Karl Marx in the Rose Garden

By Jim Hodgson

I take my title today from a subhead in a column by Enrique Galvan Ochoa in the Mexico City daily La Jornada. I’ll translate and summarise from his text here:

Not even Karl Marx would dare to imagine such a spectacular coup against neoliberalism and globalization as that carried out by President Donald Trump with his explosion of tariffs to the whole world on April 2 in the Rose Garden of the White House. The cathedrals of capitalism tumbled, from Wall Street to all the other global stock markets. In just a week, investors fled in search of refuge for their money: in gold, government bonds—swallows in search of a nest. The blow from that unpredictable businessman installed in Washington will have lasting effects. And it will hit the poor as well as the rich.

With respect, I am not so sure that it was a blow against neoliberalism so much as its logical next step: away from unrestricted movement of capital and toward concentration of wealth in ever-fewer hands. 

But that’s my point: I’m not sure. Daily—this has been going on since Trump began his run for political office a decade ago—new opinion pieces land in my inbox, many of them making strong historical analogies. Is he trying to restore a golden age/Belle Époque—think of the 1870s through to the start of the First World War and the beginning of income tax—for oligarchic billionaires and their closest allies, the mere millionaires? 

I loved seeing the rapper Lizzo on Saturday Night Live this past weekend wearing a cropped t-shirt emblazoned TARIFFIED. On the right: Trump in a storm.

What to make of these tariff wars and consequent stock market losses? I find myself pushed to go deeper.

You don’t have to be a Marxist—I think here of sociologist Max Weber and Canadian social democrat Tommy Douglas—to see how societies (including the liberal ones) are divided between the dominant structures defended by the elites and the counter movements supported by those with fewer privileges. 

And you don’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his writing. A passage in The Communist Manifesto describes how love and poetry, religion and community, are “drowned in the icy waters of selfish calculation.”  All of these are drowned so that personal worth becomes exchange value—you sell your labour—and numberless freedoms are abolished in favour of “that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.” * 

We might be forgiven if we thought free trade was invented at the time of the great debates ahead of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, or the Canada-U.S. agreement in 1989, or the advent of the common market in Europe in the 1960s. Some might know that elections in Canada were fought and lost at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries over various proposals for free trade with the United States: “No truck or trade with the Yankees!” cried the Conservatives in 1911, defeating the Liberals of Sir Wilfred Laurier. 

Just before Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels published their Manifesto in 1848, debate raged in Britain over the “Corn Laws.” These were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food enforced between 1815 and 1846. Large land-owners wanted the tariffs kept high to keep out competition. Industrialists wanted them lowered because cheaper food meant they could pay workers less. (The industrialists won.) In a speech in Brussels in January 1848, Marx said protectionism was conservative and free trade was destructive. But he also saw that free trade in that context “hastens the social revolution” and thus merited his support. 

I like to say that I have been fighting free trade since 1848. But truth is the first time I wrote about the free trade debate was in 1986 (above).

My issue wasn’t so much having about rules for international trade—and we always press for protection for labour, the environment and human rights—as it was the protections that were built into the trade agreements for corporations (always referred to as “investors”). Under those waves of free trade deals, governments were blocked from protecting public health or the environment. Corporations would bring their complaints to an “investor-state” dispute resolution tribunal. Most times, the tribunals would rule in favour of the corporation and the state would be on the hook for the corporation’s imagined future earnings. Or they would succumb to the threat of the suit, as Panama is doing now in the face of a $20-billion suit.

Now that Trump has thrown away the rule book, it may seem that people like me are suddenly defending free trade. I think we’re defending the idea of at least having rules. Even as we fight specific battles (I think of the lawsuit brought by Canadian mining companies against El Salvador), we learned to live with economic integration: even after the havoc caused in Canada to industrial jobs and farmers after the 1989 FTA with the United States; even after U.S. abandonment of its industrial workers; and even after two million Mexican farmers were forced from their land and into the cities and across the border after NAFTA in 1994. 

But let’s not lose sight of longer-term objectives. In the face of this crisis in capitalism, what are the opportunities? The “social revolution” envisioned by Marx may be distant, but in these last 40 years, social movements have never ceased to uphold human rights broadly understood: economic, social, cultural and environmental. 

