When told the Pope thought he should stop repressing Catholics under his yoke, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin famously asked, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” A different version of the same put-down, typically issued in response to someone who says they are going to make you do something: “on yeah, you and what army?”

Both of these phrases passed through my mind after I (belatedly) read through the section titled “What is to be Done?” in the Marxist-Leninist (possibly even Stalinist [1]) Michael Parenti’s 2007 book Contrary Notions.

My reflections here are hardly limited to Parenti’s book.  I often want to say “us and what army” or “how many divisions do we have?” to fellow leftists and progressives as I hear and read their generally smart and noble statements on what needs to be done.

A Good Read 

Contrary Notions is a brilliant volume. I bought a copy in a left-wing bookstore in downtown Madison, Wisconsin two months ago and sat down with it in a nearby coffee shop. I couldn’t put it down. On one important topic after another – racism, capitalism, ecology, ethnic stereotypes, patriarchy, gay marriage, history, US imperialism, technology, corporate media, propaganda, academic culture, stolen US elections, and more – Parenti offered eloquent, highly readable insights.  Listen, for example, to this formulation:

“Newscasters who want to keep their careers afloat learn the fine art of evasion.  We should not accuse them of doing a poor or sloppy job of reporting.  If anything, with great skill they skirt around the most important parts of a story.  With much finesse, they say a lot about very little, serving up heaps of junk news filled with so many empty calories and so few nutrients.  Thus do they avoid offending those who wield politico-economic power while giving every appearance of judicious moderation and balance.  It is enough to take your breath away.” (Contrary Notions, 7)

Exactly.  Most of Contrary Notions reads like that – straightforward and powerful prose telling an important truth about something that matters. I was particularly impressed by this formulation:

“American socialism cannot be modeled on the former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or other countries with different historical, economic, and cultural developments. But these countries ought to be examined so that we might learn from their accomplishments, problems, failures, and crimes. Our goal should be an egalitarian, communitarian, environmentally conscious democratic socialism, with a variety of participatory and productive forms. …What is needed to bring about fundamental change is a mass movement that can project both the desirability of an alternative system and the possibility and the great necessity for change in a social democratic direction. There is much evidence indicating that Americans are well ahead of political leaders in their willingness to embrace new alternatives, including consumer and worker cooperatives and public ownership of some industries and services.” [2]

That, too is very well said and much to be applauded, on the whole.

Proposals Abound

There is much, also, to recommend the section of Contrary Notions titled “What is to be Done?” The section consists essentially of a set of policy recommendations for reforms that would make the US and the world more just, sustainable, and democratic places to live.  Among the decent social-democratic  things that Parenti proposed:

  • the public financing of elections
  • proportional representation in elected legislative assemblies
  • abolition of the archaic Electoral College in US presidential elections
  • breaking up giant corporations and placing corporations under popular control
  • making corporate directors personally liable for company crimes
  • limiting and transforming corporate charters in accord with social and environmental need
  • the replacement of toxic corporate agribusiness with sustainable and organic agriculture
  • measures to ensure conservation and ecological restoration
  • the replacement of fossil fuels with alternative renewable energy
  • the introduction single payer national health insurance – the de-commodification of health care for all
  • the development of rapid mass-transit
  • statehood for Washington DC
  • steep progressive income, wealth and business taxes
  • giant jobs programs to meet social and environmental needs
  • the re-legalization of union organizing
  • massive slashing of the giant Pentagon budget and conversion to a peacetime economy in which resources formerly dedicated to the military are directed to social need
  • repealing all so-called free trade agreements
  • the progressive funding and reform of Social Security[3]

Today, as in 2007, I support each of these policy suggestions and more (e.g., a financial transactions tax and a carbon tax to help pay for renewable energy programs and other worthy social and environmental investments) in the way of major structural reform. Reading through that list, I was reminded of one of my favorite lines from Noam Chomsky: “One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: ‘they present solutions and I don’t like them.’”[4]

We – the Left that is, such as it is (more on that below) – advance “solutions” all the time, and (though you wouldn’t know it from Parenti’s “What is to be Done” section) not just reformist ones.

