It might seem that way, but genuine freedom and democracy aren’t compatible with capitalism.
看起来似乎如此，但真正的自由和民主与资本主义是不兼容的。
In the United States, many take for granted that freedom and democracy are inextricably connected with capitalism. Milton Friedman, in his book Capitalism and Freedom, went so far as to argue that capitalism was a necessary condition for both. It is certainly true that the appearance and spread of capitalism brought with it a tremendous expansion of individual freedoms and, eventually, popular struggles for more democratic forms of political organization. The claim that capitalism fundamentally obstructs both freedom and democracy will then sound strange to many.
To say that capitalism restricts the flourishing of these values is not to argue that capitalism has run counter to freedom and democracy in every instance. Rather, through the functioning of its most basic processes, capitalism generates severe deficits of both freedom and democracy that it can never remedy. Capitalism has promoted the emergence of certain limited forms of freedom and democracy, but it imposes a bow ceiling on their further realization.
At the core of these values is self-determination: the belief that people should be able to decide the conditions of their own lives to the fullest extent possible. When an action by a person affects only that person, then he or she ought to be able to engage in that activity without asking permission from anyone else. This is the context of freedom. But when an action affects the lives of others, then these other people should have a say in the activity.
This is the context of democracy. In both, the paramount concern is that people retain as much control as possible over the shape their lives will take. In practice, virtually every choice a person makes will have some effect on others. It is impossible for everyone to contribute to every decision that concerns them, and any social system that insisted on such comprehensive democratic participation would impose an unbearable burden on people. What we need, therefore, is a set of rules to distinguish between questions of freedom and those of democracy. In our society, such a distinction is usually made with reference to the boundary between the private and public spheres.
There is nothing natural or spontaneous about this line between the private and the public; it is forged and maintained by social processes. The tasks entailed by these processes are complex and often contested. The state vigorously enforces some public/private boundaries and leaves others to be upheld or dissolved as social norms. Often the boundary between the public and the private remains fuzzy.
In a fully democratic society, the boundary itself is subject to democratic deliberation.Capitalism constructs the boundary between the public and private spheres in a way that constrains the realization of true individual freedom and reduces the scope of meaningful democracy. There are five ways in which this is readily apparent.
Capitalism is anchored in the private accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of income through the market. The economic inequalities that result from these “private” activities are intrinsic to capitalism and create inequalities in what the philosopher Philippe van Parijs calls “real freedom.”
资本主义以私有财富积累和通过市场追求收入为基础。 这些“私有”活动产生的经济不平等是资本主义所固有的，并且在哲学家Philippe van Parijs所称呼的“真正的自由”中制造了不平等。
Whatever else we might mean by freedom, it must include the ability to say “no.” A wealthy person can freely decide not to work for wages; a poor person without an independent means of livelihood cannot do so easily. But the value of freedom goes deeper than this. It is also the ability to act positively on one’s life plans — to choose not just an answer, but the question itself. The children of wealthy parents can take unpaid internships to advance their careers; the children of poor parents cannot.
Capitalism deprives many people of real freedom in this sense. Poverty in the midst of plenty exists because of a direct equation between material resources and the resources needed for self-determination.
The way the boundary between the public and private spheres is drawn in capitalism excludes crucial decisions, which affect large numbers of people, from democratic control. Perhaps the most fundamental right that accompanies private ownership of capital is the right to decide to invest and disinvest strictly on the basis of self-interest.
A corporation’s decision to move production from one place to another is a private matter, even though it makes a radical impact on the lives of everyone in both places. Even if one argues that this concentration of power in private hands is necessary for the efficient allocation of resources, the exclusion of these kinds of decisions from democratic control unequivocally decimates the capacity for self-determination by all except the owners of capital.
公司决定将生产从一个地方转移到另一个地方是一件私事，尽管它会对这两个地方的每个人的生活产生极大影响。即使有人争辩说私人手中的权力集中对于资源的有效配置是必要的，但将这些决定排除在民主控制之外，明确地毁灭了所有人的自决能力，除了资本所有者。（Job is a right,一个人做自己想要做的工作是一种人权，而私人独裁公司在老板的独裁命令之下肆意转移侵犯了工人的人权。）
3. Nine to Five Is Tyranny
朝九晚五是暴政
Capitalist firms are allowed to be organizedas workplace dictatorships. An essential component of a business owner’s power is the right to tell employees what to do. That is the basis of the employment contract: the job seeker agrees to follow the employer’s orders in exchange for a wage. Of course, an employer is also free to grant workers considerable autonomy, and in some situations this is the profit-maximizing way of organizing work. But such autonomy is given or withheld at the owner’s pleasure. No robust conception of self-determination would allow autonomy to depend on the private preferences of elites.
A defender of capitalism might reply that a worker who doesn’t like the boss’s rule can always quit. But since workers by definition lack an independent means of livelihood, if they quit they will have to look for a new job and, to the extent that the available employment is in capitalist firms, they will still be subject to a boss’s dictates.
4. Governments Have to Serve the Interests of Private Capitalists
政府不得不服务于私人资本家们的利益
Private control over major investment decisions creates a constant pressure on public authorities to enact rules favorable to the interests of capitalists. The threat of disinvestment and capital mobility is always in the background of public policy discussions, and thus politicians, whatever their ideological orientation, are forced to worry about sustaining a “good business climate.”Democratic values are hollow so long as one class of citizens takes priority over all others.
Finally, wealthy people have greater access than others to political power. This is the case in all capitalist democracies, although wealth-based inequality of political power is much greater in some countries than in others. The specific mechanisms for this greater access are quite varied: contributions to political campaigns; financing lobbying efforts; elite social networks of various sorts; and outright bribes and other forms of corruption.
In the United States it is not only wealthy individuals, but also capitalist corporations, that face no meaningful restriction on their ability to deploy private resources for politcal purposes. This differential access to political power voids the most basic principle of democracy.
These consequences are endemic to capitalism as an economic system. This does not mean that they cannot sometimes be mitigated in capitalist societies. In different times and places, many policies have been erected to compensate for capitalism’s deformation of freedom and democracy.
Public constraints can be imposed on private investment in ways that erode the rigid boundary between the public and private; a strong public sector and active forms of state investment can weaken the threat of capital mobility; restrictions on the use of private wealth in elections and the public finance of political campaigns can reduce the privileged access of the wealthy to political power; labor law can strengthen the collective power of workers in both the political arena and the workplace; and a wide variety of welfare policies can increase the real freedom of those without access to private wealth.
When the political conditions are right, the anti-democratic and freedom-impeding features of capitalism can be palliated, but they cannot be eliminated. Taming capitalism in this way has been the central objective of the policies advocated by socialists within capitalist economies the world over. But if freedom and democracy are to be fully realized, capitalism must not merely be tamed. It must be overcome.
No struggle for liberation and democracy has ever benefited from U.S. military intervention–because Washington’s wars come at the price of perverting those aims.
没有任何争取自由和民主的斗争从美国的军事干预中获益过—因为华盛顿的战争是以扭曲这些目标为代价的。
THE UNITED States has a history of presenting its motives for military intervention in a good light–spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, deposing unpopular tyrants, protecting civilians and saving lives.
In each case, the reasons the U.S. has concocted for public consumption to explain its decision to take military action differ substantially from the real aims of the operation.
在每个案例下，美国为公共消费而编造的以解释其采取军事行动的决定的原因都与该行动的真正目的非常不同。
Much can be learned from the way the U.S. behaved toward the Cuban independence movement against Spain in the late 1890s–which culminated in 1898 in the “splendid little war” that made the Philippines and Puerto Rico colonies of the U.S., and Cuba a protectorate.
AFTER THE Civil War, the U.S. emerged as a world economic powerhouse–though as a latecomer, its military power, political clout and colonial interests lagged far behind that of the European powers, particularly Britain and France.
As the end of the 19th century approached, the European powers were busy carving up the world into colonies and spheres of influence in an effort to secure sources of raw materials, cheap labor and protected markets. U.S. officials, politicians and business interests began clamoring for a foreign policy that would assert American naval and military power, particularly in the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific.
“It makes the water come to my mouth when I think of the state of Cuba as one in our family,” wrote Frederick R. Coudert, a leading Wall Street figure, in 1895.
“当我把古巴的状态看作是我们家中的一员时，它会让水进入我的口中，”1895年华尔街主要人物Frederick R. Coudert写道。
A number of American investors were coming to dominate the lucrative Cuban sugar industry, and Cuba was seen as a strategically important island for controlling the Caribbean.
