The $1,200 Check, and the Definition of the Word: Money

The government has signed a bill to give $1,200 to people living in this country. Clearly, there will be many people living here who won’t be getting that money. This is not a blog about who will and who won’t be getting a check.

In all probability the $1,200 will be insufficient to deal with all the expenses that most working people have. So, if we get this check or not, the problem of having the resources to meet our needs will continue to be a pressing issue. This is in spite of the fact that the resources have been available to eliminate poverty for a very long time.

What does the word money mean?

This isn’t a question that we ask ourselves very often. Money is only a means of exchange that can be used to purchase things we need or want. Money, in and of itself, has no value. People don’t eat money, or wear clothes made out of money, or live in houses made of money.

Understanding this, we can ask another question: Why are corporate officers so obsessed with getting large amounts of money? We can begin to answer this question by looking at a bit of history.

Back in the early years of capitalism, individual capitalists formed their own corporations. These capitalists included: Andrew Carnegie, Pierre du Pont, John Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. Then, as those corporations became larger, banks took over the financing of most major corporations.

This means that when we purchase commodities, we are not only contributing to the profits of several corporations. We are also contributing to interest payments that finance these corporations. The problem is that profits and interest contribute absolutely nothing to the production costs of goods and services.

So, corporations and banks need a continuous flow of money in profits and interest in order for them to survive. While these profits and interests benefit the affluent, they adversely affect working people. When corporations gouge out more in profits, workers have less. When workers gain more in wages and benefits, capitalists have less. This is one reason why the standard of living for working people has been deteriorating, while the stock market rocketed to an all-time high.

The Pandemic

Today corporations have responded to the pandemic by creating an unemployment rate of 30%. This means that working people are left to figure out how to survive on our own. However, while many workers are struggling to find ways to feed ourselves, farmers are in the position where they need to destroy vast quantities of food.  

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about this in 1848 in their pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. They argued that in capitalism there is a disease that humanity has never seen before. This is the disease of overproduction.

This explains why food is being destroyed, while many don’t have enough. Commodities aren’t produced to provide for the needs of people. In the capitalist system production is always geared to gouge out profits for the affluent.

Understanding this reality, we can look at the $1,200 check many received from the government from a different perspective. At the same time as the government decided to give us this money, they also gave literally trillions of dollars to corporations. This money benefited some of the most affluent people in the world. Yet, while the affluent have been receiving this money, hospitals are experiencing severe shortages of medical supplies.

I can also add that workers don’t expect the government to recoup losses we accrue at a casino, or when we purchase lottery tickets. We understand that when we lose this money it is gone, and we won’t get it back. However, when corporations lose vast quantities of money because of bets they place on the stock market, they expect to be reimbursed. In fact the government not only gives them trillions of dollars, they give them all that money in a hurry.

So, the $1,200 check is a good example of the limitations of what money represents. A few months ago, receiving a check for $1,200 would have been greeted with joy. Today most workers view that check as grossly inadequate.

What does it cost to produce a commodity?

Today, governments around the world are asking workers to stay at home. Since workers produce all goods and services, I think we need to ask a question that we rarely think about. What are the real production costs of goods and services?

First, we can start with the minerals that emanate from the ground. Some of these include: food, steel, cotton, rubber, coal, oil, and natural gas. These are some of the many materials that are absolutely necessary. Workers are the ones to who take these, and many other materials out of the ground.

Then, those materials need to be refined so they can be used in manufacturing.

Then, those materials are fabricated and assembled to create the goods we all need.

Then, those goods are transported by air, ships, rail, or highways to locations where they can be purchased.

In order to manufacture these commodities, we also need education and health care services.

There is something you might notice from all these industrial and social enterprises. Nowhere do we see the enterprises of banking, insurance, advertising, corporate law, or the military. Although these enterprises aren’t necessary to production, we pay for all those enterprises with literally every commodity we purchase.

We have visual aids in seeing all those enterprises that contribute nothing to the things we need and want. These are the skyscrapers we see in most of the major cities in the world. Goods and useful services are not usually produced by sitting at a desk. Certainly, we need engineers, architects, accountants and many others who are a necessary part of the production process. However, we don’t need insurance companies, banks, advertising agencies, corporate law firms, or corporate boards to produce those commodities. Those are the enterprises housed in most of the skyscrapers in the cities.    

So, while improved technology causes production costs to go down, the prices we pay go up. Now, that we are in the midst of a crisis, I believe we need to examine the things we actually need and how they can be produced safely.

How could a worker’s government organize the world without money?

