Can we make a better society, a more humane and fair world? Dave Eggers in his 2013 dystopian novel The Circle sees us headed in another direction. His book is a major best-seller and is hard to put down. Reading it with our friends could open some useful discussions with them. Maybe imagining with them how society might change, they would better understand why we disagree with that book’s take-away message. Why, as Nadine Gortimer said, “Communists are the last optimists.”
The plot of The Circle centers on a woman in her early 20s, but the main philosophical perspectives are provided by the three “Wise Men,” billionaire founders of the company where she works. The Circle is a cutting-edge and rapidly expanding corporation that is the center of a fascist digital empire. It’s basically what you would get if Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft melded into one company and controlled over 95 percent of everything on the Web.
Mae Holland lands a job there and thinks she’s in heaven. What’s not to like about a great salary and benefits, beautiful corporate campus, free cultural events and a steady stream of gifts and special perks? Well, a few things. We watch Mae as she’s molded and shaped, working faster and harder, striving mightily to fit in and excel in an environment where her every keystroke is monitored and her efficiency — and by inference her attitude — is constantly evaluated by her superiors.
Behind the iPhone-like glossy image of the company we discover three outlooks represented by the three business partners. Ty Gospodinov, the enigmatic and brilliant generator of an endless stream of ideas and solutions to problems, would probably consider himself apolitical, perhaps with anarchistic leanings.
Eamon Bailey, the main public face of the Circle, is a father figure to the thousands of 20-somethings that make up the workforce. He is the one who lays out the philosophy of the Circle in speeches to thousands of employees in the Great Hall each month on Dream Friday. Bailey presents utopian visions that all hinge on information management breakthroughs brought to you by the Circle.
The third partner is Tom Stenton, the venture capitalist. He is best likened to a creature he brings back from the Marinas Trench, a shark that devours everything placed in its tank with astonishing efficiency. What he lacks in creativity and salesmanship, he makes up for by his uncanny (and merciless) business sense.
Slave Away Cheerfully
The contrast between the unlimited freedom and community that form the Circle philosophy presented by Eamon Bailey and the social reality of this 21st century digital sweatshop is hard to miss. There is a steep hierarchy ranging from the Wise Men on top, through the Gang of 40, who get to decide which lucky start-ups (“plankton”) will get the honor of being swallowed by the whale that is the Circle. These 40 managers are, in turn, revered and feared by the next level of bosses.
At the bottom of the ladder are the Newbies who slave away cheerfully (a less than exuberant tone of voice could result in a costly loss of points, or their job) as more and more computer screens are added to their work stations and they learn of the latest metric the Circle has devised to monitor their output. They never consider risking their dream job by complaining. Jobs outside the Circle, even those landed by graduates of elite colleges like Mae, are scarce and un-cool. It’s awesome to be a Circler, even at the bottom of the food chain.
The Circle philosophy, as presented by Bailey, is more fully revealed when Mae’s career hits a crisis. Mae gets in trouble when she’s caught borrowing a kayak without permission (and not wearing a life vest!), an indiscretion that could cost her her job. Eamon Bailey uses this situation and Mae’s desperation about keeping her post to get her to agree that she should always tell “the community” — in effect, her employer — everything. To be a good Circler she should believe that “Secrets are Lies,” “Privacy is Theft” and that “Sharing is Caring.” She is to become the poster child for transparency and will be elevated into the upper ranks of the corporation.
Then Bailey lays out his vision of “closing the Circle.” When the Circle is closed there will be complete access for all people to all knowledge and information. This transparency will create perfect democracy, security and happiness. Of course this transparency does not include the plans being hatched by the Circle elite and other important “intellectual property,” but Mae, like most Circlers, is so caught up in the intoxicating dream woven by Bailey (not to mention all the free stuff) that this doesn’t occur to her.
The emotional climax of the novel is a series of events that result from Mae’s ever deeper surrender to the Circle’s vision and its untoward effects on her parents and old boyfriend, probably the main loves of her pre-Circle life. (You will have to read the book to see how those come out!)
The Anticommunist Kernel
The prevailing outlook in the world today, sadly, is that things are a mess and solutions are hard to imagine. When the nightmare nature of the utopia painted on Dream Fridays becomes clear, that pessimism is reinforced. Eggers’s dystopia is different, and is published in a vastly different political context, from the two most famous 20th century novels about scary futures, Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) and 1984 (George Orwell, 1949). Those cautionary tales were written at a time when socialism was a rising force in the world.
