The Gulf Coast disaster and the Crisis of the U.S. State:

Oct. 9, 2005, presentation by members of the Editorial Group of CommunistCentury.com

Introduction Communistcentury.com

We gave a couple of presentations a couple of years ago, one on globalization and one on the Iraq war. After we did that we continued to have discussions and decided to create a web site where we would post the transcripts for general interest and also other documents on the same themes that we were interested in. We chose as the name of site communistcentury.com. We want to explain why we chose that name. We chose the epigram for the site 'The Twentieth Century was the century of Socialism. The Twenty-first Century is the century of the transition to Communism.'

Some of you may think that is counter-intuitive, but for us it represented an optimism about world developments and it was based not just on wishful thinking but on the conviction that the world revolutionary process is ongoing and in is fact accelerating. And that it is happening despite the ups and downs of the world communist movement and communist camp. It doesn't seem to us to be that much of stretch to think of the 21^st century as the century of communism. We see as our task to understand this revolutionary process better and to draw wider attention to it and thereby contribute to the development of a theory of revolution for the 21^st century. We have tried to make that distinct either from criticism of current reality or of visualization of an ideal future reality. Although we are not necessarily in conflict with those approaches, we have cut out this particular area we think we can make a contribution. That is really what communistcentury.com is all about. It is an ongoing project and it is not our personal property. In fact we hope and invite others to join in the work. We try to make it open and in a way people who have been involved in the discussions up to now are involved in this project. One of things we have done is to put the transcripts of our discussions on our web site, but hopefully people will be involved in more active ways and we invite it participation and contribution and criticism and so forth.

I want to introduce our discussion for today which is along the same theme of what I described i.e. to discuss the processes. Today's topic is the Gulf Coast disaster and the emerging crisis of the US state. There are two parts to the presentation. In the first we describe how this disaster reveals a growing crisis of the state, and in the second part we argue the assertion that it puts the question of power on the agenda.

The Gulf Coast Disaster

The drama of the aftermath of the hurricanes on the US gulf coast that we have watched in the national media since August 27^th has graphically illustrated to the people immediately affected as well as to the US people generally and has shown all the people of the world that the world's richest country, the one that consume 40% of the world's GDP and is able impose its will on other country by means of its mighty war machine and the one that has enormous growth in the last period, that country cannot save its own people from weeks of isolation starvation and months, if not years, of disease and homelessness. In a natural disaster that was predicted by experts of all varieties the people who hold power representing, of course, the capitalist class as a whole have completely failed to carry out their obligations to the people they supposedly serve i.e. the people as a whole which of course means the proletariat, which constitutes something like 95% of the population. US capital is apparently unable to act even in its own self-interest. Aside from saving human lives and preserving the safety of human survivors, and it is not like we are saying 'aside from that' that we want to brush that aside, but from the capitalist point of view US capital cannot even protect its own property.

The history of the failed levees is a very good example. The struggle to protect New Orleans from ravages of hurricanes goes back at least to Huey Long, the populist governor and senator from Louisiana, who before his assassination in 1935 lost the fight with Franklin Roosevelt to have government to develop a TVA-like project in the Mississippi delta. Because Roosevelt hated and feared Huey Long, that project didn't happen.

The journalist Greg Palast had this to say about Huey Long on September 2.

'There is nothing new under the Sun. In 1927 a hurricane swamped New Orleans. President Coolidge promised to rebuild the state. He didn't. Then as the waters rose a politician [Huey Long] said roughly, “ Screw this! They are lying. The president is lying. The rich fat cats that are drowning you will do it again and again and again. They lead you into imperialist wars for profit. They take away your schools and your homes, and your hope and when you complain they blame Blacks and Jews and immigrants. Then they push your kids under. I say kick'm in the ass and take your rightful share.” Huey Longs laid out a plan: a progressive income tax, real money for education, public works to rebuild Louisiana and America, and end to wars for empire and an end to financial oligarchy. The water receded, but the anger did not and Huey 'Kingfish' Long was elected Governor of Louisiana in 1928.'

He went on to put into practice some of his program and he called for sharing the wealth. This program of public works and jobs for all was so frightening to capital that they had to invent the New Deal, at least according to Greg Palast. Huey Long was the source of the New Deal and Greg Palast recommended Harry Williams' biography, Huey Long, written in the 1950's. And it is a fascinating book and wish I had the time to read the, more than, 700 pages. I recommended it to anyone who has time.

In 1965 Hurricane Betsy devastated New Orleans. Pictures from the time show eerily similar scenes of house in the 9^th Ward submerged up to their roofs. The levees were rebuilt ; they say higher, but apparently no stronger. Fast forward to 2003, when a series of articles in the Time-Picayune warned of the disaster waiting to happen.