Today, because of the nature of COVID-19, medical experts are asking people to stay at home. If this is the case, then how will everyone get all the things we need?

A worker’s government would create a rational dialogue with the people. Representatives of that government certainly wouldn’t be advising people to inject cleaning fluid to rid ourselves of the virus. That government wouldn’t limit itself to giving people a check for $1,200. The fundamental priority would be to provide everyone in the world with all the things we need.

A rational government would explain that capitalist governments routinely sacrifice human life for profit. While they understood, for years, that the pandemic was a possibility, they invested $1.5 trillion in the F-15 fighter bomber. While thousands of people were dying of COVID-19, they gave corporations trillions of dollars in a bailout package.

So, a rational government would argue that we need to completely change our priorities. They would identify all the services we all need. Then, they would ask for volunteers to do those jobs. Then, they would make it a top priority to provide workers with the best protective equipment, so people would have a safe working environment.

A rational government would argue that we are the working class of the world. We have nothing in common with the capitalists. Therefore, in order to advance our interests, volunteers would work to alleviate the conditions in nations that lack sufficient access to food, electricity, housing, and water.     

In order to achieve this, all banks, insurance companies, advertising agencies, and corporations would be immediately confiscated. With those corporations confiscated, there would be no need for them to be bailed out.

Even with all these measures, many would lose their lives to COVID-19. However, with this kind of environment, people would have genuine hope and a common sense of purpose. All the problems associated with staying at home would be addressed. If massive numbers of people were being tested, then we would know where we are with respect to the pandemic every day. With that perspective, we would know how and when we might begin to see the end of the spread of this disease.

Today, when we imagine living in that kind of environment, this might seem like an impossible dream. However, with each passing day, the capitalist system appears to be falling apart. As this happens, more and more workers will see the need for a world based on human needs and not profits. In that kind of world, the needs of everyone will be the priority, and the drive to attain more and more money will appear to be a bad dream from the past.

We Are Cuba – How a Revolutionary People Have Survived a Post-Soviet World

By Helen Yaffe

Yale University Press - 2020

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

Before I look at Helen Yaffe’s wonderful book, I think it is important to look at our current reality to place this book in context.

Today, the United States has become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands are losing their lives, and there are severe shortages of medical supplies. There is a 30% unemployment rate and people are being left on their own to figure out how to survive. How could this be happening in the most affluent nation in the world?

First, we can say, that without a doubt, the U.S. government had warnings, years ago, that this pandemic was bound to happen. Dr. Michael T. Osterholm published his book Deadliest Enemy – Our War Against Killer Germs in 2017. In his book, Dr. Osterholm not only predicted the inevitability of the pandemic, he also reported on the global supply network that would make the United States vulnerable to supply shortages during a pandemic. Dr. Osterholm’s book was one of several books warning of the pandemic we are now experiencing.

How did the United States government respond to this information? They voted to fund a project to build the F-15 fighter bomber that would cost $1.5 trillion. After the government became aware that thousands of people in this country were becoming infected with COVID-19, what did they do?

They had a unanimous vote to give corporations trillions of dollars in a government bailout. While the pro-capitalist news media reported on some aspects of this unfolding story, they have routinely supported military funding, as well as corporate bailouts.

Reading these sentences, we might get the idea that the government and the press are made up of a bunch of stark-raving lunatics. However, when we take a closer look at what is happening, we see that these seemingly criminal policies are routine in the political economic system of capitalism.

Today the international capitalist system is based on finance. Whenever we pay for any commodity, we are also paying for interest on loans to banks. This means that banks depend on a flow of obscene amounts of money for their survival. When most of the economy stopped due to the pandemic, the flow of money to banks also stopped. Without that continuous flow of money, banks will be in the position where they will need to close their doors. This could mean that basic financial transactions would all come into question.

So, while the policies of the government appear to be sheer madness, this reality explains why politicians argue that these same policies are absolutely necessary. Understanding this reality, we might appreciate Dr. Helen Yaffe’s new book, We Are Cuba – How a Revolutionary People Have Survived a Post-Soviet World.

Dr. Yaffe is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. During the mid 1990s, Yaffe was eighteen years old and lived in Cuba with her sister. These were the years of considerable shortages on the island. The considerable support Cuba had been receiving from the Soviet Union was over. So, from that perspective, Dr. Yaffe was able to see the how the Cuban people transformed themselves to deal with this crisis. Just as Fidel Castro was the leader of the 1959 Revolution, Fidel also led Cuba in this new transformation.

