Why the oil monarchies constitute capitalism’s inevitable “ endgame

The petromonarchies of the Persian Gulf are countries usually seen as strange, eccentric, unique, idiosyncratic or other similar words. Ever since I read Collins Gem: Basic Facts — Geography and various editions of The Guinness Book of Records I was aware they were extremely distinctive. Reading Gordon Robison’s 1996 Arab Gulf States gave me much more knowledge of these nations than could be garnered from either of previous book. Robison made these states seem more interesting than I had thought beforehand, although likely this is because I had not seen any reason to study them using the Grolier at Essendon Grammar Middle School.

The oil monarchies would always attract interest from me in subsequent years. Continuing alarm at Australia’s abysmal greenhouse gas emissions performance and the fact that Australia is fundamentally similar to the Gulf monarchies in being a high income resource-rich, low-latitude country, attracted attention at first. However, at this time I still assumed the petromonarchies as minor global players. Moreover, despite their reputation for extremely strict Islam — which Robison highlighted in his chapter on Saʽudi Arabia — I naïvely assumed the actual rulers of the petromonarchies were doing everything possible against al-Qaʽida. This belief was intensified by the one-eyed focus of Trotskyists upon Israel and the only slightly less one-eyed focus of the Right upon Iran, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It is true that in his early writings Robert Spencer would highlight the rigidity of Islam in Saʽudi Arabia, where non-Muslims cannot practice their religion at all, but by the middle 2010s Spencer was ignoring the Saʽudis.

When I read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed, I wondered how writers like Hoppe viewed the petromonarchies. On the one hand, they clearly viewed monarchy as superior to democracy, yet they never so much as mentioned the Gulf States. I did, I must say, have the feeling that Hoppe and his ilk did admire these states, but out of fear that praising the Gulf States would either:

1. imply a sympathy to Islam that Hoppe obviously lacked, or
2. make for greater criticism from his Austrian School allies

The one thing that really made me slightly question the insignificance and plain strangeness of the oil monarchies was a small section of Chapter 9 of Kevin Williamson’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, where Williamson said that the Arab oil states were cases where the oil industry had taken over the state, as I knew the coal industry had in Australia. I knew from the obscene greenhouse gas emissions of Australia and the Gulf States how dangerous a country where the fossil fuel industry is the government had to be. Under this condition, the government makes its money from greenhouse gas emissions, with the result that it will be dogmatically opposed to emissions reductions no matter how urgent or costly for the rest of the world.

What I did know about the petromonarchies, with hindsight, ought to have been enough to question the practical ignorance of them by Israel-obsessed Left. Nevertheless, it was not until reading two articles — ‘McJihad’ by Timothy Mitchell and ‘Taxation, Non-Tax Revenue and Democracy’ by Wilson Prichard, Paola Salardi and Paul Segal — that I began to understand that absolute petromonarchies are not eccentric, strange societies who are purely products of Western imperialism but something far more dangerous and even sinister. Prichard, Salodi and Segal showed that, contrary to Hoppe’s impression of an extremely limited government under absolute monarchy, the Gulf petromonarchies actually have the world’s highest government revenue with absolutely no taxes on capital (a facet I was long aware of via The Guinness Book of Records).

What this made me realise was that:

1. the Gulf petromonarchies are in fact very wealthy states who earn their wealth exactly as anarcho-capitalist theory says “private states” must: by selling what they own [petroleum and natural gas]
2. petromonarchies are, as was noted as early as 1982 by William Powell in his Saudi Arabia and Its Royal Family, family businesses run more akin to (nonprofit) capitalist enterprises than to post-Communist Manifesto Western governments
3. petromonarchies constitute genuine imperialist powers who exploit the workers of many other countries with an abundance of labour.

The Levant and South Asia have become oppressed colonies of the petromonarchies: their primary source of private and even public revenue is remittances from the Gulf. So have, more recently, large portions of sub-Saharan Africa. The effects of this are profound. Because the Levantine and Asian workers are prohibited from organising collectively in any way whatsoever in their new home, they lose the ability to gain from globalisation that workers in labour-rich nations historically possessed. Petromonarchy aid also plays an important role keeping in place authoritarian rulers throughout the Arab world, and most likely also South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, as noted by Killen Clarke in this year’s ‘The New Rentierism’. Global de-democratisation is very plausibly driven by petromonarchy power to a greater degree than even Clarke notes. As writers like Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page and Sheldon Wolin noted in the late 2000s and early 2010s, influence of mass preferences on government policy has totally disappeared, whereas decline of formal democratic institutions has been much smaller. Additionally, scholars note how inequality changed from decreasing to increasing at the precise time the 1973 oil crisis multiplied Gulf non-tax revenues (see here for a description of how the revenues multiplied).

Many academics have observed downward pressure on capital taxation, yet none discuss the possibility that the rise of the tax-free Gulf monarchies with vast rent revenues is what has pressured capital taxation downwards since 1973. The existence of states where wealth is totally untaxed and revenue is independent of high-tax states [older tax havens depended upon support from high-tax states] must make revenue generation via wealth taxation less feasible elsewhere. With their rigid bans on strikes and unions, the Gulf monarchies possess an absolute, uncompromised dictatorship of capital over labour, which creates pressure for policies more favourable to the extremely wealthy in the rest of the world. This lowering of taxes has created a vicious circle of debt in those states unable to gain large rent revenues, further increasing the geopolitical power of the petrostates, especially since the rulers invest heavily in lobbying for and gaining favourable policies from foreign governments. The most graphic illustration of this is the refusal of the US to target Saʽudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Although all but two of nineteen hijackers were from those nations and support for al-Qaʽida by Saʽudi princes suspected at the time and confirmed re all four of the wealthiest Gulf states since, weakening the petromonarchies was and is entirely unacceptable to the rich. It would lessen downward pressure on capital taxation and make it easier for the masses to demand higher rates thereof.

Ron Rogowski in his 1989 Commerce and Coalitions demonstrated that if a sector of society gains economically, it will want to translate its gains into politics. Because for almost two millennia (before 1900) gains of capital at the expense of labour always occurred during economic declines, Rogowski could not grasp what capital would do at the expense of labour under the economic situation prevailing since 1973 — one where capital gains at the expense of labour from globalisation. What we have seen capital do is eliminate the economic power of labour — absolutely essential for anything beyond nominal democracy — and in the past decade seek to transform the whole structure of politics to match a reality well established for three decades of a hegemony over labour. If social structure would match the observed economic hegemony of capital over labour as per Gilens, Page and Wolin, then:

1. workers would logically have zero rights vis-à-vis their bosses
2. academia and media would have zero freedom to oppose bosses’ absolute power
3. bosses would seek to justify their power in terms of natural law and religion
4. bosses would logically have absolute ownership of property
5. this property owned by bosses would be fully owned privately

These exact conditions describe the Gulf States:

1. as noted above, (almost entirely expatriate) workers have zero bargaining power vis-à-vis their (citizen) bosses
• contra Austrian School dogma, most expatriate workers in the Gulf lack the option to choose employment elsewhere — increasing global substitution of capital for labour severely limits options inside labour-rich nations
2. no independent media whatsoever exist
3. education is dictated by the requirements of the national and religious ideology of the royal families
4. ownership of property is restricted to citizens (bosses), with workers (noncitizens) completely excluded
5. as discussed earlier and presciently by Powell, the Gulf monarchies are private states completely owned by the royal families
• what is popularly called the “public sector” is not “public” at all, but is owned as family property
• the division of the Gulf economies are instead into:
1. a “state” or “nonprofit” sector directly owned by the state and employing primarily citizens
• this is conventionally called the “public” sector but given that the state is a family business, this is a misnomer
2. a “non-state”, for-profit sector in which extremely few citizens are employed except as bosses

These facts point towards the Gulf petromonarchies being the inevitable endgame of capitalism carried to the point wished by the global super-rich. Capitalists obviously would desire a society without taxes, unions, unrest from workers, or freedom to so much as argue for a system where bosses lack absolute power over workers. Being run as private corporations makes petromonarchies plainly much closer to a capitalist enterprise than even a nominally democratic parliamentary state could possibly be. It also means that the public has virtually no knowledge of how they operate: the archives of the Gulf States are almost entirely inaccessible and were never even analysed in Kian Byrne’s survey of Middle East archives. This secrecy, as has been discussed since Powell’s work on Saʽudi Arabia, is a large part of why almost nobody recognises why the purest form of capitalism would be necessarily a society akin to the tax-, union-, and strike-free oil monarchies, and without any freedom of speech or the press for the immense majority.