US capital is not capable of protecting its own property and people. Contrast with a very recent event. In China in early August, 2005 more than 1.24 million people were evacuated to safety in east China's Zhejiang province as Typhoon Matsa entered the Chinese mainland. There are lots of reports on the internet, but not in the mainstream media. It was at the same level as Katrina, but fewer than 50 people died. Also contrast it to Holland, which is not a communist country. In 1954 North Sea storms swamped one third of the country. Many people died, and the leadership and the people decided to rebuild the dykes to withstand a 10 thousand year disaster and they did it and they have not had any damaging storm since then. We think this has to do with the character of capitalist development in Holland. The dyke system is the major condition for development in the country. Without the dykes system Holland would be a swampland along the north-west coast of Germany as it was 800-1000 years ago. The role of communist and socialist parties we have not researched this, but they must have had greater influence than here. That is because of the history of Europe in the 20^th century and its proximity to the Soviet Union. The conclusion is that you do not have to be a communist country to protect your people, but it helps. Another example, closer to home, of how the capitalist cannot protect the people is how in California the same situation applies to the levees that protect the agricultural land of Northern California. They are antiquated and will collapse in a major disaster, like an earthquake. Agricultural capital, one would think, would like to save its land, but they expect the state to deal with it and the state expects them to deal with it and so it goes on and on not being dealt.

Returning to the hurricanes, we saw and still see enormous chaos that the federal government was unable to respond to what was happening to people. People had to help themselves and some people had more resources to help themselves than others and some had none at all. That is why we saw the great disparity primarily a class disparity in the ways people were affected by the natural disaster. Then all the affected people start saying

' Why are we part of the U.S.? The government is unable to help us. Why are we part of the state of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi or Alabama?' The legitimacy of all governments especially the federal government is undermined. Local officials who are responsible for people's safety in the immediate sense – the sheriffs, mayors, police, city counselors, school officials – start to feel really betrayed. They want to do their jobs, but there are no plans for allocating personnel or materiel and not enough resources.

In an article entitled 'High Water' in the October 3, 3005 issue of the New Yorker its author and the magazine's editor, David Remnick, states: ' Although there were no looters now and very few residents' he got there after most people had gotten out ' the streets were still being patrolled in fantastic numbers by—and this is a random sampling—the New Orleans Police, New Orleans swat teams, the New York City Police Department, the Sacramento Fire Department, the Greenbelt, Maryland, police, private Blackwater security contractors, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the 82nd Airborne, National Guardsmen, San Diego lifeguards, Surf Zone Relief Operations, and, in yellow T-shirts, Scientology Disaster Response teams. The Scientologists pitched a tent outside Harrah's Casino with a sign reading ';Something Can Be Done About It' and offered massage 'assists' to the police. ' I also recommended this morning's New York Times magazine. Of course it is anecdotal stuff, but other descriptions of what people thought when they went home or tried to. This is fascinating from the point of view of someone whose house was on higher ground and not flooded.

Even when the capitalists or the political powers are really trying to do their best and it comes across, it is still not adequate. The governor of Texas and the mayor of Houston really looked good in the beginning. They welcomed people. They had everything in order. The got people into hotels or the Astrodome, and everything looked good. The opened two closed schools in Houston and they invited displaced teachers to help children get resettled. They seemed to be doing a pretty decent job, bbut then came Rita and tried to good job with that and orderly evacuation. We saw what happened - 100 mile traffic jam for 30 hours. The infrastructure was overwhelmed. For some very complex reason that are interesting but not germain to this discussion the decision was made to downgrade FEMA. It was allowed to become a patronage dumping ground, but FEMA's failure is a symptom of an underlying crisis, not the crisis itself. Another contributing factor that has been advanced is that the war in Iraq depleted the force of first responders, who could be called in, and much of their specialized equipment was overseas. While those two things are definitely true, again I think it more a symptom of the underlying crisis. The anarchy that we saw on TV mirrors the anarchy of the capitalist political and economic system. To use a different metaphor the anarchy in the gulf raises the curtain on the crisis of the capitalist state. People or media often speak of the crisis in health care or education or of other parts of the system that are supposed to serve people but are breaking down. These are not separate crises. It all the same crisis and it has started to go from objective to subjective. At least at the moment, we have a crisis of belief in the system. When we talk about anarchy and chaos, we are not talking about criminality. We are talking about the failure of different levels of government to respond to peoples needs in an emergency. Some have characterized this situation as a break down of the social contract. That is similar to what we have been saying, be we see it in terms of a political crisis of the state.

What has happened highlights how rigid and inflexible the US political system is. It is insane to have to complete paperwork in order to send materiel and national guard troops from one state to another. Is the crisis of a constitutional nature? Maybe. The events of the last month expose the contradiction that has existed throughout the whole history of the US between the central government and the states. It started with the tenth amendment versus the constitution. Very simply, the tenth amendment says whatever powers are not granted to the federal government go to the states or the people. Then we have had 200 years of discussion of what that means. A civil war was fought over it. Although the conflict has evolved over 200 years,, the contradiction is still there. Now we have question whether the Posse Comitatus act, passed in 1878 right after Reconstruction. Posse Comitatus means the force of the country. The common law meaning is that the sheriff can put together a posse to go after the bad guys, but in the act of 1878 it was intended specifically to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in the former Confederate state, so essentially put the nail in the coffin of Reconstruction. It prohibits units of the federal government and units of the National Guard that are under federal authority from acting in law enforcement capacity within the US, except when Congress says otherwise or the President waives it for domestic emergcencies.