We always have. Yes, we and what army, with how many divisions?

Eleven Pages on The Point of it All?

I have four problems with Parenti’s “What is to be Done?” section.  First, it is remarkably slim – a mere 11 pages in a 400-page book – given what one would think to be the central significance of the topic for a Marxist-Leninist like Parenti. “Philosophers,” (the first official Left icon) Marx once wrote, “have tried to understand history; the point is to change it”[5](of course, understanding history might be useful for those who want to change it). The first widely read pamphlet published by Lenin, a second great Left icon, was titled What is to be Done? My copy of that key Bolshevik polemic is 200 pages long.

Reforms Will Not Suffice

“At this point,” Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argued in their important book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009), “creating the political will to make society more equal is more important than pinning our colours to a particular set of policies to reduce inequality…Political will,” Wilkinson and Pickett added, “is dependent on the development of a vision of a better society which is both achievable and inspiring.”[6]

As Wilkinson and Pickett might have added, leftists and other egalitarians have done a lot more work on policies than they have around vision. Parenti is no exception.

My second problem with Parenti’s “What is to be Done” section is that it contains nothing remotely like a sketch of a vision of an alternative society beyond the rule of capitalist and other elites.  Is this a problem?  I think so.  In 1932, the great American philosopher John Dewey noted that U.S. politics was “the shadow cast on society by big business.” Things would stay that way, he predicted, for as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda”[7]

It might seem that Dewey spoke too soon. Between the 1930s and the 1970s, a significant reduction in overall economic inequality (though not racial inequality) and an increase in the standard of living of millions of working class Americans occurred in the United States. This “Great Compression” occurred thanks to the rise and expansion of the industrial workers’ movement (sparked to no small extent by Communists and other radical left militants), the spread of collective bargaining, the rise of a relatively pro-union New Deal welfare state, and the democratic domestic pressures of World War II and subsequent powerful social movements. Still, core capitalist prerogatives and assets – Dewey’s “private control” and “business for profit” – were never dislodged (consistent with New Deal champion Franklin Roosevelt’s boast that he had “saved the profits system” from radical change). The gains enjoyed by ordinary working Americans were made possible to no small extent by the uniquely favored and powerful position of the United States economy (and empire) in the post-WWII world.

When that position was significantly challenged by resurgent Western European and Japanese economic competition in the 1970s and 1980s, the comparatively egalitarian trends of postwar America were reversed by the capitalist elites who had never lost their critical command of the nation’s core economic and political institutions. Working class Americans have paid the price ever since. For the last four decades, wealth, income, and power have been sharply concentrated upward, marking a New or Second Gilded Age of abject oligarchy.  Along the way, and intimately related to the neoliberal regression, US and global capitalism have pushed the environment to the edge of a grave, possibly irreversible catastrophe.[7A]

Reforms will not suffice, as Dewey suggested – and as a Marxist like Parenti (who referred in other parts of Contrary Notions to the desirability of socialism) surely knows. Both to help people live better lives and to gain credibility with the broad populace, leftists must advance reforms under really existing capitalism. At the same time, they should never fall prey to the illusion that justice, democracy, and livable ecology can ever be seriously and lastingly attained under the rule of “business for private profit.”  They can’t.  And it is hard to know why elites should agree to pass reforms unless activists with a mobilized mass constituency articulate a popular revolutionary vision that threatens those in power with genuinely radical and structural change unless rulers concede smaller changes.

Missing: Corporate Divisions of Labor and Coordinators 

Parenti’s singular focus on reforms in his “What is to be Done” section left me wondering how genuinely interested he really was in authentically radical and democratic transformation – the kind of deep, taproot change required. It encouraged my suspicion that Parenti was interested not so much in popular revolution and egalitarian transformation as in the replacement of one set of elites by another.