Reading this book, I began to think that the events of the 1990s signaled a Second Cuban Revolution. However, when we look at Cuban history, we realize that the independence struggle started in the year 1868 with the revolutionary movement against Spain. So, perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the events of the 1990s were a culmination of over 150 years of Cuban revolutionary history.

The economics of Ernesto Che Guevara

When the world began to see the full impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States predicted that the revolutionary government of Cuba would also collapse. Clearly, the last thirty years of history has proven the C.I.A.’s prediction to be nothing more than a fantasy. The question that Dr. Yaffe’s book begins to answer is: How did Cuba survive for those thirty years?

We can begin to look at this question from the economic writings of Ernesto Che Guevara when he was the Minister of Cuban Industries. Before Dr. Yaffe wrote this book, she wrote an entire book on Che’s economic ideas.

Che rejected the economics of the Soviet Union, that developed from the time of Joseph Stalin, who organized to murder the entire leadership of the Russian Revolution. That decentralized approach encouraged individual enterprises to produce, and received economic incentives based on quantities of production.

Che argued that this “hybrid” system used capitalist methods but lacked the efficiency of capitalist production. The efficiency of capitalism is based on the routine coercion of the working class that produces all wealth. Workers understand that the kind of democracy we see is the, “do it their way, or hit the highway” style of democracy.

Che’s Budgetary Finance System centralized the control of the economy with the government. Workers were motivated by seeing that socialist planning was superior to the capitalist dog-eat-dog system. The government would use its power to determine the needs of society, and organize production accordingly.

Because Cuba had a single crop economy, initially the idea was to increase the production of sugar to gain more funding for the economy. That effort failed. Then, the priority was to strengthen relations with the Soviet Union.

So, for years thousands of Cuban students trained in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Block countries. Cuba had a huge number of Soviet made gasoline powered tractors used for tilling the land. There were also massive quantities of fertilizer used for sugar production. Because of the Cuba-Soviet relationship, for several years the Cuban people had relatively comfortable lives. This relationship ended with the collapse of the Soviet block.

So, given that 80% of Cuban trade collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union, this was why the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States predicted the fall of the Cuban revolutionary government. Therefore, new measures needed to be adapted. The Cuban leadership began to return to the economic methods promoted by Ernesto Che Guevara.

The Special Period

In the United States there are routine downturns in the economy. Today, we are living through one. When this happens, workers can lose our jobs, our health insurance, or our homes. Then, there is the humiliating experience of spending day after day looking for a job. Parents need to do all this, while attempting to create a positive atmosphere for their children. Then, when a worker finally finds a job, they are oftentimes motivated to work all the overtime they can, losing even more contact with their families. 

On July 26, 1989 Fidel Castro gave a speech in Agramonte Square in Camaguay. He argued that even if the USSR collapsed and the United States prevented all imports to Cuba, the Cuban people would continue to resist. Why was Fidel so confident of these words?

Before the Revolution, many people who lived in Cuba lacked direct access to running water, electricity, health care, and education. Today, those conditions affect literally hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.

In 1987 I was a member of a brigade that worked to build a day care center outside of the town of Matagalpa in Nicaragua. There, I witnessed the living conditions that much of the world experiences. A worker testified that he never saw an electric light bulb before the Sandinista Revolution. During the three weeks that I lived in this area, three children died of easily preventable diseases. In the world, the United Nations reported that about 30,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases.

Michael Parenti visited Cuba shortly after the revolution. He asked a farmer in a remote area of the island: Why did he support the revolution? The farmer answered that before the revolution, when someone became ill, they needed to transport the patient for two days to gain access to medical care. After the revolution, the government organized to build a health care center in the village where this farmer lived. These are some of the reasons why Fidel Castro was confident that the Cuban people would resist any efforts to reimpose capitalism on the island.

So, with the collapse of the USSR, the masses of Cuban people experienced a significant deterioration in their standard of living. The embargo by the United States government greatly exacerbated the crisis.

One response to the crisis was to legalize the dollar. This became necessary because of the power of the United States economy in the world. This meant that Cubans who had families living in the United States would have access to money and commodities that would be unavailable to most Cubans.

All these measures meant that most Cubans lost a few pounds of weight during those years. Ironically, in spite of these hardships, the infant mortality rate went down, and the years of life expectancy went up during these same years. The percentage of people who suffered from the disease diabetes also decreased.

The crisis in Cuba became so sharp that many decided to leave the island. However, the confidence people had in the revolution gave most people the determination to remain in their homeland and struggle against the difficult conditions they faced.