During the course of the last 200 years the economy has changed greatly and the relationship between the federal government and the states has changed. As a result there has been a centralization of political life, because it has been necessary for capital to have that centralization. There is still very unequal relations between the states and that gets mediated by the federal government in a very unfair way. This is not a crisis in the sense that the system cannot function anymore, but during that last month a bright light has been shone on the situation. There is a maturing of an ongoing crisis- a jump in people's consciousness of the crisis. Things a probably going to settle down again as the powers that be settle them down, but how fast that happens and how many people are changed forever in their beliefs depend on the concious forces. How can we educate people? How can we deepen the subjective crisis?

There are a number of wrong and dangerous responses to the situation - dangerous because they lead away from conciousness of the underlying failure of the capitalist system. I want to mention some errors. One is that anger around the situation is diverted and directed solely at Bush. It is Bush's fault, so impeach Bush. That is the answer. That does not get at the heart of the matter. Another is that leading Democrats and McCain supporters could take advantage of the weakening of Bush's authority in this situation to expand troop levels in Iraq instead of accelerating the withdrawal of troops. That would be dangerous in a lot of obvious ways, but in addition escalating the war in Iraq is a diversion from what is really happening. Another possibility is that there is going to be another external terrorist attack, which would get this crisis off the front pages just as the hurricanes got the growing anti-war movement off the front page, in particular Cindy Sheehan and what she had done to raise peoples understanding about the war. Another danger is that the NGO's that are tasked with reconstruction will collapse under the weight of the task. They are not setup to take on the mission that really belongs to the federal government in this level of crisis. Of course, it is not in our interest to take on that role, but I am just trying to say what are kinds of things that are not helpful in educating people about what is really going on. It is clear that the crisis is going to continue. The capitalist solution may be to increase state taxes, reduce federal contribution to the state and thus excaserbate the inequality among the states. The crisis is going to go on. You know that whoever is tasked with reconstruction there will be all sorts of fights about where do we build, whether they rebuild, should it be at union wages, who gets to profit, etc.

The only productive response from a communist point of view is that a crisis of this magnitude put the question of power on the agenda. Communists care about which class has state power and in particular we are in favor of the working class taking power from the capitalist. We cannot shy away from the question of how that could possibly happen. Every crisis gives us another opportunity to talk about the question of power.

Question of Power

To review briefly, the two points we are discussing today are 1) the emerging political crisis i.e. the weakening of the hold on power of the ruling class and the exacerbation of contradictions within the political ruling class and within the state amongst various sectors of the state and capital and disagreement about how to handle their rule and 2) the question of power i.e. given an objective political crisis of the way the political class rules the state the question of power is put on the agenda whether or not the forces of revolution are ready, whether or not those of us who are for socialism have done the preparation work. We need to examine that side of the issue.

Briefly the US state has overreached itself. The war in Iraq was an overreach, an underestimation of the resistance and the anger of the people about the deprivation among broad sections of the people – not only in Iraq, but also in the gulf coast and other places. Significant sections of the people outside the Gulf disaster area have seen the level of depravation and disorganization, the failure of the state to respond in any kind of timely fashion e.g. Even today more than five weeks after Hurricane Katrina large areas do not have electricity, water, etc. That is also true in Iraq for different reasons. In Iraq the US-led war machine destroyed the infrastructure. Regardless of what our estimate of the Saddam Hussein regime, the idea of collective punishment of the Iraqi people for a reactionary government may be a manifestation of democracy in a certain way, but it is not something that reflects well on our society. These things have come together in a way that has undermined the confidence in the political authority of the state amongst broad sections of the people. There are other things that have come to the fore in the last several weeks that exacerbate the problem – the indictment of various White House staff, Tom Delay, the expose of the spy working in Vice President's office and the FBI, the jailing of a journalist for withholding the name of leaker from the White House. I am not arguing that it is good to maintain the secrets of CIA agents, or that journalist Judith Miller has integrity or should be hailed or anything like that. I am pointing these out to show that there is a broad arena of problems that the state and the political apparatus are facing and not dealing with well. These things lead to loss of confidence in the authority of the political structures. All of the minor things might not amount to much were it not for Katrina, because it has lifted a veil to reveal the weakness of the system. The inability of the system to deal with these problems is not because the owners of capital or the political class is necessary venal or mendacious. It is because the needs of capital in this period require a diminution of allocation of surplus to the state. The state itself in the US, the multi-layered character of the state are overweight, duplicative and cumbersome. The more advanced sectors of capital have come to this recognition. They have been trying to streamline the state. They want to get rid of elements of the state.