A repeat of Wiker from the opposite angle rather than a detailed critique — and a socialist’s book that never mentions “capitalism”

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York in Critique of Intelligent Design often seem to be rewriting Wiker from the opposite angle rather than looking more deeply

Two decades ago, the “intelligent design” movement became widely publicised following the court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, in which to the anger of its advocates, the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (based in Harrisburg) declared that:

1. intelligent design was a form of creationism
2. the school board policy [of Dover Area School District of York County] violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

(The fact that Judge John Edward Jones III, who decided the case, was appointed by Bush junior and not a Democratic president, undoubtedly further angered intelligent design’s supporters).

Soon after Kitzmiller — of which I would have no knowledge for a long time afterwards — Regnery Publishing published the late Tom Bethell’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science and nine months afterwards Jonathan Wells’ The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. At that time, I had no idea of socialist criticisms of intelligent design, for the inability of Trotskyists to explain September 11, 2001 satisfactorily had substantially turned me away from them. I was wholly aware of critisms by my mother of intelligent design, but they entirely failed to refute the arguments of Wells and Wiker.

In more recent years, intelligent design has faded from view as Republican-dominated courts have substantially permitted private education curricula teaching young Earth creationism, whose unacceptability drove intelligent design in the first place. However, it has become clear to me today why the far right dislikes Darwinism. It dislikes Darwinism because of its well-established connections with Marxian socialism. These connections established themselves whilst Marx and Darwin remained alive, and European working classes were developing a rigid anti-religion politics. As John Kautsky noted in his Social Democracy and the Aristocracy (review here) this politics was always much less intolerant of private capitalism than of Christian influence, because Christianity was viewed as the key obstacle to workers’ political rights. This accords with Orthodox apologist Vladimir Moss, who in ‘Must An Orthodox Christian Be A Monarchist’ (written a few years after Critique of Intelligent Design) showed that Christianity was uniformly viewed as absolutely incompatible with any form of democracy [though not incompatible or much less so with the Herrenvolk democracies of the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia] from its foundation until the Great Depression. Eusebius of Caesarea famously developed a political theology for absolute monarchy, arguing that:

“just as there is one God ruling the cosmos, there should be one Emperor ruling the earth”

Yet, a large part of Critique of Intelligent Design focuses upon merely reversing the arguments of familiar Intelligent Design advocates, most especially Benjamin Wiker. For anybody familiar with Wiker’s Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, the book’s narrative is remarkably familiar. The exact same historical arc is used to reach an opposite conclusion, a fact which severely weaken’s Foster’s intended argument. It prevents the possibility of creationism being linked to capitalism or, more than very weakly, to the reactionary politics Foster, Cark and York attack inadequately. Remarkably for an ecosocialist like Frost, the book does not once mention “capitalism” or any related word! Plainly, although there is substiantial discussion of how social issue are linked to the divide between materialism and creationism, the book makes essentially no attempt to show how, if socialism is linked to materialism, then capitalism must logically be linked to creationism. As I noted discussing John Kautsky, there exist problems with doing this. These problems increased greatly beyond the rise of Nazism — a dictatorial political system with an ideology not linked to any form of creationism, but in which the state took over the traditional role of the Church itself as well as its own such role. This severely reduces its effectiveness as a critique of the present political order and its massive ecological and social problems, because as Critique of Intelligent Design reads there is no link between creationism and capitalism. Amy Gilligan’s 2012 review in International Socialist Review notes in this context that:

“A more thorough explanation of the reasons why many in the ruling class today continue to hold and promote creationist ideas would have been welcome.”

Gilligan grossly understates that issue. Eusebius and his contemporary, Saint Gregory the Theologian, did demonstrate creationism as entirely incompatible with mass political power. Creationism’s design-based cosmology requires social stability and a defined moral order which even an immense majority has no right to challenge. Today, Muslim nations like the Gulf monarchies and Erdoǧan’s Türkiye forbid teaching evolution to children with the undoubted goal of defending existing social hierarchies — whether feudal or capitalist or tribal — as divinely designed. This has allowed them to develop a more advanced form of capitalism than possible under a materialist cosmology because divine design constitutes an unrivalled means of defending the right of the extremely rich to accumulate unlimited wealth. The fact that Muslim theologian Hârun Yahya is known to have used Christian intelligent design materials in his writing proves that creationism is not merely a Christian institution. Creationism indeed predates monotheism and was used by the monarchs of Egypt and Sumer to justify their rule.

Further problems with Critique of Intelligent Design relate to its omission of working-class perspectives, especially of how working class gains depend upon defying the creationism used by the ruling classes to justify thier power. In 2009’s ‘The God Debates and the Materialist Interpretation of History’, Alex Saxton makes one extremely relevant point:

“Some [socialists] perhaps fear that to concur in a critique of religion might alienate religiously oriented resistance movements that seem to be shaping up again in other parts of the world.”

What Foster, Clark and York needed to do but did not (or could not) was study historical failures of religiously oriented resistance movements and thus demonstrate materialism’s significance for the lower classes. Silvia Federici in ‘All the World Needs a Jolt: Social Movements and Political Crisis in Medieval Europe’ from her 1986 Caliban and the Witch: Women the Body and Primitive Accumulation discusses the many religious movements that flourished as protest during the High Middle Ages, especially during the Black Death. Federici also studies workers’ movements at the end of that period, noting that Marx called the fifteenth century

“[the ]golden age of the European proletariat”

without ever analysing why efforts to fight against what she sees as a ruling class counterrevolution failed as completely as they did. The complete absence of a materialist cosmology is at the very least a potential factor. Further examples of the failure of religiously-oriented resistance movements completely overlooked within Critique of Intelligent Design occur in Ward Churchill and Michael Bryan’s 1984 Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America. Although that book has a very limited focus and by its nature cannot critique religious resistance movements in, say, Palestine [e.g. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad] it does suggest that religiously oriented nonviolent resistance was inadequate for such successes as Indian independence (see also ‘Revolt in the Colonies’ by Neil Faulkner), civil rights, and the social struggles of late-twentieth century Latin America. The Radical Reformation of the sixteenth century — in which originally radical sects became extremely conservative “Old Order” churches — provides further evidence that genuine social reform is barred without a materialist cosmology.

All these problems make Critique of Intelligent Design not nearly the detailed critique it could (should) have been. More than that, the book entirely fails to link creationism to the most advanced forms of capitalism in the United States, Türkiye and especially the Gulf monarchies today, although such links stand undeniable. As such, the book is deeply flawed and misdirected even if it appears revealing at first sight.

A book that rivals ‘Foot Ball’

Today, looking to correct a YouTube comment, I stumbled upon a book that at first was curious to me but when I open a small sample I realised immediately that I had stumbled upon a book as bad as R. Picken’s awful Foot Ball of many years ago.

Written by one Larry Robinson and originally published in 2020, the book is titled “The Myth of the Moderate Democrat: How the Party of Jacksonian Democracy transitioned to Marxist Statist Collectivism”. Its author claims to have been a political junkie for six decades before the publication of The Myth of the Moderate Democrat, and to be a pastor, evangelist and theologian possessing a Doctor of Divinity.