Agriculture

Before we look at Cuban policies with respect to agriculture, we might look at the reality faced by farmers in the United States. Before the current pandemic, about one out of every ten people in this country didn’t have enough food to eat. Today the unemployment rate has shot up to 30%. Yet, farmers are destroying food because many restaurants have closed. While food is being destroyed, the numbers of people who are lack in food security has increased.

As corporate farmers have dominated the production of food, many small farmers have been driven off the land. While small farmers find it difficult to make their farms profitable, they only receive a tiny percentage of the price supermarkets receive for those same fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products. 

Before the 1990s, most of the income Cuba received came from sugar, where tractors and large amounts of fertilizer were used. Because of the special period, all this changed.

Many of the farms that produced sugar closed because they could not compete on the international market. This is because sugar cane workers in other parts of the world routinely live in abject poverty, and are exposed to the instability of the capitalist market.

Responding to this crisis, the Cuban government gave large tracts of land to agricultural cooperatives that benefitted directly from the sale of food. Individual Cubans also received land where they could produce their own food. Cubans also organized to produce food in urban gardens.

However, all these measures were insufficient to fulfill all of Cuba’s needs for food. The facts are that large scale farming requires significant capital investment. Therefore, in many cases it was less expensive to import food rather than to produce that food in Cuba.

Cuban Social Workers

In the United States a large percentage of the population lives in poverty, while a tiny percentage lives in opulence. There are dramatic disparities with respect to health care, education, housing, and access to virtually all commodities.

Because of this reality, the news media reports on the, “school to prison pipeline.” Because of the astronomical costs of education, many young people view access to a university education an impossible dream.

I used to have a union job in a factory. Many of those jobs were automated or have moved to nations where the wages are between $1 and $10 per day. One day while working at that job, there was an article in the newspaper about the prevailing wages of people who sold illegal drugs. Those wages were roughly the same as the wages I was being paid. That job was one of the millions of manufacturing jobs that were eliminated in the United States.    

During the special period, there many were Cubans who lived under very difficult conditions. The government organized People’s Councils to identify those who were at risk. The government also made sure that no school or hospital was ever closed.

Before the Revolution of 1959, many women worked as prostitutes because this was the only way for them to earn a living. After the Revolution, the Cuban Federation of Women organized those women to become nurses. Many of those women transformed themselves into living a new life.

During the Special Period, some Cuban women also became prostitutes. Again, the Cuban government worked to give these women useful trades and integrate them into the economy. One of those jobs was to become social workers.

Many Cuban men and women faced difficult circumstances during the Special Period. Normally, the students with the best high school scores were the ones who went on a University education. However, in those years, the Universities opened their doors to at risk young people. They studied several liberal arts courses, and then worked to integrate more young people into this system.

Fidel Castro argued that he wasn’t interested in statistics that showed how Cubans might be doing better. He argued that when even one person experienced extremely difficult conditions, this was unacceptable. He encouraged social workers to find everyone who was at risk, and determine the specific needs of each person. Then the government would do its best to alleviate those conditions.

During those years, there were shortages of gasoline. Some Cubans were hording the gasoline in an effort to turn a profit. Many Cuban social workers monitored the use of gasoline to prevent illegal hording.

Energy Production

The first method of mass transit in the United States was by railcar. This continues to be the most fuel-efficient method of transportation. In spite of this fact, the government organized to spend trillions of dollars to build roads, bridges, tunnels, and interstate highways. These efforts were about promoting the profit drive of all the corporations related to automotive production.

As a result of those policies, today the cost of cars, insurance, gasoline, and maintenance of those vehicles has skyrocketed. Not having a car in the United States means many aspects of your life are restricted.

While most Cubans do not have cars, their attitude towards energy production is completely different. The Cuban government realized that considerable amounts of money could be saved by giving the Cuban people energy efficient appliances.

Therefore, Cubans received Chinese rice cookers and convection ovens. Cuban families also upgraded their light bulbs from incandescent, to fluorescent, to LED. Because of the centralized nature of the economy, these changes actually saved money.

Cubans also utilized renewable energy. The primary source of this energy is solar power. Many Cubans like to take about three showers every day. Much of the hot water for those showers comes from solar power. Some of these solar panels were made in China, and Cuba has also become a major supplier. 

The Cubans also use the waist in sugar production, known as bagasse, as a source of fuel. Cuba also has an evasive weed known as marabú. These plants cover about 18% of the Cuban landscape. Marabú is also being used as a source of fuel. Cuba also has a factory that converts plastics into material that is used for construction and furniture.

Clearly Cuban energy needs continue to be a problem. However, Helen Yaffe’s book gives a nice outline of how Cuba is using every method at its disposal to deal with this problem.