As they try to do that, after fifty years of building up the national security state and intelligence/industrial complex it is very difficult. You cannot have a whole bunch of laid off spies or soldiers running around. The example of Iraq shows what happens when you lay off an army. You end up with people who are trained to use weapons, who are able to disrupt the establishment of a stable political power. Part of the development of the homeland security apparatus was a way of corralling the intelligence/industrial complex and get hold of that, because it was getting out of line. In fact there is some possibility that elements of the US intelligence/industrial complex played a role, if only complicitly, in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I am not saying it was a conspiracy of US capital to attack itself as a pretext to go to war for oil. I am saying when you build up an enormous military and intelligence/industrial complex, it has created contradictions that were unforseen when they built it up. Of necessity there would be elements that might find it useful to allow an attack like that on the United States.

Back to the Gulf Coast disaster and its aftermath. It is clear that the effect of the loss of confidence of political power structure has been widespread. People all over the country have been having difficulty making sense of the events – the failures, the callousness, the corruption, the ineptness of the state. What is important is not that they think this is not what democracy is. It is what capitalism and democracy is. But is not what broad sections of the people think democracy and capitalism is. The fact that broad sections of the people are having difficulty making sense of this is why there is an opening and why power is on the agenda.

A couple of things one can point to that point a direction to the future. One, people's self-organization. There was widespread self-organization for survival and there continues to be. Spontaneously, in New Orleans even criminal gangs organized themselves to round up food supplies, ice, water, diapers and so on and bring them back to the communities that had been left to hang, and to police the neighborhoods. Not that criminal gangs are the model for the future, but the situation where the failure of the state is so significant that the spontaneous organization of the people includes criminal gangs that are, after all, armed become a self-appointed force for order, at least within small areas and done in a way that earns the respect of the citizenry. Their authority is not based on fear, but on the actual services. It was not just criminal gangs that did this, but also workers in small towns and fishing villages along the coast were doing the same thing. Those people have learned a permanent lesson, that they cannot rely on the state, and in the future they are going to be less willing to contribute to the state economically through taxes, etc.

Another example was the response of Wal-Mart - a vertically integrated international economic entity. It is so vast that it includes socialist China as part of its vertical organization. Wal-Mart stepped up to the plate as soon as the disaster hit - opened its stores to the people, gave food and clothing away, etc, and continued their vertically integrated operation. It is not that they simply emptied out their stores and said that's it. The vertical integration that is related to just-in-time production that Wal-Mart has adopted -this most advanced technology- continued to operate during the whole thing. They continued to get delivery of goods. They continued to have goods produced as goods went out the door, and so on. All of that continued to happen throughout this whole disaster and they did it without payment. There may have been people who paid, but that was not the operative principal. They continued to distribute the needed goods to the people based on need. Ironically, the communist principal was put into practice by one of the largest capitalist firms in the world, whose internal organization is based on the most advanced technology in the world. We thus have a situation in which Chinese socialism played a role in rescuing thousands of people in the gulf.

Those are two positive developments that can be built on for the future. Local officials around the country - city council members, mayors, police officers, firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc - all of whom are part of the state apparatus at a very basic local level are now worried about disasters in their own areas of the countries. They are also drawing lessons from this and are worried. State officials here in California are worried about this. The need of capital to streamline the state and reduce the amount of surplus value allocated to the state exacerbates the tensions between the various levels of the apparatus - the tension between the states and the center, the federal government, the tensions between the local governments and the center, between states and within the federal government. That is just the tensions within the apparatus. We have not mentioned the tension between the mass of people and the apparatus and its various parts. These tensions that have become clearer to people functioning within the apparatus is causing consternation among wide sectors of elected and appointed officials - anybody who takes seriously their political positions within society are extremely worried. That really opens things up, because it is right here in the center of the apparatus that it is possible to reach in and grab power. That is where the opportunity for power resides. Power is not going to come from the Left or from a Left-Center or the Left gaining hegemony in the trade union movement and activating it. All those things may be nice, some of those things may happen, but that is not where the question of power is finally going to be addressed. It is going to be finally addressed right in the center of society, right in the center of where power resides. The United States is probably the most organized society in the history of the world in terms of social organization and in terms of political organization. Most people in this society belong to some sort of organization. That does not mean they are revolutionaries. It just means that they belong to some kind of organization. That is very dissimilar to other periods of history and to other societies that have had proletarian-led revolutions. For instance, Russia a century ago had very little organization in society, so when the soviets sprang up in the process of the 1905 revolution that was led the priest, Father Gabon, Lenin saw that and said there is an example of self-organization of the people. That might be a form for state power in the future. This was a society that had no organization. We are society that has massive, if anything we have more organization than we need, both in terms of social and political organization. One could look at local governments as local soviets. Aside from the fact that it is a different class holding power, in terms of structures of society the local councils in the United States are not that different from local soviets in the USSR. The layers of apparatus above them are different, because in the Soviet Union the local councils elected the regional councils and the regional councils elected the Supreme Soviet. Here we have layers that are completely disconnected from each other and therefore can be more in conflict with each other. If we want to take power we have to use the contradictions that exist within these structures of the political apparatus.