The most explicitly anti-communist of the two, 1984, was published when the Soviet Union was widely admired for having defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and when the Chinese Communist Party had just made a successful revolution and taken control of the most populous country in the world. Clearly, from the bosses’ perspective, an anti-communist cultural antidote to the popular image of socialism was needed. They didn’t want workers in the West to start getting ideas.
Eggers’s anti-communism is more subtle. It pushes the idea that human nature precludes the existence of any truly collective, non-exploitative society. To the extent that the evil turn of the Circle is seen as the work of Stenton, it could even be read as anti-capitalist. But its pessimistic outlook is more profound than fear of aggressive venture capitalists. The anti-communist kernel of The Circle is the idea that any situation where everyone’s efforts are aligned for the same purpose will inevitably have someone behind the scenes pulling strings for their own purposes. In The Circle it’s Stenton, the main investor who sets priorities. But he is enabled by Eamon Bailey, who preaches, and maybe even believes, a humanistic vision of enlightened corporate control of human society, i.e., fascism.
Revolutionary Optimism Based on History
Communists today still believe that a society based on collective effort to achieve common goals is both possible and good. This is not blind faith but an assessment of advances that revolutionaries actually achieved in the past. History is the basis of our optimism. Recent issues of Challenge carried a four-part series of articles describing the growth of a factory with over a hundred workers from what had been a four-worker scrap metal shop on a rural commune over a few years at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China.
The descriptions of life and work in that simple factory included dramatic increases in production and solving of difficult technical problems, but the hard work, long hours and creative energy was motivated by a shared desire to see the communal farm, the village and the society advance. No one got higher pay for their work, including those managing and leading the work. No one was in danger of losing their job if they didn’t meet production quotas, but somehow, everyone pitched in and got things done ahead of schedule. Although the farmers-turned-metalworkers in that Chinese village worked as frenetically as the Newbies in Eggers’s novel, their village and all its residents owned the factory which they had built by their collective effort. At least they did until the defeat of the Cultural Revolution.
Unfortunately, that little factory and the social relations that held it together were destroyed by the capitalist “reforms” introduced after 1976, a microcosm of China’s return to capitalism. The factory, built by farmers in a spirit of unselfish cooperation during the Cultural Revolution was handed over to one person as the new capitalist-style owner. Soon the social relationships changed to reflect the new ownership and a handful got rich while others struggled to survive. The sense of community was destroyed. This outcome was not inevitable, but it is what really happened.
A general awareness of the reversal of communist developments like that little factory, but on a massive scale, underlies much of today’s pessimism about the future. The Circle shows us a vision of capitalist social relations masquerading as “community” and creating a hellish work environment. The only alternatives presented to total surrender to exploitation by the company are very individualistic.
One lone shadowy character at Circle, Kalden, has a plan for sabotage. Outside the corporate campus confines, Mae’s former boyfriend, Mercer, and her parents, made miserable by the intrusiveness of the Circle into their lives, try to escape by living off the grid. But the notion that the general population — not to mention the slaving Newbies on campus — might rebel is never considered. The notion of collective action as a route to freedom from oppression, rather than as a mechanism of enslavement, is not even hinted at.
The feeling of hopelessness The Circle leaves us with is useful for today’s ruling classes. Without a vision of a new world worth working toward, we become passive in the face of injustice and exploitation. As communists, we need to find ways to help our friends and co-workers see the liberating power of collective action. More revolutionary culture to communicate this basically optimistic vision is sorely needed, but we shouldn’t expect those novels to end up on the New York Times best-seller list. Not until workers take over the New York Times! In the meantime, engaging our friends in speculation about the future, even using a dystopian novel as a jumping off place, can be a useful way to lay out the historical basis of our profound optimism about the future.
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U.S. Rulers’ Strategy: Workers’ Blood for Bosses’ Oil
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- 18 September 2014 158 hits
The U.S. bosses’ widening campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as ISIL or IS, represents their latest move to control Middle East oil and dominate their imperialist rivals in the heart of their global empire. Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism. The loss of the world’s most profitable reserves would devastate energy giants like ExxonMobil and send the U.S. into its worst depression in history (see box, page 2). The bosses will continue to defend their interests at all costs. Twenty-three years of invasions, bombings and sanctions have killed more than three million working-class Iraqis and tens of thousands more in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. For U.S. rulers, the most violent terrorists in the history of the world, eliminating ISIS terrorists would represent a drop in the bucket.