Health Care

The United States spends more money on health care, per person, than any other nation in the world. Yet, during the past thirty years, about 400,000 hospital beds were eliminated.

In order to receive medical care in this country, patients need to be insured by one of the many private insurance companies. None of the workers in those insurance companies directly care for patients. Insurance companies merely move money from one place to another. Because these corporations are motivated by profit, they are all obsessed with cutting costs and minimizing health care.

In Cuba things are different. Even during the most difficult years, no Cuban hospital closed. However, funding for those hospitals did decrease. Cuban doctors needed to come up with new ways of treating diseases.

They did this by working to encourage lifestyle changes that would be healthier. Because meat products were not as available, and there were more community gardens, Cubans started eating more fruits and vegetables.

Because the drugs marketed by pharmaceutical corporations are expensive, Cuban doctors made routine visits to their patients, and gave suggestions that would lead to a healthier lifestyle.

This was especially effective with pregnant women. Cuban women and children get routine medical checkups. This doesn’t happen for all women in the United States. As a result, today Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. This is in spite of the fact that doctors in Cuba have much fewer technical resources.

Today, Cuban doctors and medical students are going door-to-door checking on Cuban residents for symptoms of COVID-19. When a resident has the symptoms of the pandemic, they are transferred to a location where they are tested. If they test positive, they are quarantined for two weeks. If necessary, they are treated for the disease. This kind of care is unthinkable in the for-profit health care system of the United States.   

Many doctors and nurses from other countries come to the United States because the salaries here are higher. Critics of this trend have labelled it as a “brain drain” from underdeveloped nations. This means that less developed nations spend considerable resources to train doctors, only to see them leave the homeland for more money.

The U.S. government has promoted a Medical Parole Program to attract Cuban doctors who might be attracted to the higher salaries in the United States. Less than ten percent of the Cuban doctors took advantage of that program.

In their effort to promote this program, the U.S. government has labelled Cuban doctors who treat patients all over the world as victims of state sponsored “human trafficking.” This charge is not only insulting to Cuban doctors, but also to the millions of patients who they have treated. Even the New York Times ran an editorial critical of the U.S. charge against Cuba of human trafficking.

Cuban doctors have been training doctors from some of the poorest nations in the world. Most of these doctors continue to practice in their homeland. As a result, some of the least affluent patients are receiving health care.

Thousands of Cuban doctors have also travelled to over one-hundred nations in the world in the sixty years since the Revolution. During those numerous missions, Cuban doctors treated millions of patients who otherwise would not have had medical care. In the United States the priorities are the exact opposite. Here, the least affluent patients oftentimes receive less than adequate care if they receive any care at all.

Scientific Research

Much of the pharmaceutical research in the United States is funded by the government. When a drug company sees a potential drug that might be profitable, they take over that research in hopes that a new drug can be patented. If this new drug comes to market, drug companies routinely charge astronomical prices for that drug. This is how the drug companies have become so profitable. They use some of those profits in massive advertising campaigns that we routinely see on the television.

Because of the astronomical prices of commercial drugs, as well as the U.S. embargo against Cuba, the Cuban government supported efforts to develop their own pharmaceutical research. The U.S. research into new drugs is commercially motivated.

In the treatment of cancer, doctors routinely prescribe radiation or chemotherapy. While this treatment can be effective, chemotherapy can also kill healthy cells, and at times, even causes the death of a patient.   

On the other hand, Cuban pharmaceutical research has been largely about finding ways to teach an individual’s immunological system to fight infections. This research began with a visit by U.S. oncologist Randolph Clark Lee. Dr. Lee convinced Fidel Castro that his interferon research might be effective in treating disease by stimulating the immunological system.

The Cubans began an intensive program to develop an interferon treatment. When the Cuban researchers finally came up with their own interferon, about 340,000 Cubans were infected in the potentially fatal disease of dengue. The Cuban interferon treatment proved to be effective in treating those infected with dengue.

Today, the Cuban interferon drug Alpha-2B has been shown to be effective in preventing COVID-19 patients from developing pneumonia. Cuba manufactures massive quantities of this drug in China. Nations around the world are discovering that Alpha 2B is effective. Because of the U.S. trade embargo, COVID-19 patients might be dying because the government refuses to import Alpha-2B.

Democracy

In the United States politicians and media pundits routinely argue that we live in a “democracy.” This argument is based on the fact that most people living in the United States have the right to mark-up ballots in voting booths one day every year.