一些美国投资者开始主宰利润丰厚的古巴制糖业，古巴被视为控制加勒比地区的重要战略岛屿。
The famed Cuban revolutionary, José Martí, who had spent some time in the U.S. organizing a movement in exile against Spanish domination, welcomed the political and financial support of U.S. citizens for the Cuban cause.
But he was suspicious of U.S. designs on the island, writing in his last letter, not long before his death at the hands of his Spanish enemies in 1895: “It is my duty, inasmuch as I realize it and have the spirit to fulfill it–to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon other lands of our America. All I have done up to now, and shall do hereafter, is to that end.”
U.S. soldiers during the Spanish American War（美西战争中的美国士兵）
“I have lived inside the monster,” he continued, referring to the U.S., “and know its insides–and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.”
“我一直住在怪物里面，”他继续指着美国说，“并且知道它的内部——而我的武器只有大卫的弹弓。”
The revolutionary war for Cuban independence begun by Martí and his cohorts in 1895 had widespread support in the U.S., fanned in part by the “yellow press” owned by media moguls like William Randolph Hearst, who supported U.S. intervention in Cuba and used his newspapers to press for it.
No doubt, the press had much to work with in making the case against Spain. After the triumphal march of the revolutionary armies through Cuba, Spain put Gen. Valeriano Wyler in charge: he immediately implemented his now infamous reconcentration plan. This decree gave eight days for all inhabitants of Cuba to move into towns occupied by Spanish troops and forbade the transfer of food from one place to another. The policy led to the deaths by disease and starvation of as many as half, and possibly more, of the 500,000 to 600,000 people affected by the transfer policy.
Throughout the war, however, the U.S. under President Grover Cleveland refused to recognize the Cuban revolutionary armies, and used its powers to prevent the flow of men, arms and supplies to them–in effect, aiding the Spanish. Many commentators at the time wrote of the fact that the revolutionaries could have easily defeated the Spanish before the U.S. invasion if they had been able to purchase munitions, food and medical supplies from America.
Nevertheless, these under-equipped, half-starving armies of guerrilla fighters, never totaling more than 30,000, but ably led by the likes of Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, ran the Spanish ragged and seized control of dozens of towns and most of the countryside. By the time the U.S. made its decision to intervene, it was widely believed that it was only a matter of time before the Spanish were defeated anyway.
There was a minority in the Cuban independence movement, such as Tómas Estrada Palma, the delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party stationed in the U.S., who supported some kind of American intervention on the grounds that only the U.S. could establish the conditions for stability and “law and order” necessary for Cuban business interests on the island. In the words of historian Philip Foner, Estrada “came to favor American intervention to prevent the revolution from becoming too revolutionary.”
This argument that independence would produce chaos–and in particular, a “race war,” which was a code phrase for the dominance of Blacks–was one of the reasons the U.S. justified both non-intervention, and then later, its right to assert control over Cuba.
“There are…strong reasons to fear,” wrote Cleveland’s Secretary of State Richard Olney, “that, once Spain were withdrawn from the island, the sold bond of union between the different factions of the insurgents would disappear [and] that a war of races would be precipitated.”
克里夫兰的国务卿 Richard Olney写道：“有……强烈的理由担心，”一旦西班牙退出该岛，叛乱分子不同派别之间的联盟将会消失[和] 种族之战将会爆发。“
But Estrada’s support for U.S. intervention was not the position of the majority, especially those on the ground fighting in Cuba.
但Estrada对美国的干预的支持并不是大多数人的立场，特别是那些在古巴进行实地战斗的人们。
“We do not need any intervention to obtain victory in more or less time,” Antonio Maceo wrote eight months before he was killed, in December 1896, by Wyler’s troops. “Bring Cuba 25,000 to 35,000 rifles and a million bullets…We Cubans do not need any other help.”
MACEO’S WORDS were prophetic. President William McKinley, who replaced Cleveland, began planning a war against Spain, not to aid the Cuban independence movement, but to gain hold of Cuba before independence could be achieved.
The U.S. government was willing to let Spain rule so long as it guaranteed U.S. business interests on the island. When it became clear that Spain was no longer able to do so, that was when the U.S. decided to intervene.
The invasion was presented publicly as a humanitarian effort–“for the purposes of extending succor,” in McKinley’s words–though the explosion of the USS Maine off the coast of Havana was also milked to arouse pro-war sentiment.
But as Foner notes, everything known about Cuba at the time pointed to the fact that the rebels’ victory was only delayed by lack of arms. If McKinley was so concerned about the interests of humanity, he need only allow weapons to get to the rebels. However, “such a policy would mean that Cuba would be truly independent–independent of the United States as well as Spain–and this was something that the administration would under no circumstances countenance,” Foner wrote.
McKinley’s April 11 speech to congress announcing war with Spain was fairly explicit in its opposition to Cuban independence: “To commit this country now to the recognition of any particular government in Cuba may subject us to embarrassing conditions of international obligations toward the organization so recognized. In case of intervention, our conduct would be subjected to the approval or disapproval of that government.”
Even the way McKinley framed the issue of humanitarian intervention indicated a desire to cut out the revolutionaries from any say in the outcome: “The forcible intervention of the United States as a neutral to stop the war, according to the large dictates of humanity and following many historical precedents where neighboring states have interfered to check the hopeless sacrifices of life by internecine conflicts beyond their borders, is justifiable on rational grounds. It involves, however, hostile constraint upon both the parties to the contest as well to enforce a truce as to guide the eventual settlement.”
The Cubans insisted that without any recognition by the U.S. of Cuba’s independence, they would consider any American invasion a “declaration of war by the United States against Cuban revolutionists.”
But the revolutionaries were somewhat mollified by the Teller amendment, which stated that the U.S. “hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control over said island, except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination when that is accomplished to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”
This statement proved meaningless when it came to the subsequent invasion and occupation of Cuba.
在随后对古巴的入侵和占领中，这一声明被证明是毫无意义的。
The U.S. was able to land its forces in the southeastern part of Cuba in large part with the help of Cuban revolutionary troops under Gen. Calixto Garcia, which prevented Spanish reinforcements from being able to move toward the area.
Despite the indispensable role played by Cuban troops in the U.S. victory, the U.S. press, aided by military officials, began a campaign of slander against the rebels, saying that they were lazy, ineffective and unhelpful–all in attempt to elevate the role of the U.S. as the sole victor in the war.
Adding salt to the wound, Gen. William Shafter, the head of the expeditionary forces, did not invite Gen. Garcia or any rebel officers to the official celebration after the city of Santiago de Cuba fell. Indeed, the U.S. allowed the Spanish administrators to continue at their posts, and forbid any Cuban rebels from entering into the town. Garcia was so incensed that he resigned.
The same thing happened in December when the Spanish handed power over to the Americans in Havana. The Cuban popular committees planned a five-day celebration to congratulate the joint Cuban-American victory, complete with a parade of Cuban revolutionary troops. The celebration was canceled by the American general in charge, and Cuban troops were forbidden from entering the city.
THE U.S. army stayed in Cuba. Under Gen. Leonard Wood, the island was divided up into military districts, each ruled by an officer and policed by a contingent of U.S. troops.
As a condition for withdrawal (which took place in 1902), Wood insisted that an amendment–known as the Platt Amendment–be written into the Cuban constitution stipulating that the “the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United States.”
In short, the amendment gave the U.S. the right to invade Cuba whenever it wasn’t pleased with developments there. U.S. troops occupied Cuba in 1906, 1909, 1912 and between 1917 and 1923. After that, the U.S. largely protected its interests by backing friendly dictators.
There are many important lessons to be drawn from this experience. While no historical parallels are exact, the story of the U.S. in Cuba provides a useful framework for understanding its intervention more than 100 years later in Libya–and stopping us from the facile and historically unjustifiable belief that the world’s biggest, most violent, imperialist powers are capable of exerting military force for the good of humanity.
No revolutionary movement has ever benefited from accepting military intervention from an imperialist power–because such “support” comes at the price of perverting the aims of the movement itself. In the words of Antonio Maceo, “It is better to rise or fall without help than to contract debts of gratitude to a neighbor so powerful.”
A couple of excerpts from the work of scholars of fascism against the notion that the fascists were socialists.