What Robinson said in the section of the book that was accessible is at first familiar Republican propaganda — that FDR governed with a Marxist ideology. Whilst there may have been Communist sympathisers in American government during the New Deal era, the reality is that the New Deal was a series of largely ineffective compromises involving many players not only within the United States. As Ron Rogowski in his Commerce and Coalitions and Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert in American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History demonstrate, the New Deal was a by-product of a series of revolutions and hyperinflations that affected Europe after post-World War I chaos whereby Europe’s working classes supported the Bolshevik Revolution but failed to spread it beyond the Russian Empire. The result of all these processes was a prolonged “deglobalisation” that lasted until the rise of the oil monarchies in the middle 1970s, while the result of deglobalisation in capital- and land-rich nations [North America, continental Oceania] was a pronounced, but historically unique reduction in income inequality. 

FDR was never a Marxist. In fact, as Thomas Paul Bonflglio noted in his 2012 The Psychopathology of American Capitalism, the New Deal was accompanied by a dismantling of the left-leaning parties of the first third of the century. Especially in the nonplantation South and some Western states settled therefrom [e.g. Nebraska], ballot laws became so rigid that formerly not insignificant “socialist” parties could never even access the ballot. As Bonfiglio noted, this placed American politics, especially after the war, in a unique position whereby “left” meant what most would consider right-wing, and anything remotely centrist was called “far left”, which has always made me laugh. Also, unlike the social liberalism of the European working classes, who supported legalisation of homosexuality in the 1920s or earlier, the New Deal was socially highly conservative, involving a uniquely strict “Motion Picture Production Code”. Following the collapse of the union base beginning in the 1960s, the Democrats did reverse themselves vis-à-vis the New Deal in order to stay viable. However, this made the 1990 to 2020 Democratic Party one of strong social liberalism combined with — by the standards of the rest of the world — strong economic conservatism. Today, demography and the desire of the global ruling classes to overcome the (high but insufficient) ceiling social liberalism places on corporate profits is, if the World Socialist Web Site’s [originally New York Times’] assessment of declining Democratic membership and registration be accurate, likely to make the Democratic Party less and less viable with time.

Robinson does not understand that Democrats completely abandoned collectivism after the 1980s, and their embrace of social liberalism in the 1960s is evidence they were abandoning it then. By the 1990s the difference between the parties became exclusively social rather than economic, because the hegemony of big business as donors absolutely excludes any party representing the bottom nine-tenth or more of America’s economic distribution. Demography, in this situation, defeats liberalism because the socially liberal tend to have extremely few if any children, which explains the present takeover of the radical right at a global level.

Did Barrington Moore write too early?

Re-downloading and re-reading Ron Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, I was struck by a quite interesting and revealing quotation:

“In one of the classic works of modern comparative sociology, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1967) [Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy] focused attention on a particularly malignant — indeed, protofascist — developmental coalition, namely the protectionist one of capitalists and landowners against labor. If the present [Commerce and Coalitions, 1989] approach is correct, such an alliance was likeliest to arise in the formative nineteenth century in countries where land and capital were both scarce and only labor was abundant — that is, virtually all of Europe save its economically advanced northwestern corner, and all of eastern and southern Asia. There capital and land could be expected to unite in support of protection and imperialism; only labor, and the most labor-intensive agricultural and manufacturing enterprises, will normally have supported free trade and a less expansive foreign policy.

What Moore saw — rightly, in my [Rogowski’s] estimation — as the far more hopeful coalition of capital and labor should have arisen, according to the present theory, principally in two quite different circumstances: where both of those factors were abundant, and only land was scarce (essentially northwestern Europe, our first case[)]; and where both labor and capital were scarce, and only land was abundant (the “frontier” societies of the third case). In the former case, workers and capitalists alike will have favored free trade and a foreign policy of restraint; in the latter, both will have embraced protection and imperialism. In either of the two cases, however, the fatal alliance of land and capital is circumvented and, in Moore's perceptive telling, the path to a tolerably free society remains open.”

In light of last year’s US presidential election, the rise of Peter Dutton, and the much longer-term rise of geopolitically powerful petro-dictatorships, I get the feeling that Moore wrote his book too early, indeed much too early.

As I have repeatedly emphasised over the past two years, during the era discussed by Moore there existed no example of Rogowski’s “fourth case” — where both capital and land were abundant and only labour was scarce. Under such a situation, which today prevails in:

1. North America
2. continental Oceania [Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia]
3. the Persian Gulf oil states
4. the more advanced countries within North and Central Asia

capital and land are expected to unite in favour of free trade and a (theoretically) less expansive foreign policy, while labour and more labour-intensive enterprises will favour protectionism and (theoretically) imperialism. The problem, which Rogowski does hint at, is that the recent history of the United States and the East Slavic and Turkic “core USSR”, alongside the entire history of the Gulf States since oil was discovered, demonstrate the capital and land are never satisfied with whatever suppression of labour they achieve, because their goal, as emphasised here and here by Red Flag Magazine, is always to increase profit. Moreover, the scarcity of labour encourages ruling classes to import labour in order to lower wages in the labour-intensive nontradable sector. This has several critical effects:

1. it virtually eliminates the ability of labour in those labour-abundant countries [South Asia, Tajikistan, the Levant, Central America and the Caribbean, non-continental Oceania] from which labour is imported to gain from exporting
2. it reduces the ability of the countries noted in 1) to offer competition for the capital- and land-intensive production via labour-intensive production
3. it thus eliminates the political power of labour in the countries noted in 1) and further increases the control of capital and land in countries rich in both
4. as Christopher Allen Culver of Pennsylvania State University and the US Air Force Academy has noted in his ‘Remittances and Autocratic Regime Stability’ and ‘Manipulating Remittances’, remittances sent back to the countries noted in 1) allow these labour-abundant countries stronger currencies, which further:
1. weakens export competitiveness
2. strengthens local capital and land against labour
3. strengthens the global hand of the ruling elites in capital- and land-rich nations

As discussed most explicitly by the late Sophie Body-Gendtrot in her 2002 The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective, the ruling elites of this free-trading coalition favour the most extreme possible social control of the domestic underclass. Although it is not explicitly discussed, the fact that the wealthy favour the most intense policing is, plainly, because political activity — requiring international class solidarity — is the only exit route for the ghetto underclass. Mass incarceration is a direct reflection of the political hegemony of America’s very rich, whose primary goal is closing any route to a challenge from the bottom ninety percent. Placing the poorest and potentially most dangerous under direct control is a huge step towards this goal, and the Gulf States do the same thing via their contract system with expatriate workers. Labour, contrariwise, will favour a much more open and free domestic policy, illustrating Sigmund Freud’s principle that economic freedom is opposed to political and sexual freedom.

Free-trading capital and land under expanding trade must ensure trade continues to expand. Externally driven declining trade [via export controls by labour-rich nations, as with Cold War-era Southern Africa] will in these labour-scarce trade-open economies empower previously powerless labour, as discussed by Ron Rogowski, and Texas Tech’s David Letzkian and Dennis Patterson. A free-trading coalition of capital and land must thus ensure labour-rich nations cannot restrict exports to them. Consequently, the theoretically less expansive foreign policy of the free-trading coalition of capital and land becomes much less restrained than Stolper–Samuelson theory predicts. This factor explains the existence of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, whose strict and enforceable trade rules are exceedingly critical to the global power of the United States and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies. Alexander Etkind in his Russia Against Modernity (reviewed here) similarly suggests that Russia’s war against Ukraine is aimed to prevent foreign states decarbonising and Russia losing its fossil fuel profits. Whilst Etkind’s assessment is debatable, massive and influential lobbying by the Gulf States in the West is much more definitively aimed at preventing the loss of profits through reduced global oil and gas use. US wars against Central America (between 1944 and 1996) undoubtedly had the same aim of preventing those nations controlling trade.