The news media gives a massive amount of publicity to candidates in the Democratic and Republican Parties who are ardent supporters of the capitalist system. Those candidates who support socialist politics are routinely ignored by the media. As a result, most people don’t know the names of the socialist candidates who are running for office. While Bernie Sanders claims to support the idea of socialism, his actions indicate that he is completely tied to the capitalist political economic system.

Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban people needed to make some difficult decisions. So, the government organized a national discussion about a new constitution. These discussions complemented the routine discussions Cubans have about the issues they face.

Government officials are not only members of the Cuban Communist Party, but consist of all those who have shown that they are effective in resolving problems. Because of this reality, campaigning for offices in the government is illegal. People living in their communities understand who are the most effective people organizing the functioning of the community.

Dr. Yaffe has an entire chapter of her book dedicated to the history of the United States government’s embargo against Cuba. She argues that the Cuban people have responded to that history by effectively writing a “rulebook on resiliency.”

With the current pandemic, the world is seeing the unmasking of the capitalist system. People who have power are demanding that workers risk our lives, so they can continue to maximize profits on their investments. However, the downturn in the economy will, no doubt, have consequences that are difficult to predict.

Dr. Helen Yaffe’s book gives clear evidence that there is an alternative. If humanity were to utilize the tremendous productive forces for human needs and not for profit, the world would be a profoundly better place. The Cuban example gives us good reason to believe that idea is not an impossible dream, but a real possibility.

  

      

         

            

Ghosts of Gold Mountain – The epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad

By Gordon H. Chang

Huffington Mifflin Harcourt – 2019

Reviewed by, Steve Halpern

Thinking about Gordon H. Chang’s new book, Ghosts of Gold Mountain – The epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad made me think of another book. This was Edward E. Baptist’s book titled: Half Has Never Been Told – Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. That book is about the unimaginably horrendous conditions of chattel slavery in this country, and about how that institution was the foundation for the capitalist system. With all the books written about slavery in the United States, Baptist argues that, “Half has never been told.”

We might make a similar statement about the hundred-year war against Native Americans to rob them of their land and culture. We might also mention that after slavery was outlawed, the Supreme Court of the United States openly supported the Jim Crow laws that effectively robbed African Americans of citizenship rights. Those rulings were flagrant violations of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

Then, we can talk about the theft of land from the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Southwest that we know today as Mexicans. After that theft, there was the systematic discrimination against Mexican people who lived on both sides of the Rio Grande River. We can also talk about the horrendous conditions of men, women, and children in the early years of basic industry.

While the pro-capitalist press likes to highlight prominent capitalists and politicians in this history, it was the workers who were the ones who built this country. Gordon H. Chang has given us another glimmer into the history of the labor movement. This is about the 20,000 Chinese railroad workers who were 90% of the labor force on the western leg of the transcontinental railroad.

Chang deserves credit for making a determined and comprehensive effort in telling this story. He acknowledges that there is much about this history that we don’t know. So, given Chang’s determined effort, we can also say that, half has never been told.

Life in Southern China in the 1800’s

Most of the Chinese who worked on the railroad came from Guangdong province. Within the Guangdong province is the Siyi, that is composed of four counties. Across the water from Guangdong is present day Hong Kong.

The 1800s were particularly turbulent times in China. The Manchu are a minority nationality In China. About 90% of the Chinese population consists of the Han nationality. Manchu royal families ruled China from 1644 to 1910.

The Manchu royal family required Chinese men to wear the hairstyle known as the queue. This meant that men did not cut their hair and wore it in a pigtail. The front of their head was shaved. Failure to wear the queue was punishable by death.

Many Chinese women were compelled to have their feet bound and broken in an early age. This made it difficult for women to walk.   

There were three Opium Wars. The British decided to flagrantly violate Manchu royal edicts that prohibited opium imports. The defeat of China in the Opium Wars caused a financial catastrophe for the entire nation.

The Taiping Rebellion challenged the deteriorating conditions in China. While the Taipings were a fundamentally religious movement, they favored basic reforms for women that included an end to foot-binding. The Taiping Rebellion lasted from 1850-1864.

The imperialist powers supported the Manchus in their effort to defeat the Taiping rebellion. According to what I’ve seen, about 10 to 30 million Chinese lost their lives in the Taiping Rebellion that took place during the same years as the Civil War in the United States.

Faced with that reality, about 200,000 people living in Guangdong province left China. They went to many countries in the world. One of those countries was the United States.

