the interests of the working class, even if some members of this working class were not interested in joining this Party, never wanted to belong to it. Nevertheless, the Party had the interests of a public in mind, the interests of the majority. There were services this public needed, public services—social housing, decent education, adequate health care, reliable buses, trains, and subways. Under the old questions, the city itself was never a market: it was a public good, a space managed in the public interest, not in the interest of the rich—not managed by the rich in the interests of the rich. There was a city government and this city government had a plan. City governors and city planners were elected officials, constituted by the Party in office, who were accountable to “the people,” often made up of “the people,” with checks and balances that assured democracy was agreed upon. Indeed, it was assumed that the checks and balances would control what the rich did, preventing them from speculating on those vital public goods, so that all any city government needed to do was to ensure its poorest citizens could live in safe and stable neighborhoods. Any Hobbesian war of all against all had to stop; the overarching public interest had to be maintained. Perhaps the old questions and the old responses can become new solutions again, ending this endgame urbanism of ours? “Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.” Beckett’s focus on poverty and loss, on lessness, is maybe the new spirit the Marxist tradition needs to resuscitate. A new old Marxism based on immiseration. A macro practice around the micro, around concrete poverty, not around abstract long waves of history. Perhaps Marxism and Marxists need to take to the streets to see things close up, in the raw, like the vagabond Clébert? Perhaps it needs a new epiphany about what it once was? Its theory has lost sight of its subject, aban- doned its subject: this residue of neoliberal capitalism, this rank and file, Marxism’s real constituency, the Beckettian evicted and exhausted, thrown out of their dwelling space as well as their workspace. It is a global working class whose ranks swell by the day, yet that no longer has its Party—indeed has witnessed a fin du parti. Is the Labour Party up for being its representative in Britain? We are still not sure. An old question might not be so much What Is to Be Done? as Where to Begin Again? After the defeat of the Paris Commune, Arthur Rimbaud, a 17-year-old poet-protagonist, said the blood of its victims drained away all hope for his generation. For a long time to come, Rimbaud said, truth will have to go underground. It had been reduced to tatters, along with Endgame Marxism & Urbanism 53 life. Our age today is one in which truth has similarly been reduced to tatters, along with life. To trace out any hope of its recovery, Marxists need to organize underground, follow Old Mole of old, agitate underground, assemble in Beckettian bedsits, in sunken basements, maybe in communal squats, somewhere cheap, somewhere far away. Or perhaps close by. Begin again. Build up again. For it is true that truth today is more truthful in the underground than in the commercial overground. Truth will not be voiced from the rich core, but from the honest poor periphery, from the margins of life, from the margins of our cities, from its grungy peripheral banlieues, from broken-down informal zones à défendre, defended to the end. There, as Beckett said, nothing will be truer than nothingness, the source of a new radical beginning. The other likelihood is that truth will get communicated via old means not new media. Ah, the old answers! It will be shared by word of mouth and on paper, not online. One of the problems with the ubiquity of our current social media is its saturation, that there is too much of it, and too much of it peddling lies, and fear and loathing. Too much commercial media play too many channels that offer people too little choice. We are flooded with truths, making it hard to decide which truth is not false. A new underground truth will emerge like it once did, from smart people living off very little, living in ruined and cheap neighborhoods, often in experimental neighborhoods, communicating via old experimental media. And there will be cafés and hang outs where kindred spirits and fellow travelers can commune with one another, bump into one another, talk and argue with one another, share sounds together, maybe some old jazz riffs. They can be present, in person, and engage in old debates about the future, have direct human encounters not mediated screen encounters. Some of these new experimental neighborhoods might mimic the Greenwich Villages and SoHos (and Sohos) of old. There might be new re- paratory theaters, reenacting old plays by Beckett or Bertolt Brecht or by new Living Theatre troupes, putting fresh spins on old staples, reinvent- ing a new vanguard, inspiring new audiences while reenergizing old ones who have not entirely forgotten what it was like the first time around. What would begin again is a new Marxist Underground, where a new critical culture might be incubated, a will to live differently, like it did before, making our cities interesting and democratic again. Or perhaps it will not happen. Perhaps nothing like this will ever happen. Not again. Perhaps it is no longer possible for Marxism to go on, having lost so much. Try again with the old answers? Fail again, fail better? And even if Marxism cannot go on, it will go on—maybe for another two hundred years. archive.monthlyreview.org REPRISE DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_5 U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

