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Recently two women judges have been appointed in Malaysia in the Sharia court but strangely enough their appointment is conditional on their not handling cases pertaining to marriage and divorce.

They can handle other cases like the custody of children, maintenance, property, etc. The appointment of women judges is a welcome move but the conditionality attached seems strange.

The question is: why can’t women judges deal with marriage and divorce cases? Is there any such injunction in the Quran or the Sunnah? No, not at all. In fact Imam Malik and the famous historian and Quranic commentator, Tabari, have held that women can become qazis; Imam Abu Hanifa was of the opinion that women can be appointed as qazis in certain circumstances; no one held that it would be under certain conditions only.

Why then have such conditions been laid down in the case of the two Malaysian women judges? Is it not sheer male prejudice against women? Our jurists and scholars always oppose any innovation (bidah) and consider it haram, but when it comes to innovations involving women and which have no basis in the Quran or Sunnah, these are welcome. When the Quran and Sunnah do not lay down any conditionality for women judges one is justified in asking: why, then, this innovation?

Why can’t a woman qazi handle cases pertaining to marriage and divorce? Are the appointing men afraid that women judges would be sympathetic to women who generally suffer in cases of marriage and divorce, and that cases would be favourably disposed of in favour of the suffering women? Apparently no reasons have been given for putting in such conditions; one can only infer from circumstances.

Several hadiths have been narrated by the Prophet’s (PBUH) wives, particularly Hazrat Ayesha, in matters of marriage and divorce. If a woman has no proper understanding of such issues why are such hadiths accepted by the jurists? They should be rejected because they have been narrated by a woman. Also, it is known to Islamic historians that the Prophet used to consult his wives on several matters.

The Quran repeatedly asks believers to enforce what is good (maaruf) and prohibit what is evil (munkar) and believers include both men and women. Thus, it is as much obligatory on men as on women to carry out this injunction of the Quran, more so in the case of a judge. Imam Abu Hanifa was in favour of appointing women qazis precisely on the basis of this Quranic injunction. What is the function of a qazi if not to enforce what is good and prevent that which is evil?

Also, who understands better than women as to what marital problems are and how often men divorce their wives simply in a fit of anger? In Islam marriage is a contract and both men and women have equal rights to enter into the contract, laying down conditions they like. If the woman has the right to lay down conditions for entering into a marital contract, she can also be supposed to have a thorough understanding of marital relations or a mutual relationship.

Nowhere do we find a verse in the Quran or a suggestion in a hadith that women are intellectually inferior in understanding such matters. As for the controversial tradition that women are naqis al-aql (intellectually inferior) and naqis al-iman (inferior in faith), the less said the better. The Prophet consulted his wives in several matters. He consulted one of them on the crucial matter of peace at Hudaibiyah, and accepted her advice to sacrifice his camel. He could not have said that women were inferior in intellect.

It was Hazrat Khadija who congratulated her husband for becoming the Prophet of Islam after he received the first revelation, and was perspiring and feeling uncertain as to what was happening to him. It was Hazrat Hafsa, his wife, in whose custody the earliest compiled Quran remained until the time of Hazrat Usman. The Prophet also is reported to have said that one who honours women becomes honoured himself.

The Prophet had all daughters and no surviving male offspring. He greatly loved them and brought them up with great affection. He used to say that one who loves his daughter, educates her and marries her off his place in paradise is assured. He loved his daughter Fatima most and would rise to his feet in respect when she entered his house. There are no differences on these matters among jurists and narrators of hadiths, and yet several hadiths are deemed as forged, which show women in a very poor light.

In fact, it should be not surprising that the entire discourse on women in the Quran is right-based and for men duty-based. What is surprising is that in Islamic jurisprudence the entire discourse reverses: for men it is right-based and for women duty-based. It is high time the Muslim intelligentsia came forward to rethink the entire corpus of Islamic jurisprudence in respect of issues and bring it in conformity with the Quranic spirit of justice, equality and human dignity.

The writer is an Islamic scholar who heads the Centre for Study of Society & Secularism, Mumbai.

Editor’s Note: Many people, who admire Judaism’s commitment to reason and its defense of the persecuted, have been troubled by the fits of brutality and the retreat into religious mythology that have characterized some Israeli governments, especially under the Likud.

Yet, Judaism’s enduring humanistic principles remain an inspiration to millions, including Daniel C. Maguire, a professor of moral theology at Marquette University, a Catholic Jesuit institution located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

My coming out as a Jew would certainly surprise my Irish Catholic parents who produced a brood of seven Irish Catholics, including me, three of whom became priests, including me.

My coming out as a Jew would also surprise Benjamin Netanyahu, especially when I insist that I am more Jewish than he is.

Did I convert to Judaism? No need to do that. I just became Jewish, I absorbed Jewishness as my ego and personality was being constructed. It was a matter of osmosis, as well as study, as is my Buddhism, Hinduism, and humble agnosticism, etc.

Some of my Jewishness I got from Catholicism which, like all of Christianity, is an offshoot of Judaism. So all Catholics are to some degree Jews even if they don’t know it.

And no Jew is just a Jew. The constructions that give persons their identity are always ecumenically “engineered,” and that is increasingly the case with proliferating communications and intensifying intercultural intercourse.

There are no biological Jews. Jewishness or Irishness do not show up in biopsies or in blood or genetic tests. Jews are not a race, nor are the Irish or the Russians or the Japanese or the Ugandans. Our race is human, with enriching incidental variations structured onto and absorbed into individuals and cultures.

Sameness?

What is my point? “Let’s all be nice since we are all the same?” No way. Not even identical twins are identical personalities.

Every individual is different from everyone else and getting more so all the time as new value experiences and encounters seep into our structured and evolving egos. And the same is true for cultures. You never step into the same culture twice, as has been said of a river.

So why am I picking on Jews? I’m not. I am a Jew, remember? But why am I announcing my Jewishness and not my Buddhism?  The problem is that there is a special problem pressing on us today because so many Jews and non-Jews think of Jews as biologically distinct and that is truly anti-Semitic.

Am I blurring Jews into everything else? Are there no distinctively Jewish cultural energies, emphases, skills, and valuations shared by many who call themselves Jews? Are there heroes and stories, faults and virtues that are formative among those who call themselves Jews?  Sure.

Does Tibetan Buddhism also have something of a distinctive personality? Sure. Do you expect and find things in Dublin that you do not find in Karachi and vice versa? Certainly there will be more sobriety in Karachi, but there is more difference than that.

Tribal Isolationism

The problem is that some whose primary socio-cultural tradition is Jewish, who practice distinctively Jewish rituals and observe traditional Jewish holy days, think they are biologically different and want to establish a biologically distinct Jewish state.

Problem: you can’t build a fact on a fiction.