When Barack Obama said, “We don’t have a strategy yet” in the face of ISIS’s grab of oilfields and refineries in Iraq and Syria, he was lying. His capitalist handlers have had an explicit, petroleum-based, Middle East war strategy for decades. In his 1980 inaugural address, two months after profit-hungry Iranian rulers seized the vast assets of Exxon and other Western firms, President Jimmy Carter said: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
When U.S. presidents cite “vital American interests,” they hide the fact that these are the bosses’ interests, directly antagonistic to the needs of the international working class. Workers gain nothing from Exxon’s business. To the contrary, we are the ones who die in imperialist wars to protect the oil companies’ profits. This vicious cycle will end only when the bosses’ capitalist system is smashed by communist revolution and replaced with a society run by and for workers, who create everything of value. That’s the goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party.
Obama Wedded to Oil War Doctrine
Obama’s anti-ISIS policy, outlined in his speech on September 10, is an extension of the Carter Doctrine and the pledge by President Franklin Roosevelt to Saudi Arabia during World War II: that the U.S. would defend the region’s oilfields at all costs. The same strategy triggered the Gulf War in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush. It drove the sanctions under President Bill Clinton that strangled Iraq from 1993 to 2001. It set off President George W. Bush’s “shock and awe” invasion of 2003 and the eight-year Iraq War that followed. Obama is as tightly tied to this strategy as the Republicans and Democrats before him.
The president’s plan for now is to attack ISIS through air strikes and major ground deployments by regional allies. But since this approach will inevitably fail, the U.S. rulers’ growing hydrocarbon rivalry with China promises a deeper, wider and deadlier Middle East conflict (“NATO Foresees Three Years of War in Iraq,” Le Canard Enchaine, 9/10/14). On September 16, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said he might recommend “the use of U.S. military ground forces” in Iraq.
It’s not just Iraqi oil that’s at stake. Given ISIS’s expansionist program, the U.S. bosses have to worry about the longtime linchpin to their Big Oil world order: Saudi Arabia.
Racism: U.S. Bosses’ Dilemma
ExxonMobil and the finance capitalists who own it are openly steering U.S. policy on ISIS. Their problem is that Obama, hindered by a fractured Congress and a war-weary public, can’t provide the billionaires all the firepower they want. Meanwhile, the rulers’ racist attacks on black and Latin youth — a key part of their effort to divide and pacify the working class — pose a dilemma for them. The same young people murdered by cops in U.S. cities and apartheid towns like Ferguson, Missouri, the same ones who are imprisoned by the millions by the racist criminal justice system, are also the bosses’ leading source of cannon fodder for their perpetual imperialist wars. By alienating these youth, the capitalists undermine their case for their needed military draft. Alienated workers also contribute to the unreliability of the present U.S. military, which will once again be counted on to shore up U.S. control of the Middle East.
Obama Gets His Marching Orders
Two days before his ISIS speech, Obama hosted a White House dinner for a handful of former top-level war planners to hear “their views on a range of national security and foreign policy issues” (New York Times, 9/9/14).
The mass-murdering guest list united Democrats and Republicans. All had tight connections to Exxon itself or its founding Rockefeller family, which bankrolls hundreds of “philanthropies” to advance U.S. imperialism. In sum, the group represented U.S. capitalists’ “central committee,” the tight circle that gives Obama his orders. They included:
• Stephen Hadley, national security advisor for George W. Bush. He helped lead the deadly 2007 troop surge in Iraq and now works directly for Exxon;
• Condoleezza Rice, another Bush national security advisor, also hired by Exxon. According to Iraq Oil Report (2/8/13): “Rice and Hadley have been consulting Exxon on Iraq and on the broader region as well since at least 2011”;
• Richard Haass, the Director of Policy Planning under the Bush State Department, helped prepare the 2003 Iraq invasion. Haass currently heads the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the finance capital think tank that counts Exxon as a “founding member”;
• Samuel R. Berger, who advised Clinton to bomb Bosnia and Kosovo and sits on the boards of imperialist foundations like the Rockefeller- and Soros-funded International Crisis Group;
• Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution policy factory, which lists the ExxonMobil Foundation as a top donor;
• Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and the author of the Carter Doctrine. Together, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller founded the Trilateral Commission, which seeks to unite pro-U.S. forces from North America, Europe, and Asia in a potential World War III alliance.
Obama’s ISIS manifesto, in which he compared the new fight to U.S. air campaigns in Yemen and Somalia, failed to satisfy this oil-driven oligarchy. Kenneth Pollack, a Brookings scholar, suggested that Obama “should have reminded the American people that this is ultimately about oil and our economy....we need to acknowledge that that is where our ultimate interest in the Arab states lies” (Brookings website, 9/11/14).