We might also keep in mind that the Chinese people had a long history of completing huge construction projects. The Great Wall of China extends for about 5,500 miles. This is over twice the distance from New York City to Los Angeles, California. The Grand Canal of China is a human made waterway that extends 1,500 miles. The Chinese constructed hundreds of ships that sailed across the Indian Ocean in the year 1410. During the 1500s the Chinese supplied Europe with vast amounts of silk and porcelain in exchange for silver that Native Americans mined in the Spanish colonies.

The climate in Guangdong is warm and humid. As we will see, the Chinese immigrants found a completely different climate in the United States.

The Gold Mountain

Most Chinese came to the United States to take advantage of the gold rush that was centered in San Francisco, California. After gold was discovered in California, people came from all over the world in hopes of striking it rich. The population of San Francisco skyrocketed as a result. Because of that reality, the Chinese referred to the United States as the “Gold Mountain.”

Leland Stanford was born in New York state, became a lawyer, lived in Wisconsin, and then moved to California. He became wealthy by running a general store that catered to miners. He was also a politician and founded Stanford University.

Stanford, along with Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, and Collis Huntington invested in the idea of building a transcontinental railroad. One leg of this railroad would start on the east coast. The other leg would start in California and meet in the center of the United States.

 At that time, travel from the East Coast to California would take months and was extremely dangerous. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad, travel across the United States took six days.

We should also say that the building of this railroad coincided with the genocidal war against Native Americans. General Phillip Henry Sheridan reflected the horrendous views of the United States government when he stated: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Following that sentiment, the government organized to murder millions of buffalo so the Native Americans would not have the means to live.

Leland Stanford initially had racist views of the Chinese. Living in California, and being exposed to the Chinese people, he began to change his views.

One of his relatives received effective medical treatment by a Chinese doctor. At that time, the Chinese had a long history in medical care. Their treatments were as good or better than the treatments of the doctors in this country at that time.

 Stanford eventually came to realize that the labor of the Chinese workers was indispensable to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. Stanford’s racist views were typical of the predominant views about the Chinese at this time. While people of European heritage prided themselves in being industrious, the history of the construction of the transcontinental railroad is a testament to the fact that it was the Chinese who had the stamina, persistence, and determination to complete this massive project.

Gordon H. Change did extensive research into writing this book. He discovered that there were many letters from the Chinese railroad-workers to their homes in China. He could not find a single one of those letters. However, he was able to piece together an outline of what it meant to work building the transcontinental railroad.

Chang found the correspondence of an engineer who had been hired to survey the western leg of the railroad where most of the Chinese workers toiled. This engineer faced mud, snow, cold, and a seemingly impassible terrane. After six months, this engineer resigned because he could no longer tolerate the job. The Chinese rail-workers would have a much more difficult job.

The Western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad was significantly more difficult to build than the Eastern leg. This was because of the mountains, the need to cut a path through uncertain terrane, and the need to build a series of tunnels.

One persistent problem was the snow. Many rail workers perished as a result of avalanches in the mountains. The snow, at times, was so deep that rail workers needed to live under the snow. This meant they needed to cut air vents so they could breathe, and tunnels so they could get to work.

Then, there were the tunnels that needed to be cut through the granite in the mountains. Drills were powered by the Chinese workers who used a sledgehammer to slowly drive long drills into the granite mountains. Then, dynamite was placed in the holes, and the granite was blasted away. As we might imagine, many Chinese workers perished because of accidents in using that dynamite.

Due to the institutionalized racism of the rail bosses, the Chinese workers were paid significantly less than their caucasian coworkers. Yet when the railroad bosses hired Scottish workers who specialized in this work, the Chinese proved that they were much more productive than their Scottish counterparts.

Gordon H. Chang doesn’t fully understand how the Chinese workers were able to lower themselves down steep cliffs in order to blast through granite and build tunnels. He knows that, at times, Chinese workers lowered others with ropes in hand made baskets. They then cut a deep hole in the mountain, inserted dynamite, lit the fuse, and got out of the way in a hurry. I don’t believe that workers who were not Chinese ever attempted to blast through mountains using this method.

We might also mention that much of the food the Chinese workers prepared for themselves was shipped from China. This trade, across the Pacific Ocean, thrived in spite of the fact that the Chinese railroad workers had salaries of about one dollar for a workday that might be sixteen hours.  

The Strike

Gordon H. Chang devoted an entire chapter to a strike by Chinese workers who protested these conditions, as well as the systematic discrimination they faced. In June of 1867, 3,000 Chinese rail workers from many locations laid down their tools and went on strike. They took a break from the arduous and dangerous work, and gave themselves some much-deserved time off.

