One of the claims Russo makes is that the Bankers have promoted a ‘socialist’ form of government, even though they may not admit it or tout it as one. That is, the idea that the money system should be controlled from above is supposed to be one of the main ideas of Marx and Engels. I wondered about this. If true, that would undermine any leftist’s commitment to whatever they thought was good about Marx’s argument. At least, if Marx lead to the ‘one world totalitarian government’ as Russo and Jones argued, then maybe Marx should be resisted.
The idea that Marx advocated the ‘Federal Reserve System’ is argued by conservatives, who say things like this,
Posted: Tue Aug 16th, 2005 12:16 am
In the mid 1800’s, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were faced with the question of what the perfect communist state would look like. In other words, what condition would be necessary to facilitate a “perfect implementation of collectivist principles.”The short essay Marx and Engels wrote has become one of the most famous written documents in history. The document is know as the communist manifesto.
Here is a summary of the 10 planks:
1. Abolition of private property
2. Heavy Progressive Income tax
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance
4. Confiscation of property of all emigrants and rebels
5. Central Bank
6. Government control of communication and transportation
7. Government ownership of factories and agriculture
8. Government control of labor
9. Corporate Farms, regional planning
10. Government control of education
Look carefully at the first plank because the first plank is the fundamental idea behind communism. Since all rights extend from private property, it follows when there is no private property, there are no rights.
John Adams said: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
If communists intend to abolish private property, then you have no rights under communism.
Let’s take a brief look at each plank and see how many of these policies already exist in the United States. Keep a tally on a sheet of paper or mentally, and think to yourself how close the comparisons are.
1. Abolition of Private Property
The war on drugs has prompted government agencies to establish asset forfeiture laws which allow the agency to take property belonging to someone suspected of being involved (not accused or convicted) with drugs. Frequently the agency is acting on an anonymous phone call. The property is sold at auction for pennies on the dollar and the agency keeps the money.
The government also commonly uses eminent domain to take private property for “public” use. Many times the public use is a large corporation like Wal-Mart.
2. Heavy Progressive income Tax
A progressive tax means the more you make, the higher the tax you pay percentage wise. If you are lucky enough to make enough money, you may fall into the 50% tax bracket. The strongest slaves are lucky enough to carry the biggest rocks.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance
If you parents die without a will, the government may take half of everything your parents owned before you and your siblings are allowed to divide what’s left. Even with a will the government takes a percentage. This prevents family in future generation from accumulating a significant amount of wealth.
4. Confiscation of property of all emigrants and rebels.
Anyone who travels internationally must declare whether he or she is carrying more than $10,000 dollars in money, stocks or bank notes of any kind. I know someone who wanted to move to Austrailia and was told they could not take their money with them.
5. Central Bank
The Federal Reserve Bank is a private company and not part of the US government. You can prove this by looking in the phone book at the government agency section for the federal reserve office. If you don’t find it there look in the white business pages. When you control printing of money it doesn’t matter who controls government. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 is completely, totally and unquestionably unconstitutional.
6. Government control of communication and transportation
The FCC controls all television and radio in the United States. The FAA, NTSB and every state department of transportation and motor vehicles control every aspect of transportation in this country. You cannot travel without government approval.
7. Government Ownership of factories and agriculture
The government doesn’t own factories, but it should be bailing our United Airlines, Chrysler Corporation and Savings and Loans when they get into trouble. The recent collapses of Enron and WorldCom suggests inappropriate government involvement. The USDA controls and regulates every aspect of the food chain from farm to table.
8. Government Control of Labor
Innumerable government agencies regulate every type of business. Although there is no formal control of unions the are strongly influenced by OSHA and other agencies.
9. Corporate Farms, regional planning
In the not too distant past most farms were owned by small families. Now they are owned by large corporations and merely leased to the original owners.
Every city in the US has a regional planning office, a planning and environmental / conservation services department and a planning and economic development office. Check your phone book.
10 Government control of Education
There is no point arguing this one, government controls education. Democrats and Republicans are falling over each other on who has the best plan for the public education system.
So what was your total?
8? 9? 10? If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it’s likely a duck. Regardless of what people around me say if the United States is already practicing all 10 communist principles then we must be living in a communist country. Does that give you a warm cozy feeling inside or are you suddenly concerned about people in Washington who have promised to protect your rights?http://perspectives.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=56431&forum_id=5
What exactly is Marx recommending? Is he saying that he recommends something like the Federal Reserve System as described by Russo and A. Jones? Is he advocating it without coming out and admitting it because, well, he’s secretly wanting to impose a system where Bankers enslave everyone? Is the argument he makes supposedly in order to free workers actually going to make them even more controlled by these Bankers than they were under mere capitalists?