Returning to Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore did note the importance of the alliance between Southern planters and northern industrialists to US politics — transformed today into an alliance of fossil fuel producers and giant agribusinesses — since the great globalisation following Reconstruction. He noted the possibility of this coalition evolving earlier, which presumably would have shaped the US into the de facto oligarchy it became during the Jim Crow era and more decisively after the expansion of trade that began according to Rogowski in 1963 — but minus the democratising reforms of Reconstruction. In Saudi Arabia, power-sharing between the Al Saud and Al Ash-Sheikh meant an alliance between the rentier capital of the state and the Wahhabi clergy (land) had forged a free-trading coalition even before capital became abundant after oil was discovered. Similar links between imams and sheikhs developed in other Gulf states. This has prevented any possibility of a tolerably free society for anyone except capitalists and the traditional nomadic pastoralists, and, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is potentially much more dangerous in the long term than the better-known protectionist alliance of land and capital.

Another idea from ‘Commerce and Coalitions’: Why no tradition of private charity in most of the world?

Looking again at Ron Rogowski’s book Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignment, it has occurred to me that his theory might explain something I have long known about but have never even attempted to explain.

This question is about why traditions of private charity are so geographically restricted. Despite the commendation of private charity in all or almost all traditional religious systems, large-scale traditions thereof are exceedingly restricted. They are extremely well developed in the United States, marginally developed in the United Kingdom, well developed in the wealthier Muslim nations (zakat is a Muslim pillar), but almost absent everywhere else in the world.

Throughout my life, I have romanticised private charity, despite the fact that, as groups like Resistance [now part of Socialist Alliance] demonstrated to me a quarter of a century ago, its primary purpose has always been to prevent either:

1. rebellion by the oppressed and/or 
2. money moving into the control of the immense majority, as this quote from Socialist Worker demonstrates:

“Every dollar in Mark Zuckerberg's private charity is a dollar wrested from public coffers and from democratic control, writes Jason Farbman, in an article published [originally ]at Jacobin.”

I have always imagined, without any sense of logic, that a society based on private charity would be softer, friendlier, more hospitable, and less selfish than one based upon taxation, despite the refutation of this argument by countless socialist groups over almost two centuries. Even among non-Marxists, Emory Paul alongside Jordan Weissman and Mike Konczal demonstrate how private charity has never been able to eliminate poverty, whilst Kathleen Wellman in her recent Hijacking History: How the Christian Right Teaches History and Why It Matters notes on page 286 that:

“private charity never provided an adequate social safety net before the Social Security Act of 1935 [Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), page 460]”

In fact, I will plainly confess that my romanticism noted above comes from the idea that private charity might provide a completely adequate social safety net — implicitly viewed possible by such books as the Politically Incorrect Guides.

If we follow from what socialist groups say, and from Rogowski, the geographically restricted nature of private charity becomes no surprise. Although the very rich will always prefer private charity to taxation, and most likely prefer private charity to paying rents to government, private charity still costs them a lot of money. Thus, something must be gained by the extremely rich from large-scale private charity before they will develop it. Under most economic conditions, very low wages for labour will cost the wealthy less than large-scale private charity — after all, the rich must exploit workers to become rich. The exception will occur when the profits from using labour are limited by scarcity and the rich can gain much more from owning and profiting from capital and/or land. This will occur when goods that use labour significantly can be more economically imported than produced locally, with the result that low-skill labour becomes restricted to a limited range of nontradable industries. Under these conditions — export of capital- and land-intensive goods and import of all even modestly labour-intensive ones — the ruling class can gain politically by demoting to private charity. Charity here:

1. prevents local labour from politically organising in the absence of employment opportunities
2. allows the ruling class to discriminate in whom it gives its donations to, so as to divide the lower classes by race and ethnicity and eliminate the possibility of a unified nonelite
3. serves to allow the local ruling class(es) to justify its views via philosophy, e.g.
• right-wing think tanks in the US
• jihadist groups funded by Saudi, Qatari, Emirati and Kuwaiti charity
• foreign aid to authoritarian regimes in labour-rich Levantine and South Asian countries
4. conseuqently prevents the governments of labour-abundant societies from becoming independent of capital- and land-abundant ones

Where labour is abundant, contrariwise, the ruling class will always profit most from employing it, while much less potential profits exist from labour-efficient production. Such a ruling class has neither the ability nor the incentive to encourage charity: it requires abundant labour to engage in the colonialism found when both capital and land lose from free trade and restrained foreign policies. Thus, enduring abundance of labour in Europe and monsoonal Asia is enough of itself to explain the absence of large-scale private charity in these societies — exactly as with anarcho-capitalism.

 

Large-scale private charity appears indeed to require extreme scarcity of labour. Commerce and Coalitions notes in its discussion of the long sixteenth century that in 1750 Latin America was ten times less sparsely populated than North America. This suggests that, although Latin America imported labour-intensive goods, there was not the same incentive to economise on labour and for owners of land — whose ownership was much more concentrated than among whites in North America — to engage in private philanthropy amongst the lower classes.

Another factor unrelated to Rogowski’s book that may explain the absence of traditions of private charity in Oceania and Latin America is that immigration was much more tightly controlled by colonial governments than in the United States. Private charity in the US was substantially developed by persecuted religious groups who migrated to North America to escape the oppressive influence of European governments. These governments often did not permit them to practice their faith or in some cases even to remain in their domains. Latin America’s and New Zealand’s much tighter control of immigration, and Australia’s antiquated and infertile soils that forbade these capital-scarce sects from establishing low-input farming communities, prevented the development of these networks of charity. This cannot be a full answer given that Canada, which saw the same type of settlement by persecuted religious sects as the United States, did not develop the same traditions of private charity.

 

Nonetheless, it is a very reasonable hypothesis that significant private charity will invariably be confined to societies that are, or historically were, exceeding land-abundant and labour-scarce.

Least “average” yet most “American” — not the contradiction it seems

Several years ago, I read on Wikipedia about how Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States. I accepted that ideal easily, given that the state — excluding the Memphis, Tennessee-aligned southernmost three counties of Alexander, Pulaski and Massac — is a mixture of the Midwest and the nonplantation South, which I have come to view as the most generically “American” regions of the country.

Upon actually reading the article, originally published in The Southern Illinoisian in 2007, I found something somewhat surprising:

“West Virginia was the least typical state — poorer, whiter, more rural — followed by Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont and Kentucky.”

That New Hampshire and Vermont are among the least typical states is impossible to question. Although certain features of their cultures — among the most distinctive in the US — may be retained from or linked to Puritan history, their dependence on highly global industries like tourism and finance exposes them to highly modern influences.

Mississippi is a slightly complicated case. Although ever since the Civil rights era it has been thought exceptional, in reality its highly trouble civil rights history is not “Mississippi exceptionalism” but “Mississippi genericism” at least vis-à-vis the other wholly “Deep South” states of South Carolina and Louisiana. Both South Carolina and Louisiana are among the most distinctive states of the US culturally and in political structures. Mississippi, contrariwise, had and has political structures analogous to the nonplantation South (and most of the US).

It nonetheless surprised me that Kentucky and West Virginia would be called the least typical states. In many ways, especially regarding culture — not a criterion used by The Southern Illinoisan — Appalachia and other nonplantation areas of the South comprise the most distinctly “American” region of the United States. In that sense, West Virginia and Kentucky are (two of) the most “American” states in the country.

The interesting thing is that, when I think about it, there is no contradiction between being the least “typical” state and the most “American” one. The reason Appalachia and other nonplantation regions of the South are such is that they are almost completely unexposed to outside cultural influences. Instead, they have become what James Löwen called “white ghettoes”, but which he and I agreed are more accurately named “white cloisters”. For historical reasons, many rural areas in the nonplantation South, the Midwest and the interior west have chosen to isolate themselves from outside culture for either religious or racial reasons — which of course may be linked.