Judaism is a religion, a historic moral and cultural tradition, with many varied forms, and few in the world are not the beneficiaries of its spiritual achievements. Some Jews are theistic: many are not. Some observe feasts and practices with rigor, others not so much.

The state of Israel is based on the myth that first century Jews were moved en masse into a world-wide diaspora, that they did not proselytize and rejected all converts to formal Judaism; they never intermarried with others all over the world, and today’s “Jews,” even the blue-eyed Jews from Russia and the dark-skinned Jews from Africa are all in biological continuity with the first century Jews expelled by the Romans. Come now!

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 took this fantasy for granted without any historical evidence that such a miracle of non-miscegenation did or could happen and with mountains of evidence to the contrary.

There are claims from Israeli and other historians that the Palestinians of today who converted to Islam or Christianity might actually have a better claim to being in some biological continuity with the first century Jews. Early on, the Zionist David Ben Gurion held that view.

The effort to build “a Jewish state” based on biological connectedness is an impossible dream. It is a return to the ancient tribal instinct.

Through most of our history, as anthropologist Ralph Linton notes, “at the primitive level, the individual’s tribe represents the limits of humanity” and non-tribesmen “are fair game to be exploited by any possible means or even as a legitimate source of meat.”

Extreme nationalism is the form that modern tribalism takes.

The great Rabbi Abraham Heschel feared that the effort to have a “Jewish state” could cause that state to be in “exile from Judaism” as state power needs superseded Judaism.

Prophetic Judaism

Prophetic Judaism pioneered the idea that only justice yields peace. Prophetic Judaism, with which I identify passionately, pulses with compassion for “the orphans, widows, and the exploited poor.”

I do not see the Likud tribalism which throws orphans and widows out of their homes and builds walls to keep them from their olive groves as being Jewish. Indeed these practices insult Judaism and make the current state of Israel unsafe. They also are a major stimulant of anti-Semitism.

Prophetic Judaism is my spiritual parent, as it was for Jesus. An Israel that will not settle for the 1967 borders in accord with international law is not being Jewish.

An Israel that ignores the repeated offer of full recognition by the Arab League, Iran, and even Hamas if they settle for the 1967 borders with minor adjustments and reparations for the displaced is relying on kill-power more than on justice, and that is not Jewish. Nor is it safe.

A truly Jewish Israel would be the safest place on earth, even for Catholic Jews like me. A tribal “Jewish” state that ignores Zechariah’s warning that you cannot build Zion on injustice and bloodshed will, as the prophets of Israel warned, fall into the pit it is currently and frantically digging.

Daniel C. Maguire is a Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University, a Catholic, Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He can be reached at daniel.maguire@marquette.edu.

July 16, 1945 marked the beginning of the Nuclear Age.  On that day, the United States conducted the first explosive test of an atomic device.  The test was code-named Trinity and took place at the Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto Desert.  The bomb itself was code-named “The Gadget.”

The Trinity test used a plutonium implosion device, the same type of weapon that would be used on the city of Nagasaki just three and a half weeks later.  It had the explosive force of 20 kilotons of TNT.

The names associated with the test deserve reflection.  “The Gadget,” something so simple and innocuous, was exploded in a desert whose name in Spanish means “Journey of Death.”  Plutonium, the explosive force in the bomb, was named for Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld.  The isotope of plutonium that was used in the bomb, plutonium-239, is one of the most deadly radioactive materials on the planet.  It existed only in minute quantities on Earth before the US began creating it for use in its bombs by the fissioning of uranium-238.

There is no definitive explanation for why the test was named Trinity, but it generally seems most associated with a religious concept of God.  The thoughts of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project to create the bomb and the person who named the test, provide insights into the name:

“Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: ‘As West and East / In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, / So death doth touch the Resurrection.’ That still does not make a Trinity, but in another, better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God.’”

Oppenheimer’s reaction to witnessing the explosion of the atomic device was to recall these lines from the Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns

Were to burst at once into the sky,

That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One…

I am become Death,

The shatterer of Worlds.

Did Oppenheimer think that he had become death that day, or that all of us had?  Certainly that first nuclear explosion portended the possibility that worlds would be shattered (by a “Mighty One”?), as they were soon to be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This year marks the 65th anniversary of the Trinity test.  We are now 65 years into the Nuclear Age.  At Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have seen the devastation that nuclear weapons can inflict on cities and their inhabitants.  We have witnessed a truly mad arms race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, in which the number of nuclear weapons in the world rose to 70,000.  We have learned that one nuclear weapon can destroy a city, a few nuclear weapons can destroy a country, and a nuclear war could destroy civilization and most of the complex life forms on the planet.

Nuclear weapons have endangered the human species, and yet today there are still more than 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  Nine countries now possess these weapons.  Humanity is still playing with the fire of omnicide – the death of all.  We are still waiting for the leaders who will take us beyond this overarching threat to our common future.  Instead of continuing to wait, we must ourselves become these leaders.

On this 65th anniversary of embarking on the Journey of Death, we must change course and move back from the nuclear precipice.  The weapons are illegal, immoral, undemocratic and militarily unnecessary.  The surest way to bring them under control is by negotiating a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

The United States led the world into the Nuclear Age.  President Obama has pointed out that the country also has a moral responsibility to lead the way out.  This can be done, but not with a citizenry that is ignorant, apathetic and in denial.  Sixty-five years on the Journey of Death is long enough.  It is past time for citizens to awaken and become engaged in this issue as if their future depended upon it, as it does.

The fervent prayer of the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is “Never Again!”  They speak out so that their past does not become our future.  It is a prayer that each of us must join in answering, both with our voices and actions to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.

By David Krieger

David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), an organization that has worked since 1982 to abolish nuclear weapons.  Dr. Krieger is the editor of The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons.

“In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history.” This sentiment, introducing the essay that made Francis Fukuyama a household name, commands renewed attention today, albeit from a different perspective.

Developments during the 1980s, above all the winding down of the Cold War, had convinced Fukuyama that the “end of history” was at hand. “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” he wrote in 1989, “is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

Today the West no longer looks quite so triumphant. Yet events during the first decade of the present century have delivered history to another endpoint of sorts. Although Western liberalism may retain considerable appeal, the Western way of war has run its course.

For Fukuyama, history implied ideological competition, a contest pitting democratic capitalism against fascism and communism. When he wrote his famous essay, that contest was reaching an apparently definitive conclusion.

Yet from start to finish, military might had determined that competition’s course as much as ideology. Throughout much of the twentieth century, great powers had vied with one another to create new, or more effective, instruments of coercion. Military innovation assumed many forms. Most obviously, there were the weapons: dreadnoughts and aircraft carriers, rockets and missiles, poison gas, and atomic bombs — the list is a long one. In their effort to gain an edge, however, nations devoted equal attention to other factors: doctrine and organization, training systems and mobilization schemes, intelligence collection and war plans.