My concern on this score was deepened by a third problem with Parenti’s “What is to be Done?” section: the lack of any serious egalitarian thinking on the related issues of how work (what Marxists have long called “the labor process”) is organized and who presides over the contemporary workplace. Jean Paul Sartre is supposed to have once commented that Marxists seemed to think that people didn’t really exist until they got their first paid jobs. I’ve often found that many Marxists seem to think that working people need to care about little more regarding work than the pay and benefits workers receive, the purchasing power of their wages, and the pace, length, and safety of the working day. Also, Marxists too commonly seem to think that the only real and relevant oppressors of the working class majority are the big holders of capital, the bourgeois owning and investing class, as if droves of critical and intermediate managerial and professional elites – those left-libertarian economists Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert designate the “coordinator class” – do not also rule and enjoy privilege. For traditional Marxism (of which Parenti has long been an able and prolific popularizer), the socialist transformation that is desired comes down basically to a shift from the authoritarian and selfish private ownership to the socially democratic public ownership of the nation’s means of production and investment.  As Parenti explained in his 2002 book Democracy for the Few, “What is needed then is public ownership of the major means of production and public ownership of the moneyed power itself – in a word, socialism.”

In reality, of course, most workers suffer not just from the private, profit-seeking capitalist ownership of the workplace but also from what Albert calls the “corporate division of labor” – an alienating, de-humanizing, and hierarchical subdivision of tasks “in which a few workers have excellent conditions and empowering circumstances, many fall well below that, and most workers have essentially no power at all.”  This pecking order “marks the difference between being an all- purpose gopher, a custodian, an assembler, a foreman, a manager, an engineer, a vice president, or a CEO.” The core disparities between these jobs are not merely about money and benefits.  They also reflect vast differences in the autonomy and pleasure of work, along with differences in information, status, training, knowledge, confidence, and voice on the job.  Over time, Albert noted in his anti-coordinator and anti-capitalist book Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2002), corporate divisions of labor harden “into a broad and pervasive class division” whereby one class – roughly the top fifth of the workforce – “controls its own circumstances and the circumstances of others below,” while another (the rest, the working class super-majority) “obeys orders and gets what its members can eke out.” The “coordinator class…looks down on workers as instruments with which to get jobs done.  It engages workers paternally, seeing them as needing guidance and oversight and as lacking the finer human qualities that justify both autonomous input and also the higher incomes needed in order to support more expensive tastes.”

The problem is not limited to capitalism. A shift in ownership from private to public, while necessary, does not undo the problem of hierarchical “labor process[es]”and workplaces. In centrally planned state-socialist economies like that which prevailed in the old USSR (of which Parenti was and remains something of a cheerleader), this coordinator class ruled entirely without capitalists.  Members drawn from its elite ranks became the militantly undemocratic (arch-authoritarian, in fact) ruling class of “really existing socialist” nations. At the same time, coordinators reign without capitalists (though of course within the broader framework and rules of capitalism) in numerous public bureaucracies and large non-profit institutions in the US today.[8]

No meaningfully social and democratic vision of the changes required in the US and elsewhere today can ignore the need to confront the difficulties posed by corporate divisions of labor – difficulties that are intimately related but not merely reducible to the rule of capital.  Surely, this must be a central focus for any leftist who claims to embrace “participatory” and “democratic” socialism and who says they want to critically examine the experience of the USSR, China, and Cuba “so that we might learn from their accomplishments, problems, failures, and crimes.” We do not wish to replace the rule of capitalists and coordinators with the rule of coordinators alone.

For what it’s worth, there’s nothing inherent in Marxism or the Marxist tradition requiring the omission of critical points hierarchical divisions of labor and the authoritarian organization of work.  Indeed, one can find careful and often brilliant discussions of this problem in the more “humanistic” writings of Marx and in the reflections of numerous self-described Marxist writers and theorists like Harry Braverman[9], Rudolph Bahro[10], Andre Gorz[11], Stephen Marglin [12], and now perhaps Richard Wolff.  In a recent reflection at the Marxist Web site MRZine, the leading US Marxist Wolff offered the following admonition and analysis:

“What socialists need first is to recognize and accept that the classic socialist focus on macro-level institutional change – from private to social ownership of productive assets and from markets to planning – is insufficient ….socialists need…to stand emphatically for the transformation of the enterprise: more precisely, for its radical democratization….In a socialism redefined along these lines, all the workers in an enterprise collectively and democratically make all the key economic decisions…Such a redefined and refocused socialism opens a path beyond capitalism different from what happened in the USSR, PRC…”