I am pretty sure that Marx was not advocating anything like the ‘Federal Reserve System,’ as we see it in Russo and Jones. But, I can see that the ‘left’ has not been as concerned about the ‘Federal Reserve,’ the ‘bankers,’ or even the ‘one world government’ issue because they thought, perhaps, that as Marx argued that workers should organize themselves, he was eventually going to recommend one world government, run by workers, of even one state bank, run by workers. The ‘left’ may have presumed that a unified government would have meant an end to inter-state wars. They thought, nationalism run by private capitalist interests, on Marx’s view, was something that ‘one world government was supposed to work against.
I am pretty sure that Marx would not recommend either something like the ‘federal reserve,’ or one world government, as conceived by the conservatives or Russo and Jones, because Marx’s solution to the foxes guarding the chicken coop problem was not to promote a more powerful state. The problem with promoting any kind of scheme involving a powerful state was the fact that if there were still foxes around they would maneuver themselves into controlling positions in that government. There would be no way for the chickens to keep them out. Marx’s solution was of a different kind, and without remembering his solution, what he says in the ‘communist manifesto’ would make no sense. Marx thought that the problem in life for the chickens was the fact that the foxes ate them. There was no getting around this fact, according to Marx. So, the solution, for the chickens was to get rid of the foxes. The point of throwing off one’s chains and organizing was not to just build a bigger state apparatus, or to compete with the foxes for control of the institutions of government. Chickens could not compete with the foxes because the foxes were not into competition, they were instead just hungry. The only goal that would make the lives of chickens any better, according to Marx, was the elimination of the foxes.
So, when Marx spoke about making a central bank that would control the money, he meant this to occur at a time when there would be no private banking interests. One way to look at this, I believe, is to look at what the ‘single payer’ proposal for providing health care amounts to. The problem in America’s health care system is that the private insurance companies skim off approximately 20% of the money in the system for profits and their overhead. By doing this, the mechanisms that have been constructed to provide care, including hospitals, doctors and nurses and other allied fields, do not have enough resources to provide care to all of the people of the country. Nor, are they able to guarantee adequate care to even the people who have health insurance. The solution for many countries other the the U.S. has been to eliminate or limit health care paid for by private health care insurance companies. In this way, these countries have made their systems efficient enough that all their citizens can have health care in an affordable, fair, and complete way. This is the proposal being made in Congress right now for the United States.
The ‘single payer’ proposal does not involve there being set up a private corporation whereby all medical decisions about one’s health care would be decided. That is, as in other countries, the payer of the health care does not thereby decide whether this person gets a to see the doctor he wants in this clinic or some other cheaper doctor in some other clinic that he doesn’t want. Granted, there may be considerations of cost, as in how many expensive machines are provided in a geographical region, but no system can exist that is not limited by such considerations. The point is, if a father pays for his kid’s dentist bill, that does not mean he is expected, nor would he be given, the authority to tell the dentist which teeth to drill or what medicine to kill the pain with.
In the same way, a ‘single banker’ system as promoted in section 5 of the communist manifesto, would not involve setting up a private ‘central bank’ devoted to making money for itself at the expense of the state or its people. In the interview above, Russo makes a distinction between the private ‘Federal Reserve System’ that lends money to the state with interest and the stet’s treasury which, he says, could make the money itself without incurring either debt or interest. This money, Russo says, could be set up to be backed by gold, or other valuable commodities, so that inflation could be prevented and only so much money created. This could very well be exactly the system that Marx advocates in the manifesto. It is just the kind of system in banking that one would find comparable to the ‘single payer’ system in health care.
If we imagine that states are like the chicken coops, where the workers are the chickens and the foxes are the owners, then Marx’s solution to the problem would eliminate the private bankers, the private insurance companies, but also the world understood to be divided up into chicken coops. This may suggest Marx is having us work towards one world government. However, the kind of government that Marx would advocate would exist without there being private banks or bankers, private insurance companies, or people who made their living off of extorting the sick, and so forth.
The following exchange provides us with a suggested problem for Marx’s project. It’s an exchange,
States are still susceptible to the market. You can decide between here or almost any state in the world.
