THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL of the Labor Uprising that started in Wisconsin and is spreading across the nation is already terrifying the Ruling Class.
Definitive proof of the extent to which the capitalist aristocracy is genuinely frightened comes from two seemingly unrelated developments.
One of these is the government's decision to charge Private First Class Bradley Manning with a death-penalty crime – the intent obviously to make him an example a la Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The other development is Time magazine's publication of an anti-Marxist warning that eerily recalls the Rosenberg era.
Wikileaks suspect Manning is facing 22 additional charges that include the capital offense of aid to the enemy. Because the new accusations have received almost no coverage in Ruling Class Media apart from MSNBC, they are detailed here:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/02-7
I am hardly surprised by the newest action against PFC Manning. The unusual (and perhaps unprecedented) long-term confinement of an Army soldier in the maximum-savagery environment of a Marine Corps brig is a telling index to the magnitude of both the Ruling Class alarm and the resultant government vindictiveness.
But the appearance of the Time opinion piece is genuinely surprising. For nearly as long as I've been alive, the Ruling Class has conditioned us to believe Marxism is thoroughly discredited by its own failures – that its exposure of the historical truth of class struggle is therefore irrelevant if not delusional.
The Time article discards both these plutocrat-protecting falsehoods. Indeed it is the first printed evidence of specifically anti-Marxist panic – whether civilian or military – I've seen since the 1950s.
It is entitled “Your Incredible Shrinking Paycheck.” Written by Rana Foroohar and published via the Internet on 28 February, it presumably also appears in a print edition of the same approximate date. In any case it's core argument is that capitalism should beware a new Marxist revolution.
To stave off such an event, says Foroohar, the capitalists should evolve a new humanitarian facade – an updated version of the New Deal – behind which to hide capitalism's tyrannosauric malevolence. Such camouflage, the essay concludes, is “a lot better than the Marxist alternative.”
Never mind that – exactly as Gov. Scott Walker is proving in Wisconsin – today's capitalists are far too maliciously greedy to allow even the most minimal concessions.
Though no Time staffer would ever be permitted to describe capitalism as forthrightly as I just did – Foroohar describes the facade urged on the capitalists as “social mobility” rather than a Big Lie – “Paycheck” nevertheless makes the astonishing admission that public interest in Marxism is growing fast:
“Before I started writing this column on why paychecks are likely to keep shrinking even if unemployment starts to inch down,” Foroohar tells us, “I consulted Google to see if the term Marxism was trending upward. It was and has been ever since the end of December, the conclusion of a year in which workers' share of the U.S. economic pie shrank to the smallest piece ever: 54.4% of GDP, down from about 60% in the 1970s.”
“No wonder Marx is back in fashion. It's been more than 100 years since the German philosopher predicted that capitalism's voraciousness would be its undoing — as bosses invest more in new technologies to make things more cheaply and efficiently and less in workers themselves, who, deprived of fair wages, would eventually rise up and revolt...”
“Yet even if unemployment starts to ease, it's unclear whether labor's portion of the pie will stop shrinking. The global headwinds may be too strong. Just as Marx predicted, technology-driven productivity is increasing not just in manufacturing but also in services...
“The other megatrend of our age, the rise of emerging markets, will also continue to put pressure on U.S. wages...
“A recent study by Capital Economics found that from 2002 to 2008, employment abroad by U.S. multinationals (grew by) 22.6%, while employment at home increased by a mere 4.9%. What's good for U.S. companies and what's good for U.S. labor and wages are no longer always the same thing. The discrepancy may become an increasingly contentious political issue.”
The full text of “Paycheck” is here.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2050019,00.html
Prompted by Foroohar's curious omission of the Google statistics so cited, I did some checking on my own and learned that Google searches targeting Marxism have gone up by 420 percent since 2007, from approximately 18,000 to 94,000 in 2010. Hits on Marxist topics have increased by nearly 300 percent during the same period, from 637,000 to 2,380,000.
Meanwhile to older members of the Ruling Class, the renewal of their Marxophobia must seem like the worst possible case of deja vu, harkening back to the 1930s, when Communists boasted what still today was the best organized political party in U.S. history – also the third largest.
In those halcyon years of national resistance to capitalism, the cringing fat cats encountered fearsomeness everywhere, even in music: U.S. Communists and their socialist allies had adopted “Song of the Plains,” a breathtakingly powerful ballad favored by Russia's Red Cavalry, as their own anthem of solidarity.
Its a good bet most of the participants in the new uprising have never heard it. Due to the purges that began the moment World War II ended, “Song of the Plains” quickly became the most forbidden song in the United States, and so it remained until probably a decade ago. But now it's on the Internet. Here it is as sung by the incomparable Paul Robeson on his 1941 album Songs of Free Men:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5PBrFXNQQA&feature=related
The melody is probably as old as Russia herself, possibly even as old as the magnificent Scythian horse-archers who routed Darius and his Persians in 512 BCE.
But the words Robeson translates so movingly came out of the Russian Civil War and its epic cavalry marches from one battle to the next – ride two hours, dismount and walk one hour to rest the horses; ride two hours, walk one hour; on and on across the endless steppe beneath its eternal skies, the leather sling of your Vintovka Mosina wearing blisters and then calluses on your shoulders as your soul aches with yearning for the wife or lover you have not seen in months – and nothing to abbreviate the numbing miles of grassland sameness but singing.
In Russian “Song of the Plains” is called Polyushko Polyē, and it again became a favorite of the Red Army – especially the horse cavalry – in the fight against the Nazi invaders. Here it is as performed and recorded by the Red Army Chorus sometime after World War II:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdHyz0G7qcw&feature=related
The great fear of the capitalists in the 1930s and 1940s and even in the 1950s was that they like the Tsarist aristocrats before them would awaken in their mansions to discover their mercenary guards gone and the gates open and the wind bearing the song of approaching revolutionaries:
O maidens fair raise your eyes
Gaze upon the road we follow
Far and away the road goes winding
Look and see how merrily the road goes...
LB/3 March 2011
(-30-)
This is a wonderful post, Loren, thank you for putting this information together. It was in Russia, after all, where after
being czarist tools for generations, the soldiers at last
refused to turn their guns on the striking & rebellious crowds of
workers & their families. This is happening in Wisconsin now, the state & local police supporting the protesters, & it is very inspiring. So is the information in your post.
Posted by: Barbara Mor | 03/04/2011 at 06:02 PM
Now I'm going to be humming that song all day at work...
Posted by: Franetta McMillian | 03/06/2011 at 08:53 AM