Out Now! — A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. against the Vietnam war

By Fred Halstead

1978, Pathfinder Press

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

For the past several months the Israeli government has been carrying out an unimaginably horrendous genocidal campaign against Palestinians. That campaign has been met with unprecedented demonstrations of protest from around the world. 

Yet the Israeli government, as well as the government in this country have been essentially indifferent to those demonstrations. As a result, the genocide continues.  So, a legitimate question to be asked is: What is the most effective way for activists around the world to build a movement that will put an end to this horror?

Fred Halstead’s book Out Now!—A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. against the Vietnam war gives a much needed background to the kind of movement we need today. Halstead and I were members of the Socialist Workers Party. 

In his analysis of the anti-war movement, he supported the politics of the SWP at that time. Halstead gave considerable evidence of how the SWP’s perspective in the anti-war movement was essential to mobilizing masses of people in demonstrating against the war.

Today the Socialist Workers Party has an entirely different political orientation. They view the Israeli organized genocide against the Palestinian people as a legitimate war against the Palestinian organization Hamas. This was the SWP perspective expressed in the February 5 issue of their newspaper The Militant:

“The Israeli government and people have little choice but to fight to eliminate Hamas.”

Because Fred Halstead felt that the politics of the SWP were essential to his perspective, I believe it is first necessary to outline the profound change that took place with respect to the politics of the Socialist Workers Party.

Part 1

The complete change in the politics of the Socialist Workers Party

Leon Trotsky was one of the central leaders of the Russian Revolution. He was also the commander of the Red Army that defeated an invasion of the Soviet Union by 14 nations.

For various reasons Joseph Stalin organized for the betrayal of the revolution. He presided over the murder of most of the Bolshevik leaders of the Revolution, including the assassination of Trotsky. He went on to support the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, the Chinese ruthless government of Chiang Kai-shek, as well as the terrorist gangs that forced 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes and created the state of Israel in 1948.

James Cannon, who had been a leading member of the Communist Party in this country came across a document written by Trotsky while attending a conference in Moscow. This was the beginning of the formation of the Socialist Workers Party.

Then in 1934 SWP members became leaders of the Teamsters Strike in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That strike was one of several that led to the formation of the trade union federation known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). 

However, with the United States entry into the Second World War, the Presidential Administration of Franklyn D. Roosevelt organized to charge and convict leading SWP members of violating the Smith Act. This law in fact violated the right of citizens of this country from opposing the Second World War. Those leaders served about 18 months in prison.

Then, in the year 1954 Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the teamsters strike, organized to give support to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I believe that Fred Halstead was also a part of that effort.

In the last year his life, Malcolm X he spoke at Militant Labor Forums three times. The SWP helped to publish many of the speeches of Malcolm X in Pathfinder Press. The SWP also organized to publish speeches of the revolutionary leaders Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sakhara, W.E.B. DuBois, Fidel Castro, and Ernesto Che Guevara.

The SWP has also been a consistent supporter of the Cuban revolutionary government ever since the Revolution in 1959.

This was the background to Fred Halstead’s participation in the movement that protested the war against Vietnam. He documented that period of his life in the book Out Now! 

We can begin to see how the politics of the SWP has completely changed with the South African government’s charge that the Israeli government is carrying out a genocidal campaign against Palestinians. South Africa brought this convincing case to the International Court of Justice. That court found the charge of genocide “plausible.”

This is how the SWP’s newspaper The Militant responded to that charge in its June 3 edition.

“Claiming that Israel is carrying out ‘genocide’ is a complete falsification.”

This same edition of The Militant argued against the idea that Israel is an apartheid-like state in the following quotation. 

“It is preposterous to say that’s (apartheid) what exists in capitalist Israel today, a country of 9.9 million people where 21% of the Israeli population are Arabs, mostly Muslims, almost all of whom are citizens with the right to vote and the right to travel anywhere they want.”        

This statement deliberately ignores the fact that at least 4.5 million Palestinians live in the occupied territories of the East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip. 

Although these Palestinians live under Israeli occupation, they do not have the right to vote in Israeli elections. Their right to travel is severely restricted. Before October 7, most Palestinians who lived in the Gaza Strip, even university graduates, were unemployed. They barely had sufficient amounts of food or clean water. Most residents of Gaza had relatives, friends, or neighbors who were murdered, injured, or sent to prison because of wars carried out by Israel.

The primary reason for this shift in the politics of the of the SWP has to do with their idea that the state of Israel, as it is, should have the right to exist. They also argue that Hamas is an anti-Semitic organization that is determined to murder all Jews in Israel. The Israeli government has a similar perspective with respect to Palestinians. 

There are a few persistent problems to this argument. The Israeli government has been supporting Hamas since its inception in 1987. They had good reason for this support. The Israeli government understands that the people who live in Gaza have legitimate grievances. Clearly Israel doesn’t want to give those Palestinians equal rights in Israel. Clearly the Israeli government doesn’t want to give Palestinians the right to a sovereign nation. 

So, they need to have an organization that polices the people of Gaza and works to suppress resistance to Israeli occupation. Israel has relied on Hamas to do that job. While Hamas has been a repressive force in Gaza, they also advocated for Palestinian liberation. This is their fundamental contradiction and explains why there is opposition to Hamas in the Palestinian community today. 

This also explains why the October 7 Hamas organized raid was not supported by the masses of Palestinians. Because Hamas has been the police force for the Gaza Strip, their Palestinian support has been compromised. So, while I condemn the October 7 raid, I also believe that the Israeli government needs to share responsibility for that raid.

Ilan Pappe wrote his meticulously researched book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. This book documents the systematic efforts of terrorist gangs to murder thousands of Palestinians and coerce 750,000 to leave their homes. These were the Stern Gang, the Irgun, and the Hagenah.

We might also look at the unimaginable horror inflicted on Black people 

by the Ku Klux Klan in this country. The purpose of that systematic violence was to force Black people to do the worst jobs and live in the poorest neighborhoods.

As horrendous as that terror was, the Palestinian people have been subjected to an even more vicious persecution. The Israeli government isn’t satisfied with forcing Palestinians to do the worst jobs. The current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank represents clear evidence that the Israeli government wants to remove all Palestinians from their homeland. 

David Ben Gurion organized a systematic study of about 500 Palestinian cities and towns in 1947. This was in preparation for the subjugation and removal of Palestinians in their homeland. So, when we look at the unimaginable horror Palestinians are experiencing today, we can say clearly that this started with Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.