Manuel Pérez Rocha works now with the Institute for Policy Studies and writes an occasional column for La Jornada. (In the late 90s, we both worked with the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, RMALC). Recently, he pointed to a long list of actions taken together by Mexican, Canadian and U.S. organizations. He continued: 

“Under Trump, we suffer from a savage neoliberalism that evades treaties, written rules, and multilateral organizations. He sees no friends and only enemies. The only laws are those of the strongest and ‘I’m in charge.’ Mexico must respond by demanding a thorough review of the USMCA [called CUSMA in Canada and T-MEC in Mexico], chapter by chapter, since its purpose and content are largely the same as those of NAFTA: to make Mexico an export platform to take advantage of cheap labour. Together with Canada, we must promote this review by generating spaces and resources for democratic participation, not only for business leaders but also for grassroots organizations in all three countries.”

Meanwhile, Charlie Angus continues his resistance campaign. (In the current federal election, he is not running again.) On April 14, he reminded his Substack readers of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

Angus points to what Alinsky would say about our collective sense of loss over what is happening in the world today:

“Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing – but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power.”

* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), The Communist Manifesto in Essential Works of Marxism (18th ed., 1979), New York: Bantam, p.15.

Empathy: a basic element of human decency

by Jim Hodgson

Back in the late 1990s, I travelled frequently by bus over the mountains between my home in Cuernavaca and my job in Mexico City. Even when the traffic was bad, the trip usually took less than two hours. The bus company almost always showed a film.

When not working or looking at the views, including the Popocatepetl volcano, I watched the movies. I can’t guess how many movies I saw without ever seeing how they ended. My friends and I joked about organizing a Pullman de Morelos film festival, renting or borrowing some of the movies, and just watching the last half hour of all of them to see how they ended.

Among those movies was a favourite of mine, Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Bille August, 1997). The shocking death of a small boy in Copenhagen opened a tale of conflict between corporate greed and the Inuit people of Greenland. But I never saw how it ended. 

Years went by and then, in a used bookstore in Strathroy, Ontario, I found the novel by Peter Høeg on which the film was based. It’s an excellent book with a satisfying ending. 

Among parts that have stayed with me was this:

“…[W]e read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. It was a book I grew quite fond of. For its trembling, feminine empathy and its potent indignation. I know of no other book with such a strong belief in how much you can accomplish if you simply have the will to change.” *

Hmm. Empathy as a feminine virtue? Let’s see. Google offers this definition: “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” 

To me, it’s a basic element of human decency. A measure of empathy is vital in action to transform the plight of those made miserable by any who abuse their power. To empathize doesn’t mean you have to agree with someone: just recognise their different circumstances. Maybe some of us would rather say solidarity.

“In a time when empathy is increasingly treated as a vice, we must not turn our backs on the world’s most impoverished,” wrote Andy Harrington after a recent visit to South Sudan. Harrington is the executive director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB), a Winnipeg-based NGO that enables food aid to reach people in need and communities to move toward food sovereignty. He said people are already dying because of Trump’s cuts to USAID, adding that Canadian support is more essential than ever. (Eight people in South Sudan, including five children, died as they tried to walk for three hours to seek treatment for cholera after U.S. cuts forced local health services to close, Save the Children said April 9.)

Elon Musk said recently that empathy is killing Western civilization. But it seems the far-right has been attacking empathy for a long time now. And it does so with some masculine archetypes.

“MAGA influencers have begun to talk of the tariffs as a way to make the United States ‘manly’ again, by bringing old-time manufacturing and mining back,” asserts historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Substack post on April 8. In these first three months of the disastrous Trump regime in the United States, she has found her way into my daily reading as she sets current events in historical context. She adds: 

In a larger sense, Trump’s undermining of the global economy reflects forty years of Republican emphasis on the myth that a true American man is an individual who operates outside the community, needs nothing from the government, and asserts his will by dominating others.

Associated with the American cowboy, that myth became central to the culture of Reagan’s America as a way for Republican politicians to convince voters to support the destruction of federal government programs that benefited them. Over time, those embracing that individualist vision came to dismiss all government policies that promoted social cooperation, whether at home or abroad, replacing that cooperation with the idea that strong men should dominate society, ordering it as they thought best.