“In such a transition to socialism, workers would transform themselves – from undereducated, under-informed, and often deskilled drones, controlled and directed by others, into members of self-directed cooperatives. Their tasks are equitably shared, everyone develops multiple skills, and rotation of function keeps jobs from hardening into status ranks, etc. Everyone partakes in turn in giving and taking orders to get jobs done. In such democratizations of workplaces and work-processes, new kinds of people will emerge.”[13]

Wolff critically leaves out coordinators and their central role under capitalism. He advocates a market socialism that is frankly inconsistent with the radical reorganization of work (“enterprises”) he now claims to advocate. As workers’ control advocate Tom Wetzel wrote me: “It’s true that his description here sounds like the change in jobs proposed to break down the power of the coordinator class. But…it would be very unlikely for that to happen under market socialism, because labor markets would empower people with special experience and skills in managing, engineering and they could force coops to empower them as a condition of being hired.”

Still, it interesting and useful to see a leading Marxist intellectual go so explicitly beyond the traditional stale and inadequate definition of socialism largely as a change in ownership (from private to public) of core economic institutions and into the “micro” territory of how workplaces and the “labor process” are organized.

“There is No Left Now”  

Fourth, and last but not least, Parenti’s section on “What is to be Done” contains nothing about organization.  His silence here is doubly ironic. Parenti claimed in Contrary Notions that (as quoted above) “What is needed to bring about fundamental change is a mass movement.” Movements require organization. At the same time, Lenin’s famous 1902 pamphlet What is to be Done? (certainly the inspiration for the title of Parent’s section) said nothing either on reforms under capitalism (or under Russian Tsarist rule) or on what an alternative, post-capitalist society might look like. It was focused entirely on the critical question of revolutionary (as opposed to merely reformist and “economist”) organization.

One does not have to be a Leninist to recognize the critical nature of this curious omission. With all due respect for Wilkinson and Pickett’s important point (quoted favorably above) about the necessity of broad societal vision for the creation of mass egalitarian political will, I cannot escape the suspicion that the greatest barrier to such will is the lack of viable institutional Left with the capacity to act meaningfully on (abundantly developed) Left policy proposals and alternative societal vision (far less abundantly developed). What’s missing above all and quite egregiously is durable popular and revolutionary organization and an entrenched Left cadre ready to spark and lead people’s struggles and to tie together struggles over disparate issues through thick and thin and over a long period of time.

The dominant media and many mainstream politicians, particularly Republicans, are strongly attached to the notion that something called “the Left” (a term that preposterously ranges in application from the left anarchists and Marxists who sparked Occupy Wall Street to Oprah Winfrey, the New York Times, and Barack Obama) is a powerful force in the United States today. The news and commentary media speak constantly about the supposedly sharp “polarization” of US politics between “left” (meaning the corporate- and Wall Street–captive Democrats) and “right” (the deeply reactionary, arguably radical Republicans). But, as Noam Chomsky pointed out in a 2010 interview with David Barsamian, the “mainstream” discussion is absurd:

Barsamian: “The Left seems to have nothing to say.”

Chomsky: “The Democratic Party and even the Democratic left are not going to tell people, ‘Look, your problem is that, back in the 1970s, we took part in a major process of financialization of the economy and the hollowing out of the productive system. So your wages and income have stagnated for thirty years, while what wealth is produced is in a very few pockets. Those are our policies.’ No, there is no real left now. If you are just counting heads, there are probably more people involved than in the 1960s, but they are atomized, committed to different special interests—gay rights, environmental rights, this, that. They don’t coalesce into a movement that can really do things” (emphasis added).