When Fred Halstead and I were members of the Socialist Workers Party the SWP supported the idea of a democratic secular Palestine. Astonishingly, today this same party makes the following argument.

“defense of Israel as a refuge for Jews is a key battle for working people everywhere.”

Clearly there was a holocaust where the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Clearly systemic anti-Semitism has existed in the world for a long time.

However, there were many other holocausts in the world before and after the establishment of the state of Israel. We can mention the genocide against Native Americans. There was the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of people born in Africa and forcibly transported to the Americas. We can look at the British forced starvation of tens of millions of people in China, India, and Brazil. The Nazis used the same genocidal methods against the Jews as Germany used in the holocaust they organized in Namibia.

The challenge isn’t to give one people a homeland by organizing a genocide or ethnic cleansing of another people. The challenge is to fight against all forms in discrimination in the world. The Israeli government happens to be an arms supplier to some of the most vicious governments in the world. 

Finally, we need to say that the formation and continued existence of the state of Israel has been totally dependent on support from Britain, the United States, France, and Germany. These nations have given massive support to Israel because it is located in the middle of the region that produces oil for the world. All corporations are totally dependent on a continuous flow of oil.  

So, when we read Fred Halstead’s book Out Now, his references to the Socialist Workers Party and their youth group the Young Socialist Alliance represented an entirely different political orientation than the SWP is about today.

Part 2—Out Now!

When we look at the Vietnamese resistance to the armed forces of the United States, as well as the anti-war movement around the world, this was a truly inspiring chapter in human history. 

Towards the end of Fred Halstead’s 974-page book he gave a summary of the costs of the war. While we don’t know the exact numbers, millions of Vietnamese lost their lives during those years. Close to 60,000 soldiers in the armed forces of the United States also lost their lives, many because of the so-called “friendly fire.” In the following passage Halstead contrasted the money the United States spent on the war versus the annual per capita income of the Vietnamese.

“The direct dollar cost to the U.S. in South Vietnam alone was $141 billion. This was more than $7,000 for each of the area’s 20 million inhabitants, whose per capita income was only $157 per year.”

We might also consider that the United States government began their support of French colonization of Vietnam with the Presidential Administration of Harry S. Truman. It ended with the Presidential Administration of Gerald Ford.

During the election campaign of Lyndon Bains Johnson, he promised to keep U.S. soldiers out of Vietnam. A few months after he won the election, he greatly increased the number of U.S. soldiers in the war. He did this by drafting soldiers into the military. 

During President Nixon’s election campaign, he promised to wind down the war. After he won the election, Nixon escalated the bombing campaign against Southeast Asia. While Johnson labelled his bombing campaign Rolling Thunder, Nixon called his mass murdering bombing campaign Linebacker I and Linebacker II.  

The Vietnamese National Liberation Front only had a tiny percentage of the military resources the U.S. armed forces had at their disposal. That support came from the Soviet Union and China. Their strength consisted of the massive support they had with the Vietnamese people.

The anti-war movement in the United States emerged in the years after the anti-communist repression of McCarthyism. At one time the Communist Party in this country might have had 100,000 members and many more supporters. A common misconception is that the CP lost its influence because of the repressive actions of Joseph McCarthy’s in the 1950s. Fred Halstead disagreed with that perspective.

At that time the Communist Party had been following the political orientation of Joseph Stalin who headed the government of the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev took power after Stalin’s death. Khrushchev spent four hours and 40,000 words where he documented many of the crimes of Stalin in what was called the Khrushchev Revelations. That, along with the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, caused most members to abandon the Communist Party.   

As a result, most people who were active in the peace movement at that time had a conservative perspective. They centered their activities around the Ban the (atomic) Bomb campaign. Initially many people who were apart of this movement supported the war against Vietnam.

Then, there was a new organization called the Students for A Democratic Society or SDS. SDS opposed U.S. participation in the war against Vietnam. They called for a demonstration protesting the war on April 17, 1965. SDS organizers only expected about 2,000 people to participate in the action. 

However, President Johnson reversed his campaign pledge to keep the United States out of the war. He also drafted young men into the armed forces to support his war drive. As people began to see the unimaginable horrors of this war, 20,000 people participated in the 1965 SDS organized demonstration. 

At this point in the history, divisions developed that argued for contrasting strategies on how to advance the goals of the movement. One strategy called for spectacular actions where relatively small groups of people would violate the law, get arrested, and win publicity for the movement. This strategy also argued for a multi-issue campaign that would protest against many of the injustices we continue to face. 

Fred Halstead argued for the orientation of the Socialist Workers Party. This perspective advanced the idea of a single-issue anti-war movement centered on the demand of total, immediate, and unconditional U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia. This was summarized in the demand Out Now! That strategy also called for a perspective that worked to organize the largest possible legal demonstrations. Supporters of these two perspectives would debate their contrasting points of view throughout the history of the anti-war movement.

A.J. Muste

A.J. Muste was born in the Netherlands in 1885. He immigrated to the United States as a young child. His family attended church regularly. He studied religion and became an ordained minister. However, he felt the need to participate in the movement protesting the grinding inequality that surrounded him.

In the year 1919, when he was 34 years old, Muste gave his full support to the textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Workers on strike regularly toiled for 54 hours per week for twenty cents per hour. They demanded a 48-hour work week with no cut in pay.

The police responded to Muste’s actions by mercilessly clubbing him. They kept Muste behind bars for one week. The charge against him of disturbing the peace was later dismissed.

Muste went on to lead a 1934 strike of auto workers in Toledo, Ohio. In that strike, the workers deliberately violated a court ordered injunction and won union recognition. This strike also led to the formation of the union federation called the C.I.O.

Eventually Muste developed pacifist views. He worked with Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and James Lawson to develop a strategy of non-violent civil disobedience. That strategy was effective in forcing the government to do away with its Jim Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights.

Muste also worked with David McReynolds, who was also a pacifist and served time in prison for opposing U.S. participation in the Second World War. 

Teach-ins at Madison and Berkley

Every time the United States goes to war, the government and the press become obsessed with promoting a war drive. There is a reason for this obsession with promoting war. Workers are normally averse to sending young people around the world to murder poor people. 

So, those who have power argue persistently that young people need to risk their lives to prevent poor people from having their own government. While this argument appears to be totally absurd and nonsensical, in the early years of the war most people went along with the U.S. government’s war drive.