Haass, meanwhile, wrote that the capitalist bosses “need to set a scale of effort on our part far larger than anything that is being undertaken or contemplated in Yemen or Somalia.” As Haass lamented, “What air power cannot do is take and hold territory. You need a ground component, and we are not in a position to provide that” (CFR, 9/11/14).
Building PLP Under Rising Fascism
Aggravating the bosses’ problems is the need for more military funding for their relentless oil wars. This can come only from intensified exploitation of the U.S. working class, from higher taxes to cutbacks in wages and social services. Workers will suffer greatly from these attacks. From Ferguson to France to Palestine, workers will also respond as they always have in the face of capitalist oppression: with greater opposition and fightback (see pages 4, 5, 6).
Despite Obama’s caution and their reluctant and inept regional allies, U.S. capitalists cannot walk away from the Middle East. They will do what they feel they must to sustain their brutal system of exploitation. Expect more workers’ blood to be spent for bosses’ oil. But as Karl Marx declared, capitalism generates the seeds of its own destruction by creating a working class. The job of Progressive Labor Party is to lead that class to communist revolution and to end imperialist war for all time.
Newark, August 20 — A multiracial group of 250 workers, students, community activists and others, marched today to condemn the racist cop murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Abdul Kamal (an unarmed black man shot and killed by cops in Irvington, N.J. last year). The event was called by the People’s Organization for Progress (POP), an activist community group. The protesters continuously chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” while marching down Market Street to the center of Newark. Many onlookers responded favorably to the militant tone of the march. A total of 240 Challenges were distributed.
Progressive Labor Party members mobilized people from mass organizations to attend this event. The class struggle in this area has been increasing, and a few more of our friends are involving themselves in larger political events than in the past. This presents PLP with more opportunities for growth, but also important challenges.
Liberal Rulers Mislead Workers Away from Fightback
In the wake of the militant antiracist rebellion of black workers and students in Ferguson, Mo. against the murder of Michael Brown by cop Darren Wilson, the liberal sector of the ruling class is pulling out all the stops to squelch this fightback. These bosses want to mislead workers into supporting any solution other than communist revolution to the systematic killings of young black and Latin workers by racist cops. The contradiction between what masses of workers really need and what various activists and community leaders are saying was on full display in the speeches given.
Various speakers couched the demand for “justice” for these three and others killed in calls for investigations by the U.S. Justice Department, or beefed-up local Civilian Complaint Review Boards (CCRB). But New York City has a CCRB already. Only 14.4 percent of the complaints filed with the CCRB last year resulted in any recommendation for action against the cop. And, of those complaints that were substantiated, only half resulted in any discipline, for an overall rate of 7.2 percent. In fact, NYPD chief cop Bratton recently complained that the CCRB was “overcharging” NYPD cops as he ignored many findings of misconduct (NY Times, 8/26/14).
The call at the rally for intervention by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Kamal’s shooting will lead to a similar dead end. The liberal rulers consciously use Holder to try and cool angry workers. Promising Justice Department “investigations” is guaranteed to lead to something less than “justice” for murdered black workers and students. Many past shootings, like those of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell (a total of 91 bullets fired), never even led to charges against the killer cops. In the few cases that have actually led to a conviction of the cops involved (as in the 1999 torture-murder of Earl Faison by the cops in Orange, N.J.), the cops are only jailed on “violation of civil rights” charges, which leads to much shorter sentences than murder or even manslaughter convictions.
One speaker at the rally pointed out the connection between mass racist unemployment in places like Ferguson and the police terror needed to keep angry black and Latin workers under control. That speaker also pointed out that it is the rulers’ fear of domestic rebellions, not the “fight against terrorism,” that motivated their distributing out tanks, armored vehicles and advanced weaponry to local police departments. The speaker told the crowd that neither bullets nor tear gas would stop the fight to smash racism. He was warmly applauded.
PLP knows that police reform will never stop racist cop murders. Hiring more black cops, taking away military weaponry and more government “investigations” are just masks to cover up the cops carrying out the bosses’ real agenda — terrorizing and murdering restive and angry workers, many of them black and Latin. Only a communist revolution will bring the true justice that workers want and need.
Members and friends of PLP in Colombia condemn the despicable murder of our class brother Michael Brown, whose name must sadly be added to the list of workers murdered in the U.S. and the world by the miserable capitalist system. Capitalism has shed the blood of our friends and comrades since its inception.
The racist policy of this criminal system will not end there and will continue adding to the choking of Eric Garner, the shooting of Kimani Gray, the bleeding-asking-for-help of Kyam Livingston, the racist police murder of Shantel Davis by black detective Phillip Atkins, and thousands more.