I am going to start with two things with which I think nearly all MR readers will probably agree. One, imperialism is an integral part of the capitalist world-economy. It is not a special phenomenon. It has always been there. It always will be there as long as we have a capitalist world economy. Two, we are experiencing at the moment a particularly aggressive and egregious form of imperialism, which is now even ready to claim that it is being imperialist. Now, I ask you to reflect upon that anomaly. How do we explain that, at the moment, we are living through a particularly aggressive and egregious form of imperialism, which for the first time in over a hundred years has been ready to use the words imperial and imperialism? Why should they do that? Now, the answer most people give in one word is U.S. strength. And the answer I will give in one word is U.S. weakness. We have to start in 1945, when the United States became hegemonic, really hegemonic. What does hegemony in this context mean? It means that the U.S. nation-state was so much the strongest, it had an economic capability so far ahead of anybody else in the world as of 1945, that it could undersell anyone in their own home markets. The United States had a military strength that was unparalleled. As a consequence, it had an ability to create formidable alliances, NATO, the U.S.-Japan Defense Pact, and so on. At the same time, the United States, as the hegemonic power, became cul- turally the center of the world. New York became the center of high culture and American popular culture went on its march throughout the world. The first time I was in the Soviet Union, in the Brezhnev era, my host took me to a nightclub in Leningrad. The one thing that startled me in the Soviet Union, the whole time I was there, was that in this nightclub one heard American popular music sung in English. And, of course, ideologically, I

Immanuel Wallerstein (1930–2019) was the director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations; the editor of Review; and Senior Research Scholar at Yale University. He was the author of numerous books, including Transforming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World-System, cowritten with Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, and Samir Amin (Monthly Review Press, 1990). Wallerstein was also a frequent contributor to Monthly Review. “U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony” was first published in Monthly Review 55, no. 3 (July–August 2003).