So, the anti-war movement challenged the government to a debate where arguments would be presented for and against the war. The government was so confident in their absurd argument that they agreed to the debate.

Halstead quoted Barry Sheppard’s reaction to the teams the government sent to university campuses arguing for support of the war.

“there apparently is nothing like these direct confrontations with the administration’s spokesmen to further expose the lies and hypocrisy of the government and build up the university opposition to the Vietnam war.”

In Madison, Wisconsin and Berkley, California the movement organized teach-ins where people learned the facts about the war. These events were crucial in demystifying the reality of the horrors of the war against Vietnam.

Isaac Deutscher, who was a Marxist biographer of Leon Trotsky spoke at a Vietnam Day event in Berkley in 1965. Deutscher had impeccable credentials and spoke for eighty minutes at the event. The fact that people listened to this Marxist for that length of time in 1965 was significant. This is quotation is from his speech.

“I still believe that class struggle is the motive force in history, but in this last period, class struggle has all too often sunk into a bloody morass of power politics. On both sides of this great divide, a few ruthless and half-witted oligarchies—capitalist oligarchies here, bureaucratic oligarchies there—hold all the power and make all the decisions, obfuscate the minds and throttle the wills of nations.”

Deutscher was raised in a Jewish religious family in Poland but became an atheist. Deutscher escaped the Holocaust shortly before the campaign of mass murder by the Nazis. However, the Nazis murdered his entire family. That didn’t stop Deutscher from being critical of the repressive policies of the state of Israel. This is how he explained his position. 

“We should not allow even invocations of Auschwitz to blackmail us into supporting the wrong cause.”

He went on to criticize Israel’s apparent military victory in the 1967 war. In that war Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and West Bank.  In this quotation he predicted the unmitigated disastrous crime Israel is inflicting on Palestinians today. 

“Israel’s security, let me repeat, was not enhanced by the wars of 1956 and 1967; it was undermined and compromised by them. The ‘friends of Israel’ have in fact abetted Israel in a ruinous course.”

We see this ruinous course unfolding today.

Contrasting strategies of the anti-war movement

James Bevel, who was a central leader of the civil rights movement, also became a leader of the anti-war movement. At a demonstration in 1967, Bevel called for a national demonstration later that year. In that same year there were about 470,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam. General William C. Westmoreland, who was in charge of the forces in Vietnam requested an additional 200,000 troops.

An antiwar conference was held in the University of Chicago organized by the Student Mobilization Committee. 600 people representing 90 colleges and 24 high schools attended.

Howard Petrick had been drafted into the military and was a member of the Young Socialist Alliance. He expressed his antiwar views as a soldier in the military. The military confiscated his antiwar literature and threatened him with court-martial. Petrick sent this message to the antiwar conference. 

“I appeal for support from all Americans who agree that GIs are citizens, who are entitled to the right of free speech guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Although I have never disobeyed an order and have fulfilled my duty as a soldier, my constitutional rights are now being threatened.” 

One of the reasons why the government didn’t court martial Petrick was because of the growing antiwar movement. The Chicago conference called for a national anti-war demonstration for October 21.

Eventually one of the reasons for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was because of the mass opposition to the war by rank-and-file soldiers. Towards the end of the war U.S. military officers were afraid to give soldiers commands that few were willing to carry out.

At this point, there was a division with respect to the tactics used for the October 21 action. Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and David Dellinger all favored a march on the Pentagon. This is how they viewed their vision for this action at a press conference.

Abbie Hoffman argued that “We’re going to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet in the air.”

Jerry Rubin argued, “We’re now in the business of wholesale disruption and widespread resistance and dislocation of the American society.”

David Dellinger continued in that vein arguing, “There will be no government building left unattacked,”. 

Brad Little was working on logistics for the October 21 action. Back in 1965 he was concerned that given the inflammatory language of some of the organizers that the demonstration would be attacked by the police or right-wing groups. 

Fred Halstead responded in the following quotation. “I told him I couldn’t make any promises about the police and ultra-right groups who might attack the march, but that I and everyone else organizing the October 1965 event agreed on a nonviolent tactic for the occasion and we were doing everything we could to make it go that way.” This attitude continued in 1967.

Dr. Benjamin Spock was a pediatrician who wrote a widely popular book titled The common sense book of baby and child care. Spock was a consistent supporter of the anti-war movement. 

Before the October 21 demonstration he called Fred Halstead and said he would only endorse the action is there was a clear separation between the legal action and the civil disobedience. Spock wanted mothers to feel safe bringing their children to the demonstration. He understood that this would be an important aspect to the demonstration. Halstead assured him that there would be a separation between the two actions and Spock was satisfied by this.

At the time Dr. Spock always wore a Brooks Brothers suit with a tie. His wife Mary only convinced him to wear blue jeans when he was 75 years old. This is what Dr. Spock had to say at the October 21 demonstration. 

“We do not consider the Vietnamese north or south the enemy… They have only defended their country. Against the unjust onslaught of the United States… The enemy, we believe in all sincerity, is Lyndon Johnson.”

100,000 people attended the demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. Thousands marched to the Pentagon. A few hundred attempted to break the line of soldiers and enter the Pentagon. 

In all, about 675 demonstrators were arrested. Another 200 were arrested but not booked.  Some of the demonstrators stayed close to the Pentagon all evening but were chased away by the police in the morning.

Then in 1968 the National Mobilization Committee organized to demonstrate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The mobilization was aimed at support of a nomination of Eugene McCarthy for President. About 15,000 people showed up for that demonstration. However, a minority of those who came to Chicago were determined to break the law. This is how Jerry Rubin explained his point of view.

“Repression turns demonstration protests into wars. Actors into heroes. Masses of individuals into community. Repression eliminates the bystander, the neutral observer, the theorist. It forces everyone to pick a side. A movement can not grow without repression.”

So, when a minority of protesters challenged the National Guard and the police 660 people were arrested, 1,000 injured, and there was one fatality. 

Protesting this repression anti-war organizations called for another legal demonstration in Chicago. Twenty-five thousand people attended the action. While the press gave considerable coverage to the repression by the police, there was little press coverage given to this larger legal demonstration. 

Black liberation

During the same years as the U.S. government was at war against Vietnam, they also carried out a hot war against the African American community. In the mid 1960s the government buckled to pressure from the Civil Rights movement and did away with the Jim Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights.