Colombia is no different. As the backyard of U.S. capitalism, Colombia’s fascist presidents such as Álvaro Uribe and Juan Manuel Santos have followed the genocidal policies of U.S. imperialism. They order the daily murder and disappearance of workers, peasants and teachers who fight for the interests of the working class.
We admire and support the rebellion and struggle of youth and workers in Ferguson. We know that these just rebellions will continue because they are a necessity and an example for the international proletariat to follow. Ferguson counters the bourgeois norm of believing in capitalist justice and its criminal and racist courts, that are accomplices to the murders. We workers of the world must destroy the bosses’ borders by uniting in our international Party, developing our theory and political organization and combining these forms of struggle to reach our goal of communist revolution.
For these reasons, we encourage your protests, rebellions, takeovers, and strikes. There shouldn’t be a minute of peace for our class enemies! We must be clear that the oppression of the working class will only end with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the forging of a new communist society.
Comrades in Colombia
FERGUSON, Sept 16 — In August, the first team, three students and a teacher, of Progressive Labor Party members went to Ferguson, Missouri, to fight alongside local residents against racist police terror and murder. As soon as we got into the crowd, we could feel the tension between community members and the St. Louis County police. The cops had formed a line with assault rifles, clubs, shields, and armored trucks to block protesters from marching down the street. We responded with chants like “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” or “Who Shot Mike Brown, You Shot Mike Brown!” The crowd of mostly black youth was fearless in confronting the hyper-militarized police force.
As black nationalists and local ministers tried their best to pacify the crowd, militant workers and youth shouted them down and chased them off. Police used megaphones to order protesters to keep moving, and the ministers said the same thing. But the protesters sat down in defiance. When a pastor told people to follow him down the street to continue the ”peaceful” march, a protester replied, “You can walk down the street, but we’re not leaving.”
The famous rapper Nelly, also fronting for the ruling class, tried to calm the angry crowd by saying, “We don’t need to be on out here protesting and causing havoc in the streets because we have options now.”
He was interrupted by a protester who shouted, “You have options — you’re rich!”
Workers in Ferguson saw right through the misleaders who wanted to stop the rebellion.
For five hours, protesters congregated by a Quick Trip gas station that had been burned down a couple of days earlier. The PLP team distributed 300 CHALLENGEs, made contacts with community members, and had conversations about capitalism and how fighting back against racist oppression cannot end in Ferguson. Many workers were receptive to our ideas about capitalism and its direct link to the murder of black youth by police.
During the protest, the fascist cops would point their assault rifles at the crowd from atop their armored vehicles. Led by PL members, the crowd responded by chanting even louder: “They Say Get Back, We Say Fight Back!”
In the midst of this confrontation, community members looked out for one another by sharing water and food; we caught a glimpse of what communism would look like.
Solidarity Against Fascist Cops
As it got darker, the atmosphere grew tense. We knew the cops would go on the offensive at any moment. Younger protesters told older people to return to their homes for their safety. One woman who looked close to 80 sharply responded, “Do you think we are going to leave you all to face these racists by yourselves?”
That statement reflected our solidarity and strength. Fifteen minutes later, the cops attacked us with tear gas. They shot rubber bullets into a crowd with elders and little children. When one comrade got separated from the PLP team, and we ran back for him, we saw a gruesome scene. People were limping out of the clouds of tear gas. Some had trouble breathing; others were passing out. Most were running for their lives as the fascist police marched forward, assault rifles drawn, arresting anyone they could. Even the bosses’ media journalists weren’t safe, as cops attacked and arrested them as well. Some protesters had to be carried and dragged to safety. But with chants still echoing in the background, we recovered our comrade and helped others. Some people from the crowd did shoot back at police, rejecting the misleaders’ pacifist message. They demonstrated that black workers are not afraid of violence and are willing to fight back.
The cops’ murder of Mike Brown shows us that racist attacks on black youth will continue until we smash capitalism. The capitalist courts encourage cops who murder black, Latin and immigrant workers. The bosses are preparing for urban rebellion, but so are we. Workers are ready to fight back to smash this system. We need more rebellion, but rebellion is not enough. We need a revolutionary communist society, where the working class has the power to rid the world of killer cops. The growth of the Progressive Labor Party is the only way to stop the bosses’ racist police murders. No matter how long it takes, PLP will eventually lead the working class from Ferguson to Gaza to smash the bosses’ cops and courts and establish a communist society free from racist and sexist exploitation.