There is only one reason for a communist party to exist and that is the question of power. The Communist Party is not needed to build trade unions. The workers will build trade unions and did before there was a CP, although it is true that in the 1930's the Party played the decisive role in building the CIO. That is a fact, but it is not the function of the CP to build trade unions, nor is its function to make sure that schools run smoothly, that people are eating lunch or whatever. It is not the function of the CP to make sure that capitalism runs smoothly. The reason for a communist party to exist is only one and that is the question of political power. Political power requires organization and this is the most organized country in the world.

The question of how do we relieve the bourgeoisie of their hold on power is what I want to address now. When I talk about the tensions between the various levels of the society there is an alternative to the national government. There are a number of alternatives to the national government that exist already in the society. They do not exist as centers of power at present. They only exist primarily as lobbying bodies, but some of them could be converted into centers of power. I am talking about the National Council of Local Governments, the National League of City and County Governments, national organizations of mayors, schools committees, state governments and so on.

Any number of those entities could be utilized as alternate power centers i.e. you strengthen one or another of those organizations create a dual power situation and eventually over time you move power to one of the national organizations, roughly the equivalent of the Supreme Soviet.

This country is the most democratic and most developed, most open capitalist country and the reaction of the political power to Katrina and Rita is actually the best that it can do. The problems that arose, the failures of the system to function are not a lack of democracy and not a failure of openness in the society. It is not a problem of under-development. This is not the same as the earthquake that hit Pakistan or the Tsunami, which hit underdeveloped countries that were not able to react. You can say that development will address some of those problems. Development may address some problems here too, but this is the most developed country in the world, and if its response is the best that it can do, it suggests that the solution cannot be found with more democracy, more openness, more development, but with a change of power. Those are the kind of ideas that need to be communicated to the broad sections of the population, who as I said before are confused and are having difficulty making sense of what happened.

As we mentioned earlier, there are dangers in turning this into an anti-Bush thing or anti-Republican and so on.

How do we relieve the bourgeoisie of power? We would like to put before you two possibilities. At the moment they are still speculations. We have not ourselves come to any conclusions on their validity. We invite input from you all today and not just today.

The first option is to take the country apart state by state. California could easily exist as an independent nation. If it were independent it would have the fifth largest economy in the world. With Oregon and Washington, which could easily come with California, it would be an even larger economy. The advantages for the states separating from the US include the elimination of federal tax. There would be increased state taxes, but not at the same level. California, Washington, Oregon, and some of the Northeastern states pay much more into the federal treasury than they get back in services from the federal government and we see that the federal government fails even in places where they get back more than they put in, namely the gulf coast states.

New England could also separate easily and operate as an independent political and economic entity. New England already gets much of its power form Quebec Hydro. There are no economic reasons for these parts of the country not to separate and they actually would be better off separating.

If that is the way thing do develop, we would suggest that they occur within the framework of NAFTA and that they also take place in a way that normal relations would continue with the remnant USA. It would be taking apart the US as a political entity, but not by declaring war on the rest of the population. Finally, as the USA broke apart in that way we would be in favor of the US eventually reuniting in a unitary socialist republic, perhaps on a continental or even hemispheric basis, depending on how things develop.

A second possibility is that we could move to strengthen the unitary state, the central power and get rid of the states, utilizing the organization of local governments as an alternative center of national or central power. That would resolve the antiquated political structures that are an obstacle to fuller economic and political integration in the US and get rid of problems that emanate from the Bill of Rights, particularly the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and the Posse Comitatus Act and things of that nature. With that I want to open the discussion.

Discussion

Speaker 1: I don't go for this. If you are describing a scenario for the dismantling of the US rather than a program it is a possibility, but I doubt if there would be any interest in the capitalist class to permit this, since there power in the world is based on the national state, even during globalization. It is a fiction that there is no longer an imperialism, a capitalism because of globalization. They project their power based on their relation to the national economy, even if they have got resources all over the world. Here is what I think is being bypassed in your presentation is that what is necessary for the tranfer of power is the intervention of the working class led by existing proven revolutionary parties deeply entrenched in the working class. That is not where we are at. The whole world left, including parts that I have been in are in disarray since the fall of the Soviet Union. Regardless of what attitude they had towards the Soviet Union, they argue whether China is capitalist. There is endless confusion. We need to rebuild a world communist movement and an International that is devoted to revolutionary ideas not conciliatory, peaceful coexistence ideas with imperialism. I want to end with a question. I heard the statement that the capitalist class can no longer afford to subsidize the government. Certainly it subsidises the military component of the government. What the retrenchment is on is all social services. The Commerce Department published figures that show that one percent of the population owns 90% of the wealth of the US. That is the greatest disparity of all human history. Before the French Revolution there was not such disparity. Why are they risking weakening the middle class that serves as their buffer? Is it because the labor bureacracy was ? of it and tied to Democratic Party has so weakened the working class that they do not fear it, that they do not think the working class can reorganize when only 8% is organized? And that portion is tied to the rear end of the Democratic Party, which is one of the parties of the capitalist class. I would like some deconfusion on this. Why are they taking such an enormous risk? It used to be that they had 50-60% of the wealth. Why is good for them to transfer all the wealth to the top 1%? Is that what they need for globalization?