However, institutionalized racist discrimination continued to be a fact of life. The issue that pushed the Black community into action was routine and systematic police brutality. Elizabeth Hinton wrote a powerful book titled America on Fire that documented all the rebellions in this country that continued until the 1980s.

The government responded to rebellions in Watts, Detroit, and Newark by murdering 180 people. Responding to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 cities across the country erupted in rebellion.

One year to the day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King gave a speech where he opposed the war against Vietnam. In that speech King argued that the United States was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” He went on to argue that the United States armed forces might appear to be “strange liberators” to the Vietnamese.

Malcolm X didn’t just oppose the U.S. war against Vietnam. He was inspired by the Vietnamese resistance to imperialism. Speaking about the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, this is what Malcolm had to say. 

“The French were deeply entrenched in Vietnam for a hundred years or so. They had the best weapons of warfare, a highly mechanized army, everything that you would need. And the guerrillas come out of the rice paddies, with nothing more than sneakers on, and a rifle, and a bowl of rice. And you know what they did in Dien Bien Phu. They ran the French out of there. And if the French were deeply entrenched and couldn’t stay there, then how do you think someone else is going to stay there, who isn’t even there yet?”

  

Mohammed Ali was influenced by Malcolm X and refused to be inducted into the military. He argued that “No Vietnamese ever called me n—word.” Although Ali faced a possible prison sentence for his refusal to be inducted, the Supreme Court looked at his case and needed to take a few things under consideration. 

They understood that Ali might have been the most popular person in the country at that time.  They understood that the Black community and the anti-war movement would erupt if he went to jail. So, in 1971 the Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision and respected Ali’s right not to serve because of his religious convictions.

In that same year, there was a revolt at the Attica prison in New York. The prisoners demanded that they be treated as human beings. Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the armed forces to crush that rebellion. This resulted in the murder of several inmates.   

Women’s liberation

Nancy Rosenstock wrote an important book titled Inside the second wave of feminism—Boston female liberation, 1968-1972, An account by participants. We might consider that before this movement, women were routinely prohibited from wearing pants at work. They were not allowed to have a credit card. Doctors routinely refused to give single women prescriptions for birth control. Most women worked jobs as secretaries or housekeepers. Only a tiny percentage of doctors were women. Abortion was illegal.

The combined movements of women’s liberation, civil rights, and anti-war all created a political climate where women began to gain rights they never had before. One of those rights was the right to decide if and when women become mothers. Today the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has compromised that right. As a result of the political atmosphere of those days, many of the leaders of the anti-war movement were women.

The invasion of Cambodia and the war against anti-war protesters

Richard Nixon became President in 1969. On April 15, 1969, massive anti-war demonstrations erupted in cities across the country. President Nixon saw the massive anti-war sentiment and started withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. However, he also escalated the bombing of Vietnam in his Linebacker I and Linebacker II bombing campaigns. 

Then Nixon ordered the military to escalate the war by invading Cambodia. The Student Mobilization Committee responded by calling for immediate demonstrations to protest this escalation of the war.

One of the places where demonstrations took place was at Kent State University. National Guardsmen responded to a May 4 antiwar demonstration by informing the protesters that the gathering was illegal. The Guard ordered them to leave. When this didn’t happen, the Guard fired tear gas into the crowd. When that didn’t fully disburse the demonstration, the National Guard fired live ammunition murdering four students and injuring many more.

Universities throughout the country began to go on strike protesting the murder of the Kent State students as well as the war. The student Mobilization Committee issued a statement saying:

“On a growing number of campuses, the strike has advanced from ‘shut it down’ to ‘open it up’ as an antiwar university.”

On May 9, in Augusta Georgia a sixteen-year-old Black youth was beaten to death in a country jail. The police fired on about 1,000 people who protested the police murder. 

Governor Lester Maddox labelled the demonstration “a Communist plot” and ordered in the National Guard. The guard proceeded in murdering six people in the Black community. No police or guardsmen were wounded.

Then on May 13, at Jackson State College in Mississippi 300 students held an antiwar demonstration. The mayor called out the National Guard. The Guard fired live ammunition at students who were merely congregating on campus. They murdered two students. The Guard fired on a women’s dormitory and several of the women who lived there were injured.

The Chicano community of the Southwest organized their own antiwar group called The National Chicano Moratorium. On August 29, 25,000 mostly Chicano people demonstrated against the war in Los Angeles, California. One of the reasons for this action was because of the disproportionate number of Chicanos who were dying in the war.

The sheriff’s deputies mobilized and attacked the demonstration. When the protesters disbursed, the deputies chased them.

One of the protesters was Ruben Salazar, who was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and was the news director of the Spanish-language television station KMEX. Salazar was a leader of the Chicano community and documented the systematic racist discrimination in Los Angeles. 

Retreating from the sheriff’s attack, Salazar went to a bar to have a drink. A Sheriff’s deputy fired a teargas projectile into the bar that took Salazar’s life. The Sheriff’s deputies took the lives of two other Chicanos on that day. 

When we think of the loss of all those lives, we also might think of the fact that the United States was forced to take the military out of Vietnam. We also might consider how the U.S. government used lethal force against peaceful antiwar actions. We also might think of how the movement that protested the war against Vietnam also continued the struggle for the right of people in this country to engage in peaceful protest. These were real conquests of the antiwar movement.      

Conclusion

Today we can only speculate as to how Fred Halstead would view the current movement protesting the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians. Clearly there are several differences in the antiwar movements of yesterday and today.

For the most part, U.S. soldiers are not directly involved in this genocide. However, the IDF would not have been able to murder 37,000 Palestinians without abundant U.S. financial and military support.

There are about seven million Jews who live in this country. Many have the mistaken idea that Israel needs to engage in this genocide to defend itself. The idea that Palestinians living in the occupied territories need to have equal rights with Jewish Israelis is not even mentioned in the so-called news media.

Some of the most ardent supporters of Israel understand that criticism of Israel is not analogous to anti-Semitism. Saying that, statements critical of all Jewish people are anti-Semitic. The antiwar movement needs to distance itself from those statements. Today the primary cause of anti-Semitism is the Israeli organized genocide against Palestinians. 

The National Liberation Front of Vietnam had considerably less resources than the United States invading forces. However, it is clear that the NLF decisively defeated the U.S. invaders. The antiwar movement in this country and around the world aided in that effort. Today the world is a better place because of those actions.