All of this furious activity, whether undertaken by France or Great Britain, Russia or Germany, Japan or the United States, derived from a common belief in the plausibility of victory. Expressed in simplest terms, the Western military tradition could be reduced to this proposition: war remains a viable instrument of statecraft, the accoutrements of modernity serving, if anything, to enhance its utility.

Grand Illusions

That was theory. Reality, above all the two world wars of the last century, told a decidedly different story. Armed conflict in the industrial age reached new heights of lethality and destructiveness. Once begun, wars devoured everything, inflicting staggering material, psychological, and moral damage. Pain vastly exceeded gain. In that regard, the war of 1914-1918 became emblematic: even the winners ended up losers. When fighting eventually stopped, the victors were left not to celebrate but to mourn. As a consequence, well before Fukuyama penned his essay, faith in war’s problem-solving capacity had begun to erode. As early as 1945, among several great powers — thanks to war, now great in name only — that faith disappeared altogether.

Among nations classified as liberal democracies, only two resisted this trend. One was the United States, the sole major belligerent to emerge from the Second World War stronger, richer, and more confident. The second was Israel, created as a direct consequence of the horrors unleashed by that cataclysm. By the 1950s, both countries subscribed to this common conviction: national security (and, arguably, national survival) demanded unambiguous military superiority. In the lexicon of American and Israeli politics, “peace” was a codeword. The essential prerequisite for peace was for any and all adversaries, real or potential, to accept a condition of permanent inferiority. In this regard, the two nations — not yet intimate allies — stood apart from the rest of the Western world.

So even as they professed their devotion to peace, civilian and military elites in the United States and Israel prepared obsessively for war. They saw no contradiction between rhetoric and reality.

Yet belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. “Peace through strength” easily enough becomes “peace through war.” Israel succumbed to this temptation in 1967. For Israelis, the Six Day War proved a turning point. Plucky David defeated, and then became, Goliath. Even as the United States was flailing about in Vietnam, Israel had evidently succeeded in definitively mastering war.

A quarter-century later, U.S. forces seemingly caught up. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, showed that American troops like Israeli soldiers knew how to win quickly, cheaply, and humanely. Generals like H. Norman Schwarzkopf persuaded themselves that their brief desert campaign against Iraq had replicated — even eclipsed — the battlefield exploits of such famous Israeli warriors as Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin. Vietnam faded into irrelevance.

For both Israel and the United States, however, appearances proved deceptive. Apart from fostering grand illusions, the splendid wars of 1967 and 1991 decided little. In both cases, victory turned out to be more apparent than real. Worse, triumphalism fostered massive future miscalculation.

On the Golan Heights, in Gaza, and throughout the West Bank, proponents of a Greater Israel — disregarding Washington’s objections — set out to assert permanent control over territory that Israel had seized. Yet “facts on the ground” created by successive waves of Jewish settlers did little to enhance Israeli security. They succeeded chiefly in shackling Israel to a rapidly growing and resentful Palestinian population that it could neither pacify nor assimilate.

In the Persian Gulf, the benefits reaped by the United States after 1991 likewise turned out to be ephemeral. Saddam Hussein survived and became in the eyes of successive American administrations an imminent threat to regional stability. This perception prompted (or provided a pretext for) a radical reorientation of strategy in Washington. No longer content to prevent an unfriendly outside power from controlling the oil-rich Persian Gulf, Washington now sought to dominate the entire Greater Middle East. Hegemony became the aim. Yet the United States proved no more successful than Israel in imposing its writ.

During the 1990s, the Pentagon embarked willy-nilly upon what became its own variant of a settlement policy. Yet U.S. bases dotting the Islamic world and U.S. forces operating in the region proved hardly more welcome than the Israeli settlements dotting the occupied territories and the soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) assigned to protect them. In both cases, presence provoked (or provided a pretext for) resistance. Just as Palestinians vented their anger at the Zionists in their midst, radical Islamists targeted Americans whom they regarded as neo-colonial infidels.

Stuck

No one doubted that Israelis (regionally) and Americans (globally) enjoyed unquestioned military dominance. Throughout Israel’s near abroad, its tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships operated at will. So, too, did American tanks, fighter-bombers, and warships wherever they were sent.

So what? Events made it increasingly evident that military dominance did not translate into concrete political advantage. Rather than enhancing the prospects for peace, coercion produced ever more complications. No matter how badly battered and beaten, the “terrorists” (a catch-all term applied to anyone resisting Israeli or American authority) weren’t intimidated, remained unrepentant, and kept coming back for more.

Israel ran smack into this problem during Operation Peace for Galilee, its 1982 intervention in Lebanon. U.S. forces encountered it a decade later during Operation Restore Hope, the West’s gloriously titled foray into Somalia. Lebanon possessed a puny army; Somalia had none at all. Rather than producing peace or restoring hope, however, both operations ended in frustration, embarrassment, and failure.

And those operations proved but harbingers of worse to come. By the 1980s, the IDF’s glory days were past. Rather than lightning strikes deep into the enemy rear, the narrative of Israeli military history became a cheerless recital of dirty wars — unconventional conflicts against irregular forces yielding problematic results. The First Intifada (1987-1993), the Second Intifada (2000-2005), a second Lebanon War (2006), and Operation Cast Lead, the notorious 2008-2009 incursion into Gaza, all conformed to this pattern.

Meanwhile, the differential between Palestinian and Jewish Israeli birth rates emerged as a looming threat — a “demographic bomb,” Benjamin Netanyahu called it. Here were new facts on the ground that military forces, unless employed pursuant to a policy of ethnic cleansing, could do little to redress. Even as the IDF tried repeatedly and futilely to bludgeon Hamas and Hezbollah into submission, demographic trends continued to suggest that within a generation a majority of the population within Israel and the occupied territories would be Arab.

Trailing a decade or so behind Israel, the United States military nonetheless succeeded in duplicating the IDF’s experience. Moments of glory remained, but they would prove fleeting indeed. After 9/11, Washington’s efforts to transform (or “liberate”) the Greater Middle East kicked into high gear. In Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror began impressively enough, as U.S. forces operated with a speed and élan that had once been an Israeli trademark. Thanks to “shock and awe,” Kabul fell, followed less than a year and a half later by Baghdad. As one senior Army general explained to Congress in 2004, the Pentagon had war all figured out:

“We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing unprecedented near real time situational awareness, increased information availability, and an ability to deliver precision munitions throughout the breadth and depth of the battlespace… Combined, these capabilities of the future networked force will leverage information dominance, speed and precision, and result in decision superiority.”

The key phrase in this mass of techno-blather was the one that occurred twice: “decision superiority.” At that moment, the officer corps, like the Bush administration, was still convinced that it knew how to win.