来自法西斯主义学者的一部分工作摘要反对法西斯主义者是社会主义者这一观点。
Anyone who has ever argued in person or online with Republican, alt-right, fascist, white nationalist, or the myriad overlapping identities of the Right today will recognize a few standard ahistorical moves they use to “win debates.” One is to bring out the “Black Book of Communism” whereby the body counts of state-capitalist, Stalinist, and Maoist, regimes are held up to show that “communism” has killed elevendy jillion people while capitalism has saved an equal amount, and simultaneously spread freedom, democracy, and wealth. The intent is never really to criticize these (state capitalist) regimes, but to prove capitalism is the only possible system a sane person would choose. A supporting argument notes that “capitalism is human nature” so stop pretending anyone who was not brainwashed by cultural Marxists at the University has a legitimate gripe with it. The vast majority of the people defending capitalism as freedom cannot tell you how capitalism works.
Especially popular these days are what I think of as the “mirror world” arguments. In our world we know capitalism is a system in which a ruling/owning class expropriates the surplus value of the labor power of the working class. Capitalism is a redistribution of value and wealth upward to a small dominating class. In mirror world, genius entrepreneurs and business people are “creatives,” “job creators” and “risk takers” whose “work” creates all wealth. The rest of us benefit from the hard work of this “John Galt” class. If you work hard you can be a boss someday, or a useful person like Kylie Jenner or Steve Jobs. Socialists “spend other people’s money” so they can drive the economy into the ground by giving out free stuff no one earned. It’s the people in urban areas, illegal immigrants, spoiled college students, feminists, and intellectuals who contribute nothing to society who get in the way of the normal functioning of such a perfect system.
Coming back to the subject of fascism, today the mirror world arguments depict antifa as violent thugs attacking peaceful marchers who only wanted to celebrate free speech. Antifa, or anyone in the street confronting white-nationalist wildings are the “real fascists.” Stormfronters, KKK, American Guard, Sons of Odin, Proud Boys, Rise Above Movement, White Aryan Resistance, Identity Evropa, Patriot Prayer and other groups who, together, mobilize fighting units to attack cities, terrorize and beat leftists, and demonize immigrants while calling for their deaths, are the Enlightened pro-democracy forces pushing against censorship and for civility. And aren’t the Proud Boys multi-ethnic, thereby proving they can’t be fascists? Never mind that Imperial Japan’s leaders were fascist, or that today’s Hindutva nationalists in India are fascists. Proud Boy Tiny Toese is Samoan! Who cares that he wears a “Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong” shirt? The “Right Wing Death Squad” line of clothing, is of course also not fascist in any way. “Pinochet killed zero people because communists aren’t people” is the Proud Boy line. If you see interviews with Proud Boy fighters, they usually portray themselves as under attack by hysterical communists, with themselves in the familiar Chris Kyle (“American Sniper”) role of the “sheep dog” fighting off the wolves to protect the herd (good, normal, Americans).
One of the most popular mirror world arguments posits that fascism has always been a leftist movement, anti-capitalist, and even socialist. These arguments often cite Nazi rhetoric used to appeal to the working class in the 1930s (and Trump also appeals to them today) from speeches on “the workers” or against bankers. They also like to bring up that Mussolini was a socialist (but leave out the part where he rejected socialism for nationalism) as evidence that fascism has always been socialist.
Here is Dinesh D’Souza whose anti-historical “research” often reads like a manifesto from a mass shooter, cherry picking data from left and right sources to make completely unhinged arguments:
“But the most notable thing about, not only Mussolini’s Black Shirts, but about the National Socialists in Germany is that above all, They. Were. Socialists! They were socialists. Mussolini started out as a Marxist. He was the editor of the socialist journal in Italy. And so again, on the issue of fascism, in the 1930s and 40s, fascism and Nazism were widely understood to be left wing. They were understood that way by Mussolini, by Hitler, they were understood that way by FDR and by the New Deal. They were understood that way by reporters writing about the period. But after World War II a very interesting thing happens. Fascism becomes right wing. Right wing. This I want to suggest is another big lie. It is essentially the result of a kind of an intellectual sleight of hand in which after the war, when the horrors of National Socialism are now manifest for the world to see it becomes imperative to move fascism into the right wing column and pretend like it was some sort of excrescence of capitalism. That fascism was some sort of invention of the business community. Whereas in reality it arose out of an argument within socialism.”
So I thought it might be useful just to post what a couple of historical scholars of fascism have to say about whether fascism is either anti-capitalist or socialist. I don’t expect people on the far right to be persuaded by historically grounded arguments, but with such grounded sources, those on the left can better define our own goals in opposition to fascism and its progenitor, capitalism.
Excerpt from Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism:
来自Robert O. Paxton的“法西斯主义剖析”摘录：
Another supposed essential character of fascism is its anticapitalist, antibourgeois animus. Early fascist movements flaunted their contempt for bourgeois values and for those who wanted only “to earn money, money, filthy money.” They attacked “international finance capitalism” almost as loudly as they attacked socialists. They even promised to expropriate department-store owners in favor of patriotic artisans, and large landowners in favor of peasants.
Whenever fascist parties acquired power, however, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. By contrast, they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism. Street fights over turf with young communists were among their most powerful propaganda images. Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners’ purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers. Faced with these conflicts between words and actions concerning capitalism, scholars have drawn opposite conclusions. Some, taking the words literally, consider fascism a form of radical anticapitalism. Others, and not only Marxists, take the diametrically opposite position that fascists came to the aid of capitalism in trouble, and propped up by emergency means the existing system of property distribution and social hierarchy.
This book takes the position that what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said. What they said cannot be ignored, of course, for it helps explain their appeal. Even at its most radical, however, fascists’ anticapitalist rhetoric was selective. While they denounced speculative international finance (along with all other forms of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalization—capitalist as well as socialist), they respected the property of national producers, who were to form the social base of the reinvigorated nation. When they denounced the bourgeoisie, it was for being too flabby and individualistic to make a nation strong, not for robbing workers of the value they added. What they criticized in capitalism was not its exploitation but its materialism, its indifference to the nation, its inability to stir souls. More deeply, fascists rejected the notion that economic forces are the prime movers of history. For fascists, the dysfunctional capitalism of the interwar period did not need fundamental reordering; its ills could be cured simply by applying sufficient political will to the creation of full employment and productivity. Once in power, fascist regimes confiscated property only from political opponents, foreigners, or Jews. None altered the social hierarchy, except to catapult a few adventurers into high places. At most, they replaced market forces with state economic management, but, in the trough of the Great Depression, most businessmen initially approved of that. If fascism was “revolutionary,” it was so in a special sense, far removed from the word’s meaning as usually understood from 1789 to 1917, as a profound overturning of the social order and the redistribution of social, political, and economic power. (Paxton. The Anatomy of Fascism, P.10-11)
Excerpt from Ian Kershaw’s The Nazi Dictatorship dealing with the continuity of the class system under Nazis:
摘自Ian Kershaw的“纳粹独裁统治”，论述纳粹统治下的阶级制度的连续性：
The emphasis has, therefore, been far more heavily laid upon the essential continuities in the class structure of Nazi Germany, rather than upon incisive changes.
因此，重点更多地在纳粹德国阶级结构的基本连续性上，而不是强烈的变化上。
Schoenbaum himself had accepted that the social position of the elites remained relatively unscathed down to the last phase of the war. He may, however, have rather exaggerated the extent of the fluidity in social structures and the amount of upward mobility which took place. Of course, it is true that thrusting, energetic, ruthless, and often highly efficient ‘technocrats of power’ such as Heydrich or Speer pushed their way to the top. And the war certainly accelerated changes in the high ranks of the Wehrmacht. But the new political elite co-existed and merged with the old elites rather than supplanting them.
Non-Party preserves such as big business, the civil service, and the army recruited their leadership for the most part from the same social strata as before 1933. Education remained overwhelmingly dominated by the middle and upper classes. The most important and powerful Party affiliation, the SS, recruited heavily from the elite sectors of society. If the traditional ruling class had to make some room for social upstarts from lower ranks of society who had gained advancement through positions of power and political influence, such changes amounted to little more than a slight acceleration of changes already perceptible in the Weimar Republic.
At the other end of the social scale, the working class– deprived of a political voice, its social gains of the Weimar Republic reversed, and exposed in the shadow of mass unemployment to the brutal exploitation of employers backed by the repressive apparatus of the police state– had its living standard reduced in the first years of the Third Reich even from the lowly level of the depression era. The slight rise in real wages in the later 1930s was a by-product of the armaments boom, and was accompanied by intensified pressure– physical and mental– upon the industrial workforce. The class position of workers remained basically unchanged into the middle of the war– except that the most extreme exploitation now fell upon foreign workers.