54 Immanuel Wallerstein 55 think we underestimate the degree to which the theme of the “free world” has had legitimacy among wide segments of the world population. So the United States was really on top of the world for about twenty-five years, and it got its way in whatever it wanted to do. It is true that there was the Soviet Union, which posed a military difficulty for the United States. Nonetheless, the United States handled that very simply by an agreement. It is called Yalta, which encompasses more than just what happened at Yalta itself. I think the left has underestimated historically the reality and the importance of the Yalta agreement that made the Cold War a choreographed arrangement in which nothing ever really happened for forty years. That was the important thing about the Cold War. It divided up the world into the Soviet zone that was about a third of the world, and the U.S. zone that was two-thirds. It kept the zones economically separate and allowed them to shout at each other loudly in order to keep their own side in order, but never to make any truly substantial changes in the arrangement. The United States was therefore sitting on top of the world. This lasted only about twenty-five years. The United States ran into difficulty somewhere between 1967 and 1973 because of three things. One, it lost its economic edge. Western Europe and Japan became sufficiently strong to defend their own markets. They even began to invade U.S. markets. They were then about as strong and as competitive as the United States economically and that, of course, had political implications. Secondly, there was the world revolution of 1968 in which many MR readers were involved, in one way or another. Think of what happened in 1968. In 1968, there were two themes that were repeated everywhere throughout the world in one version or another. One, we don’t like the U.S. hegemony and dominance of the world, and we don’t like Soviet collusion with it. That was a theme everywhere. That was not only the Chinese stance on the two superpowers but that of most of the rest of the world as well. The second thing that 1968 made clear was that the Old Left, which had come to power everywhere—Communist parties, social-democratic parties, and national liberation movements—had not changed the world and something had to be done about it. We were not sure we trusted them anymore. That undermined the ideological basis of the Yalta agreement, and that was very important. The third thing that happened is that there were people who didn’t agree with Yalta. They were located in the third world and there were at least four significant defeats of imperialism that occurred in the third world. The first was China, where the Communist Party defied Stalin and marched on Kuomintang-controlled Shanghai in 1948, thus getting China out from under U.S. influence on the mainland. That was a central 56 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 defeat in the U.S. attempt to control the periphery. Secondly, there was Algeria and all its implications as a role model for other colonial territo- ries. There was Cuba, in the backyard of the United States. And finally, there was Vietnam, which both France and then the United States were incapable of defeating. It was a military defeat for the United States that has structured world geopolitics ever since. The threefold fact of the rise of economic rivals, the world revolution of 1968 and its impact on mentalities across the world, and Vietnam’s defeat of the United States, all taken together, mark the beginning of the decline of the United States. How could the rulers of the United States handle the loss of hegemony? That has been the problem ever since. There were two dominant modes of handling this loss of hegemony. One is that pursued from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton, including Ronald Reagan, including George Bush Sr. All these U.S . presidents handled it the same way, basically a variant of the velvet glove hiding the mailed fist. They sought to persuade Western Europe and Japan and others that the United States could be cooperative; that the others could have an alliance of semi-equals, though with the United States exerting “leadership.” That’s the Trilateral Commission and the G7. And, of course, they were using all this time the unifying force of opposition to the Soviet Union. Secondly, there was the so-called Washington Consensus that coalesced in the 1980s. What was the Washington Consensus about? I remind you that the 1970s was the era when the United Nations proclaimed the decade of development. Developmentalism was the name of the game from the 1950s through the 1970s. Everybody proclaimed that countries could develop. The United States proclaimed it. The Soviet Union proclaimed it, and everybody in the third world proclaimed it—if only a state were organized properly. Of course, people disagreed about how to organize a state properly, but if only it were organized properly and did the right things, it could develop. This was the basic ideology; development was to be achieved by some kind of control over what went on within sovereign national states. Now, the Washington Consensus was the abandonment and the deni- gration of developmentalism, which had visibily failed by the late 1980s, and, therefore, everybody was ready to abandon. They substituted for developmentalism what they called globalization, which simply meant opening up all the frontiers, breaking down all the barriers for: (a) the movement of goods and, more importantly, (b) capital, but not (c) labor. And the United States set out to impose this on the world. The third thing they did along this line of “cooperation” was an ideological consensus-building process at Davos. Davos is not unimportant. Immanuel Wallerstein 57