Why no anarcho-capitalism before the 1970s?

In Commerce and Coalitions, Ron Rogowski argued on pages 165 to 168 that socialism never evolved in the United States because of the enduring abundance of land and scarcity of labour. Whilst Rogowski is too timid about discussing race — for a start, the theories of Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, and later Wolfgang Stolper and Paul Samuelson, are in no way inconsistent with division on the basis of race if ownership of production factors be divided thereby — he does offer quite reasonable explanations in terms of how labour loses from trade and becomes either timid or powerless except during falling trade.

One related point I thought of on reading Rogowski but which has not been discussed is why anarcho-capitalism evolved where and when it did. Since the Republican Revolution, anarcho-capitalism has been a highly influential ideology amongst the US ruling class, with Randolph Hohle arguing that anarcho-capitalist and allied writers use a code of:

“private” = “White”

“public” = “Black”

to justify their vision of a society without public services. (Although Hohle says this code developed only after the civil rights revolution of the middle 1960s, I feel that it probably dates back to at least the early Republic when free blacks, as I noted previously, became viewed as wholly deviant.)

Despite its influence, anarcho-capitalism has never been subject to detailed scholarly study. The critical question is why, given the benefits not having to pay taxes would have to the extremely rich, anarcho-capitalism only became an established ideology in the 1970s, and never evolved in Europe or Japan at all. Here, Rogowski can provide a very clear answer. Anarcho-capitalism is, by definition, a militant movement of the upper classes to remove the power of labour, and in its goal to eliminate the public sector is the direct opposite of socialist movements aiming to eliminate the private sector. By inverting what Commerce and Coalitions says about socialism, we can predict logically that anarcho-capitalism (or similar militant movements against democracy) will arise where(ever) capital benefits from expanding trade and labour does not, that is, where capital is abundant and labour scarce. In Rogowski’s terminology, anarcho-capitalism will arise in advanced economies with a high land:labour ratio. Under these conditions, capital and land gain from free trade, whilst labour sees its opportunities restricted and its incomes reduced. Thus class struggle is intense as capital and land seek to eliminate the power of groups opposed to their unlimited power by funding politicians so dedicated, and ultimately to destroy all possible sources of power of such groups. Under this condition, those who do not lie at the very bottom of society — lacking the resources to unite with those who do as their skills are devalued — will stigmatise those at the very bottom. Rogowski himself showed that this stigmatisation can be extremely powerful on page 85 of his 1974 Rational Legitimacy: A Theory of Political Support, and on page 157 he suggests that the probability of a coalition between lower classes with different stigmatisation states is likely to be very low if the groups lack combined economic power.

As I have discussed here, there were never any advanced economies with even a relatively high land:labour ratio at any point between the birth of Christ and about 1900. An undated file from the University of Michigan noted this at PS 489.1 (page 5):

“Abundance of Land and Capital, Scarcity of Labor (p. 32):

Who?

1. 1840: no one
2. 1914: US and Canada
3. [1991-: US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Arab Gulf States, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Turkey (marginal)]”

Thus, before 1900 no state favourable to the development of strong and/or influential anarcho-capitalist type movements existed. Although Proudhon’s ideas as depicted by Marxist Left Review strikingly resemble anarcho-capitalism in many respects, if Rogowski be correct then Proudhon was planting an ideological seed onto the unfavourable soil of mid-nineteenth-century France.

In the developed countries of northwestern Europe, enduring abundance of labour meant that when trade expanded, enriched workers pressed for and gained more rights and a larger public sector. Additionally, labour did not oppose capital because both benefitted from trade, and this made capital compromise severely with labour’s opposing demands for the highest possible taxes and greatest regulation. This is even more emphatically true of later-developing East Asia.

In a labour-rich society, labour opposes capital only when capital is scarce. There capital becomes militant only during falling trade and is intensely protectionist. This militant capital will then support autarky with only the most restricted possible trade, a position entirely opposed to free-trading anarcho-capitalism. Unlike anarcho-capitalism, Marxian socialism was and is not explicitly pro-free trade. Thus one could theoretically imagine militant socialism arising in advanced, land-rich economies under falling trade, though history does not provide an example and there exist many reasons why this would not happen even if the falling trade were extremely prolonged. Thus, “no anarcho-capitalism in labour-rich societies” is almost certainly a more rigid rule than “no militant socialism in labour-scarce societies”.

The rule that there is no anarcho-capitalism in labour-abundant societies can also be extended to other forms of ruling class militancy like religious fundamentalism. This also first emerged in the United States after it became abundant in capital, notably with the second Ku Klux Klan, and re-emerged there after the postwar globalisation. It has been the dominant force in the Gulf monarchies since the pivotal oil crises of the 1970s. These movements argue, at least implicitly, that God’s law decrees a natural hierarchy based on non-class distinctions like race, gender or religion, and that this is a natural order for all human societies.

The harsh reality of Nazi and Communist sympathy — trivialised too often

In recent years, in an attempt to dissect the old Politically Incorrect Guide series, my brother and mother have frequently noted that the founder of Regnery Publishing, Henry Regnery, was a Nazi sympathiser. This despite the fact that Regnery’s books are never supportive of the Nazis and frequently critical.

However, the reality about Nazi sympathisers, as shown by Clement Leibovitz during the 1990s in his book In Our Time: The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, which I have been reading recently, is much darker than merely heroes of the extreme right being Nazi sympathisers. Leibovitz demonstrated, in fact, that a clear majority of the ruling classes even in those nations that remained democratic were Nazi sympathisers. Moreover, even those portions of the ruling classes of the democratic survivors who were not Nazi sympathisers had negligible sympathy for liberal democracy. They saw democracy as only a temporary compromise with workers’ demand for a revolution to eliminate ruling classes entirely before — as had been done throughout Central and Eastern Europe except Czechoslovakia — defeating the workers completely and restoring a status quo ante where workers lacked the political and legal rights (like the right to vote, the right to unionise, the right to strike, and freedom of speech) gained since the 1860s.

Leibovitz shows that the overwhelming goal of the British and French ruling classes — and presumably the ruling classes of other remaining democracies in Europe, not to mention the US, Canada and Australia — was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime by whatever means necessary. He demonstrates that they never accepted the existence of the Soviet Union, even after Stalin relinquished the goal of international revolution. It was this desire to overthrow the Soviet government, which had been consistently dominant within the Western ruling classes, that drove their strong sympathy for Nazism and their appeasement policy.

At the same time, Leibovitz — much more than even Trotskyist groups like Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organisation and the Democratic Socialist Party — conclusively demonstrates that the working classes of Western Europe overwhelmingly sympathised with the Soviet government. Of course, the majority of Europe’s working classes had supported the spread of the Bolshevik Revolution back at the tail end of the 1910s. Once revelations of real wages cut by a third or more, and loss of hard-won rights to form unions and to strike in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy appeared, the working classes of surviving European democracies became desperate to have Hitler and Mussolini overthrown, or minimally prevented from expanding by force. That idea drew overwhelming opposition amongst their ruling classes, who knew it would result in the spread of Bolshevism — something they could not tolerate.

Leibovitz also conclusively shows just how much Thomas Woods (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) and Paul Kengor (in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism) trivialise sympathy for Lenin and Communism in general. Kengor’s claim of 25 percent of Millennials having a favourable view of Lenin is insignificant when it is observed that probably over 90 percent of industrial workers in Europe in the late 1910s and early 1920s had a favourable view of the Russian Revolution’s leader. Woods’ focus on Communist sympathisers in American government and Hollywood is similarly ridiculous. Even in the 1930s most workers in Britain and France sympathised with Russia as much or more than with their own government, while when Lenin was alive Western Europe’s industrial working class observed how a workers’ revolution could transform society. They not merely wanted to emulate what Russia’s workers had done, but believed they were capable of emulating them locally.