In my opinion, the only way to bring peace to the Middle East is to give all Palestinians equal rights with Jewish Israeli citizens. Clearly the current genocide isn’t moving to achieve that goal. However, the Israeli government has never been more isolated in the world.

Mass actions didn’t just aid in the defeat of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Mass actions forced the government to do away with Jim Crow segregation. Mass actions forced the South African government to do away with apartheid. This history is clearly relevant to the antiwar movement today.

The book Out Now! by Fred Halstead offers many lessons as well as a rich perspective that is relevant to antiwar activists today. Halstead never ruled out the use of nonviolent civil disobedience. 

However, he believed that the most effective strategy was to attract the largest number of people in mass actions. This perspective required teach ins and educationals aimed at cutting through the nonsense promoted by the so-called news media every day.

Clearly there have been huge demonstrations protesting the Israeli organized genocide all over the world. My opinion is that the book Out Now! argues that this movement needs to grow even larger. 

Today the majority of the population of this country supports the demand of Ceasefire Now. The challenge is to get large numbers of people who already support that demand to join protests in the streets. This is a challenge for the antiwar movement today. Fred Halstead’s book Out Now! gives us invaluable lessons as to how this was done in the past.

India Sweets and Spices

The film directed by Geeta Malik. Available on Netflix

Starring: Sophia Taylor Ali (Ali Kapur), Manisha Koirala (Sheila Kapur), Deepti Gupta (Bhairavi Dutta), and Adil Hussain (Ranjit Kapur)

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

It is rare to find a film that has a universal appeal. In my opinion, India Sweets and Spices is one of those films. The first scenes of this film don’t appear to be compelling at all. Then, we see a change in the plot that puts those opening scenes in perspective. 

This film starts with a party on the UCLA campus where the students become inebriated after a year of study. Then, the main character, Ali Kapur, travels to her opulent home in New Jersey. Ali’s parents Sheila and Gupta are preparing a party in the upscale Indian community where they live. The Indians included in the family’s inner circle have the best homes, clothes, and cars. They also view themselves as better than Indians who do not have their wealth.

The film begins to change when Ali goes to the local store called India Sweets and Spices to purchase crackers for an upcoming party. There she meets the Dutta family, who are the new owners of the store. Since Ali doesn’t have the elitist values of her family, she invites the less affluent Dutta family to the upcoming party. Ali’s mother, Sheila, is enraged at the idea that her daughter invited mere store owners to her imagined prestigious party.

At the party, the mother Bhairavi, who co-owns the store, is stunned to meet Ali’s mother Sheila. They both went to school together in India. Initially Sheila tries to deny that she knows Bhairavi, but then acknowledges their acquaintance and quickly moves to another room.

In the course of the film, we learn that both Bhairavi and Sheila were active members of a feminist organization in India. We see a photo of them when they shaved off most of their hair as a protest demanding women’s rights. Sheila would spend a few days in prison in India because of her activities. 

I won’t give away the rest of the plot of the film. However, we learn that Sheila’s family became enraged because of her political activism. We also learn that the affluent Indian community that pretends to be better than their imagined underlings, is also a nest of vicious scandals. 

For me, one of the things that makes this film compelling, is the idea that fighting for liberation is in no way easy. Yet if we want to be true to our best selves, this is necessary. 

Real life is much more complex than the story portrayed in this film. However, the genuine liberation of women is, no doubt, an international issue. The film, India Sweets and Spices gives us a view of the international character of this movement that seeks to ultimately transform the world.  

Capitalism a Global History

By Sven Beckert - Penguin Press 2025

A review by Steve Halpern

Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He has written an important 1,325 page book on the overall global history of the capitalist system. Beckert travelled the world researching this project. Harvard University and the Ford Foundation were among the organizations that funded his research. 

Most history books are biographies, or national histories, or histories of events. Beckert's book is unique in that he looks at the entire history of the political economic system we know as capitalism.

President Donald Trump, like all Presidents, claims to represent people who live in the United States. His famous slogan is "Make America Great Again." Certainly there were outstanding moments in the history of this country. However, I don't believe there was ever a period in the history of this country that we can label as great. 

Another problem with this slogan is Beckert's compelling argument that capitalism has always been a global system. In fact, the world learned something from Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio (Bad Bunny) in the recent Super Bowl game. His performance made clear that "America" consists of the entire hemisphere of North, South, Central America and the Caribbean.   

When we look at the vast history of capitalism, there has been a recurring and persistent problem. Throughout its history, capitalism has bounced from one unimaginable disaster to another like a wrecking ball. A summary of the events in Beckert's book will underscore that conclusion.

Seeds of capitalism: 1150 AD and the trade in the Indian Ocean    

Much of the history students learn in this country has been criticized for being "Eurocentric." Clearly there is a lot that can be learned from the history of that continent. However, Europe is only one of seven continents of the world.

Sven Beckert gives the evidence that the seeds of capitalism sprang from trade across the Indian Ocean. Beckert used the word "archipelago" to describe the islands of merchant trade in a sea of feudal societies. The center of that trade was the city of Aden in Yemen. Aden connected merchant trade from West Africa to India, and China. 

So, for hundreds of years Europe was the relatively underdeveloped section of the world. There were two events that began to change this reality.

First, the bubonic plague caused the deaths of about thirty percent of the European population. At that time royal families were dependent on peasants for their income. The plague killed many peasants and decreased the revenue of the royal families. The response was to rely more on income the royal families received from merchants. 

The other event was the contact with the Americas. Before that contact, there was international trade that included the enslavement of human beings. With the contact of an entire hemisphere, that trade exploded and European powers began to play a more dominant role in the world. Other areas of the world continued to rely on entrenched feudal regimes. 

Single crop economies replace self sustaining economies

In the feudal system most people were peasants who farmed the land. A portion of their crops went to the feudal lords. In other words, the feudal manors were largely self-sustaining communities. 

The tribal societies in the Americas had different levels of development. Some tribes were nomadic and travelled from place to place in order to sustain themselves. Other native tribes had a more stationary lifestyle. While there was trade between tribes, Native American societies were also largely self-sufficient. With capitalism this changed.

Before European contact with the Western Hemisphere, there had been trade in sugar and other commodities. Human beings, including many from Europe, were viewed as commodities that merchants bought and sold. 

With the European contact of the Americas, this trade exploded. Instead of creating self-sustaining manors, single crop economies were the new source of wealth. 