Davos was an attempt to create a meeting ground of the world’s elites, including elites from the third world, and constantly bring together and blend their political activity. At the same time, the objectives of the United States during this period took three forms. One was to launch a counteroffensive. It was a counteroffensive of neoliberalism on three levels to: (1) reduce wages worldwide; (2) reduce costs for (and end ecological constraints on) corporations, permitting the total externalization and socialization of such costs; and (3) reduce taxation, which was subsidizing social welfare (that is to say, subsidizing education, health care, and lifelong guarantees of income). On all these three levels they were only partially successful. None of these three succeeded totally, but they all succeeded a little. However, cost curves were not brought down to anything like the 1945 level. The cost curves had gone way up and they are down now, but they are not down below the 1945 level, and they will go up again. The second objective was to deal with the military threat. The real threat to U.S. military power, and they say it all the time, so let’s believe them, is nuclear proliferation; because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action. That is what North Korea is demonstrating at this moment. North Korea only has two nuclear bombs, if what the newspapers say is correct. But that is enough to shake things up. The third objective—and this was very crucial and they’ve been working at it since the 1970s—was to stop the European Union. The United States was for the European Union in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was a means of getting France to agree to have Germany rearm. But once it became serious it was viewed as an attempt to create a European state of one variety or another, and the United States was of course strongly opposed to it. What happened? First, we had the collapse of the Soviet Union. That was a disaster for the United States; it removed the most important political weapon they had in relation to Western Europe and East Asia. Second, there was Saddam. Saddam Hussein started the first Gulf War. He did it deliberately. He did it deliberately to challenge the United States. He could not have done that if the Soviet Union had still been an active power. They would have stopped him from doing it because it would have been too dangerous in terms of the Yalta agreement. And he got away with it. That is to say, at the end of the war, all he lost was what he had gained. He was back at the starting point. That is what has stuck in the craw for ten years. That war was a draw. It was not a victory for the United States. Third, we saw in the 1990s, to be sure, a momentary spurt of the U.S. economy, but not of the world-economy as a whole and a spurt that is 58 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 now over. But we now have a weakening of the dollar, and the dollar has been a crucial lever of the United States, enabling it to have the kind of economy it has and the dominance it has over the rest of the world. And finally, we had 9/11 that showed that the United States was vulnerable. Enter the hawks. The hawks do not see themselves as the triumphant continuation of U.S. capitalism or U.S. power or anything else. They see themselves as a group of frustrated outsiders who for fifty years did not get their way even with Reagan, even with Bush Sr., even with George Bush Jr. before 9/11. They are still worried that Bush Jr. will chicken out on them. They think that the policy that went from Nixon to Clinton to the first year of George W. Bush, of trying to handle this situation, diplomatically, multilaterally—I call it the velvet glove—was an utter failure. They think it just accelerated the decline of the United States and they think that had to be changed radically by engaging in an egregious, overt, imperial action—war for the sake of war. They did not go to war on Iraq or Saddam Hussein because he was a dictator. They did not go to war on Iraq even for oil. I will not argue that point here, but they did not need the war on Iraq for oil. They needed it to show the United States could do it, and they needed that demonstration in order to intimidate two groups of people: (1) anybody in the third world who thinks that they should engage in nuclear proliferation; and (2) Europe. This was an attack on Europe, and that is why Europe responded the way it did. I wrote an article in 1980 in which I said, “It is geopolitically inevitable that over the next period, there will emerge a Paris/Berlin/Moscow alliance.” I said this when the Soviet Union was still in existence and I have repeated it ever since. Now, everybody talks about it. There is actually a website now, paris-berlin-moscou.info, which reprints what people are writing in French, German, Russian, and English throughout Europe about the virtues of a Paris/Berlin/Moscow linkup. We must not underestimate the second Security Council nonvote in March of this year. It is the first time since the United Nations was founded that the United States, on an issue that mattered to it, could not get a majority on the Security Council. Of course, they have had to veto various resolutions in the past but on no issue that was truly crucial to them. But in March 2003 they withdrew the resolution because they could not get more than four votes for it. It was a political humiliation and it was uni- versally regarded as such. The United States has lost legitimacy, and that is why you cannot call it hegemonic anymore. Whatever you want to call it, there is no legitimacy now and that’s crucial. So, what should we look for in the next ten years? First, there is the question of how Europe will construct itself. It will be very difficult, but Immanuel Wallerstein 59 they will construct themselves and they will construct an army. Maybe not all of Europe, but the core. The United States is really worried about it, and that army will sooner or later link up with the Russian army. Second, look at North East Asia. This is harder but I think China, a re- united Korea, and Japan will begin to move together politically and economically. Now, this will not be easy. The reunification of Korea will be a tremendously difficult thing to achieve. The reunification of China as well will be a difficult thing to achieve, and those countries have all sorts of reasons for hating one another and tensions with deep historical roots, but the pressure is on them. If, realistically, they are going to survive as independent forces in the world, they will move in this direction. Thirdly, you should watch the World Social Forum. I think that is where the action is. It is the most important social movement now on the face of the earth and the only one that has a chance of playing a really significant role. It has blossomed very fast. It has a wealth of internal contradictions that we should not underestimate and it will run through all sorts of difficult periods, and it may not make it. It may not survive as a movement that is a movement of movements, that has no hierarchical center, is tolerant of all the varieties within it and yet stands for something. This is not an easy game, but it is where the best hope lies. Finally, I would think you ought to look at the internal contradictions among capitalists. The basic political contradiction of capitalism throughout its history has been that all capitalists have a common political interest insofar as there is a world class struggle going on. At the same time, all capitalists are rivals of all other capitalists. Now that is a fundamental contradiction of the system and it’s going to be very explosive. I don’t think we should underestimate the fact that in April 2003 Lawrence Eagleberger, the secretary of state under the first President Bush, and still a close adviser of the current president’s father, said in print that if the United States were now to invade Syria, he, Eagleberger, would be for impeaching George W. Bush. Now, that is not a very light thing for a person of that sort to say. So there is a message being sent, and who is the message coming from? I think it is coming from the father for one thing. And beyond that, it is coming from an important seg- ment of U.S. capital and of world capital. They are not all happy about the hawks. The hawks have not won the game. They have grabbed hold of the U.S. state machinery; 9/11 made that possible. And the hawks know it is now or never and they will continue to push, because if they don’t push forward, they will fall back. But they have no guarantee of success, and some of their biggest enemies are other capitalists who do not like the line with Europe and Japan because they basically do believe in the unity 60 MONTHLY REVIEW / November 2019 of capital; who don’t think that the way you handle these things is by smashing all opposition, but would prefer to co-opt it. They are extremely worried that this is Samson pulling down the house. We have entered a chaotic world. It has to do with the crisis of capitalism as a system, but I will not argue that now. What I will say is that this chaotic world situation will now go on for the next twenty or thirty years. No one controls it, least of all the U.S. government. The U.S. government is adrift in a situation that it is trying to manage all over the place and that it will be incapable of managing. This is neither good nor bad, but we should not overestimate these people nor the strength on which they rely.