Leibovitz also shows that the only thing that limited the ruling classes’ ability to let Hitler and Mussolini expand east and destroy the USSR was popular — which can only mean lower class — opposition to those dictators, and/or support for the Soviet Union. Even if working class excitement had died down by the 1930s, the USSR remained the enemy of every paramount enemy of the workers — Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Thus, even if they disagreed with Stalin’s policies and/or practices, the working classes in the surviving democracies still wanted the USSR to survive.

All this points to a harsh reality: extremely few people in interwar Europe sympathised with liberal democracy. Generally, the ruling and middle classes desired right-wing authoritarian regimes, whilst the working classes desired revolutionary socialism: a society without bosses or profits where all decisions were made directly under workers’ control, far more democratic than familiar systems of liberal democracy. Even when the ruling classes did very reluctantly accept fighting the Nazis — and as Leibovitz shows most therein privately thought they were fighting the “wrong” enemy — they did not come to accept liberal democracy as a “good”. The workers, for their part, overlooked the brutality of Stalin’s regime and the reality of his counterrevolution because Stalin’s Russia at least publicly opposed what they hated the most: right-wing authoritarianism and the Catholic Church.

The localisation of “dangerous” academics

During the middle 2000s the seemingly — and in some ways actually — inadequate and unconvincing responses of groups like Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Resistance to the September 11 terrorist attacks turned me somewhat away from these groups. Unfortunately, what I turned to as an alternative was much, much worse than any flaws in the radical left — into reading, on the assumption of “true unless refutable”, the propaganda of the anti-democratic Republican Party.

Republican propaganda is not ipso facto internally consistent. I early on noted contradictions between The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the later Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East, accepting the former’s much more convincing view that Saudi Arabia was an extremely dangerous ally of the US. However, one of the worst examples of Republican propaganda that I partially took on board during this period was David Horowitz’ 2006 The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. It was a standard mantra of the Republican Party that American universities are hotbeds of left-wing radicalism, and as a lover of lists I used my brother’s card to borrow The Professors from Monash.

Even reading when less critical of the extreme right, I saw many flaws in The Professors despite possessing little knowledge of the vast majority. What Horowitz’ said that I did know something about seemed extremely flawed, sometimes to the point of being absolute errors. Re-reading when one learns more has made me far more disbelieving of Horowitz’ claims, which sources like the World Socialist Web Site have demonstrated as contrary to fact.

What is really revealing is that Horowitz’ “dangerous professors” are geographically remarkably concentrated, as can be seen from the table below where the 101 “most dangerous” academics are listed by the state they worked in. In order to account for bias from institutions with many “dangerous” academics, I have included an additional column listing how many different institutions in each state had professors profiled in Horowitz’ book. Different campuses of the same university are counted as one because they are likely to be politically similar and might work together.

	Professors	Institutions
Alabama	0	0
Alaska	0	0
Arizona	0	0
Arkansas	0	0
California	16	6
Colorado	6	4
Connecticut	0	0
Delaware	0	0
District of Columbia	4	1
Florida	1	1
Georgia	1	1
Hawaii	1	1
Idaho	0	0
Illinois	7	4
Indiana	3	3
Iowa	0	0
Kansas	0	0
Kentucky	1	1
Louisiana	0	0
Maine	0	0
Maryland	0	0
Massachusetts	6	5
Michigan	2	1
Minnesota	0	0
Mississippi	0	0
Missouri	1	1
Montana	0	0
Nebraska	0	0
Nevada	0	0
New Hampshire	0	0
New Jersey	2	2
New Mexico	0	0
New York	25	9
North Carolina	3	2
North Dakota	0	0
Ohio	3	3
Oklahoma	0	0
Oregon	1	1
Pennsylvania	10	5
Rhode Island	1	1
South Carolina	0	0
South Dakota	0	0
Tennessee	0	0
Texas	5	3
Utah	0	0
Vermont	0	0
Virginia	0	0
Washington	2	2
West Virginia	0	0
Wisconsin	0	0
Wyoming	0	0
TOTAL	101	57

Although I was unable to draw a precise map as I intended when planning this post, it is striking that thirty of fifty states are not home to a single one of these academics listed as “dangerous” by Horowitz. Apart from four universities in Colorado and three in Texas, the entire area between the Mississippi and the Cascades is entirely unrepresented, as is Upper New England and even Connecticut. The Deep South has only two academics, and including Texas the remainder of the South has just eleven.

The Northeast, contrariwise, is academically home to forty-eight of the 101 most dangerous academics. More than that, a quarter worked in New York alone, and sixteen (one-sixth) in New York City alone. What this confirms is that opposition to the policies of the Republican Party is massively concentrated in a few areas, and is exceedingly weak elsewhere. For Americans who have no exposure to the ideas offered by so-called “dangerous” academics, Republican propaganda constitutes an unchallenged message, regardless of what Republican spokespeople and think tanks say.

Why countercultures merge into GOP orthodoxy

The 1990s Republican Revolution, whose ultra-free-market ideology has largely dictated American politics over the past three decades, was frequently justified by its supporters as a response to the supposedly ultra-liberal media of the Bush Senior Era.

When I first read the Republican Revolution’s advocates — my first experience being Peter Kreeft — I found many of their arguments absurd, but gathered that they viewed the Bush Senior Era media as excessively liberal compared to the opinions of most Americans, and government policy even in the Reagan era as similarly much more socially liberal than public opinion.

What I have come to realise in the past few years, however, is that, notwithstanding their successes in lowering taxes for the very rich to almost nothing, and eliminating public services for ordinary Americans, the “conservative counterculture” that emerged with the Republican Revolution has failed completely to achieve the social goals which it promoted during the late 1990s, like:

1. dramatically reduced immigration, especially from countries of the Tropical World and/or of Muslims
   
2. a foreign policy less supportive of and/or more hostile to strongly Islamic countries
   
3. a return of women to their traditional roles as wives and mothers
4. an end to abortion and even to all artificial birth control
5. an end to violence in entertainment, music and even video games (whether by rigid censorship or public boycotts)
6. a return to traditional religious morality in public education

Author Oliver Wiseman in his ‘Have the National Conservatives Missed Their Moment?’ argues that the nationalist/social conservatives have completely missed their moment because of their inability to challenge conservative economic orthodoxy where it opposes the interests of social conservatives as noted in the previous list. He argues that this occurs even when conservative groups try to secede from a socially liberal society that they regard as corrupt, and much more critically that the problem is that:

“[“movement conservatism” or GOP orthodoxy] removes from the political arena, and consigns to the ‘private’ sphere, the very value judgments and critical questions that most affect our humanity and our civilization”

This point reveals why countercultures on the Right move into GOP orthodoxy. Unless the existence of the private sphere (and the private sector) per se is challenged, it is impossible to challenge anything related to the hyper-capitalism that has become politically hegemonic since the 1973 energy crisis. To challenge the private sector and private sphere involves radical class struggle by the working classes. This has always been impossible in the United States due to racism, by which the ruling classes are intensely invested in tight alliances with lower-class whites and providing them with privileges — from freedom of choice in residence to fairer policing — that prevents them seeing that they have much more in common with poor people of colour than the ruling class.

The cultural interests of poorer whites in the United States — many of whom initially seceded from a Europe intolerant of their churches — has served to create what James Löwen misleadingly described as “the white ghetto”, but is much more accurately called a white cloister. This rural (sometimes exurban) white cloister is completely isolated (substantially of its own choice, as Löwen showed in Sundown Towns) from urban America, and much more still from the wider world. Since the standardisation and nationalisation of media in the late 1970s, information sources and culture available within the white cloister have become more and more uniformly hyper-capitalist, which helps explain why it is less and less able to challenge Republican orthodoxy on the economic front.

