La Voz,

I read with great interest the essay by my friend Paul Palath in the February 28 issue of LaVoz, in which he analyzed the role of nationalism and educational institutions in reinforcing support for U.S. militarism and global economic domination. Challenged by his call to resist the military science courses and recruiters on our campus, I want to extend the debate on the U.S. military, ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ by responding to Math Instructor Scott Peterson’s recent bombast against DeAnza students (and some unidentified instructors) who question the conventional views of conservatives on these and other issues. I share many of Paul’s concerns about U.S. militarism and corporate capitalism, but I also want to comment on his article.

Scott Peterson understandably questions some of Paul’s assertions, which appear to be making pacifist arguments against all warfare, or appear to imply that ‘power’ utilized as a ‘problem solver’ or military institutions derive primarily from European models, but Scott employs such relentlessly condescending, defamatory, and exaggerated rhetoric that he undermines his own argument and needlessly paralyzes the discussion with personal attacks. He contends that logic somehow makes the U.S. corporate empire inevitable and the best of all possible worlds, and claims that capitalism is the “near unanimous choice” of the majority of the planet (Did I miss this proposition? How was it worded? Could the people of socialist societies ìchooseî when nuclear weapons, CIA coups and mercenaries or embargoes accompany the wrong choice?).

Not only does Scott disagree with Paul but he apparently wants the student who dares to posit an alternative in print to cower in disgrace. Writing in La Voz, in April of 1999, in regard to the controversy over the diversity / multiculturalism requirement in the GE curriculum (which he calls an abomination), Scott quotes Oscar Wilde’s lament that if ideas canít be answered, name-calling serves as a recourse, which he argues is ‘typical on this campus”. Yet in four brief columns Scott denounces Paul’s ideas as “rambling”,… “uneducated, blatantly ignorant, ill-considered, unbelievably ridiculous, non-factual, irresponsible, illogical, a diatribe, the result of ‘sleeping through world history classes’, ridiculous (again), idiocy, extremist (?), colorblind (?), cavalier zeal, tolerant of labor camps, unreasonable and uninterested in evidence, specious, childish, intellectually immature, outrageous, contemptible (‘although not as contemptible as teachers (?) who promote such ignorance’)”, and lastly, … “deserving of pity”. This is overkill worthy of the U.S. military’s recent use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq, Kosovo, and Serbia. Paul Palath does not deserve this kind of venomous attack in his own student newspaper. He is raising very important moral and political issues which clearly establish links between our lives on campus and the militarized globalization some of us are trying to discuss in our classrooms and resist in whatever public sphere is still accessible to us.

Scott defends U.S. veterans from Paul’s ‘attacks’ (i.e. suggesting that their role in the military be regarded as ‘mistakes’) and I would not presume to question U.S. veterans’ perception of their own or ‘their’ nationís interests. In fact, I am grateful for the veterans who participated in the defeat of fascist forces in W.W.II, including my father and his two brothers, but this does not erase or compensate for the blood of millions lost in the wars against the U.S. empire’s interventions and slaughters, or that of the authoritarian regimes it has supported in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Indonesia, East Timor, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Haiti, Congo, Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Iraq, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Nor do veterans’ admirable sacrifices negate the role of sectors of U.S. society which helped to build the Nazi war machine (Ford and General Motors), normalize its political agenda, or organize, finance and arm the legions of fascists and death squads which have proliferated since W.W.II.

Scott Peterson claims that “…capitalism … is far superior to any other system”, “all forms of socialism are failures”, “the U.S. military does not kill people to advance the profits of greedy corporations”, that profits and the vast wealth being accumulated under capitalism benefit ‘people’, and socialist regimes in the Soviet Union and China murdered 90 million and 30-40 million people respectively (By the way, what color is statistical accuracy in Scott’s world?). I can certainly agree (and so did Karl Marx) that certain forms of capitalism, enabled by centuries of colonial expropriation of indigenous lands and slave labor are highly productive and capable of generating vast wealth. This wealth is used to further concentrate financial and political power, which results in the increasing desperation of over a billion of the world’s people who now live in absolute poverty. What happens to those nations without the specific historic advantages of the U.S. elite, or those unfortunate social classes in the U.S. and elsewhere to whom such ‘market conditions’ bring only suffering, increasing inequality and callous disregard. There have been plenty of failed capitalist states just as there are many failed businesses. Competition does not assure winning and the history of ‘capitalism’ is rife with the wreckage of such failures.

The ‘free trade regime’ presently being foisted upon the worldís people via structural adjustment programs under IMF / World Bank tutelage or the GATT and the WTO belies the fact that state-subsidized and protectionist capitalism made the U.S. a global economic power, not the ideology of trade liberalization which will merely facilitate the concentration of power of the largest corporate players. In recent years we have witnessed the modest but significant gains of millions of working and middle class people in the state-subsidized capitalist (but authoritarian) regimes of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and others destroyed by the deregulated economic policies advanced by the IMF/ World Bank, WTO, and the U.S. Even the super-capitalist George Soros, who has personally profitted from these fiascos is sounding alarms about the dangers of this new ideology of ‘free trade globalization’. The intensifying debt crisis in the South is a ticking time bomb, both figuratively and literally.

Obviously we need explanatory categories that are a bit more nuanced than ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ to adequately explain the successes and failures of various economies. We need to try to understand which types of capitalism succeed and for whom, and under what specific conditions. What types of socialism have been attempted and under what conditions did they ‘fail’? What role did U.S. militarism play in these ‘failures’ and to what end? Rhetoric about ‘free trade’, whether from the conservatives or liberals, who sound like each other more and more, is not sufficient.

Socialism as practiced by the Soviet Union was productive enough to give the U.S. and its allies plenty of nightmares in the twentieth century; but of course, as Scott points out, it gave Russians and many others plenty of nightmares as well. I wouldn’t describe such a system as socialist just because collectivization was carried out; but an argument can be made that the loss of political legitimacy by fascistic rule and the pressure of the arms race made any socialist experiments impossible in the twentieth century. Mao’s failures in the Great Leap Forward don’t prove socialism couldn’t be productive, just that Mao and his party apparatus wouldn’t heed the wisdom of their own farmers. The Mondragon Community in the Basque region of Spain appears to be a highly productive experiment in quasi-socialism, and Cuba has produced the best medical system in Latin America and has distributed its meager wealth very equitably, despite its grinding poverty and its regrettable
repression of domestic dissent. I’m not sure that socialism is the best term for an alternative to capitalism, because of the poisoned reputation that the word connotes in the minds of those who so badly need a new form of economy, but I know the glib triumphalism of the free traders and the premature burial of Marx and his heirs will come back to haunt them, as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has so aptly described it. After decades of resistance to this predatory corporate capitalism in the South, and the vicious U.S. militarism which has so often installed or defended it, the protests which have recently erupted in Seattle and D.C. may be the dawning of a new day for those of us, like Paul Palath, who dream of a better world for all. Perhaps the best way to continue these discussions is in a public forum.

Rich Wood

Instructor, Sociology