Such claims of success, however, proved obscenely premature. Campaigns advertised as being wrapped up in weeks dragged on for years, while American troops struggled with their own intifadas. When it came to achieving decisions that actually stuck, the Pentagon (like the IDF) remained clueless.

Winless

If any overarching conclusion emerges from the Afghan and Iraq Wars (and from their Israeli equivalents), it’s this: victory is a chimera. Counting on today’s enemy to yield in the face of superior force makes about as much sense as buying lottery tickets to pay the mortgage: you better be really lucky.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy went into a tailspin, Americans contemplated their equivalent of Israel’s “demographic bomb” — a “fiscal bomb.” Ingrained habits of profligacy, both individual and collective, held out the prospect of long-term stagnation: no growth, no jobs, no fun. Out-of-control spending on endless wars exacerbated that threat.

By 2007, the American officer corps itself gave up on victory, although without giving up on war. First in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, priorities shifted. High-ranking generals shelved their expectations of winning — at least as a Rabin or Schwarzkopf would have understood that term. They sought instead to not lose. In Washington as in U.S. military command posts, the avoidance of outright defeat emerged as the new gold standard of success.

As a consequence, U.S. troops today sally forth from their base camps not to defeat the enemy, but to “protect the people,” consistent with the latest doctrinal fashion. Meanwhile, tea-sipping U.S. commanders cut deals with warlords and tribal chieftains in hopes of persuading guerrillas to lay down their arms.

A new conventional wisdom has taken hold, endorsed by everyone from new Afghan War commander General David Petraeus, the most celebrated soldier of this American age, to Barack Obama, commander-in-chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. For the conflicts in which the United States finds itself enmeshed, “military solutions” do not exist. As Petraeus himself has emphasized, “we can’t kill our way out of” the fix we’re in. In this way, he also pronounced a eulogy on the Western conception of warfare of the last two centuries.

The Unasked Question

What then are the implications of arriving at the end of Western military history?

In his famous essay, Fukuyama cautioned against thinking that the end of ideological history heralded the arrival of global peace and harmony. Peoples and nations, he predicted, would still find plenty to squabble about.

With the end of military history, a similar expectation applies. Politically motivated violence will persist and may in specific instances even retain marginal utility. Yet the prospect of Big Wars solving Big Problems is probably gone for good. Certainly, no one in their right mind, Israeli or American, can believe that a continued resort to force will remedy whatever it is that fuels anti-Israeli or anti-American antagonism throughout much of the Islamic world. To expect persistence to produce something different or better is moonshine.

It remains to be seen whether Israel and the United States can come to terms with the end of military history. Other nations have long since done so, accommodating themselves to the changing rhythms of international politics. That they do so is evidence not of virtue, but of shrewdness. China, for example, shows little eagerness to disarm. Yet as Beijing expands its reach and influence, it emphasizes trade, investment, and development assistance. Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army stays home. China has stolen a page from an old American playbook, having become today the preeminent practitioner of “dollar diplomacy.”

The collapse of the Western military tradition confronts Israel with limited choices, none of them attractive. Given the history of Judaism and the history of Israel itself, a reluctance of Israeli Jews to entrust their safety and security to the good will of their neighbors or the warm regards of the international community is understandable. In a mere six decades, the Zionist project has produced a vibrant, flourishing state. Why put all that at risk? Although the demographic bomb may be ticking, no one really knows how much time remains on the clock. If Israelis are inclined to continue putting their trust in (American-supplied) Israeli arms while hoping for the best, who can blame them?

In theory, the United States, sharing none of Israel’s demographic or geographic constraints and, far more richly endowed, should enjoy far greater freedom of action. Unfortunately, Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued.

And always there is a chattering claque of militarists, calling for jihad and insisting on ever greater exertions, while remaining alert to any hint of backsliding. In Washington, members of this militarist camp, by no means coincidentally including many of the voices that most insistently defend Israeli bellicosity, tacitly collaborate in excluding or marginalizing views that they deem heretical. As a consequence, what passes for debate on matters relating to national security is a sham. Thus are we invited to believe, for example, that General Petraeus’s appointment as the umpteenth U.S. commander in Afghanistan constitutes a milestone on the way to ultimate success.

Nearly 20 years ago, a querulous Madeleine Albright demanded to know: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Today, an altogether different question deserves our attention: What’s the point of constantly using our superb military if doing so doesn’t actually work?

Washington’s refusal to pose that question provides a measure of the corruption and dishonesty permeating our politics.

By Andrew J. Bacevich

29 July, 2010

TomDispatch.com

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, has just been published. Listen to the latest TomCast audio interview to hear him discuss the book by clicking here or, to download to an iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Andrew Bacevich

The most powerful nations in the world met recently at the G-20 in Toronto and managed to agree on only one thing of significance: the need to reduce deficits, “half by 2013.” Implied by the statement is the need to lower deficits via “austerity,” meaning eliminating or reducing social programs.

Why does every mainstream political pundit or corporate CEO fanatically agree that reducing deficits is the most important thing to do now? Let Obama explain

“… if financial markets are skittish and don’t have confidence in a country’s fiscal soundness, that is also going to undermine our recovery.”

Apparently, the most important policy for the world economy cannot be said in plain English. What does Obama mean? Essentially, he is saying that “financial markets” should determine how wealth is distributed and how the economy is directed.

What are financial markets? And why must every country be at their mercy?

A financial market is anyplace the super-rich invest their money. It can be done through a bank, hedge fund, or a private equity firm, etc. The rich demand that their investments are safe and therefore are especially “skittish” at the slightest hint of inflation or other economic distress.

The rich who dominate financial markets advocate only one solution to balancing budgets: reducing or eliminating social programs. They ignore the other solution— a massive public works project— because it directly affects them in a negative way: raising taxes on the wealthy.

This raises another issue. The investors who control financial markets know that a day of reckoning is coming: the massive debt that was pushing forward the world economy for years needs to be paid back, and those who own the banks don’t want the responsibility. Better for millions of workers to sacrifice social services, pensions, wages, etc., than for thousands of rich investors to be taxed.

Some people will argue that it is counterproductive to tax the rich, since they will then choose not to invest their money, causing further harm to the economy. But this is already happening and happens every time a recession hits.

The New York Times describes one example of the rich hoarding their money, until better, profitable times return:

“Only on Wall Street, in the rarefied realm of buyout moguls, could you actually have too much money…. Private equity firms, where corporate takeovers are planned and plotted, today sit atop [are hoarding] an estimated $500 billion. But the deal makers are desperate to find deals worth doing…” (June 24, 2010).

Rich investors are not investing in companies because consumers are not buying the products that corporations produce. And where mainstream economists blame “consumer confidence” for this problem, the real issue remains “consumer impoverishment.”