Oil states as an analog to the United States – and resource rather than settler status as key?

During the 1990s and 2000s, I was extremely aware that the working classes of the United States and Australia were radically different from the powerfully Communist working classes of Europe. The working classes of the United States and Australia, indeed, opposed Communism as anti-Christian.

More recent reading, especially since the 2016 presidential election, has seen a much darker side in that the conservatism of the United States lower class, at least of its white component, is largely or even wholly driven by racism. The fact that, despite massive increases in the wealth of the richest 1 percent, stagnating real wages, and major decreases in religious observance (although they remain much higher than of European workers 150 years ago), poor white Americans are voting for Republicans in larger proportions than they did for Richard Nixon in his 1972 landslide over George McGovern suggests that the role of religion is less marked than I had assumed.

In the 2010s – I think before the Trump victory – I looked online at a book titled Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by one J. Sakai. “J. Sakai” does not sound like a real name but web searches have failed to find out what his real name actually is. “J. Sakai” argued that the poor white population of America was much more different from the working classes of Europe, East Asia and Latin America than I had presumed previously. He argues that lower-class whites are essentially a petit bourgeois or a “labor aristocracy” and that as settlers they had the same interests as the ruling class.

Whilst I was sceptical of Sakai, I was much less sceptical of Michael Goldfield, who argued and argues that race has always been the mainspring of American politics. A recent article by Mitchell Peterson on medium.com demonstrating the the US is mapped towards a one-party authoritarian regime made me wish to look deeply at this. It is abundantly clear that poor whites are the critical group to reverse increasing income inequality and voter suppression. What I found was an (admittedly outdated, written in January 2010) article by Sebastian Lamb titled ‘J. Sakai’s Settlers and Anti-Racist Working-Class Politics’ which argued that defending the privilege of belonging to the dominant racial group is attractive to lower class whites and promoted constantly by the ruling class as a means of protecting itself. Concurrently the US ruling class invests heavily in making it as difficult as possible for white workers to unite with workers of color. Lamb argues that this emphasis on white supremacy has led to many distinctive traits of US politics and culture.

What Lamb did not discuss, but might, is why the US ruling class has been so much more able to do this than ruling classes in other Enriched nations. I think a relatively simple answer exists:

1. that the US is vastly richer in natural resources than almost any other Enriched nation
2. capitalists who own natural resources are uniquely vulnerable to a united lower class because their assets are so physically immovable
3. ownership of natural resources gives capitalists more financial ability, as well as need, to divide lower classes

I believe that there exists a “hidden” and consistently ignored example elsewhere in the world of an analogous situation to the absence of a socialist party independent of the ruling class in the United States. This being the absence of any democratisation movement in the Gulf oil monarchies (except for an unsuccessful attempt in Baḥrain), as is noted by Sean L. Yom and F. Gregory Gause III in their 2012 ‘Resilient Royals: How Arab Monarchies Hang On’ which emphasises the role oil reserves play in preventing any democratisation movement in most of the oil states. That the United States’ vast and more diverse mineral resources could play an indispensable role in allowing the ruling class to so successfully and consistently divide white workers and workers of color is ignored by Lamb. So is the fact that the Gulf oil monarchies possess similar blood-based caste systems to the white/nonwhite racial classification in the United States. Once one sees this, it actually becomes logical to think that the racial caste system of the United States is more analogous to that of the Gulf Oil monarchies than of India or perhaps even South Africa. Yet writers like Michael Goldfield and Isabel Wilkerson (in Caste) never mention the Gulf oil states as a possible comparison to the United States, despite what I have said above.

If we look at the traits noted by Sebastian Lamb that distinguish the United states, and which he notes are due to racism, and then make a comparison with the Gulf States, one can in most cases see possible similarities as the table below shows 

US trait noted by Sebastian Lamb	Comparative Feature in Gulf Oil States
bad jobs	high frequency of low-paying jobs by expatriates in oil states
low pay	low-paying jobs taken by expatriates in oil states
	extreme relative scarcity of jobs full stop in states from which oil state expatriates originate
low level of unionization	unions are banned by law in all oil monarchies
the dominance of bureaucratic business unionism
no mass workers’ party organizationally independent of the ruling class	complete absence of movements amongst citizens of oil states for any democratisation
almost no public health care or welfare	exception because segregation is sectorial (public v. private) rather than geographic as in the US
the influence of patriotic nationalism and narrow individualism	extremely strong nationalism is apparent amongst citizen populations in oil states

As the table shows, there is one key difference: the Gulf States do have large public health and welfare systems for their citizen populations. The reason for this difference is that caste segregation takes upon a different form in the oil states from the United States. Whereas in the United States caste segregation takes the form of confining nonwhites to urban ghettoes or impoverished reservations, in the Gulf States segregation takes the form of privileged citizens working in the public sector with much greater security than expatriates who dominate all but the highest positions in the private sector. This is possibly because in the United States the expansion of the public sector coincided with nonwhite civil rights movements. These in turn coincided with imperialist competition with Stalinist Russia that forced a degree of racial reform on the United States to avoid being viewed as a pariah internationally and prevent mass international support for Moscow over Washington.

Despite this difference, it does seem logical to me that the US is politically similar to the Gulf oil states to an extent unrecognised. I even suspect that for the Republican Party and its academic supporters, the oil monarchies may be a political model of “privately owned government” (Hans-Hermann Hoppe) regardless of the powerful anti-Islamic bent of the Republicans.

Even the radical left, as can be seen in Gabriel Kuhn’s 2017 ‘Oppressor and Oppressed Nations: Sketching a Taxonomy of Imperialism’, has failed to consider that the US (and Australia) may be much more critically “resource states” than “settler states”. Of the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are undoubtedly true imperialist nations, as seen in their support for international Islamic terrorism and their ability to blockade greenhouse gas emissions reductions. Kuhn also does not recognise that New Zealand – although a settler state – has much more in common politically and economically with noncolonial European nations or the European periphery (especially Iceland) than with Australia or even perhaps the US.

‘The Week’’s mistake

Today, a journal called The Week said in an article titled ‘Tucker Carlson joins the right-wing pilgrimage to Budapest’:

“All of which means that Hungary looks to be for populist conservatives in the 2020s what the Soviet Union was for the international left a century ago: a foreign model of a morally and politically edifying future.”

There are serious problems with author Damon Linker’s idea. The most important is that conservatives have always had far more political models available for them than the international left. As Jacobin Magazine notes here and here, it has been very rare than the industrial working class has had the political power to create regimes so much as acceptable to the academic Left, and no other group but large industrial working classes in tradable heavy industry has the power to do so. The academic Left has typically had either zero models to work upon or a small choice from:

• revolutionary Russia in the fleeting moment before the Civil War
• revolutionary Spain in a similarly fleeting moment before its own Civil War
• certain Stalinist regimes, chiefly Cuba
• less often, European social democratic regimes (which tend to be rejected when dealing with much more conservative electorates like Australia or the United States)
  

Contrariwise, conservatives have available models dating back to the establishment of Christianity or even earlier, although in practice almost no conservative academics advocate regime types dating back further than the eighteenth century. Even Politically Incorrect Guides that praise the Middle Ages (especially the Guide to Western Civilization by Anthony Esolen) do not offer medieval society as a serious model. Corresponding to this far greater choice of political models for conservatives, there has typically been competing conservative models of an edifying future, which can indeed be opposed to each other as firmly as conservatism is opposed to liberalism and to socialism.