The most significant changes in the nature and composition of German labour occurred in the last phase of the war and were, in the main, the consequences of military service, losses at the Front, destruction of industries, dislocation of the workforce, evacuation and homelessness, and ultimately foreign conquest. Whatever changes had taken place by 1945 were, therefore, a product of Nazism’s collapse more than of its policies while in power. (Ian Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, 175-176)
I had written this up as a response to various online tallies of communism’s death count which were listed as a defense of capitalism. It’s from memory, jotted down, and so any quibbles or qualifications, even disagreements are welcome:
A very partial list of deaths caused by capitalism. It’s more than ever in vogue to go to the “Black Book of Communism” and whip out ahistorical decontextualized statistics and body counts for “communism.” It’s not that I have any desire to defend Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot or others, but that in historical context we can’t come to the conclusion that the “antidote” to tyranny and death is capitalism, a system completely intertwined with those deaths and many many more.
Just a very partial tip of the iceberg listing of some capitalist caused deaths. I’ll leave off the roughly 9 million people who die of hunger every year in the capitalist global system, an obviously failed system.
First, neither Stalin’s Russia, nor Mao’s China were communist. If you define communism as workers control over production, abolition of wages as a tool of the owning class extracting the value of workers, abolition of classes, and of markets, obviously we haven’t seen a communist society yet, except in brief moments like Paris 1871, Spain 1936, and a few others. So your totals from State capitalist regimes are sad and horrifying but have little to do with communism. What we have in the Soviet Union for example was a state bureaucracy functioning as a ruling class, extracting value from labor of a working class inside a hideous totalitarian gulag/police state. That was state capitalism, and now Russia is just extreme western style capitalism with more open gangsterism and state control overlaid. The revolutionaries were successful in crushing the repressive monarchy of the Tsar, but the Bolsheviks then took over the revolution and ushered in a one party state capitalist regime with Stalin as the final symbol of defeat. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution was neither cultural nor a revolution and you can read Simon Leys, the foremost critic of Maoism to see that Mao ruthlessly crushed communist formations inside China as he attempted to industrialize the country to compete with capitalist powers.
There are other important totals to look at as well. Mike Davis has written about “Late Victorian Holocausts,” with the example of the British Raj killing 30 million Indians from the mid 19th century to 1900. This was due to the destruction of traditional systems of emergency distribution that existed under the Mughals. Production had been forced into mono-crops, and exported to ports for the world market via British built rail systems. The British ruling class saw the mass famine as “Darwinian winnowing” of a subhuman species.
还有其他重要的总数可供考虑。 Mike Davis写过关于“维多利亚晚期大屠杀”的文章，其中英国的殖民从19世纪中叶到1900年杀死了3000万印度人。这是由于穆加尔人之间存在的传统紧急分配系统的破坏。 生产被迫进入单作物的，并通过英国建造的铁路系统出口到世界市场的港口。 英国的统治阶级将大规模饥荒视为一种比人类低等的物种的“达尔文式颠簸”。
A bit earlier, the British capitalists had killed a million Irish in a potato famine, even though there was more than enough food being produced to feed them and millions more. It had to be shipped out to markets for profit though, so it was ok just to let them die.
David Stannard and countless other historians put the Native American genocide at around 100 million. If we look at other scholars estimates of non-disease related deaths they go down to about 15 million in “democide”, mostly in Latin America a great center of capitalist encomienda production by the first major capitalist colonial power, Spain, and also Portugal.
David Stannard和无数其他历史学家将美洲原住民的种族灭绝数置于1亿左右。 如果我们看看其他学者对非疾病相关死亡的估计，他们的“民主灭绝”大约有1500万，其中大部分在拉丁美洲的是第一大资本主义殖民大国西班牙和葡萄牙的资本主义生产中心。
At least 2 million black slaves were killed directly in the Atlantic middle passage of the early emerging capitalist economy, but the devastation created inside Africa, as is well known, destabilized much of that continent down to the present day. Hard to calculate the suffering or body count there.
Adam Hoschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost showed 10 million Congolese killed in his “Free State of Congo” to supply rubber to the west for bicycle tires.
Adam Hoschild的国王利奥波德的鬼魂在他的“刚果自由邦”中杀害了1000万刚果人，他们向西方供应用于自行车轮胎的橡胶。
World War 1, was as is not in dispute, a war between imperialist powers to control colonies, labor, resource, trade routes, etc. 41 million casualties and of those, 18 million were deaths. World War II, the continuation and settling of that war saw 70 to 85 million. World War 2 would never have happened were it not for the capitalist Great Depression which saw the rise of the previously disappearing Nazi Party in Germany, which started the war under Hitler, in a series of invasions that brought another total war with the reaction to the invasion of Poland. It was mostly between belligerent capitalist empires as was World War I. All of the empires had already racked up millions of corpses, and sadly, the fascists were not exceptional in that regard. But there’s no question that fascism is a defense of the capitalist state, and that it’s main enemy was “communism.” Fascists crushed workers unions and brought them under control of the party and capitalist state.
The US invasion of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, killed roughly 3 million, mostly from illegal secret bombings. The resulting destruction of civil society in Cambodia led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Unless you think those things are somehow unrelated?
The US led UN Security Council sanctions against Iraq killed one million including 575,000 children, according to Unicef. The 2003 invasion has since created about a million more “excess deaths,” according to the British Medical Journal the Lancet and many other studies.
About 250,000 Filipinos died in the war of American invasion of 1899-1902.
大约250,000名菲律宾人在1899年至1902年的美国侵略战争中丧生。
Renowned economist Amartya Sen’s research concluded that about 100 million “extra deaths” resulted since the implementation of the “capitalist experiment” in India in 1947 up to 1979.
In September 2017, feeling the first twinges of labor, I walked beyond the ten-block radius my ob-gyn had prescribed me, defying her bed-rest orders for one reason: to tour day-care centers and get my unborn kid on as many wait lists as possible.2017年9月，感受到了第一批劳动力的痛苦，我走出了我的妇科医生给我规定的十寸半径，因为一个原因违抗了她的卧床休息命令：去日间护理中心，让我未出生的孩子出现在尽可能多的等待名单上。I knew I had to take the risk only because I’d worked for three years on youth and family programs at a high-quality New York nonprofit.
我知道我必须承担风险，这只是因为我在一个高质量的纽约非营利组织为青年和家庭项目工作了三年。
When I’d started in 2012, our preschool had a two-year wait list. By the time I left, the wait list had swelled to almost four years, which meant that most children who had been added to the list never got into the program. We had at least twenty applications for children in utero, and two for children who hadn’t yet been conceived. Sometimes mothers mentioned to me that they’d miscarried, but would like to keep their application open, and did in fact conceive again before receiving an offer of admission. One baby died while on the list.
My program was unusual in that it featured a first-come/first-serve “need blind” admissions process and substantial tuition assistance to families who could prove that they needed it — but its $37,000 a year price tag was all too typical for American childcare.
For the Church, life begins at the moment of conception. For an American baby, life starts much sooner — the moment a parent (almost always a mother) begins to think about how and when she can afford to have a child, and who will care for the child when she returns to work, as the vast majority of parents must do. If she has been in the same job for a year and worked at least 1,250 hours for an employer who also happens to employ at least fifty people within a seventy-five-mile radius of her workplace, then she will be eligible for twelve weeks of unpaid time off and continuation of health benefits under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). She may be able to extend that slightly further with unused sick time — assuming she has any.
FMLA is an accommodating piece of legislation passed during the labor-punishing Clinton era, which applies to a little over half of US workers. It was the Democrats’ polite throat-clearing sigh, a gentle nudge in the general direction of our bosses, asking “Please sir, can I have my job back after taking care of my dying daughter?” when working families needed a paid family leave program comparable to the rest of the world’s, and a universal, federally funded childcare program. Since 1985, the majority of mothers of preschool children have participated in the workforce, and in the thirty years since, unprecedented growth in wealth inequality has transformed an urgent need into a moral and economic crisis. Now, as Baby Boomers age and a smaller percentage of the population has young children, there are fewer adult advocates for their needs.
There is no reason we can’t have nationally subsidized, paid parental leave and childcaretoday. At present, public spending on early childhood education and care in the United States represents less than 0.5 percent of GDP, less than any OECD country besides Croatia, Latvia, and Turkey.我们没有理由今天不能享受全国性的补贴，带薪育儿假和儿童照料服务。目前，美国的儿童早期教育和护理方面的公共支出不到GDP的0.5％，低于除了克罗地亚，拉脱维亚和土耳其以外的任何OCED国家。
At the time of its bipartisan passage in 1993, the Chamber of Commerce warned that FMLA set a “dangerous precedent,” and John Boehner muttered something about “the light of freedom growing dimmer,” but twenty-five years later, a vast majority of employers report that complying with FMLA is easy and has had a positive or neutral effect on their workplaces. It is the sole non-means-tested federal provision for American families in the first few weeks of their children’s lives. Still, the burden is on parents to obtain doctor’s notes and coordinate it — and even it can hardly be called universal.