Talking about the existing components of administrative policy, which are made up of millionaires and other high-income individual who are serving the top 1 %, how are you going to get them out of the hands of that middle class element, millionaires like congress, who serve the multi-billionaires? The capitalist class restabilized after WWI when there was titanic dislocation in Europe and after WWII. How did they do it? Did we play a role in allowing them to restabilize? It is not enough to know how bad they are, but what are we doing that plays into their hands?

Speaker 2: I miss from your analysis any class basis whatsoever. You do not talk about it. You mention it in one sentence, but there was no other discussion. This whole discussion of these bureacracies that as a matter of fact support the capitalist state are all of sudden going to become soviets. I never heard such pie in the sky from supposed communists, and I use that term advisedly. That is a fantastic kind of proposal that you would even put that out as something that is realistic. Again it ignores the class basis of what occurred in Katrina and what rules the country. To say that in some way we are the most highly organized state is ridiculous. The French call us capitalism 'sauvage' i.e. capitalism gone wild and certainly the countries of Europe with social democracy are much better organized, much more representative of the people than anything that exists in the US. You are divorcing yourselves from reality and putting forward proposals that have no possibility of answering the questions you are posing.

Speaker 3 I want to thank you for your theoretical efforts regardless of the criticisms. The current wealth distribution is extraordinary and does not serve the interests of the capitalist class. I think one the assumptions when we address questions like this is that the capitalist class is conscious and I have never believed that. I believe it is by its very nature is various individual constructs obsessed with accumulation. Consequently I do not think they get together and figure out what is in their class interest. I think they do what they perceive is necessary on an immediate basis. The major tactical problems the capitalist class has and one of the major strategic advantages we have is their absolute inability to think as a collective entity. When situations such as Speaker 1 pointed out emerge which are clearly both a) created by the capitalist class and b) not in the interest of the capitalist class it show the anarchy of their capacity to function. They function on a completely pragmatic basis, with a capital P. All you have to do is look at the business section. What do they think? This quarter, that quarter, the next quarter. How could you have an overarching sense of what is in your interests as a class, if cannot even think beyond three months? I think it is a kind of epistimological crisis within capital that has always existed. Their understanding of knowledge is so limited, so constricted that the cannot see an emerging crisis. I think his point about disempowering and collapsing the middle class, which has been a buffer, I dont think they care. I thinkwhat they care about is whether they are going to meet what is necessary for their stockholders when the quarterly report comes out at the end of October. I think the irrational nature of capital that gives rise to these things.

Speaker 4 I don't think the system has ever cared. They had no intention of providing for everybody. Any time we buy into the words they put out we are making a mistake, which everybody here understands. Whenever you have an analysis that refers to some obligation or promise that was unfulfilled, they never intended to do anything. With reference to the multitude of organizations in this country, many of them are churches. Many people have gone back to church to pray and found God through drugs. There is so much chaos in people's lives. Try driving and you will see many people who do not move when the light changes to green or dawdle along at 10 mpg. They are totally disoriented and if they have worked their eight hour day at a crappy job, they are even worse off. Perceiving how disoriented people are and the chaos that is are creating and the inability of these organizations to come. Even Global Exchange is advocating capitalism called ?. Well let's have this kind capitalism. That is what Kevin Danaher is advocating... I don't like us calling anarchy a bad thing. Anarchy is our ultimate objective.

Speaker 5 In terms of what you were saying about the capitalist structure it is a lot of independent wealthy people. It all has the same basic focus - to accumulate power and they have one commonality. They have wealth. It can translate into a political view of a joint struggle to increase our wealth. While they may not be meeting together to do that they all have that frame of mind, so it comes together in the class structure.

You were talking about the shift in political power, but I wonder if you take political power what happens to economic power. You cannot just strip the multi-millionaires of their wealth. How would you go about doing that without creating some kind of chaotic society.

A year ago I was on vacation in Florida when the first hurricane hit Florida, which was quite strong. Everybody was being told to evacuate Tampa. Everybody from Tampa went to Orlando, flooded the hotels there. The hurricane ended up hitting Orlando. We then tried to drive from Orlando to Tampa, but the road was so crowded that an 80 mile drive took 5 hours, which just goes to show they did not provide the people with the rght information. The authorities did not make provision to evacuate all the citizenry. Concerning your question of whether we should break up the United States or eliminate the all the states, I think that break will destroy what we have built up the last 200 year and dont think it is the right thing to do. I think if you eliminate the states and create a single state, they will just create other layers you need to go through just to have action taken, which was the problem during the hurricanes. Having all those layers creates a class structure in the government.