MONTHLY REVIEW Fifty Years Ago The more the giant monopolistic corporations conglomerate and multinationalize, the further removed their top managements become from any particular product or production process. The concerns of headquarters are purely financial, i.e., profit- and accumulation-oriented; while matters of production, technology, etc., are relegated to the division, subsidiary, and plant managers who are responsible for producing and even to a large extent selling the corporation’s many products.… The multinational corporation, in brief, is the key institution of finance capital in the second half of the 20th century; and Lenin’s characterization in Imperialism (1917) requires little modification to fit it: “The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of this term.” —Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, “Notes on the Multinational Corporation,” Part Two, Monthly Review, November 1969 archive.monthlyreview.org DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_6 POETRY This is our legacy

MARGE PIERCY

How will they curse us, the 3rd, 4th generations, the ones that survive the deaths we left them?

How could we explain the world on fire, species wiped out daily, oceans with more plastic than fish?

That we let a corrupt man stomp refugees fleeing rape, murder and hunger that we let him set blazes no one could put out. We saw the cliff ahead We were well warned We took everyone over.

That was how our world ended, in lies and greed vast and numerous maggots dining on the corpse of hope.

Marge Piercy is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Made in Detroit.

61 archive.monthlyreview.org REVIEW DOI: 10.14452/MR-071-06-2019-10_7 Race and Mystery in Cape Cod

NICHOLAS POWERS

Bill Fletcher Jr., The Man Who Fell from the Sky (Brooklyn: Hard Ball Press, 2018), 350 pages, $15, paperback.

It begins with an assassination. In Bill Fletcher Jr.’s first novel, The Man Who Fell from the Sky, the sleepy Cape Cod town of Osterville has blood on its hands. In this murder mystery, Fletcher digs through layers of racism in Southern Massachusetts to uncover more than the killer’s identity. The novel compellingly exposes the racism of society, turning its victims against each other. When Margie Smith finds her husband TJ (short for Thomas Julius) shot dead in his car, Detective Vincent Amato and, later, reporter David Gomes try to solve the murder in a town riven with racial tension. Going from door to door, they piece the puzzle together, untangling a knot of relationships going back to the Second World War. TJ’s murder is interwo- ven with the larger conflict between the town’s Cape Verdean immigrant community and its African-American community over what “black is.” The subtheme of the fluidity of blackness runs through the novel. In one telling scene, Gomes is at a party where his Uncle Marcelino (who is described as being dark skinned) yells, “Listen, we’re Portuguese. Yeah, our family is from Cape Verde, but we’re Portuguese. I’m sick of you calling me ‘black.’ Our ancestors were never slaves!” Later, Gomes speaks with a white detective who, in an expression of nonchalant racism, remarks that he expected “someone Spanish.” Gomes explains that his last name ends in an s and not a z. Two conflicts drive The Man Who Fell from the Sky. The first is the explicit murder mystery. But boiling beneath is a mediation on race. In many ways, the book uses the former to explore the latter, smartly avoiding cli- ché backdrops like New York or London and instead situating the story in a small, mostly white town that serves as an odd crossroads for the black Atlantic. Both conflicts collide in the finale as Gomes is marched into an empty building with a .45 caliber gun aimed at his back. The Man Who Fell from the Sky is a fast, fun read. And it stands in the tradition of black authors, like Walter Mosley and Chester Himes, who