Employers approve, but how has it turned out for families? Many of those who are eligible can’t actually afford to take it. A full quarter of American mothers return to work less than two weeks after giving birth. Marissa Mayer aside, those who return soonest are most likely to be working class. Mothers who do not have housekeepers or nannies are constrained in their parenting choices, such as whether and how to breastfeed, and are more susceptible to depression.
One factory worker described breaking down in tears of exhaustion while pumping in a parking lot after a twelve-hour shift. The cheerful slogan “breast is best” is more likely to produce heart pangs than an eye-roll in the 88 percent of women who have no paid time off.
Nurri Latef, an early childhood teacher who I spoke to about her experience returning to school when her son was two months old, says, “I hated it. I felt like I was leaving my child at such a critical bonding time for the two of us, and he was premature. He spent a month in the hospital, so … I was only at home for one month with Nasir before I had to jump back into toddler-teacher mode so I could keep a roof over our heads.” No parent in any job should have to feel this way, but there’s a unique cruelty to forcing women to leave their own children before they feel ready to take care of other people’s children.
Meanwhile, Apple and Google employees get eighteen weeks of paid leave and backup or on-site day care. Googlers are awarded $500 cash referred to as “Baby Bonding Bucks.” Of course, not every worker shares in the benefits even at these seemingly enlightened firms: tech companies often outsource security, food service, and janitorial work by hiring private contractors, who are not eligible. Overall, about a third of American workers in management and other professional jobs have paid parental leave, while just over 5 percent in service occupations do.
Here’s how Julia Roitfeld, the daughter of the editor of French Vogue, describes impending motherhood: “It was like a detox — I ate healthy, I slept a lot, and I didn’t drink. All of my hormones were at the perfect levels. I was super-happy, and I really didn’t give a shit about work. Usually I’m so on top of work, but I was in a little cloud. But in August I thought, ‘Okay, I need to go back to work and start making a living again.’”
How long can a parent stay in that “little cloud” and “not give a shit” about the cost of diapers, formula, and rent? That depends both on one’s class and nationality. Brazilian mothers get seventeen weeks of leave to take care of their little ones at their full salary; Canadian parental leave was recently extended from one year to eighteen months at about 55 percent pay; Russia offers mothers twenty-four weeks paid. I could go on. The United States, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho are the only countries in the world that don’t guarantee all workers paid time off to care for a new child — here, parental leave is a luxury reserved for the rich.
At the same time we thrust new parents back into the labor market, we also insist that they comparison shop for childcare in a country with no national standards for quality, accessibility or safety. Nearly 11 million children, including over half of children below the age of one, spend an average of twenty-seven hours a week in some kind of childcare setting, yet the burden is on individual parents to assess the risks and benefits of a confusing, unaccountable, generally private system pieced together state by state for the care of our littlest and most vulnerable children. In essence, giving birth or adopting a child in America means you also take on the job of government regulator. It’s an impossible task, with occasionally tragic consequences.
In 2013, a day-care worker in Mississippi handed a ten-week-old baby boy over to his father at pickup time without noticing that the child’s skin was blue and he was unresponsive. The father directed the staff to call 911 while he performed CPR — none of the staff knew how — and his son was finally rushed to the emergency room, where he died. After an investigation, the state concluded that the childcare center met all legal requirements for operation. It remains open.
In 2014, Kellie Rynn Martin suffocated at the age of three months in a day-care center run out of a middle-class suburban home in South Carolina, where her mother suspects she was put to sleep in a bassinet with a blanket or even another infant. When forensics searched the house, they found fourteen children playing “the quiet game” in the eighty-five-degree basement under the supervision of the owner’s daughter. In an interview, Martin’s mother stressed that the day-care owner’s home had appeared clean and the owner appeared competent when she toured the program only a few weeks earlier.
On March 22, 2016, three infants died in three different unlicensed and illegally operating day-care programs in Connecticut, one from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), another from an overdose of Benadryl, and the third from a blunt injury to the head. One of the providers had had her license revoked by the state the previous year for failure to comply with safety regulations — and yet continued to operate her center. The Connecticut assistant child advocate Faith Vos Winkel blamed parents, telling the Hartford Courant that they have ample opportunities to find licensed providers through the Office of Early Childhood’s website and the 211 Infoline.
2016年3月22日，三个婴儿在康涅狄格州的三个不同的无证和非法经营的日托项目中死亡，一个是因为婴儿猝死综合症（SIDS），另一个是因为被使用了过量的镇静剂，第三个是因为头部的钝伤。其中一家供应商因前一年因未遵守安全规定而被政府吊销许可证—但仍继续经营其中心。 康涅狄格州助理儿童权利倡导者Faith Vos Winkel指责家长，告诉Hartford Courant他们有充分的机会通过早期儿童办公室的网站和211 Infoline找到有执照的提供者。（明明是政府失职，由着奸商无证经营，却指责家长？那么是不是买到假货了也是因为消费者没有自带质检实验室？）
The death rate of children enrolled in home-based day care — which is far more likely to be unlicensed than a center-based program — is twelve times that of center-based care. But home-based and unlicensed childcare is simply more plentiful and affordable. Licensed childcare centers are either geographically or financially out of reach for the majority of families.
Nearly half of American children under five live in areas where the demand for openings in childcare centers surpasses availability. (Spots for infants and toddlers in childcare centers are even more limited than those for three-to-four year olds, since the low teacher-to-child ratio necessary to ensure safety also make them difficult to profit from.) Where licensed, high-quality care is available, individual families shoulder most of the cost — and it is often prohibitively expensive.
Nationally, the average cost of tuition at a childcare center is over $10,000 per year — nearly 20 percent of the median household income. In the majority of states, childcare costs more than college tuition. Because it is largely private, our system is deeply inefficient, placing parents in competition against each other for coveted spots, instead of allowing them to negotiate prices collectively. Families in the United States spend 25.6 percent of their income on childcare, compared to an OEDC average of 13 percent, while getting significantly lower quality care.
Further, the grossly inadequate twelve weeks of job protection offered by FMLA means that many American children start day care at the exact time that the risk of dying from SIDS is highest: two to three months of age. Experts theorize that the reason why day-care deaths often happen in the first week or so that a child attends a new program is because children whose parents practice safe sleep practices at home are especially susceptible to SIDS when they are moved to unsafe sleep environments.
Derek Dodd relied on the recommendation of a friend when looking for childcare for his eleven-week-old son. But despite having been cited by the Department of Health just ten days earlier for unsafe sleep practices, the home-based provider “put our child in an unbuckled car seat on the floor, swaddled, where he wiggled down until he lost his airway and suffocated to death.” The baby was left unmonitored for two hours behind a closet door before the provider checked on him and found him blue.
Amber Scorah, whose son died on his first day in an unlicensed program in New York City, writes, “It’s possible that even in a different system, Karl still might not have lived a day longer; but had he been with me, where I wanted him, I wouldn’t be sitting here, living with the nearly incapacitating anguish of a question that has no answer.” Neither family wanted their child to be in day care so young — both were refused additional unpaid leave by their employers, and could not afford to quit.
Simply put, the deaths of these children must be counted as casualties of capitalism, an economic system which prioritizes profit over human life, especially those who do not yet add tangible value to the societies in which they live.
It’s easy to imagine negligent and abusive providers as monsters, but childcare is an exceptionally difficult job, demanding patience, creativity, compassion, self-control, and sometimes, selflessness. To consistently provide safe, quality care requires serious social investment in the well-being of children. For the most part, childcare workers and day-care directors devote an extraordinary amount of time and energy to filling in the immense gaps left by lack of federal guidance, funding, and support. The first year I worked as a teacher, I subsisted entirely on Red Bull and smoked-turkey slices I kept in my purse, so I could use the twenty-five minutes students were given for lunch to talk to them about things other than “content.” I do not know a single teacher who hasn’t routinely given up lunch breaks or taken work home to do into the wee hours of the morning, after putting their own kids to bed.