Ever since the decline of the “Old Left,” primarily the Communist Party (itself crushed by state repression in the age of McCarthyism), progressive forces have been plagued by the absence of organizational and cadre continuity. “We’re not supposed to say it,” Chomsky told Barsamian:

“but the Communist Party was an organized and persistent element. It didn’t show up for a demonstration and then scatter so somebody else had to start something new. It was always there and it was there for the long haul. . . . That’s why the old Communist Party was so significant. There was always somebody around to turn the mimeograph machine. . . . They didn’t expect quick victories. Maybe you win something, maybe you don’t, but then you lay the basis for something else. That mentality is basically missing [now]. And it was during the 1960s, too.”[14]

“Do We Want to Win”? 

There is also the related issue of fragmentation – the dissipation and division of often noble progressive and Left efforts into too many over-separated issues, too many overblown sectarian affiliations, too many local struggles, too many identities, and too many separate efforts.  This longstanding Left problem led Albert to issue a proposal and plea for strategic unity in “one big movement” last July:

“Suppose representatives from four diverse organizations, parties, and projects got together with the purpose of creating a Solidarity with Autonomy Movement (SAM) They hammer out the structural norms – a clear understanding of what allegiance implies, what dues there are, how resources are distributed back to affiliates and to overall projects, how SAM-sponsored campaigns and projects are determined, what SAM affiliates have to do vis-a-vis one another, etc.”

“Then they take this vision, which they are ready to participate in and to help build, to some other constituency groups, projects, and organizations, agreeable to each of the initial four. Perhaps they go to some media projects. Or perhaps they go to some ecology organizations, or to community groups, and so on. Slowly and steadily the growing structure could reach out to include national, regional, and even local organizing projects, periodicals, and movement organizations. It could even go international.”

“Would it be everyone who calls themselves progressive? I doubt it. But it certainly could be a very large and diverse formation, in one country, and then later across countries, able to have a huge impact on solidarity and on the ability of progressive and left elements to focus their efforts effectively.”

“Is this a pipe dream? One might put that question differently, I think; do we want to win?” [15]

The greatest obstacle to the development of mass political spirit around progressive and radical ideas (reformist and revolutionary) that are actually quite (if all too silently and passively) popular is the widespread sense of powerlessness and isolation shared by countless citizens and workers struggling to get by and stay sane in Brave New Gilded Age America. It’s the pervasive sense, drummed into millions of Americans for decades by a many-sided (at once economic, political, ideological, cultural, and personal) top-down neoliberal assault, that we are all on our own and the intimately related idea that there’s no serious or viable alternative to, and nothing really that can be done about, the dominant order. “We live,” Wilkinson and Pickett note, “in a pessimistic period.”[16]

This “no alternative” sense is the “mental slavery” [17] of our time. It feeds most fundamentally not on an absence of progressive reform proposals (quite abundant) and not on a lack of alternative visions (less abundant but not entirely absent) but above all on an absence of serious, sustained and unifying Left organization. Big alternative societal vision matters.  So do progressive measures for the improvement of life under the currently existing system. But neither revolutionary vision nor reform proposals are going to go very far without serious and durable organization – the main topic of Lenin’s famous pamphlet.  One need not share Lenin’s authoritarian mindset and dictums to get this very basic point.

It might seem odd to make this point in critiquing an essay published seven years ago, near the end of the George W. Bush era, but is amazing how little progress the Left has made on this issue over the intervening years – this even after a two term-Democratic presidency has given us yet another great historical lesson that the contemporary unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital, empire, eco-cide, white supremacy, patriarchy and coordinator-ism are richly bipartisan and that the two reigning business parties are (while not precisely “identical”) are what Upton Sinclair called them in 1904: “two wings of the same bird of prey.”

Excuses and Time are Running Out

We on the US Left, such as it is, are running out of excuses and time for our own internal fragmentation, both a cause and a reflection of our relative weakness.  Do we have any interest in actually winning?  Do we seriously want to prevail? The stakes are rather high, given the ecological catastrophe that capital and its coordinators – and other coordinators/managers – are bringing to bear: the salvation not only of democracy and social justice but of life itself.  It’s participatory socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky at this stage of capitalist and state-sponsored ecocide. “The uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros rightly argued 13 years ago, “is that if there is no future for a radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity itself.”[18]

 Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy.