Nicholas Powers is a professor, poet, and journalist. He is the author of The Ground Below Zero: 9/11 to Burning Man, New Orleans to Darfur, Haiti to Occupy Wall Street (Upset Press, 2015).

62 The Man Who Fell from the Sky 63 have used fiction to investigate race and class, diaspora identity and crime. The book is also a promissory note. Fletcher is a professional writer, activist, and scholar. Reading the crisp prose, one gets pulled into the dream state of a good story. You forget that you’re turning pages and are lost in the world he created. It is a satisfying first novel—so much so that I am left wanting another book. But not another murder mystery. No, instead, I want to see what happens when Fletcher moves beyond the guardrails of genre to expose the complexities of life that flash between the plot devices.

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Date: 9-10-2019. 64 (continued from inside back cover) In the final sentences of The Modern World-System in 1974, Wallerstein wrote: “The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.” ~ William (Bill) Edwin Foster, a longtime MR friend and supporter, father of MR editor John Bellamy Foster, died on September 1, 2019. Foster was a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal. He joined the U.S. Navy during the Second World War and served as a pharmacist’s mate in the Pacific. He graduated with a BA from the University of Washington and later became a school- teacher, medical adjudicator, and a used-bookstore owner, founder of Orca Books in Olympia, Washington. A lifelong socialist, he supported Henry Wallace for president in the 1948 elections. He often remarked on the termination of three professors at the University of Washington in 1948, during the McCarthyite witch hunt, for refusing to say if they had or had not ever been members of the Communist Party and not signing loyalty oaths. Paul Sweezy, soon to cofound MR with Leo Huberman, had provided testimony in favor of the professors. Foster eventually became a strong supporter of Monthly Review. One of his fondest memories was meeting Sweezy and Harry Magdoff in New York in 1985. He spent his last years reading the magazine from cover to cover each month, engaging with the big ideas and doing research for MR Online, providing numerous postings for Editors’ News Wire. He was especially concerned with issues of U.S. imperialism, nuclear armaments, and climate change. In 2016, at age 95, he traveled alone to a talk by Bernie Sanders in Springfield, Oregon, waited for hours in line, and managed to get a seat near the front. In one of his very last statements, he said that Monthly Review had proven that it is possible to hold out for the truth and that it needed to continue its work. He will be greatly missed. ~ We were pleased to read the editorial note celebrating our seventieth anniversary in the latest issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism (vol. 30, no. 2). We republish it here to commemorate our many decades of work and to extend our thanks for the well-wishes: We would like to congratulate the Monthly Review Editors on occasion of the seventieth anniversary of that eminent journal. Since 1949, Monthly Review stands as a beacon of politically engaged Marxism in North America and beyond. Its importance to building the intellectual framework for socialism cannot be overestimated. Over the decades many of us have gained much insight by im- mersing ourselves in the journal’s pages. We are particularly grateful to John Bellamy Foster for bringing environmental concerns to greater prominence within the journal and thereby to a larger socialist audience. The indefatiga- bility of the Monthly Review Editors in developing and diffusing socialist ideas, through all sorts of media, is truly breathtaking. We would therefore like to join Monthly Review in celebrating the anniversary and we wish the journal many happy returns. Archive user name: mrnov | password: 33h8 (continued from inside front cover) capitalist world-economy had the additional characteristic of being divided into a center, a semiperiphery, and a periphery. Wallerstein also postulated a third potential form of world-system, namely a socialist world government, which would integrate both economy and polity at the global level. In later analyses, Wallerstein was to develop this framework by examining shifting political hegemonies, long cycles (approximately twenty-five to thirty years in the up and down swings), unequal exchange, commodity chains, understandings of race and gender within