It is the rich investor that lacks the “confidence” that the unemployed or low-waged worker can buy enough of the products produced by corporations. This is the problem that will continue to haunt the establishment economists, who will incessantly preach that the economy is on a perpetual verge of recovery.

This illusion of recovery is being instituted into government policy. The Obama administration has argued that federal stimulus money is only needed in small doses to put the economy back on track. With politicians agreeing that the recession is “basically over,” less stimulus money is being offered.

Indeed, Congress has had a terrible time passing the tiniest stimulus bill, which would extend unemployment benefits and help states with Medicaid costs. If such a bill is eventually passed, it will be a mere fraction of what is needed.

Because Obama insists that “reducing deficits” is the new governmental priority, the stimulus faucet will quickly dry up (since government stimulus is financed through deficit spending).

But for millions of U.S. workers, the debate over stimulus spending is not theoretical, but a matter of life and death. If no federal stimulus is passed— and the current one has virtually died in Congress— millions of unemployed people will have zero income. Meanwhile, the states budget crises will worsen, shutting off state-run health care, social services and education, while slashing public sector jobs by the thousands.

Both Democrats and Republicans agree that “financial markets” should dictate the economic policy of the U.S. The two parties disagree only to what degree and how quickly to implement the same policy.

The American labor movement must find an independent voice to demand that a stimulus bill be passed. Labor — especially public sector workers — must ally themselves with the unemployed, students and teachers, and other victims of the states’ budget crises who will suffer real tragedies unless a federal stimulus bill is passed.

By Shamus Cooke

30 June, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

US drops cluster bombs in Yemen, kills 35 Yemeni women and children! Many Americans upset? Would psychologists and mental health experts deny that millions of kind and compassionate Germans experienced a type of Post Traumatic Stress as their German armies invaded dozens of nations.Treating sensitivity to the pain of others as a serious malady would make society aware of the cure: halting the use of explosives on human beings

“The human rights agency Amnesty International has confirmed that 35 women and children were killed following the latest US attacks on an alleged al-Qaeda hideout in Yemen. Cluster bombs. are in the news again, thanks to a recent report from Amnesty International.” July, 8, 2010, CounterCurrents, Cluster Bombs And Civilian Lives: Efficient Killing, Profits And Human Rights by Ramzy Baroud

http://www.countercurrents.org/baroud080710.htm

It really hurts that we are killing so many of our Muslim brothers and sisters and their kids right right in their homes, in their streets, in their own countries. Been reading about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, wondering why they don’t apply it to people like me. I’m mentally and emotionally upset about us killing a vast amount of people in their own residences in cities towns and countryside across six Muslim countries (as I put down these words, I notice I’m breathing short, feel a light press of anxiety on the left side of my chest).

More than fifty years of reading of, and listening to news of body counts and bombings (I’m seventy-nine). Fifty years of trying to protect my mind and the bottom of my stomach.

Wonder how many people in the world understand what have had on my mind and in my stomach off and on for years – I mean outside of people in the couple dozen countries actually bombed by us?

How other AMERICANS feel as bad as I do about it? All this bombing, invading, occupying? It’s always done in our name, you know. Am I oversensitive?

Have always tended to take responsibilities seriously. As a schoolboy, when I saw newspaper headlines on starvation death in China, it would bring to mind the nun who prepared me, as a seven year old, for my First Holy Communion. Her instruction really stuck in my serious child’s mind, especially the story of Cain fluffing off God with, “Hey, am I my brother’s keeper?”

I never really recovered from the post traumatic stress of fifteen years of us slaughtering millions of poor Vietnamese in Vietnam and bomb the living hell out of Laos and Cambodia.

A long time before this present decade of anguish over our killing Muslims in a half dozen countries, (but not in Saudi Arabia where the 9/11 highjackers came from) my peace of mind had been radically disturbed for having learned the reason for all this mass butchery going on for a half-century, starting with our taking the lives of a couple of million Koreans in Korea.

Each upset had led me to do a little research. Confusing reports of why Eisenhower was bombing Laos started me off. Slowly it became a habit to research every news bite explaining why we had to go somewhere on the other side of the world and kill to stamp out communism in little countries, but not the two big ones already governed by communist parties.

It didn’t make me feel any better in my heart to learn that our unimaginably horrible taking of innocent peoples’ lives in smaller countries overseas was in every case brought about by lies that made it acceptable to the American people. Hard working decent people, busy with their personal life, careers, and families, who simply trusted what each president told them since it was backed up and well explained as being right and necessary on their television, which they trusted even more.

But that knowledge did give me strength, made me angry, and motivated to tell my family and friends how this enormous death toll was made possible by naively believing astonishing or bewildering news we should have suspected all along. Blatant lies, so easily disproved using the governments own publications, readily available encyclopedia articles, and just plain common sense.

So for a few years, thinking that if a stupid guy like me could uncover all these pretty obvious lies, I could help spread an opposition to these wars by passing the simple truth around to people more intelligent than me and capable of doing something about this vicious mass murder.

What astounded me was the reaction from colleagues and friends. “Not interested in politics.” “What are you talking about.” “Have my own problems.” Only a few willing to at least listen, maybe a couple answering, “Well, maybe we make mistakes sometimes but we’re trying to do the right thing over there.”

My brother stopped corresponding for three years, angry that I was “duped by communist propaganda” about the Vietnam war. (After the war, he apologized, that I was right, but I’m afraid still goes on believing most of what is said on the networks’ evening news.) Last year my loving sister asked me to take her off my mailing list – I was outraging her and her Texas fundamentalist husband.

Apart from two very politically aware sons, and a politically concerned nephew, it was my only to 9th grade educated immigrant mom who understood, was upset, and would complain on her own about “the terrible things the government was doing.” Seems the more government sponsored education we get, the more we are purposely misinformed and made to accept our government’s homicidal violence. (A perception, by the way, that logically leads to the awareness that our government is not of, for or by the people.)

People at work (in the orchestra) did not “want to hear about “US foreign policy.” If pressed regarding our responsibility as citizens, many would answer, “Look! I vote in elections.” My unrecognized “PTSD’ over a war on the other side of the world was widely regarded as a sign of mental unbalance, a personality problem.

The next most important sensitizing influence after that nun was a junior high afro-American civics teacher, ” If you have free speech and you don’t speak up, you are guilty of complicity in the crimes of your government, and ignorance is no excuse in a court of law.” So off and on I took graduate level history courses at four universities and an institute in Germany.

Music was miraculous, and performing a wonderfully way to make a living, but awaiting the downbeat at the Mostly Mozart Summer Festival, looking out at an audience of professionals, I would be thinking that right about this time, 8 PM, 8 AM morning in Asia, the planes were taking off in Guam for high-altitude bombing over Vietnam while we listened to Mozart. Just the way the Nazis had listened to Wagner. Burning feeling beneath my feet to stand up and say, “Hey could we take a break, the planes are taking off to bomb right now and Mozart didn’t have that in mind as he composed this music.’