Feudal lords realized that they could enrich themselves by forcing peasants off the manors. In order for that to happen, the lords needed to rely on the government to enforce this effective theft of land. Merchants then used that land to gouge out profits. 

Then in a process that took hundreds of years, most peasants were effectively forced into cities where many worked in factories. The lands taken from the peasants were called "enclosures."  Marx argued that peasants were then "free." Because they lost everything, they were free of possessions and coerced to toil under horrendous conditions in factories.

In the Americas settlers carried out a series of wars over hundreds of years that effectively stole the entire hemisphere from the native inhabitants. Initially colonial settlers centered their economies on gold and silver mines in Mexico and Bolivia. Then they organized the extremely lucrative sugar trade. Then cotton supplied the factories of Europe that produced cloth. The unimaginably horrendous conditions on enslaved plantations and in the first textile factories gave birth to the political economic system of capitalism. 

Capitalism is born drenched in blood

Karl Marx was highly critical of the theories of Adam Smith who was an ardent supporter of capitalism. However, there was one issue that Marx and Smith agreed on. They both argued that capitalism was a more advanced system from feudalism. In fact, one of the reasons for the revolution of the thirteen colonies was was the pervasive desire to a break with feudal property relations.   

Saying that, I also support the argument of Frederick Engels and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that the state was born with capitalism as a "special instrument of repression." Some of the first actions of the United States government consisted of a genocide against Native Americans, support for chattel slavery, and an armed repression of Shay's Rebellion. That rebellion consisted of veterans of the revolution who were starving and demanded the means to live.

Sven Beckert labelled much of the history of capitalism as a history of the British styled "enclosures." These enclosures consisted of forced or voluntary world wide migrations, unimaginably horrendous working conditions, and theft of land from indigenous inhabitants.

First we see how people from all over the world came to Bolivian city of Potosi in search of riches derived from the mining of silver. Native Americans did most of the mining and that work produced the silver that became a foundation of capitalism. 

Then there was the forced kidnapping and transport of African slaves under unimaginably horrendous conditions. This was to derive wealth from the production of sugar, tobacco, and cotton.

Clearly one of the primary reasons for the Civil War in the United States was the tenacious desire to abolish the system of chattel slavery. However, up until that war, slavery had been the primary way of securing wealth in the United States. As a result, before the Civil War, the U.S. government was dominated by supporters of the system of chattel slavery.

About 350,000 Union soldiers died defeating the army of slave owners in the Civil War. Then the government adopted the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery except in cases of penal servitude. 

President Andrew Johnson has been labelled as the worst president in the history of the United States. He attempted to implement his "Black Codes" to effectively reintroduce slavery by another name. The government responded with the 14th and 15th Amendments that were supposed to guarantee "equal protection" and "voting rights" for all men who were citizens in this country.

Mother Jones was a leader of the labor movement in this country and an organizer for the United Mine Workers Union. She was also a leader of the movement to abolish child labor. Mother Jones ridiculed those who argued that slavery had been abolished in this country. Paraphrasing her words, They used to sell children on the auction block. Now they sell children on the installment plan.

Sven Beckert quoted Willemina Klusterboer's book Involuntary Labor Since the Abolition of Slavery. She argued, It was this novel combination of the "pistol and pen" that brought many cultivators into commodity production, mobilizing workers in order to immobilize them, blocking their escape with a web of debt, contracts, laws, and taxes just at the time when global rebellions had brought plantation slavery to an end. Yes, capitalism has proven to be a tricky and ruthless customer. 

Enclosures erected around the world

After the Civil War, the United States government worked to create an effective enclosure in the western half of the country. General Philip Henry Sheridan outlined the first step in this process. He argued that, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." This insidious statement might be taken in the context of the over 100 year hot war by the United States government against the indigenous people of this part of the world.

In those years, much of the economy of the United States came from mining, manufacture, agriculture, railroads, and manufacturing in the western part of the country. This effective enclosure inspired Japanese capitalists to create their own enclosure.

The northern island of Japan is called Hokkaido. In the early 19th century that island was relatively undeveloped and populated by indigenous inhabitants. Japanese capitalists hired a planner from the United States to learn how to develop Hokkaido. They were inspired by the enormous wealth derived from the westward expansion in the United States. 

Japan then worked to subjugate the indigenous people of Hokkaido. They mobilized Japanese nationals to develop the Island and constructed railroads to facilitate trade. Because of this success Japan then colonized Korea, Taiwan, and the northeast of China that they called Manchukuo. 

French capitalists also wanted their own enclosure. They decided on the continent of Africa. The French needed to share their enclosure with the nations of Britain, Belgium, Germany, and Italy. As a result, millions of Africans died as a result of these effective enclosures that became colonies.

The capitalist drive to dominate the world was driven by the need of capitalist enterprises to continually grow. Henry Ford profited from this need of capitalism with his automotive assembly plant. Workers produced thousands of automotive parts that other workers put together on the assembly line. 

The owner of Italian corporation Fiat was inspired by Ford's operation. Workers who toiled for Fiat built an assembly plant in Turin, Italy. This plant was modeled on the Ford assembly process. 

Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a central leader of the Russian Revolution, was aware of the capitalist attempt to dominate the world. He was also aware of globalized cartels that competed for access to the world's natural resources. Analyzing this atmosphere in 1917, Lenin concluded that the underlying reasons for the First World War were about global competition of imperialist powers. 

In other words, the First World War didn't happen because of mistakes in judgement by powerful people. No, Lenin argued that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism and that led to the inevitability of two world wars that cost the lives of perhaps 80 million people.

Keynesian economics, and the Communist Manifesto

When we look at the history of capitalism, one continuous feature of this system is war. Capitalist politicians don't like to talk about the financial or human costs of war. Those costs were one of the reasons for the global depression of the 1930s. 

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto in 1848. In that document they explained why depressions like the one in the 1930s are inevitable. 

"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war, of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much commerce."

John Maynard Keynes studied economics and was aware of the Communist Manifesto. He was also aware of the possibility that depressions like the one in the 1930s could be the undoing of capitalism. However, instead of learning from Marx and Engels, he was indifferent to their arguments. Keynes believed that depressions might be avoided through regulations of capitalist enterprises.

After the Second World War there was an upturn for capitalism and many nations adopted Keynesian economics. Under those conditions workers organized in unions and went on strikes demanding higher wages and better working conditions. For most workers in the United States and Europe there was a significant improvement in the standard of living.