the modern world-system, and numerous other factors. Wallerstein conceived of the capitalist world-economy as a somewhat static structure historically in that it could not be said to advance or significantly mod- ify its laws of motion through the emergence of distinct stages via industrializa- tion—for example, mercantilism, freely competitive capitalism, and monopoly capitalism—as in traditional Marxist theory. Rather, the modern world-system adhered to the same basic framework in the twentieth century as in its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century origins. The main economic shifts and crises within the world-system were the result of the changes in the economic produc- tivity (as well as military development and financial architecture) of individual states, resulting in alterations in world hegemony. The late twentieth century and early twenty-first century were thus characterized above all by The Decline of American Power (the title of his 2003 book), just as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been dominated by the decline of British hegemony, and the mid–seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by the decline of Dutch hegemony. In the twenty-first century, however, Wallerstein argued, the world for numerous reasons—economic-political-military-ecological—would not see a repetition of this pattern and the formation of a new hegemony. Rather, the transition would be to a new, noncapitalist world-system, the nature of which was yet unknown, but which would most likely be rooted in a world revolution of which the global revolt of 1968 was a preamble. Wallerstein had started off his career in the 1960s as a mainstream social scientist concerned primarily with colonialism/decolonialism in Africa. However, he moved steadily to the left in his analysis as a result of his attempts to draw out the historical implication of Fernand Braudel’s longue durée, first in relation to Africa and then in relation to the Global South in general, leading to his theory of the modern world-system. Beginning with the publication of The Modern World-System, if not sooner, he came to be closely associated with the Marxian left. Over the next nearly half century, his work gave strong credence to traditional theories of class exploitation and imperialism, relying extensively on Karl Marx’s analysis. His analysis thus increasingly overlapped with the dependency- and imperialist-theory traditions, as exemplified by Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi, the last three of whom, together with Wallerstein, came to be known as “the Gang of Four” and wrote a number of books together, including The Dynamics of Global Crisis (1982) and Transforming the Revolution (1990) for Monthly Review Press.

(continued on page 64)

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by Fred A. Wilcox Fred A. Wilcox ounty Mayo, Ireland, is spectacularly Cbeautiful. Dolphins, whales, and seals Shamrocks frolic in bays, rivers teem with salmon. Into this tranquil, unspoiled region in early 2002, and Oil Slicks came Shell Oil, announcing plans to build a gas refinery. Shell promised wonderful things: new jobs, improved roads, money for schools. But when citizens of County Mayo realized what Shell actually intended to do, they rose up. Shamrocks and Oil Slicks tells the story of County Mayo—the fisherman, farmers, teachers, business people—who, motivated by A People’s Uprising Against Shell Oil love for their environment, their community, in County Mayo, Ireland and their country, fought one of the planet’s most powerful destroyers to a standsill.

“An inspiring tale for all of us fighting against the odds for a better future.” —ANNIE LEONARD, Director, Greenpeace U.S. “A moving and important story of resistance by human beings who love their home, against the power of the corporate/government interlock. Simultaneously, it is a model for, and call to, precisely the sort of action we need to defend life on this planet from the depredations of capitalism.” —DERRICK JENSEN, environmental activist; author, The Myth of Human Supremacy “A poignant and powerful tale of one determined community’s fight against greedy corporate polluters and their craven government enablers. This story is a critical one, as it can and should be used to inspire the activism of all those waging similar fights against the fossil fuel calamity throughout the world today.” —WENONAH HAUTER, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch 168 pp | $22 pbk

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