In fact, states are just large landlords. Free market capitalism is contradictory because all it does is defend micro-states.Quote:
Was it not Marx who said, "Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly."
If you read the paragraph before that bulletin without prejudice you would realize Marx was making a prediction of what would occur in the future as the contradiction of capitalism continues to reveal itself to the world, not what would be communist.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.
If you're going to criticize Marx, at least understand what he's saying. These planks are transitional.
The problem is one met by anyone advocating a ‘socialist’ solution to the problem of foxes. They aren’t going to just let the chickens take them out. First of all, the ‘single payer’ health care advocates have to make the case that what we currently have dominated by private insurance companies is not very affordable, efficient, fair, or humane. These advocates can make strong cases, however, the promoters of the foxes can argue that nothing that government does can be any good. This is one of the views Rep. Paul, Peter Schiff, and others, have made. We can’t have a ‘single payer’ plan because it’s government controlling our health care, it’s the nanny state, it’s Marxism. This can’t be at all any good.
In the same way, advocates of getting rid of the Federal Reserve will be met with the argument that the government can’t be put in charge of the economy. They would only botch the job. We’d have inflation and massive debts for as far as anyone could see. (I’m saying this would be their argument despite the fact that with The Federal Reserve in charge that’s what we have anyway.)
I support a lot of what Russo and Jones argue, e.g., the private “Federal Reserve’ needs to be taken down, the business of 9-11 is a lie, and the wars are all hoaxes. But, it isn’t the case that Marx would advocate any of these things. He would not have been for a private ‘Federal Reserve.’ He would have also been suspicious of 9-11. That is, he would have seen it possible that capitalists could have done such a thing to their own people in order to maintain the system that provided them with their power and position. He would have seen that wars are also promulgated and used by capitalists to make a profit.
We should question Russo and Jones on whether they have any arguments making Marx or any socialists in particular their enemy, and by implication, our enemy. Whereas Jones argues that we have to look past the old dichotomy between right and left and understand that it’s rather about the puppets and who the puppet-masters are, he undermines his case by unjustifiably attacking one of the main arguments constructing the ‘left’s analysis of the world. He can’t have it both ways. He can’t say our resistance to the criminals is not a matter of the left and right and also argue that the left’s mother wears army boots.
Michael Hudson has something to say about this,
What we are seeing is propaganda designed to deceive, to distract attention from economic reality so as to promote the property and financial interests from whose predatory grasp classical economists set out to free the world. What is being attempted is nothing less than an attempt to destroy the intellectual and moral edifice of what took Western civilization eight centuries to develop, from the 12th century Schoolmen discussing Just Price through 19th and 20th century classical economic value theory.
Any idea of “socialism from above,” in the sense of “socializing the risk,” is old-fashioned oligarchy – kleptocratic statism from above. Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. The 19th-century program to nationalize the land (it was the first plank of the Communist Manifesto) did not mean anything remotely like the government taking over estates, paying off their mortgages at public expense and then giving it back to the former landlords free and clear of encumbrances and taxes. It meant taking the land and its rental income into the public domain, and leasing it out at a user fee ranging from actual operating cost to a subsidized rate or even freely as in the case of streets and roads.
Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies.
How neoliberals falsify the West’s political history
The fact that today’s neoliberals claim to be the intellectual descendants of Adam Smith make it necessary to restore a more accurate historical perspective. Their concept of “free markets” is the antithesis of Smith’s. It is the opposite of that of the classical political economists down through John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and the Progressive Era reforms that sought to create markets free of extractive rentier claims by special interests whose institutional power can be traced back to medieval Europe and its age of military conquest.
Economic writers from the 16th through 20th centuries recognized that free markets required government oversight to prevent monopoly pricing and other charges levied by special privilege. By contrast, today’s neoliberal ideologues are public relations advocates for vested interests to depict a “free market” is one free of government regulation, “free” of anti-trust protection, and even of protection against fraud, as evidenced by the SEC’s refusal to move against Madoff, Enron, Citibank et al.). The neoliberal ideal of free markets is thus basically that of a bank robber or embezzler, wishing for a world without police so as to be sufficiently free to siphon off other peoples’ money without constraint.