Speaker 6 I think that it is good that there is skepticism about what possibilities there are, but it is necessary to recognize that we are entering into a whole new situation in history. When we talk about an emerging crisis of the nation state in a developed capitalist country, that is something completely new. In previous crises of nation states like Russia and China and Cuba at the time of their revolutions they were relatively undeveloped capitalist states. Here we are talking about a highly developed state. One could argue that there is no emerging crisis. We need to talk about that some more. I would argue that the emerging crisis does not only relate to this particular development, which is a natural occurrence and which although predictable is a little bit contingent on chance and so on. You could argue whether it is passing or not passing. Internal development within capitalism cannot be ignored. For example, the question of global integation the US nation state is starting to be a barrier to that. Regarding hemispheric integation the US state is both a hammer to advance it and a barrier. There are a number of other developments that create the possibility of a revolutionary crisis i.e. that the rullng class cannot continue to rule in the old way. When one posits possibilities of existing entities changing their function, we have to be a little bit more open, because everything gets thrown in the air when you have a crisis. J may be wrong about these organizations of state and local governments, but things that seem like they do not count will suddenly become important. We also have to be open to the possibility of a deeper crisis in the state system and the possibility of radical proposals emerging not only coming from us but also from the ruling class. I do not think it true that people in ruling class in the business leading only think about the immediate bottom line. Some do, some don't, but there are sections that are thinking about it, feel they have to think about it. There are people who are appointed by them to think about it -what we call the political class. This a process that is going on -the military is thinking about it, academia. These are all part of the state apparatus - civil society, the capitalist apparatus. So I don't think we have to worry that they are not thinking about the crisis of the nation state. There are going to be developments, whatever we think. There are going to be efforts to resolve this developing crisis. At very minimum we need to need to think what proposals the ruling class is likely to make to resolve these crises so we don't get surprised.

Speaker 7 Following on that, a little political information. There has been a lot of publicity about inequality and polarization. The New York Times ran a series on class. Even the Wall Street Journal had a series on that. Probably the most interesting thing I have seen is a lecture by Robert Reich given at the Goldman School last spring and shown on C-Span. He gave a very good presentation on the statistics of inequality. He said this is like a rubber band stretching. It is either going come back together or snap. He is obviously very worried that it is going to snap. He has recently come out with a specific proposal in the Boston Globe where he suggested a new kind of social contract. What was striking about it was how little he was willing to offer. He was saying, for example, you have got to get people to accept economic innovation, so let's guarantee them health care with a kind of no-frills extension of Medicare. Then people, depending on their prosperity, can buy more insurance. That is the best he can offer. I would contrast that to the New Deal and the Huey Long stuff. FDR was able to coopt things that were coming from the Left, because capitalism still had the energy to accumulate and provide jobs and better wages. That does not seem to be the case today. They cannot deliver. They do not have anything. The accumulation process cannot procede anymore under capitalist relations, except by grinding people down more and more. When we talk about inequality we are talking about people getting poorer. The material outlook people have today is worse than in the fifties and trend has been going on for thirty years and it looks like it going to continue. There is nothing on the horizon that looks like it will turn that around – like the New Deal or World War II. The political crisis gets back to the economic underpinnings. You can point out to people that there is no more hope under this system.

Speaker 8 Lost in background noise. Disaster of Soviet Union. Children of the nomenklatura becoming billionaires. I for one would not recommend any working class person the fight for that.

Speaker 9. The basic question raised was how does change occur. There is no question that you are correct in saying that the situation has become more exposed. People are more conscious. But if change is going to occur it is most likely to occur in the Huey Long form or in the form of the populist in the 1890's i.e. the material condition will have become so bad that people will rise up in a sense and look for solutions. What those solutions will be is an open question. It can move towards barbarism or it can move to the Huey Long version. Of course, that is at the point when the Left, such as it is, has to offer solutions which will direct it in a certain way. Populist uprising is the most like scenario. That fits in with the history of the country. I we think about it that way, then we have to think about role in that kind of situation.

Speaker 10 Concerning the individualist behavior of profiteers, this is structural. Even if there are good guys sitting around deciding to give money to one thing or another, they are not really changing anything. They are perpetuating the system in way that will work for them. Marx said that the way things are structured you either take it all or somebody else will take it all. The ruling class does not need to organize. The system is already organized and it just keeps working the way it does. Concerning pushing our ideas forward, I like to think of it as an inclusive process – education from each other with great respect. People are afraid of socialism. They have learned that very well. The need for us to bring forward from people the desires for mutual care and the ability for that to happen is what we need to figure out linquistically. How do we say these things, tell people they are really sharp. How do we never talk to the working class and tell them that they don't know communism and understand? What is the most we want to have happen here on earth? I think that is the great challenge. Lets to talk to people who agree with us and see how we can develop ideas of strength, unity and so forth. Stop deriding ourselves for talking to people who agree with us.