The Trump administration has taken that idea to an extreme, gutting the U.S. government and centering power in the president, while also pulling the U.S. out of the web of international organizations that have stabilized the globe since World War II. …

Now Trump is demonstrating his power over the global economy, rejecting the conviction of past American leaders that true power and prosperity rest in cooperation.

In less than 100 days, the Trump regime has dismantled that “liberal consensus” that at least regulated corporate excess, provided very basic social welfare, and promoted infrastructure. (This is not to ignore some of the United States’ greatest failures. Among them: slavery and Indigenous genocide, of course. But also not providing universal health care and maintaining racial segregated schools by underfunding the public education systems.)

* Peter Høeg, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1997, pp.144-45.

Tomorrow: Karl Marx in the Rose Garden

Right to Truth Day sparks reflection on human rights in Argentina, El Salvador and the United States

A headline and a photo in the Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 caught my eye today. Together with a photo of Saint Óscar Romero was this phrase: “Justice and snakes only bite bare feet.” *

The writer, Alejandro Slokar, is a judge in Argentina’s federal court for appeals of criminal cases (Cámara Federal de Casación Penal). Here, he is writing about the International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and the Dignity of Victims—or more simply, the Right to Truth Day, marked now every March 24.

March 24 is not only the date when we recall the martyrdom of San Salvador’s archbishop, the human rights defender Óscar Romero in 1980. It’s also when Argentineans recall the 1976 military coup that ushered in a “dirty war” against the popular movements of the impoverished—those with bare feet—along with trade unionists, journalists, writers, artists and human rights defenders. As many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared over the next five years.

In El Salvador, about 80,000 people were killed or disappeared between 1979 and the end of the civil war in 1992.  In both countries, as elsewhere across Latin America, movements to find the “historical truth.” 

In recent weeks, families of people who disappeared during Mexico’s long “war on drugs” have drawn attention to a half-hectare farm in Teuchitlán, about 60 km west of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. The farm had been used to recruit new traffickers, but also to execute those who refused the cartel’s orders. State and federal authorities had known about the site since last September but did nothing to secure it or to identify human remains and other items found on the land. Predictably, state and federal authorities point fingers of blame at each other.

About 120,000 people have gone missing in Mexico since 2006 when then-President Felipe Calderón launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels in an attempt to curb their violent turf wars. Instead, the violence became worse. And Calderón’s security chief, Genaro García Luna, was convicted in October in a U.S. court for his deep ties to the Sinaloa cartel. 

Among the disappeared (still) are 43 students from a training school for rural teachers in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state, taken in 2014.

The “right to truth” cannot only be about historical cases. It must be the demand now in the case of the young men taken by the Trump regime and dumped into El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT). Certainly, some of the 238 Venezuelans may be criminals who were members of the “Tren de Aragua” gang but, as stories leak out, it’s clear that some of those deported were never accused, much less tried or convicted, of any crime. 

TIME magazine published a stunning photo essay about the deportations. The photojournalist, Philip Holsinger, included this description of one of his encounters: “One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.”

Drop Site News reported that another deportee was a Venezuelan professional soccer player and youth soccer coach with no criminal record. “The family only discovered that their loved one, Jerce Reyes Barrios, had been sent to El Salvador when they saw him in viral videos posted by the Trump administration, in which it celebrated what it said was the mass deportation of violent members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”

The LGBTQIA+ Advocate magazine shared reporting on PBS by Rachel Maddow about a gay makeup artist who was among the deported prisoners—forcibly removed from the United States without a court hearing or deportation order.

Those stories, combined with reports of detentions of visa holders and other visitors, and harassment of legal residents and citizens, suggest that what happened in Argentina and El Salvador has begun in the United States. Can paramilitary death squads be far behind?

Writing of historical events and of the present-day right-wing populist regimes of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei in Argentina, Slokar’s article argued that such abuses derive from the “neocolonial models”—European feudalism—applied in throughout the Americas. “While those responsible die in their beds without sanction, the consequences are almost infinite, farce and tragedy at the same time, and expressed in the inhumane neoliberal experiment that laughs at the Constitution, bitcoin, extractivism and punitive demagoguery that converge in the present.”

* The quote is variously attributed to both Óscar Romero and to the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano. It may be that Galeano was quoting Romero, but I cannot find the original source: just partial citations.