1. According to Paul d’Amato, “[Michael] Parenti’s softness for [Julius] Caesar has something to do with his Stalinism – his view that the fall of Stalinism [that is, of the USSR and Soviet bloc – P.S.] was a ‘historic defeat for the people of the world.’ In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti claims that the nastier aspects of Stalinism—the gulag, the mass removal of populations, the untold number of deaths, the inequality between workers and bureaucrats—were all exaggerated by Stalin’s critics. Is it any wonder then that Parenti tends to play down Caesar’s noble birth, his conquests, his support of slavery and empire?”  See Paul d’Amato, “Dictator of the Proletarii,” International Socialist Review, Issue 36 (July-August 2004).  I found d’Amato’s harsh description of Parenti likely accurate after I read a bizarre section of Contrary Notions where Parenti described the different components of the US political left as follows: “Further along is the political left: the progressives, social democrats, democratic socialists, and issue-oriented Marxists (There is also a more ideologically oriented components of the left composed mainly of Trotskyists, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalists, ‘libertarian socialists’ and others who will not figure in this discussion given their small numbers and intense sectarian immersion.  What they all have in common is an obsessional anti-communism, a dedication to fighting imaginary hordes of ‘Stalinists,’ whom they see everywhere, and with denouncing existing communist nations and parties.  In this they resemble many centrists, social democrats, and liberals.)” Michael Parenti, Contrary Notions (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2007), 190. This passage wildly misrepresented the activities and world view of Trotskyists, left-anarchists, and libertarian socialists (many in each category would at some level describe themselves as a type of communist) at the time (and since).  The strange notion that these groups and individuals were/are obsessed with fighting real or imagined Stalinists and so-called existing communist nations and parties could only have been held, well, by a Stalinist – so it seems at least to me.

2. Parenti, Contrary Notions, 223. Note that this paragraph marks a rightward retreat from an almost identical paragraph Parenti published in the 7th [2002] edition of his widely read book Democracy for the Few. In 2002, the last sentence of that paragraph read as follows: “There is much evidence – some of it presented in this book – indicating that Americans are well ahead of political leaders in their willingness to embrace new alternatives, including public ownership of the major corporations and worker control of production.” What shift in public opinion occurred, I wonder, over five years to induce Parenti to replace “public ownership of the major corporations” with the milder “public ownership of some industries and services” and to supplant “worker control of production” with “consumer and worker cooperatives”? See  Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (7th edition, 2002), passage reproduced at  http://www.neoeugenics.net/few.htm

3. Parenti, Contrary Notions, 103-114.

4. Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of State Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 262.

5.  Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845), accessed online at  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm

6.  Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 271.

7. John Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” New Republic (March 18, 1931), http://www.newrepublic.com/article/magazine/104638/the-need-new-party

7A. Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% v, Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014), 202-203 and passim.

8. Michael Albert, Parecon: Life After Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2003), 44-55. The US radio personality and Marx-fan Doug Henwood recently informed us that “the USSR…for all its problems, was living proof that an alternative economic system was possible” See Doug Henwood, “The Top of the World,” BookForum (April/May, 2014), www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12987.  Five years before, this admirer of the Soviet achievement denounced parecon as an unhelpful “off-the-shelf utopia.”  See Doug Henwood, “A Post-Capitalist Future is Possible,” The Nation (March 30, 2009).

9. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974).

10. Rudolf Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: Verso, 1978).

11.  Andre Gorz, Division of Labor: Labor Process and Class Struggle in Modern Capitalism (Branch Line, 1974).

12. Stephen Marglin, “What do Bosses Do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 1974, vol. 6, no.2: 60-112, http://scholar.harvard.edu/marglin/publications/what-do-bosses-do

13. Richard Wolff, “Socialism and Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises,” MRZine (September 14, 2014), http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/wolff140914.html.

14.  Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 23-32.

15.  Mike Albert, “One Big Movement?” ZNet (July 24, 2014), http://zcomm.org/znetarticle/one-big-movement/

16.  Wilkinson and Picket, Spirit Level, 271.

17.  Chomsky and Barsamian, Power Systems, 34.

18. Istvan Meszaros, Socialism or Barbarism: From the “American Century” to the Crossroads (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 80.