But I didn’t stand up, and when Martin Luther King said “Silence is treason,” it was me he was talking about.

I’m sure Mozart would have approved of the “lets stop and consider what we are doing’ tone of the articles jay janson, historian, has been composing. I figure its my therapy for my present Muslim killing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. PTSD initially was called “Shell Shock’. It got broadened to apply to people listening to the awful explosions from afar. Perhaps the medical profession itself will come to diagnose people like me, wincing for imagining the agony in death throes of fellow human beings, (reported in daily AP Press reports from the Middle East as success), as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress.

Would psychologists and mental health experts deny that millions of kind and compassionate Germans experienced a type of PTS as their German armies invaded dozens of nations. Or was it only the many millions of Russians having their families and homes blown to bits, who experienced PTS?

Treating sensitivity to the pain of others as a serious malady would lead to considering how to prescribe cures. Require society to halt the dropping of explosives on people or perform some sort of lobotomy on those suffering PTSD, that would permit the patients to adjust to exploding human beings.

Since society in the self-proclaimed “greatest country in the world’ has not yet evolved to being able to control its criminally insane, and since lobotomies (except those done painlessly over many years by commercial mass media) are a drastic procedure no longer much in use, therapy must be the answer

In some cases just talking our what’s bothering you can work as therapy. It didn’t work for me in America, because it was too difficult to find anyone who would listen. So I began to write.

My first therapy was to become enlightened as to why the killing that was causing my distress was happening. Advanced therapy has become doing everything possible to stop the killing that is bothering you.

Therapy can wind up turning PTS into something useful. The PTS disorder becomes only a relatively easy to deal with symptom of the serious mental illness War-For-Profit Criminal Insanity. (Probably cause by a prolonged exaggerated life-style of institutionalized greed.)

Therapeutic activism goes beyond being an exercise for the protection of one’s own sanity. It bolsters one’s personal integrity, citizen responsibility and accentuates love of life.

Consider the “Shell Shock’ or PTS people in America feel when looking at the eye repelling photos of the Holocaust. The obvious reaction is to just punish Germans. But the logical therapy would be to go after the owners of the majority of U.S. banks and industries which backed and invested in turning an initially prostrate Nazi Germany into the world’s foremost military power, fully aware of Hitler’s hatred of Jews and communists and plans for expansion eastward with his armies. All this investment was done right out in the open and is fully recorded for anyone suffering PTS from remembering the Holocaust to read and identify: Rockefeller, Henry Ford, DuPont etc. etc.

Had such a course in therapy been completed, and the profiting banking industrialists who backed Hitler punished, this same group of scions of banking might have been able to pull off a second Holocaust in Vietnam.

Holocaust PTS therapy for me is to tell all the young folks of the virulent anti-Semitism in the United States before W.W.II, when I was a child. One didn’t have be actually Jewish oneself to have been acutely aware of it all around you. Therapy is knowing that Henry Ford’s published writings were required reading for the Hitler Youth organization.

The therapy would have been and still is the same for the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the bombing of Lebanon, and Dominican Republic, Panama and Cuba invasion PTS. Identify the bankers and powerful business leaders who required these wars for their balance sheets of profit and accumulation of capital and resources of the invaded countries to control and if they are to powerful to imprison, try to prevent them, and the media they own, from promoting future wars.

If you don’t have PTSD, and enjoy your mornings with no disturbing thoughts of some lovable Asian child who had all its mornings suddenly obliterated along with his or her life on earth, by some American operating a weapon of mass destruction thinking he was doing duty in your name, it’s odd that you continued to read this article.

Maybe even “well adjusted’ citizens of the empire have some PTS lurking in the corners of their minds. Maybe many will someday have an outbreak of PTS if they happen to do some reading and overcome the severe American disability to put oneself in the shoes of our designated enemies (but not the shoes of his children too small to fit in). Should they happen to think of some lovable Asian kid, one of millions, who never got to see a single morning as a grown up, the apple of some mom and dad’s eye, a promise to nation and community, and imagine his or her pathetic cadaver or body parts buried lovingly by parents (if they themselves be not exterminated as well by fellow Americans using weapons of mass destruction.

If the reader has read this far it is more probable he or she is suffering from the continual Post Traumatic Stress of being a citizen of the blood soaked American empire, or at least uneasy that there is no real secure immunity from a future attack of PTSD – not as long as the sun never sets on the nation’s network of military bases.

By Jay Janson

11 July, 2010

OpEdNews

Washington – A food co-op in the hometown of Rachel Corrie, the American activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 and namesake of a Gaza aid ship earlier this year, has launched a divestment campaign against Israeli products, Haaretz reported Tuesday.

The Olympia, Washington Food Co-op board of directors met last week to make the final decision to endorse the boycott. “A couple of board members were concerned about what will be the financial effect on the organization, but it’s minimal,” board member Rob Richards told Haaretz. “For me personally there is a moral imperative that goes beyond any financial concern. So we decided to adopt the boycott which went into effect the next day.”

The boycott in Olympia, which is right now only enforced in two grocery stores, will likely have little direct effect on the divestment effort. But the board decision is symbolic, both as part of growing move in America and also because of what Olympia is: Rachel Corrie’s hometown. Last month, the student body at Evergreen State College in Olypmia, where Corrie studied, passed two declarations calling for the school “to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine” and to ban Caterpillar equipment from campus. It was a Caterpillar bulldozer that killed Corrie as she tried to prevent it from demolishing a home in the Gaza Strip.

“The fact that it is the home town of Rachel Corrie’s parents and that it is represented by Rep Brian Baird (who has been to Gaza and is outspoken against Israel) makes this ripe for issues,” said Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi of The Israel Project, a pro-Israel organization, in the Haaretz report. “So does the fact that it does not have a very organized pro-Israel community. This went under the radar screen at a time when most groups were focused on Iran sanctions and other macro issues.”

Richards defended the plurality behind the co-op decision. “There was very little feedback from the staff that was against the boycott, but it seemed as minority opinion,” said Richards. “We have two members on the board from the Jewish community who were supportive of the boycott – it’s pretty progressive town. I know that’s not universal at the Jewish community.”

The boycott will refuse any products coming from Israel, both those from within and beyond the Green Line. But exceptions will be made for any products that “improve the conditions of the Palestinians.”