The owners of the Union Pacific Railroad panicked. While they did absolutely no work to build the railroad, they invested a lot of paper values known as money. The Chinese railroad workers had developed skills that were necessary to complete this massive project. Without their continued labor, investors could have lost considerable amounts of money.

According to Chang, the rail bosses cut off the supply of food to the workers. After about one week, the strikers went back to work without getting the company to grant many of their demands.

We might look at this strike in the context of the history of this country. During the Civil War, literally hundreds of thousands of slaves freed themselves. They walked off the plantations and joined the Union forces.

President Abraham Lincoln understood that he needed thousands of soldiers to replenish the Union Army. He recruited about 260,000 Black people to fill that gap. This was one of the main reasons why Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Then, after the Chinese strike of 1867, there was another strike of railroad workers in 1877. This was followed by the strike against the Pullman Palace railcar company.

Given the fact that the labor of the Chinese railroad workers transformed the economy of the United States, we might ask the question: How were the Chinese treated after the completion of the transcontinental railroad?

Racist mobs targeted Chinese workers scapegoating them for the lack of available jobs. Many Chinese workers were murdered or forced to leave their homes.

Then, in the year 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act that made Chinese immigrants ineligible for U.S. citizenship. The law also prohibited Chinese immigration to the United States. President Chester Alan Arthur vetoed this legislation, but congress overrode his veto. Then, in 1892 Congress made this law even worse with the Geary Act.

Clearly this was an insidious betrayal of the arduous and indispensable work of the Chinese railroad workers. However, when we look at the history of the United States, we find many similar betrayals.

During the revolution that created the United States, the Cherokee fought on the side of those demanding independence. The new government rewarded the Cherokee for their service with a treaty saying they had a right to live on their traditional homeland. This land is located in what is now the state of Georgia.

President Andrew Jackson violated that treaty and subjected the Cherokee to a forced march to what is now Oklahoma. The Cherokee land in Georgia then was used to establish slave labor camps. Thousands died on that forced march. Then, after the Civil War the Cherokee land in Oklahoma was confiscated.

Thousands of Black soldiers and of ex-slaves were instrumental in the Union victory against the confederacy in the Civil War. Yet in 1877 racist mobs overthrew the reconstruction governments and Black people lost citizenship rights with the Jim Crow laws.        

Saying all of this, we can also say that the labor movement in the United States has been hampered by the institutionalized discrimination in this country. It wasn’t until the 1930s, during the depression, when workers of all nationalities began to understand that, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”

Today there are many in the labor movement who do not support the demands of workers who were born in other nations. Yet, there is also a new generation of workers who are beginning to see the importance of international solidarity.

China today

When we look at the tremendous amount of work required to build the transcontinental railroad, we can also begin to appreciate the recent developments in the nation of China. In a three-year period, China used more concrete than the United States used in 100 years. As a result, today China is the most industrialized nation in the world.

This reality begs the question: Why did hundreds of thousands of Chinese leave their homeland, in the 19^th century, while today China has more industrial workers than any other nation? How is it that today China has transport, energy, and communications projects in 68 nations where the majority of the world’s population live? The Chinese government calls this their “Belt and Road” initiative.

Part of the answer to these questions comes from the fact that there has been a massive transfer in manufacturing from the developed nations to nations where wages are between $1 and $10 per day.  As a result, millions of manufacturing jobs have been eliminated in developed nations like the United States.

Another part of the answer to these questions has to do with the reality of the Chinese Revolution. During the first years of the Chinese revolutionary government, there was an emphasis in bridging the gap between workers, farmers, and capitalists. This was a different perspective from the from the idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat” as advocated by Karl Marx and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

After the death of Mao Zedong, the Chinses government opened up the country to massive capitalist development. Because of the centralization of the economy, and the fact that China was no longer under imperialist domination, trade with the world capitalist market mushroomed.

The nation of India has a similar population as China. India also has a similar history of colonialism. However, India never had an anti-imperialist revolution. Today, the infrastructure of China is much more advanced than India, and the standard of living is significantly better in China than in India. China’s economy is about four times larger than the Indian economy. We might also say that China has done more to eliminate hunger in the world than the rest of the world combined.

However, because China is tied to the capitalist economy, that nation also has problems linked to the international capitalist system. China has a largely export economy. The current downturn of capitalism will affect China. In the past three years, there have been 20,000 Chinese strikes every year. These strikes protested the horrendous working conditions in the country.

When we think of these strikes, I believe we can link them to the Chinese railroad workers strike in 1867. Clearly there have been immense changes in the world since the 19^th century. However, the demand that Chinese workers receive the respect and dignity they deserve continues to be relevant today.