However, something else happened after the Second World War. As Lenin argued, the state was invented for capitalism as a "special instrument of repression." After WWII that instrument of repression was unleashed with a vengeance.

Before the end of WWII, the United States invited representatives of capitalists in 44 nations to a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. There the United States government effectively announced that it would be the new world's superpower replacing Britain. The U.S. dollar would be the new international currency. Then the United States Air Force showed the world what would happen as a punishment for non-compliance with the dictates of Washington and Wall Street.

Air Force General Curtis LeMay organized the fire-bombing of about 67 of Japan's largest cities. That bombing campaign destroyed large parts of those cities. At the end of this campaign, the Air Force dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

General LeMay was also involved in the near total destruction of northern Korea during the U.S. invasion of that country. In Vietnam General LeMay summarized the massive bombing campaign of that country with the following words. He argued that he wanted to bomb Vietnam "back into the stone age." LeMay also favored using atomic bombs against the sovereign nation of Cuba.

We might also consider that during most of the economic upturn after WWII the government consistently violated the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. All branches of the government supported the infamous Jim Crow laws that stripped Black people of citizenship rights here.

Only because of the civil rights and Black power movements did the government concede to give Black people citizenship rights they were denied. However, the massive demonstrations in 2020 protesting murders by the police of Black people is clear evidence that institutionalized discrimination in this country continues.

Also during the period of capitalist upturn many women were segregated into jobs as nurses, secretaries, or housekeepers. Many were prohibited from wearing pants at work. They weren't allowed to have credit cards in their own name, and sexual harassment was routine. Women did not have the right to decide if and when they became mothers. This all began to change with government concessions prompted by the Second Wave of Feminism in the early 1970s.

Neoliberalism

In the early 1970s Paul Volcker informed President Nixon that the United States didn't have the money to pay for the war against Vietnam. Volcker convinced Nixon to take the dollar off the gold standard. This action eventually prompted the government to drastically increase interest rates. 

Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both studied economics and were aware of the Communist Manifesto. Like John Maynard Keynes they were both either indifferent of hostile to its arguments. 

Hayek and Friedman were also hostile to the regulatory policies of Keynes. They believed in a complex economic formula that in essence mirrored capitalist economic policy before the depression of the 1930s. Instead of favoring government regulation their neoliberal policies favored deregulation of capitalist enterprises. Their system is known as neoliberalism. 

Up until the 1970s manufacturing enterprises in the United States were the driving force of the economy. Then banks became the dominant force. Banks invested huge amounts of money all over the world searching for places where wages were the lowest.   

Sven Beckert presented the event that gave birth to neoliberalism. This was the military overthrow of the democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende. The military murdered thousands of Chileans so the economy would be deregulated. 

As a result, a minority of the Chilean population grew wealthy while the vast majority saw their standard of living collapse. Wall Street investors celebrated, while Chileans needed to wear gas masks on their way to work in Santiago because of the intense pollution in the city. This was caused by eliminating pollution controls in favor of free market economics.  

I worked in two automotive factories in Philadelphia for twenty-one years. Those factories were among the hundreds of factories that closed in the Delaware Valley due to the free market economics of neoliberalism. 

We can see where much of that work went by reading the labels on our clothing. Workers from all over the world produce the clothing we wear at wages that hover around two dollars per day. These conditions explain why the United Nations estimates that about 15,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases.

We might consider that both Hayek and Friedman, the architects of neoliberalism, received Nobel Prizes for the unimaginable horror their theories inflicted on the world. Then, after the economic crash of 2008 another Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, argued that the neoliberal experiment had "in every aspect failed."   

Apparently Stiglitz is also indifferent to the arguments in the Communist Manifesto. Had he taken a serious look at those arguments, he would have understood that both the arguments of Keynes and neoliberalism were doomed from the start. The problem isn't a question of economic strategy in capitalism, but the inherent contradictions of the political economic system of capitalism. 

1948 and the establishment of South Africa and Israel

As the United States capitalist government asserted itself in the world after the Second World War, they decided to manage things differently from British colonial imperialism. In most cases, instead of using colonial authorities to manage entire nations, they used the economic incentives and punishments to enforce their will. 

Up until 1948 South Africa and Israel were colonies of Britain. Then the largely European immigrants of those countries imitated colonial policy in the world and erected colonial settler regimes.

In South Africa the ruling powers established the apartheid laws. These laws mirrored the Jim Crow laws of the United States that prohibited any form of equality between the indigenous Black habitants and the descendants of the European immigrants. 

Because of anti-apartheid struggles in South African and the support they received from around the world, the apartheid laws were abolished in the early 1990s. Then the people of South Africa elected Nelson Mandela, who had been incarcerated for 27 years, to be their President.

In British Palestine the indigenous Palestinian people were the large majority. There was a minority Jewish community who lived in this area continuously and they usually spoke the predominant language that was Arabic. Before the establishment of Israel Jewish people had been living in the Arabic speaking countries for centuries.

Then Jews who were escaping vicious persecution in Europe immigrated to British Palestine. Most of those immigrants supported the political ideas of Zionism. Zionism argued for an exclusively Jewish nation where Jews would dominate the politics and economics of the country.

Then in the 1940s the Zionist organizations of the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang (Lehi) carried out a series of terrorist actions against the British, the Palestinians, as well as against Jews who opposed their actions.

The goal of these terrorist organizations was clear. They were about creating a majority Jewish community in the nation that became Israel. In order to do this the majority of the Palestinians were forced out of their homeland without compensation. Millions of those Palestinians have lived in territories occupied by Israel. There they are denied equal rights to the descendants of immigrants who came to Palestine.

Since 1948 Palestinians used every form of protest to gain equal rights in their homeland. They even agreed to establishing a nation on 22% of the land occupied by Israel. The Israeli government adamantly refused even this modest concession. 

This is the background to the Hamas organized raid on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. While the Israeli government worked diligently in preventing the world from finding out what happened on that day, we can make a few conclusions. 

There were civilians who the Hamas insurgents murdered or kidnapped. Successful revolutionary movements from around the world have made it clear that they were adamantly opposed to the murder of civilians. 

An exception was the written order by General George Washington to General Sullivan. Today we can see how Washington gave the order to murder and kidnap Iroquois civilians during the revolution of the thirteen colonies. 

After October 7 the Israeli government went on a genocidal campaign of mass murder, mutilation, and starvation of Palestinians. The Gaza Strip is about the same size as the city of Philadelphia where I live. About 80% of all the buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed by the so-called Israeli Defense Force. 