It’s a hell of a lot to demand of people making $20,320 a year, the national median wage for early childhood teachers, which is below the poverty threshold for a family of four. These working-class women and men are increasingly being required to pay thousands of dollars out of their own pockets for college classes and state exams, while receiving wages far lower than the value they are providing — and lower than those of teachers who work with older kids. In essence, we are subsidizing our current system of early childhood education on their backs. It’s unfair, and it leads to high turnover — which can be dangerous. It’s also inefficient: there is a strong and well-documented relationship between higher teacher salaries and higher childcare program quality.
Yet all human beings are fallible, which is why we need consistent federal regulations in place for the protection of both children and the day-care workers who care for them. Systems like those used effectively in the community-based early childcare center I ran are critical to ensure that no child experiences the tragic negligence endured by Dodd’s son.
Our infant/toddler classroom consisted of ten children cared for by four teachers, who supported each other and kept each other responsible with extraordinary grace and effort in a demanding job. Every single teacher was trained annually in CPR and safe sleep practices, even though it meant closing the school for a couple days a year. We hired two substitute teachers who showed up every day to enable us to meet the child/teacher ratios suggested by experts, even when teachers were out sick. The presence of a program director and assistant director — as well as regular unannounced visits from the state — ensured that teachers followed guidelines at all times. Infant/toddler teachers kept a log (as required by New York state law) in which teachers initialed that they had checked on a baby in its sleep every fifteen minutes. The inspectors always examined the logs when they came to visit.
Unfortunately — and contrary to the suggestion of Connecticut’s assistant child advocate — even regulated childcare in America is not uniformly high quality. In a recent report on childcare quality and oversight of regulated centers compiled by the advocacy organization Child Care Aware of America, not one state earned an “A.” The only program to earn a “B” was the Department of Defense’s, which is run by the federal government. Ten, including New York, earned a “C,” twenty-one states earned a “D,” and nineteen failed.
不幸的是—与康涅狄格州助理儿童倡导者的建议相反—即使在美国受到监管的儿童照料服务也不是一贯的高质量。在最近由倡导组织Child Care Aware of America编制的关于儿童照料质量和监管中心的监督质量的报告中，没有一个州获得“A”。唯一获得“B”的项目是国防部的，该项目由联邦政府运作。包括纽约在内的十个州获得了“C”，二十一个州获得了“D”，十九个州失败了。
It was a simple survey: the organization used fifteen basic benchmarks representing research-backed criteria. It revealed that only thirty-one states plus the dod require a fingerprint check for childcare center staff, and just twenty-three require a check of the sex-offender registry. Thirty states plus the dod inspect centers two or more times per year, but nine states do not require any type of annual inspection. Only sixteen states addressed each of ten basic health and safety requirements recommended by pediatric experts in their licensing requirements. Just thirty-nine states in the wealthiest country in the world even have a program that rates the quality of day-care centers.
No wonder day care has a bad name in this country. But why do we fault the idea itself, rather than the well-documented failures in executing it?
难怪日托在这个国家有一个坏名声。 但是，为什么我们责怪这个想法本身，而不是在执行它时有效记录失败？
When a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study found a link between long hours in day care and behavioral problems, some headlines crowed with perverse joy, “Sorry Working Moms, Daycare is Bad For Your Kid.” The New York Times took a more concerned tone (“Poor Behavior is Linked to Time in Daycare”), and then there was the gleeful, literary, “A generation of ‘little savages’ raised in nurseries as daycare is linked to aggression in toddlers.”
What few reporters stopped to mention was that the quality of childcare is an essential piece of the puzzle. It was children in low-quality care who experienced behavioral problems later in life — and even those problems seemed to disappear over time. In fact, by middle school, researchers were able to detect little difference between kids who went to day care and those who didn’t. Not a single one wrote about the fact that the percentage of childcare-center classes observed by the NICHD meeting guidelines for adult-to-child ratio was 36 percent for children aged six months, 20 percent for children aged 1.5 years, and 26 percent for children aged 2 years.
More significantly, and equally underreported: family characteristics such as income and access to “emotionally supportive and cognitively rich” environments where “mothers experienced little psychological distress” — in other words, social class — were far more predictive of developmental outcomes than who cared for a child and for how long. And of course, no one questioned the long hours parents put in at work, which necessitated those long hours logged by kids at day-care centers in the first place.
Well, not exactly no one. The Norwegians were on it. In a study of 75,000 children, researchers from the United States and Norway not only found zero link between childcare and behavioral problems, but noticed that when they examined their sample using the same methods as the NICHD researchers, their own results were skewed as well. “Norway takes a very different approach to childcare than we do in the United States and that may play a role in our findings,” one of the report’s authors delicately noted.
Children are legally entitled to early childhood care in Norway, like most advanced capitalist countries. Where childcare programs are seen as a universal right, austerity measures cannot erode them into oblivion as has happened with the means-tested Head Start program in the United States.
Congress doesn’t hesitate to use the full power of the state to force fathers to pay child support. Child protective services commonly takes unsupervised children into custody and deems them “abandoned” — which happened recently to a South Carolina mother who could not afford the cost of summer camp and left her nine-year-old daughter to play in a park while she worked at a local McDonald’s. (The mother was jailed.) Already this year, a Chicago mother has been arrested for allowing her children to walk to the Dollar Store alone while she was at work — as well as for allowing her family to live in “deplorable conditions.” In other words, for being poor.
Meanwhile, the federal government owes practically nothing to children younger than five or any child outside of the school year. The result of this system is clear: young children in America are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group.
In contrast to Europe, where unions agitated for and won comprehensive, federally subsidized social programs, the weakness of unions in the United States meant that the only social programs on offer here were those offered by bourgeois nongovernmental institutions. Instead of solidarity, the poor got sympathy; progressives were more concerned about vagrants running wild in the streets than they were about the suffering kids experienced as laborers in factories.
The plight of mothers whose children were taken from them in Chicago and South Carolina is an echo from a time when “child savers” rounded up children off the streets and forcibly sent them away to labor on western farms on “orphan trains,” whether or not they already had homes. In the nineteenth century, poverty was viewed as a contagious disease, and being poor was justification for having your children taken from you.
This viewpoint began to shift in the 1970s when Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have provided federally funded, universal childcare and education. But conservatives echoed Progressive-era private charitable organizations in their objections: Nixon vetoed the bill, coming down on the side of “the family-centered approach” rather than committing “the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches.” Nixon continued the conservative viewpoint of earlier reformers like Lydia Maria Child, sentimentalizing mothers, while denying them economic support.
这种观点在1970s开始转变，当时国会通过了“综合儿童发展法案”，该法案将提供联邦政府资助的普世儿童照料和教育。 但是，保守派反对进步时代，主张私人慈善组织：尼克松否决了该法案，采取了“以家庭为中心的方法”，而不是将“国民政府的巨大道德权威置于公众的一边。 “尼克松继续比如Lydia Maria Child这样的早期改革者的保守观点，对母亲情感化，同时拒绝对她们提供经济支持。
In the famous “kitchen table” debate, in which he debated Khrushchev while they toured a model American suburban home, Nixon points to a dishwasher, “built in thousands of units” because, “In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev shuts down this line of thinking with a simple, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism.… We build firmly, we build for our children and grandchildren.” Actually, that’s the point, Nixon responds: consumption drives the economy. But, says Khrushchev, “In Russia, all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing. In America, if you don’t have a dollar, you have a right to choose between sleeping in a house or on the pavement.”
Most women took on work outside the home in the 1970s not because their values had changed, but because it became economically necessary to do so. But mainstream feminists did little to challenge the idea that having children is an individual choice, which must be paid for individually. In contrast to Europe, where women’s emancipation was spearheaded by workers, many liberal American second-wavers ignored or were openly hostile to mothers. Little urban zines called them “oppressors”; others viewed them as retrograde traditionalists or bad role models for their kids.
Wages for Housework, an international campaign which was far more grounded in economic demands and challenging the family wage than say, Ms. magazine, brought visibility to cooking, cleaning, and caring for children as labor and sparked debate. But it failed to successfully transform itself into a broad working-class movement. Mainstream Americans were never forced to reckon with the fundamental reason women are devalued and discriminated against in the public workplace, or stuck at home: we are the presumed primary caregivers of children. Whether we plan on having children or not, until we live in a country with adequate social provisions, we will walk into any job interview with the weight of the expectation that we will one day become less productive workers or leave the workforce altogether.