The Chicago Boys in Chile realized that markets free for predatory finance and insider privatization could only be imposed at gunpoint. These free-marketers closed down every economics department in Chile, every social science department outside of the Catholic University where the Chicago Boys held sway. Operation Condor arrested, exiled or murdered tens of thousands of academics, intellectuals, labor leaders and artists. Only by totalitarian control over the academic curriculum and public media backed by an active secret police and army could “free markets” neoliberal style be imposed. The resulting privatization at gunpoint became an exercise in what Marx called “primitive accumulation” – seizure of the public domain by political elites backed by force. It is a free market William-the-Conqueror or Yeltsin-kleptocrat style, with property parceled out to the companions of the political or military leader.
All this was just the opposite of the kind of free markets that Adam Smith had in mind when he warned that businessmen rarely get together but to plot ways to fix markets to their advantage. This is not a problem that troubled Mr. Greenspan or the editorial writers of the New York Times and Washington Post. There really is no kinship between their neoliberal ideals and those of the Enlightenment political philosophers. For them to promote an idea of free markets as ones “free” for political insiders to pry away the public domain for themselves is to lower an intellectual Iron Curtain on the history of economic thought.
So, yes, Marx advocated a central bank, but that did not for him mean that he advocated the kind of predatory banking system that Russo or Jones describe as the ‘Federal Reserve System.’ The claim as promoted by conservatives is inaccurate and is not backed up by an accurate understanding of Marx’s overall argument. It doesn’t take into account his solution to the ‘fox and chicken’ problem. The point of mischaracterizing Marx may just be to get people to think that any kind of state involvement in banking or health care, including social security, or worker protections, and so on, is problematical. Problematical because Marx was its advocate.
The problem that Marx has is not so much that he advocates programs that people would find oppressive. People find living as slaves on the ‘Federal Reserves’ plantations not all that bothersome. They probably could tolerate other people getting tortured. They probably wouldn’t mind having everything they own taken away from them. The chips discussed by Russo would not be that big of a deal. These would be alright so long as they would not be living under Marxism.
So, why is that?
People who live as slaves learn that it’s best for them if their masters are happy. Marx argues that slaves cannot be really happy unless they overthrow and eliminate their masters. People object to this argument, if they are masters, because Marx is advocating their personal elimination. Slaves object to Marx because they can’t see that their lives would be all that much better either during a revolution, or at the end even if their masters were eliminated.
I think the argument is, well, if we get rid of the powerful zombies amongst us, that means we are all zombies still. If life will remain as worthless after our violent revolution, as before, then there would be no point to subjecting everyone to that foolishness in the first place. Marx’s proposal to get rid of the foxes is, therefore, not a solution after all.
This is not to say that we should not try to get a ‘single payer’ health care system in this country, or that we should not try to take down the ‘Federal Reserve System’ because of its corrupting influence. It just means, I believe, that advocating either of these proposals as part of an effort to eliminate the foxes so the chickens will not be eaten will only cause violence between the foxes and chickens, which cannot lead to a world without zombies. That is, no good can come from it.
Those on the ‘left’ and ‘right’ who are concerned about getting a ‘single payer’ system, or to take down the ‘Federal Reserve,’ could more profitable argue that ‘single payer’ or the elimination of the ‘Fed.’ could be solutions to problems both the foxes and the chickens face.
So, for example, both American workers suffer from having little or no health care because of private insurance and corporations suffer from bearing the complete cost of health insurance for their workers, and insurance companies suffer from having to cheat sick people out of their money, everyone would benefit if the payment for health care was taken out of their hands. Insurance companies could be bought out or put out of business and their executives given scholarships for retraining much as forest product and auto workers have had to go through these past several decades.
In the same way, the American economy, as well as the world’s, is made to suffer in order that private bankers can get to control people’s lives and make a profit out of the deal. Everyone therefore suffers. The people at the mercy of the banks, and the bankers themselves. One could argue that it just makes more sense to take the profit-making out of the money-lending. Let the government run the system so that there are no winners or losers from it.
There is, even if these recommendations would be enacted, the problem remains that, given our commitments, people are still zombies, driven by their hungers or the commands of their masters, e.g. thugs under the influence.
This comes down to some metaphor like this, no matter how you put together the rest of the building, if the foundation itself rests on sand, if your journey does not begin with proper preparation, given a stiff wind, or some unforeseen stress, everything will fall apart and be lost. I have been arguing that the basic understanding we have of reason and hence, of ourselves and the world around us, has been corrupt, and so no matter how we deal with things like the ‘fox and chicken’ problem, because we still think of ourselves as zombies, everything is lost.
Figuring what we have to do to maintain ‘political rights,’ as Marx tried to do, will only mean so much because, in the end, people are still denied their ‘human rights.’
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