One could argue that looking to foreign models is relatively new for conservatives, or at least new for conservatives since World War Two. Since 1945, conservatives have typically looked to pre-World War One Western societies for models, although even this gives considerable choice between constitutional oligarchies and a variety of diverse authoritarian regimes. However, in the interwar period, many foreign conservative models were available for the ruling and middle classes of surviving democracies, and although many gained virtually zero adherents, there were many foreign admirers of and sympathizers with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and even Engelbert Dollfuß’ and Kurt Schuschnigg’s Austrian Ständesstaat or Salazar’s Portugal.

Linker is also wrong about Orbán’s regime being any sort of pariah. It has had conflicts with the remainder of the European Union, but that is totally unlike revolutionary Russia, which constituted an existential threat to every single coexisting ruling class. Both anti-Communist Paul Kengor and Trotskyist Peter Binns note that Lenin said in March 1919 that:

“We are living, not merely in a state but in a system of states and the existence of the Soviet Republic side by side with imperialist states for a long time [any length of time] is unthinkable. One or the other must triumph in the end. And before that end supervenes a series of frightful collisions between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states would be inevitable.”

Until after the Russian Civil War, no country anywhere in the world recognised Bolshevik Russia – for a ruling class that would be signing its own death warrant as the Bolsheviks – alongside Europe’s industrial working classes – were committed to the overthrow of every existing ruling class. Contrariwise, regimes incomparably more repressive and reactionary than Orbán’s – the Gulf monarchies for one, or even Putin’s Russia or Lusashenko’s Belarus – are not regarded as pariahs anywhere in the world because they support the power of the global ruling class.

Spencer does a “Hayward”

Although I have become more sceptical of the attitudes and motives of the Politically Incorrect Guides in recent years – seeing that they are at large a mouthpiece for the super-rich as the radical Trotskyist Left were saying before the first PIG was printed in 2004 – I still occasionally think about them and their perspective as a counterweight to the other side of politics.

Robert Spencer is an author I have had some respect for because of his revelations about the violent doctrines and history of Islam – something which I knew of from the Koran as a child but which was obscured until I read Spencer by books I read as a young adult in the late 1990s on the Satanic Verses affair. Spencer shows that Islam teaches extremes of violence and intolerance towards non-Muslims, which can be seen in the Sa^cudi monarchy whose fanatical Islam made them the best possible allies for the super-rich against revolution and even any non-elite political power.

Given Spencer’s focus on Islam, I was slightly surprised to discover that last year he had written a book on a topic the PIGs and their allies had previously addressed: ranking American presidents. Titled Rating America’s Presidents: An America-First Look at Who Is Best, Who Is Overrated, and Who Was An Absolute Disaster, Spencer rates in one book all the presidents from Washington to Trump. When I looked at the book on Google Books, I was not able to get all the ratings, but I did get them online from Loren Rosson – to whom I give many thanks – at The Busybody.

Unlike Hayward, Spencer goes all the way back to the first presidents, but in the interests of making a one-to-one comparison of writers I will only compare with Stephen Hayward’s original The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama. Rosson himself gave his own assessment, which as he says is with some conspicuous exceptions similar to those of Spencer.

President	Hayward rating	Spencer rating	Rosson rating
Thomas Woodrow Wilson	F	0	0
Warren Gamaliel Harding	B+	9	9
Calvin Coolidge	A+	10	8
Herbert Hoover	C-	0	5
Frenklin Delano Roosevelt	F	1	3
Harry S. Truman	C+	6	8
Dwight David Eisenhower	C+	6	8
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	C-	5	6
Lyndon Baines Johnson	F	1	3
Richard Milhous Nixon	C+	2	4
Gerald Rudolph Ford	C+	5	6
James Earl Carter	F	0	7
Ronald Wilson Reagan	A-	9	6
George Herbert Walker Bush	B	2	5
William Jefferson Clinton	F	0	7
George Walker Bush	B+	1	1
Barack Hussein Obama	F	0	3
Donald John Trump		10	2

Those presidents coloured in light purple – Richard Nixon and the two Bushes – are the biggest differences between Hayward and Spencer. I am well aware that conservatives like Spencer and Thomas Woods (The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History) view Nixon as neither a strong president nor sufficiently right-wing.

Initially my Google search was not able to see how Spencer actually views Nixon and why in Spencer’s opinion Nixon was “very damaging for America”. However, a second look showed that Nixon is disliked by Spencer because he opened negotiations with Máo Zédōng. Máo Zédōng is viewed by many on the American right as the worst mass murderer in history – Paul Kengor says Máo murdered seven times more people than Hitler. Stephen Hayward said very little about Nixon’s opening to Máo’s China, merely noting

“Nixon’s opening to Communist China gave rise to the ultimate cliché of counterintuitive politics: “Only Nixon could go to China.””

whilst saying that Brezhnev’s Russia was engaging in a “massive arms build-up throughout the 1970s”, a time when Stalinist Russia’s crisis was clearly evident to those who looked. The Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe would quite likely have collapsed regardless of who was in power in the White House and Capitol, unless they consistently purged would-be reformers over many decades like Kim Il Sung or embraced major economic reforms as China and Vietnam did. Neither policy was feasible in a continent with a long history of working class struggle even during the repressive Stalinist years – a history which the Stalinist nations who did survive lacked.

I am also aware that the Bushes have been heavily criticised by conservatives like Brion McClanahan (9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America) for circumscribing personal liberty, for instance via the Patriot Act. It is difficult to argue about the Bushes, who had little concern for personal freedom, nor for merely protecting Americans against terrorism. If Bush junior had been so concerned, his first step would have been abolishing diplomatic relations with Sa^cudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and banning entry by their citizens or people with Sa^cudi, Qatari or UAE passport stamps, not by invading states opposed to al-Qa^cida like Iraq. However, powerful ties with the authoritarian monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council are in the vested interest of the super-rich – the only group whom the major US parties represent – since their theological opposition to socialism means they are the most reliable ally for fighting a war against the interests of the majority. That the Gulf monarchies are the major supporters of global terrorism is immaterial. Any assessment of Bush junior’s real relationship to freedom should take this into account.

With Bush senior, had he left Hussein alone, Iraq would almost certainly have fought a war with Sa^cudi Arabia that would have weakened both regimes and dramatically weakened the threat of global terrorism. (Pat Buchanan in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War argued in a perfectly analogous manner that the best way to fight both Nazism and Stalinism was to let them fight each other). Again, the PIGs I have read never say this about Iraq, and these omissions need to be considered when studying such books.

“Tax grade” part II

Ever since my brother developed the concept of “tax grade” to explain Stephen F. Hayward’s rankings of the presidents from Wilson to Obama (and his presumptive high ranking of Trump), I have had a look at Hayward’s grades and found some interesting patterns in the grades over time, as can be seen from the following graph:

This graph – with two grades between each grey line – illustrates the “constitutional grade” (higher grade being shown higher on the graph) of United States presidents between 1913 and 2017 according to Stephen F. Hayward’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama.

 What I noticed on close examination is that:

1. of the theoretically possible “constitutional grades” from A+ to F, only seven are actually given by Hayward to any president between 1913 and 2017
2. the possible grades not given by Hayward to any president are:
1. A
2. B-
3. C
   
4. D, D+ or D-
5. E, E+ or E-
3. all grades higher than B minus (as I noted no president received a B- from Hayward) occur before 1930 or after 1980
4. all grades of C plus or C minus (there is no straight C as I noted) occur between 1930 and 1980
5. between 1930 and 1980, there is some overlap between Republican and Democratic presidents, although every failing grade is still given to Democrats Roosevelt, Johnson and Carter
6. contrariwise, before 1930 and after 1980, all Democratic presidents get failing grades, and all Republican presidents receive grades of B or higher

My brother believes that this difference occurs because before 1930 and after 1980 there was little acceptance by the US ruling class of the idea that taxing the super-rich was legitimate, and that the Politically Incorrect Guides are entirely about eliminating taxes on the super-rich. Whilst I appreciate my brother’s comments, I do see flaws.