Speaker 10 If we look at the actual question that this forum chose to address, which is the crisis of the state, the observation that were made were serious, but you cannot separate the crisis of the state from the crisis of accumulation. When you look at the incapacity of the capitalists to defend their own interests, it is a function of the inability of capital to accumulate adequately in this period. That is also married with the immediate political question of neo-conservatism. Neo-conservatism disparages the state and its function. One of the primary thrusts of that movement is tax cuts, starting with Reagan and revenue sharing. Those things – crisis of accumulation and neo-conservative hostility to state- have caused a particular strain on the state. Capital cannot take care of itself and also the state cannot take care of capital. It is a kind of a perfect storm where you have the confluence of an absurd ideological conception and the structural economic problem.

It is a dangerous assumption that just because the crisis of the state is more exposed does not automatically convert into consciousness, much less revolutionary consciousness. It converts into ?, chaos, despair, confusion. That is not say that it can't or won't or doesn't on some level. The capacity of the ruling class in the last several decades to manipulate the views and consciousness of the working class against their own interests is extraordinary. Thus the exposure is a political challenge

Editorial Board: We were not saying that there was revolutionary consciousness, because of what people saw on television. Conscious forces must help transform the mass consciousness into revolutionary consciousness. We are trying to look into the future and it is a likely scenario that there could be a populist upsurge. The point that Greg Palast was making in his piece on Huey Long was where is our Huey Long? He recommends the biography of Long by T Harry Williams, written in the 1950's. It is excellent book. Don't watch that stupid movie that was made about him, which reveals his demagoguery but does not get to the heart of his populism. Who could lead a new populist upsurge is another matter. How do and how did communists relate to populism? Long said it was fine with him to be called a communist. I am not sure the Party was fine with it. At the same time that the Party was doing some of its best work in the South.

Speaker 10 In the Katrina it did not seem that the power structure was prepared to send aid to the region until there was a threat of civil unrest. I heard that the mayor was relaying stories that were false in order to get the aid they needed. They had to exaggerate the stories of crime and civil unrest to get the aid that was necessary. Another thing, from the viewpoint of the capitalists it is going to bring new opportunities and one of the highest forms of accumulation is in construction. This is going to bring a whole lot of construction, especially for Cheney's old company – Halliburton.

Speaker 11 One possibility is that George Bush will become a populist leader. All the analysis indicates that could be true. Somewhere along the way we lost popular leaders. His line includes no abortion, no gay marriage, don't mess with me and I want my credit and my SUV. It is organized and the reason it is not an outside source of power is that .... red-neckism at least in appearance - the baseball caps, etc. It has suborned by the capitalist powers. The greatest threat today to ... in the United States is pretty much under control - it is the preachers, the red necks..... For the great mass of the American public [the problems in New Orleans] was all their fault, which is the purpose of the media to tell you that if you get into trouble it is your fault - not anybody else's.

Even when the people in power screw up, they have no fear. Today they have less fear than they have ever had. And it seems that despite the declining wages of the industrial workers with credit they are buying SUV's and houses even though they don't have a prayer of ever paying for it. They are living better, even without money. There is that creative aspect of capitalism. It has created a kind of massive Keynesian response to Katrina. Nothing better than a good fire or storm. Every hill billy in the country down there working on rebuilding. I don't know why people are so docile when they are being paid $6 per hour

Editorial Board: In relation to China 300 million peasants have been raised out of poverty in the last 15 years. They have been proletarianized, which is an advance socially and historically and materially. The form of production they were engaged in previously was insufficient to feed that population. There had to be a transformation and there continues to be a transformation of economic relations, particularly in rural China. The political question will take care of itself. The Communist Party is a very advanced, highly thoughtful and very conscious political organization, which will be able to guide that country through the revolutionizing of the means of production and of the relations of production and achieve great results very shortly in this century. In the next couple of decades it should be the most advanced country in the world and that will have an impact on the character of other countries. While many of the things that were said today were critical of things we said or supported them or were new, we are very happy about that. The contributions to the discussion were terrific and very helpful. I would like to encourage all of you to engage in a more active way with us in trying to develop a theoretical approach to the current political situation in this society and the world and to try and identify a path forward. That is to say a theory of revolution for this period and for the coming period. We can work out these different takes we have on some of these issues and come to some truth, to a realization of politics that can guide us forward.

There are tremendous dangers in the current situation. When the state is in the level of crisis that is in, there are tremendous dangers. The comrade who talked about the ideological tendencies of large [backward] sections of the population is right. We have had decades of people and the working class tied to the state and the bourgeoisie through ownership of homes, property, credit extension, capital, having higher paying jobs than other countries. The majority of people in society today own capital and that has to cause confusion about where your real identity or interests lie. What is important about what happened with the two hurricanes and the Iraq war and all these littler internal conflicts that are being exposed every day e.g. Harriet Mayer, is an opportunity to break the hold that the ruling class has held on the masses of people and that is why it is an opportunity for power. It is not that they are ready to take power this minute, it is an opportunity to break away sections of the masses from the power of the ruling class and break apart the political unity of the ruling class itself. There is an economic basis for breaking that unity that we have to utilize

To conclude I hope you will take up our offer for exchange either directly or over the Internet. We are a forum for theoretical discussion and production on the Internet. That is where we publish, and we will also try to have a transcript of this discussion posted on communistcentury.com