While the divestment movement is much stronger and more popular in Europe, it is beginning to gain steam in the US. Monday, Jewish Voice for Peace activists went to the New York headquarters of investment firm TIAA-CREF to deliver thousands of signatures demanding the firm divest from companies that “profit from the violation of international law through home demolitions, the destruction of life sustaining orchards, the construction of roads and transit that only Israelis can use, the killing of civilians by drones, and many other injustices.” Companies on the activists’ list include Caterpillar, Elbit, and Motorola.

Much of the pressure for divestment has triumphed on college campuses. There has also been a counterforce called “Invest for Peace” that promotes not divestment but instead microfinance projects in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Both movements are growing in numbers.

By Palestine Note

21 July 2010

Palestinenote.com

David Swanson is the author of “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union”

http://davidswanson.org

http://warisacrime.org

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http://youtube.com/afterdowningstreet

The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.

This is the third part of a four-part interview. This part is a continuation of Alex’s response to the second question.

Part 2B. Social Limits and the Crisis

MC: Capitalism has faced many moments of crisis over time. Is there something different about the present crisis? What makes the end of capitalism a possibility now?

AK: As I described in the last section, the current crisis can be understood as resulting from a massive collision between capitalism’s relentless need for growth and the world’s limits in capacity to sustain that growth. These limits to growth are both ecological and social. In this section I’ll discuss the concept of social limits to growth.

The Extraordinary Power of Social Movements

Social limits to growth function alongside the ecological limits but are drawn from a different source. By social limits we mean the inability, or unwillingness, of human communities, and humankind as a whole, to support the expansion of capitalism. This broadly includes all forms of resistance to capitalism, a resistance that has arguably been increasing around the world through innumerable forms of alternative lifestyles, refusal to cooperate, protest, and outright rebellion.

As a disclaimer it’s important to recognize that not all resistance is progressive. There are right-wing, fundamentalist, and undemocratic forces that also resist capitalism, for example the Taliban, or North Korea. These are not our allies. They do not share progressive values, we cannot condone their attacks on women, or on freedom more generally, and I don’t see anything to be gained by working with them. However it is important to recognize how these forces are aligned against capitalism, in addition to being aware of the danger they present to our own hopes and dreams.

Progressive resistance, on the other hand, has always taken its strength from grassroots social movements. Silvia Federici writes about the immense and varied peasant movements in medieval Europe that fought for religious and sexual freedom, challenging both feudal lords and emerging capitalist elites. I like to think of these rebels as my European ancestors – they were just commoners but they rose up to fight for a better world. This is the nature of social movements. Ordinary folks, daring to pursue their deepest aspirations, interests and dreams, join together with others who share those desires, and thereby create something extraordinary. The magic exists in the joining-together. Isolated individuals lack the power to accomplish what a group can achieve.

We can appreciate this extraordinary power if we look at how social movements have transformed our lives. A century ago, millions of American workers joined the labor movement and won the 8-hour day, Social Security, and workplace safety. Regular folks carried forward the Civil Rights Movement and broke Southern segregation. The feminist and LGBT movements have transformed the way gender and sexuality are viewed all over the world. It’s hard to overstate how dramatically these and other social movements have improved society. While capitalism has invented ways to co-opt social movements and redirect them into outlets that do not challenge the system on a deep level (like the “non-profit industrial complex”), movements have remained alive and vibrant by empowering people to reach towards a different world.

Have social movements limited capitalist oppression recently? To answer this we need to learn the story of the Global Justice Movement.

Demonstrators tear down a section of security fence in the Mexican resort city of Cancun to confront the World Trade Organization’s Fifth Ministerial summit on Sept. 10, 2003.

The Global Justice Movement

David Graeber, anarchist anthropologist, wrote a remarkable essay called “The Shock of Victory” in which he looks at this movement that suddenly flared up at the turn of the millennium and seemed to disappear just as quickly. Although most Americans may not remember the Global Justice Movement, and those who participated in it may feel demoralized by the fact that capitalism still exists, Graeber points out that many of the movement’s ambitious goals were accomplished.

A decade ago, capitalism was pursuing a strategy to transform the entire world into a single marketplace. It claimed this “globalization” would benefit everyone because everyone would get to share in the spoils of growth. What it really wanted was to extract maximum profit from the cheap labor of the “Global South,” by moving industry and jobs out of high-wage areas like the US, while imposing privatization and debt on the poor countries of the world. This strategy was called “neoliberalism,” because it aimed to eliminate all barriers to trade, such as worker protections or environmental regulations. Multinational corporations would have a bonanza. Like previous rounds of enclosure, the damage these policies would have on poor communities and on the planet was disregarded.

Starting from directly affected communities in places like Mexico, Brazil, India, South Korea and Africa, an enormous network of farmers, workers and educators connected with progressives and anti-capitalists in North America and Europe. They didn’t have a single leader or organization, but they came together as a Global Justice Movement to coordinate efforts and stop the spread of neoliberalism. The movement became visible to the world when it manifested at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle, where steelworkers, indigenous people, environmentalists, and students literally shut down the trade negotiations with creative civil disobedience.

Along with the WTO, the other main institutions responsible for pushing global neoliberalism were the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The GJM moved to confront all three. “Free trade” agreements such as the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) were also challenged. Through creative protest and non-violent direct action, the movement called into question the dominant story around “free trade” and pointed towards a new world of global cooperation. And to their own surprise, they were incredibly successful.

According to David Graeber, Global South governments (like India and Brazil) were emboldened by the worldwide protest and refused to compromise on the North’s (European and American) unfair agricultural subsidies. As a result the WTO’s negotiations have totally broken down. The FTAA never came into existence at all. It was stopped in its tracks. The IMF and World Bank saw their reputations tarnished after their policies led to the meltdown of the Argentinean economy in 2002, and they are no longer welcome in some parts of the world. This is especially true in Latin America, where the political landscape has completely turned around in the last 10-15 years.

In the 1990s, most of the continent was still under the heel of military dictatorships and authoritarian states, but since then a wave of leftist governments has been swept into power by unprecedented social movements opposed to neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism. For example, in 2005 Bolivia elected their first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, who came directly out of the social movement that successfully stopped water privatization in Bolivia. Morales has become a spokesperson for many:

“If you want to save planet Earth, to save life and humanity, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system. If we do not put an end to the capitalist system, it’s impossible to imagine that there will be equality and justice on this planet Earth. This is why I believe that it is important to put an end to the exploitation of human beings, and to put an end to the pillage of natural resources; to put an end to destructive wars for raw materials and the market; to the plundering of energy, especially fossil fuels; excessive consumption of goods and the accumulation of waste.”

We can’t ignore the many difficulties facing Latin America or the Global South as a whole. The situation is still extremely dire, with over a billion people living on the brink of starvation and without access to clean water, and with the U.S. expanding military bases in places like Colombia. And of course leftist governments have their own problems and need to be held accountable just as rightist ones. Regardless, the Global Justice Movement demonstrated that by joining together across borders, opposing injustice and working towards a new world, victories can be achieved. Even victories as dramatic as discrediting the major institutions promoting neoliberal capitalism and the political transformation of an entire continent.