Some American feminists even shared Nixon’s predilection for constructing private solutions to collective problems. They may not have been moving to suburban houses and stroking their dishwashers fondly while thanking the free market, but they did retreat into private enclaves, founding parent cooperatives on college campuses with volunteer schedules that were doable for artists and the self-employed, but not for the vast majority of parents with full-time work schedules. While these programs may have been personally necessary, they were certainly not political — and access to them was limited by race and class.
Historian Christine Stansell quotes one woman whose son was enrolled in a feminist center: “one Black mother did join the group,” but left “because she didn’t feel at ease with the other mothers who seemed like hippies to her.” If, as Stansell writes, hostility towards motherhood was “a white woman’s sentiment,” obliviousness to the pressing need for subsidized day care was a rich woman’s privilege.
Recollecting that heady time, Ellen Willis writes in an essay about finding a nanny for her daughter, “as feminist activists we, along with the thousands of other young, childless women who dominated the movement, had of course understood that sexual equality required a new system of child-rearing, but the issue remained abstract, unconnected with our most urgent needs; as mothers in the political vacuum of the eighties, along with millions of working parents, we pursue our individual solutions as best we can. The political has devolved into the personal with a vengeance.”
Today, Americans are finally beginning to understand that our seemingly personal struggles in finding childcare are actually a political problem. Universal childcare is wildly popular among the entire electorate, regardless of political affiliation, and people are willing to pay for it. At least 70 percent of Americans favor using federal money to make sure high-quality preschool education programs are available for every child in America. Eighty-two percent say mothers and 69 percent say fathers should receive paid family leave upon the birth of a child.
It’s certainly feasible. We’ve done it before when it became necessary to prevent working-class revolt or to go to war. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) opened “emergency” nurseries in 1933 under the control of local and state agencies (and sometimes, the public school system) through the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. Their explicit function was to serve first as a jobs program for teachers, nutritionists, janitors, and nurses, and second, to educate children. The women who became teachers observed profound improvements in those they taught, such as the disappearance of a stutter in one child, as well as their own lives (“I never knew before that it was fun to work,” historian Barbara Beatty quotes one staff member exclaiming). Enrollment by race reflected the general population at the time, but because it was primarily working-class families who used them, the stigma of the schools as anti-poverty measures meant that most of them did not endure beyond the Depression, despite the best efforts of many.
When women flocked to factory jobs during World War II, the federal government approved funding for 3,102 childcare centers under the Lanham Act. These programs were even better than the centers, with teachers trying out various responsive pedagogical approaches, and administrators ensuring that teachers and families worked together to ensure the happiness and success of the children enrolled. They hoped the schools would serve as models for a free, public, universal early childhood education program that could continue after the war, but the government shuttered it when men returned from overseas and took back their jobs. Beatty records one government official justifying the closures: “To some it connotes an inability to care for one’s own; to some it has a vague incompatibility with the traditional idea of the American home; to others it has a taint of socialism.”
More recently, we have the example of the military’s childcare centers — consistently the highest-rated program in the United States — and the only non-means-tested program that is federally subsidized and regulated. In the 1980s, when a report found that Department of Defense centers were failing to meet safety codes, Congress took action, passing the Military Child Care Act, which raised teacher salaries and provided funding for increased training, subsidized tuition, and rigorous and quarterly inspections — assessing teacher qualifications and pedagogical approaches as well as health and safety.
A parent I spoke to with two children in a DOD childcare center told me that she initially chose the program based on its cost. Her family falls into the highest bracket of its sliding tuition scale and pays $600 per month per child, below the national average and far below the average for the area where she lives. She was also drawn to its reliable coverage: the program operates year-round, Monday-Friday, from 6 am to 6 pm, and is only closed on federal holidays — unheard of in the world of early childhood care. But above and beyond these practical benefits, she’s come to appreciate the experience, skill, and communicativeness of the teachers. They keep portfolios of her children’s work, and discuss developmental milestones they’ve reached in regular conferences. One teacher is so beloved by the children that they “erupt into joyful shouting” when she arrives to the classroom.
Teachers provide daily reports of children’s activities, which are developmentally appropriate and play-based, and the school has a nutritionist who coordinates meals with whole grains, vegetables, and healthy snacks like hummus.
If we can offer this high-quality, affordable program to military families, why can’t we offer it to all families? Aside from the benefits to her children’s well-being and her family’s finances, the parent notes:
It has drastically improved my mental health and marital health, which I didn’t foresee. I am no longer losing sleep or spending the same mental energy coordinating not just my own work schedule but my children’s care schedule also. I’m not constantly wondering whether I need to choose between my job and my family.
She also adds, if paid parental leave and universal childcare were available nationally, “I’d probably be pregnant with a third child.”
她还补充说，如果在全国范围内有带薪育儿假和全民托儿服务，“我可能会怀有第三个孩子。”
New York provides an interesting case study of what can happen to teachers’ working conditions — and children’s learning conditions — when early childhood programs are integrated into the public education system. Recently, the state-subsidized, free, universal pre-K system went from serving a tiny number of families, to being open to all families in New York. In the next few years, coverage will expand to include all of the city’s three year olds, rich or poor. Now, certified early childhood educators can share in the higher wages, benefits, and collective bargaining powers of unionized K-12 educators, which has led to an exodus from lower-paying private or nonprofit community centers to the public system. Program directors at lower-paying private schools have accused the Department of Education of “poaching” employees.
What if this happened on a national level? I asked Nurri if and how America’s early childcare could improve. “It will take some backbone,” she said. “We need to ask more questions and not be afraid to defend ourselves respectfully and professionally without fear of losing our jobs. The more educators become aware of how powerful we are, the more we can band together and fight for fair and equal wages, emergent curriculums, and make access to receiving certifications and degrees more accessible to employees. We need to feel like our work matters to people and makes a difference.”
Banding together is key. Recently, when parents at one NYC childcare center advocated for an increase in wages for their children’s teachers, the center warned them that tuition would rise — an obvious attempt to divide the interests of the parents and teachers once they united against management.
History reveals that paid parental leave and universal childcare will not be won on the basis of liberal appeals to fairness, equal opportunity for women, or demands for a more diverse elite — and that Sheryl Sandberg’s benefits do not trickle down to factory workers, garbage collectors, and the nannies and early childhood workers whose underpaid labor keeps our society running. Corporations may offer these benefits to attract highly educated and skilled workers, but they will not provide them for all workers at the expense of their bottom line. By definition, capitalism seeks to maximize profit, not the quality of life of workers.
But having a child is not just a personal choice — it’s a matter of reproducing the species. It is not an act of selfishness that one should pay for, but an act of optimism and investment in society. Until the United States can do what the rest of the world has done and commit its vast resources to child welfare, the ties that bind families together will be as tenuous as their employment status.
It doesn’t matter whether early childhood education would make the American economy stronger. What matters is that we need it. Parents need to know that their children are safe and happy while they’re at work, without spending a fortune. They deserve to enjoy their children, not lie awake at night worrying about how to afford them. And children deserve to spend their days in the company of peers, having fun, and discovering the world with the help of loving, well-compensated adults.
Some liberals try to justify the expense of childcare as a social program that will save us money down the line. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania notes on his website that early childhood education is “critical to our nation’s economic strength.” Invest in children today, exploit them as toothless workers with no collective bargaining tomorrow.
This is a mistake. Evidence abounds that redistribution is a far more effective way of reducing poverty and improving academic outcomes for children from low-income families than childhood education.
And when education is seen as compensatory — when it is directed at poor children and intended to make up for the inadequacies of a child’s background — it becomes a thing that we do to children, which must be quantified, rather than a lifelong process that they get to be part of. These types of programs teach children that they are beneficiaries, not citizens, and they have no place in a democracy.
I had written this up as a response to various online tallies of communism’s death count which were listed as a defense of capitalism. It’s from memory, jotted down, and so any quibbles or qualifications, even disagreements are welcome:
我写这些是为了回应关于共产主义死亡统计的各种在线记录，这些记录被列为资本主义的辩护材料之一。 它来自记忆，个人记录，所以任何狡辩或资格质疑，甚至不赞同都是受欢迎的：
A very partial list of deaths caused by capitalism. It’s more than ever in vogue to go to the “Black Book of Communism” and whip out ahistorical decontextualized statistics and body counts for “communism.” It’s not that I have any desire to defend Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot or others, but that in historical context we can’t come to the conclusion that the “antidote” to tyranny and death is capitalism, a system completely intertwined with those deaths and many many more.