Immigration, a necessary creation of capitalism

When we look at the history of capitalism, we see that either forced or voluntary immigration or migration has been a consistent feature. The unimaginably horrendous conditions endured by kidnapped Africans transported to the Americas was the first step of international capitalism. British nationals convicted of insignificant crimes served their sentences as indentured servants in the Americas.

I'm 73-years-old and during my entire life I've attended school and worked with people who were born outside of this country. These immigrants came here from every part of the world.

When we look at the astronomical economic growth in China, we see that this growth wouldn't have happened were it not for the migration of perhaps 300 million people from the Chinese countryside to the cities. Because of the Hukou laws, these Chinese nationals, who were born in the countryside, do not have the same rights to education, health care, and housing as Chinese nationals who were born in cities. 

It isn't a secret as to why people come here from other countries. The United Nations estimates that about 13,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases. Sven Beckert reported on the underlying reasons for this state of affairs. "almost half of the world's people—46.4 percent, or a total of 3.6 billion—still live on $6.85 or less a day."

It isn't a secret as to who those people are who live on $6.85 or less. All we need to do is to look at the labels on the clothes we wear every day. Then we can think about the coffee we drink and the cars most people ride in. Most of the commodities we use are made outside of this country by people who receive nearly starvation wages.

Therefore capitalists profit from commodities made in other countries as well as goods and services produced here by immigrants. Today we see how the government is on an all out drive to kidnap people who live here because they were born in other countries.

The excuse the government gives for these horrendous crimes is that about twelve million immigrants who live here don't have the documents that would make them legal. Well, forcing Africans to come here to be enslaved was legal. Forcing the Cherokee off their land in the trail of tears in violation of a treaty was legal. Refusing to give 937 Jewish refugees on the ship the MS  St, Louis refuge from Nazi Germany was legal. About 250 of those passengers would be murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. Increasing the prison population in the United States from about 300,000 to two million, that was also legal.

There is another explanation for why the United States government gave Israel $20 billion for their genocidal campaign against Palestinians. Then they voted to spend $75 billion to fund the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). They did this in their effort to kidnap brutalize working people all over the world. This has been the history of capitalism.

Conclusion

Today growing numbers of people see that there are profound and worsening problems all over the world. We've seen this in the massive international demonstrations protesting Israeli organized genocide. Then there were the massive No Kings demonstrations protesting the move to totalitarian rule in this country. Numerous groups are organizing to defend our immigrant sisters and brothers from kidnapping, warehousing, and deportations.

When I look at the news everyday it appears that we have reached a clear flash point in the history of the capitalist system. Keynesian economics and neoliberalism have been pushed aside. For many years successive Presidential Administrations have been taking more and more power.

After the Second World War the United States manufactured about 60% of the commodities in the world. Now Asia manufactures about 50% of the commodities in the world, while the United States' share is about 16%. There is no force in the world that can bring the capitalists in the United States back to their dominance after WWII.

The Administration of Donald Trump seeks to dominate the world through naked coercion. He has sued corporate law firms and universities. He has issued tariffs on any nation that refuses to bow to his will. He ordered the military to murder people on the high seas and has defended ICE agents who murdered U.S. citizens for taking photos.

Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro refused to bow to the will of Washington. Trump responded by ordering the military to kidnap him as well as his wife Cilia Flores. We might consider that the U.S. government has a long history of organizing to overthrow elected leaders.

Ever since the 1959 Cuban Revolution the U.S. government used considerable resources to overthrow the Cuban government. Those efforts included an onerous trade embargo. 

Now the Trump Administration has declared a "National Emergency" in its efforts to overturn the Cuba Revolution. He is using the full force of the United States to block oil shipments to the island. Those efforts are aimed at the Cuban people who continue to support their government that makes a priority of human life over the drive to maximize profits.

Cuba has shown the world that a completely different kind of world is possible. Cuba not only has twice the numbers of doctors per capita as the United States, they send their doctors all over the world to treat people who lack medical care. They also have trained thousands of people to become doctors. Their priorities have been to ensure that all Cubans have the necessities of life as well as whatever support they can give to people in the world who are in need.

The capitalist government of the United States understands that the existence of the Cuban government is an obstacle to their tenacious drive to control the markets of the world. While the U.S. government succeeded in overturning governments all over the world, since 1959 they have failed in all their efforts to overthrow the Cuban government.    

Sven Beckert gave us and important global history of capitalism. However, he doesn't appear to be an advocate for socialism, or a workers government that would make human needs and not profits the priority. If he had that perspective it is unlikely that he would have received funding from Harvard University and the Ford Foundation.

Another limitation in Beckert's book is that he paid little attention to the tenacious movements that challenged the horrors of capitalism throughout its history. We can think about the hundreds of years of wars where Native Americans did everything in their power to defend themselves from the theft of their land and culture. Then there were the rebellions against slavery, legalized discrimination, institutionalized discrimination, and murders by the police.

The labor movement in the United States has been battling ever since the rail strike of 1877. Women engaged in two waves of feminism in their struggle to be treated with dignity and not as sexual objects.

There have been socialist inspired revolutions in the world. Supporters of capitalism are quick to argue that these revolutions evolved into disasters. 

In fact the Russian Revolution was betrayed by Joseph Stalin and his supporters. Stalin then became a dictator who used capitalist methods to run the Soviet Union. Today Vladimir Putin openly castigates Lenin who was the central leader of the Russian Revolution.

In China we also see how the government has bowed to capitalism. Banks invested heavily in China for a few reasons. During the 1980s China had some of the lowest wages in the world. Unlike India, China made massive investments to modernize their transportation system. Because there has been a significant improvement in the standard of living, China is now outsourcing work just as the United States outsourced work in the past.  

We can imagine the possibilities for a future world where there is genuine democracy and the needs of all humanity become the priority. We all need and want food, clothing, housing, transportation, communication, health care, education, and exposure to culture. 

However, in the capitalist system there are many enterprises that add no value to those goods and services, yet the costs of those enterprises are included in the prices we pay. These include corporate profits, interest, insurance, advertising, rents, corporate law, as well as the military. 

What we need today is the vision and organization to create an international movement aimed at transforming the world. That is the only way humanity can escape from the long history of the horrors of capitalism. When we look at the history of the resistance to this system, we can conclude that we indeed have the potential to transform the world and rebuild it using completely new foundations.