The GJM vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, but as David Graeber points out, this was partially because it met many of its goals so rapidly. With the widespread repudiation of the neoliberal doctrine, the Global Justice Movement provides an inspiring lesson that social movements can and do place limits on capitalism.

Social Limits and the Crisis

Social movements in many countries have been amplified by the economic crisis. Greece has seen massive rebellions in the past 2 years to stop the government from imposing austerity measures like cutting social services. In Iceland, a country not known for its political radicalism, huge protests in response to the country’s bankruptcy brought the government down and led to the election of the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister. In Nigeria there is an armed rebellion aimed at stopping oil companies from destroying the ecosystem and exporting their profits from the region. Off the coast of Somalia, pirates have plagued international shipping, and grabbed headlines last November when they hijacked an oil tanker headed for the US.

It’s clear that anger is building towards a capitalist system that is failing to meet people’s needs. But let’s dig deeper and ask: What role did social limits play in causing the economic crisis?

Perhaps the most instructive case is that of China and its rising labor movement. Supposedly a “communist” country, China has become a capitalist haven producing an absurd quantity of goods for the global market due to its very low (sweatshop) wages. The profit extracted from Chinese workers has done wonders to sustain capitalism over the last two decades. For this reason, the organization and rebellion of Chinese workers threatens not just the Chinese government, but the global capitalist system as a whole.

This explanation may require a bit of historical context. During the 1960s-early ‘70s, the capitalist order was challenged by a high tide of protest and rebellion – from Africa shaking off its colonial masters, to the end of Southern segregation in the US, to the struggle against the US genocide in Vietnam, to the new upsurges of the feminist, queer and ecology movements. This movement activity was pronounced a problem of an “excess of democracy” by the Trilateral Commission, a ruling class institution composed of bankers and corporate elites from the US, Europe and Japan. One of the strategies used to escape this crisis (along with increased repression and co-optation of social movements), was to relocate industrial production out of places like the US, where wages were seen as too high, to places like China, where wages were minimal.

Obviously this cheap labor generated more profit in production. But it also created a problem in terms of consumption, because US wages began to decline as all those unionized industrial jobs left the country. As explained by Professor Richard Wolff in his video “Capitalism Hits the Fan,” in order to make up for this income difference and keep consumption growing, starting in the 1970s US workers were given access to an immense pool of credit, in the form of credit cards, home mortgages and financial schemes like 401(k)s. Cheap available credit allowed the US to consume more and more junk, even as wages declined. It kept its position as the world’s strip mall.

Meanwhile, China became the world’s factory, pumping out cheap products for the global market, especially for the United States. As Americans flocked to Wal-Marts for their low prices, the Chinese government was flooded with trillions of US dollars. So far, they have dutifully recycled those dollars back into US Treasury bonds, thus keeping the American economy afloat. If they didn’t invest in the US, their main trading partner would be crippled by its trade debt, which grows daily.

The US-China relationship became core to the global economy. Each behemoth kept the other afloat – one producing like crazy by exploiting its workers near exhaustion, the other consuming like crazy by sailing on a sea of cheap credit. The damage to the planet’s ecosystem was atrocious, but immense profits were made and by the 1990s the market was soaring and “the end of history” was proclaimed. It seemed all opposition to capitalism had been vanquished.

There are numerous weak points in this international division of labor. One that has not been fully appreciated is the severe turmoil in China due to the growing strength of a new militant labor movement. This movement aims to put an end to sweatshop conditions where many toil for 12+ hours a day in dangerous, polluted factories. Organizing outside the Communist Party’s official unions, Chinese workers have initiated a series of crippling strikes that repeatedly shut down factories, among other forms of rebellion. The government has been forced to accept workers’ demands for wage increases, so the Chinese average real wage has risen by 300% between 1990 and 2005 [PDF], with half of that increase between 2000 and 2005.

Workers in green uniforms stage a sit-in protest at the main entrance of the Mitsumi Electric Co factory in Tianjin on Thursday, July 1, 2010. China Daily

Although the Chinese economy continues to grow, increased wages mean a falling rate of profit for companies operating in China, whether American, Japanese, European or otherwise. Wage increases also mean increased consumption within China, and therefore less cheap exports. When Chinese workers can afford the cars and electronics they’re producing, Americans can’t demand the same low prices.

Can we draw a direct connection between Chinese wage gains and the drying up of cheap credit in the US market of 2007-8? I humbly submit this question to the reader, as I haven’t done enough research on the relationship between the two trends. But I’ll say this about the big picture: If Chinese workers continue to break free from totalitarian control and win dignity in their jobs, the loss of China as the sweatshop of the world imperils trade arrangements that have carried global capitalist growth for decades.

If we study any country in the world, we’ll find people resisting capitalism any way they can. In the fields & factories, slums & schools, homes and prisons, the desire to be free cannot be extinguished, only held back and diverted. As humanity gains awareness of its own power and begins to act for its own interest rather than the interest of profit, the system’s tenuous grip on the world can easily falter, and a new world appears just over the horizon.

With the ecological limits encroaching on one side, and the social limits looming on the other, economic growth is under increasing strain in between. It’s as if the system cannot breathe. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, it’s too busy putting out the fires of multiplying crises, which continue to spawn and grow. The policy makers, market gurus and technocratic apologists scramble to regain control, but they are disoriented in a new arena. Circumstances have changed. They cannot come to agreement on what to do, and instead quarrel amongst themselves over diverging interests. As social and ecological forces combine and put new stresses on the system, capitalism is smothered and chokes.

Considering the ecological limits and social limits to growth side-by-side, the only conclusion I can make is that the end of capitalism is not only a possibility, but an inevitability. Neither the planet nor the world’s population appear able to support this system much longer, and something’s got to give. It may be years or even a couple decades before we can look back and say for sure that a paradigm shift has occurred and that we are living in a different, non-capitalist era. But the End of Capitalism Theory dares us to question how long a system that lives on economic growth can continue to function in a world of such profound and permanent limits.

Alex Knight is a proponent of the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. He is working on a book titled “The End of Capitalism” and seeks a publisher. Since 2007 he has edited the website endofcapitalism.com. He has a degree in electrical engineering and a Master’s in political science, both from Lehigh University. He lives in Philadelphia, where he is a teacher and organizer. He can be reached at alex@endofcapitalism.com

Michael Carriere is an assistant professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where he teaches courses on American history, public policy, political science, and urban design. He is currently working on a book, with David Schalliol, titled “The Death and (After) Life of Great American Cities: Twenty-First Century Urbanism and the Culture of Crisis.” He holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Chicago.