一个非常局限的资本主义造成的死亡人数列表。 拿出“共产主义黑皮书”，并用脱离历史背景的统计数据指责“共产主义”，这比以往任何时候都更加流行。 并不是说我有任何想要为毛泽东，斯大林，波尔布特或其他人洗地的想法，但在历史背景下，我们无法得出这样的结论：对暴政和死亡的“治疗”是资本主义，这种制度与死亡完全交织在一起， 还有更多更多。
Just a very partial tip of the iceberg listing of some capitalist caused deaths. I’ll leave off the roughly 9 million people who die of hunger every year in the capitalist global system, an obviously failed system.
只是一些资本主义导致的死亡冰山上的一小部分。 资本主义全球系统中每年死于饥饿的大约有900万人，这显然是一个失败的系统。
First, neither Stalin’s Russia, nor Mao’s China were communist. If you define communism as workers control over production, abolition of wages as a tool of the owning class extracting the value of workers, abolition of classes, and of markets, obviously we haven’t seen a communist society yet, except in brief moments like Paris 1871, Spain 1936, and a few others. So your totals from State capitalist regimes are sad and horrifying but have little to do with communism. What we have in the Soviet Union for example was a state bureaucracy functioning as a ruling class, extracting value from labor of a working class inside a hideous totalitarian gulag/police state. That was state capitalism, and now Russia is just extreme western style capitalism with more open gangsterism and state control overlaid. The revolutionaries were successful in crushing the repressive monarchy of the Tsar, but the Bolsheviks then took over the revolution and ushered in a one party state capitalist regime with Stalin as the final symbol of defeat. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution was neither cultural nor a revolution and you can read Simon Leys, the foremost critic of Maoism to see that Mao ruthlessly crushed communist formations inside China as he attempted to industrialize the country to compete with capitalist powers.
首先，斯大林的俄国和毛泽东的中国都不是共产主义的。如果你把共产主义定义为工人控制生产，废除作为一种剥削阶级占有工人价值的工具的工资，废除阶级和市场，显然我们还没有看到过共产主义社会，除了在短暂的时刻之外，像是1871年的巴黎，1936年的西班牙，以及其他几个。所以你们的来自国家资本主义政权的死亡总数是令人悲伤的和可怕的，但与共产主义没关系。例如，我们在苏联所拥有的是一个作为统治阶级的国家官僚机构，从一个可怕的极权主义的古拉格/警察国家内占有工人阶级的劳动以获取价值。那就是国家资本主义，现在的俄罗斯只是极端的西方式资本主义，更加开放的黑帮主义和与政府控制权重叠。革命者成功地粉碎了沙皇的压制性的君主制，但布尔什维克随后控制了革命并带来了一个一党制的国家资本主义政权，斯大林是最后的失败象征。毛泽东的“文化大革命“既不是文化的也不是革命的，你可以阅读毛泽东最重要的批评家Simon Leys，看到毛泽东企图工业化整个国家用来与资本主义国家竞争，并因此无情地粉碎了中国的共产党组织。
There are other important totals to look at as well. Mike Davis has written about “Late Victorian Holocausts,” with the example of the British Raj killing 30 million Indians from the mid 19th century to 1900. This was due to the destruction of traditional systems of emergency distribution that existed under the Mughals. Production had been forced into mono-crops, and exported to ports for the world market via British built rail systems. The British ruling class saw the mass famine as “Darwinian winnowing” of a subhuman species.
还有其他重要的总数可供考虑。 Mike Davis写过关于“维多利亚晚期大屠杀”的文章，其中英国的殖民从19世纪中叶到1900年杀死了3000万印度人。这是由于穆加尔人之间存在的传统紧急分配系统的破坏。 生产被迫进入单作物的，并通过英国建造的铁路系统出口到世界市场的港口。 英国的统治阶级将大规模饥荒视为一种比人类低等的物种的“达尔文式颠簸”。
A bit earlier, the British capitalists had killed a million Irish in a potato famine, even though there was more than enough food being produced to feed them and millions more. It had to be shipped out to markets for profit though, so it was ok just to let them die.
更早一点，英国的资本家们在马铃薯饥荒中杀死了一百万爱尔兰人，尽管有足够的粮食生产来喂养他们以及数百万更多的人。它必须被运到市场以获取利润，所以让爱尔兰人死掉是可以的。
David Stannard and countless other historians put the Native American genocide at around 100 million. If we look at other scholars estimates of non-disease related deaths they go down to about 15 million in “democide”, mostly in Latin America a great center of capitalist encomienda production by the first major capitalist colonial power, Spain, and also Portugal.
David Stannard和无数其他历史学家将美洲原住民的种族灭绝数置于1亿左右。 如果我们看看其他学者对非疾病相关死亡的估计，他们的“民主灭绝”大约有1500万，其中大部分在拉丁美洲的是第一大资本主义殖民大国西班牙和葡萄牙的资本主义生产中心。
At least 2 million black slaves were killed directly in the Atlantic middle passage of the early emerging capitalist economy, but the devastation created inside Africa, as is well known, destabilized much of that continent down to the present day. Hard to calculate the suffering or body count there.
至少有200万黑人奴隶直接在早期新兴资本主义经济的大西洋中段被杀，但众所周知，对非洲内部造成的破坏使该大陆的大部分地区一直不稳定至今。 难以计算那里的痛苦或死亡数量。
Adam Hoschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost showed 10 million Congolese killed in his “Free State of Congo” to supply rubber to the west for bicycle tires.
Adam Hoschild的国王利奥波德的鬼魂在他的“刚果自由邦”中杀害了1000万刚果人，他们向西方供应用于自行车轮胎的橡胶。
World War 1, was as is not in dispute, a war between imperialist powers to control colonies, labor, resource, trade routes, etc. 41 million casualties and of those, 18 million were deaths. World War II, the continuation and settling of that war saw 70 to 85 million. World War 2 would never have happened were it not for the capitalist Great Depression which saw the rise of the previously disappearing Nazi Party in Germany, which started the war under Hitler, in a series of invasions that brought another total war with the reaction to the invasion of Poland. It was mostly between belligerent capitalist empires as was World War I. All of the empires had already racked up millions of corpses, and sadly, the fascists were not exceptional in that regard. But there’s no question that fascism is a defense of the capitalist state, and that it’s main enemy was “communism.” Fascists crushed workers unions and brought them under control of the party and capitalist state.
第一次世界大战，没有争议的，一场帝国主义列强控制殖民地，劳工，资源，贸易路线等之间的战争，造成了4100万人伤亡，其中1800万人死亡。 第二次世界大战，这场战争的持续和解决造成的伤亡达到了7000-8500万。 如果不是资本主义的大萧条造成了先前在德国消失的纳粹党的崛起，纳粹党在希特勒的控制下发动了战争，对波兰的入侵带来了另一场全面的战争，第二次世界大战根本就不会发生。它主要发生在好战的资本主义帝国之间，就像第一次世界大战。所有的帝国都已经占据了数百万的尸体，遗憾的是，法西斯在这方面并不是特例。 但毫无疑问，法西斯主义是对资本主义国家的捍卫，而它的主要敌人是“共产主义”。 法西斯主义者摧毁工人工会，并将他们置于党和资本主义国家的控制之下。
The US invasion of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, killed roughly 3 million, mostly from illegal secret bombings. The resulting destruction of civil society in Cambodia led directly to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Unless you think those things are somehow unrelated?
美国入侵越南，老挝和柬埔寨，造成约300万人死亡，其中大部分是非法的秘密轰炸。由此造成的对柬埔寨公民社会的破坏直接导致了红色高棉的崛起。 除非你认为那些事情在某种程度上是无关的？
The US led UN Security Council sanctions against Iraq killed one million including 575,000 children, according to Unicef. The 2003 invasion has since created about a million more “excess deaths,” according to the British Medical Journal the Lancet and many other studies.
据联合国儿童基金会称，美国领导的联合国安理会对伊拉克的制裁造成一百万人死亡，其中包括57.5万名儿童 根据英国医学杂志柳叶刀和其他许多研究，2003年的入侵已经造成了大约100万“额外的死亡”。
About 250,000 Filipinos died in the war of American invasion of 1899-1902.
大约250,000名菲律宾人在1899年至1902年的美国侵略战争中丧生。
Renowned economist Amartya Sen’s research concluded that about 100 million “extra deaths” resulted since the implementation of the “capitalist experiment” in India in 1947 up to 1979.
著名经济学家Amartya Sen的研究得出的结论是，自1947年至1979年在印度实施“资本主义实验”以来，已造成约1亿的“额外死亡”。
I’ll stop there.
我在这里停止。
https://libcom.org/blog/against-mirror-world-fascists-were-not-socialists-26082018