Union Politics: The Contradictions of a Capitalist Labor Movement

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On December 1st, 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) officially voiced their support for a ceasefire in Gaza, becoming the largest labor union to do so. The announcement came from the union’s director, Brandon Mancilla, during a press conference outside the White House. In announcing, the UAW added its name to a growing list of union locals, national chapters, and labor organizations that have called for an end to the genocidal violence still unfolding in the region.

On January 24th, the UAW went on to announce their endorsement of Joe Biden for president during the union’s national Community Action Program (CAP) conference. Thus, in just under two months, UAW managed to call for an end to a genocide whilst simultaneously endorsing a second presidential term for one of its most powerful proponents. And they are not alone. Of the roughly 150 organizations that have signed onto the labor movement petition calling for a ceasefire, nearly one third have also publicly endorsed — or are directly affiliated with a national chapter that has publicly endorsed — Biden for the presidency. Such a gross contradiction cannot be ignored, especially as it represents only the latest example of a broader phenomenon present in much of the American labor movement: capitalist dissonance.

The movement’s shortcomings are well-documented. Much of the labor landscape in the United States — while certainly working to win immediate material improvements for the working class — often fails to provide a more comprehensive framework for revolutionary praxis that looks to a liberated future. The Black Rose Anarchist Federation said it best in their piece ‘The State of Labor: Beyond Unions, But Not Without Them,’ when they described contemporary American unionism as a largely “bureaucratic, service-oriented form” that remains “controlled by a hierarchy of career officials who operate outside the workplace, manage the sale of labor to capital, confine union struggles to narrow and legalistic ‘bread and butter’ issues within their respective industries, and encourage members to pin their hopes to the Democratic Party.” In other words, unions in the United States exist within a heavily enclosed space, one in which their organizational structures and strategic logics, either by external force or internal conviction, do not move past the operational and theoretical limits imposed by the powers that be.

On the domestic front, this can mean a gross lack of worker militancy. Pro-establishment sensibilities make many labor unions averse to necessary direct action and militant resistance in the workplace, especially when financial and legal stability is at stake. This was the case when bureaucratized inaction kept grocery workers across the country from winning tangible post-pandemic gains with their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). It exacerbated the ever-growing division between rank-and-filers and leadership in the education sector with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). It also prompted members of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to begin a petition campaign calling on leadership to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. After all, career organizers and labor leaders are incentivized to chart the path of least resistance, forged by impotent contract negotiations and anti-strike clauses. The same can be said for international solidarity. A top-down labor union in cahoots with the US government may state their disagreement with a foreign policy decision — as many did by signing the ceasefire petition. But their entrenched incentive structures and hierarchical layout will rarely allow for a wielding of labor power that truly beats the state into submission. 

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This is because such radical resistance would put the stability of the managerial labor class at risk. Domestically, opposing a two-party candidate for the presidency means foregoing an otherwise surefire way of securing business-as-usual governance for the next four years. The third-party-facing or non-electoral implications of such opposition would produce a level of uncertainty not compatible with the otherwise predictable “bread and butter” issues, industry-specific bargaining, and established labor relations so characteristic of big unions. On the international scale, the same is true. The stability of managerial labor is feasible only if preceded by that of US capital, as downturns in economic growth and fluctuations in performance can pose a risk to corporate power -- the de facto handler of labor managers -- and radicalize workers into embracing more militant sympathies and radical action as a result. One outstanding threat to such stability is the emergence of left labor movements abroad, as such movements are often characterized by policies that harm US economic interests such as the nationalization of industries and the cutting of economic ties with Western nations. The logical conclusion of such a dynamic can be seen in institutions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) Solidarity Center. This agency has a stated mission of “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” Meanwhile, its exploits have heavily involved confrontations with leftist governments in South America, often via funding they provide to opposition groups in countries such as Venezuela.

Highlighting this unfortunate reality is hardly an all-encompassing indictment of the US labor movement. The undeniable upsurge in union activity following the COVID pandemic improved people’s lives and deserves credit. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, “the National Labor Relations Board saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, the highest single-year increase since fiscal year 2016.” The embrace of more militant leadership by unions such as the UAW and the Teamsters has yielded significant victories as well, not to mention the advances made by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in September of last year.

But the imperative of organizers and class strugglers to reshape unions to better facilitate collective liberation remains. This can take many forms, such as bolstering organizing efforts by independent unions like (ex: Trader Joe’s United, Amazon Labor Union), supporting the ongoing work and growth of rank-and-file-oriented unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, and backing the emergence of caucuses and coalitions within established unions that either organize to push their organization in a more radical direction, or ultimately become an independent union that can subsequently hold a candle to its establishment counterpart in terms of size and resource access.

Reformist concessions at the negotiating table and rhetoric restricted to the worker-boss dichotomy do not have to be our daily bread. Worker militancy on the shop floor and a rhetoric of class warfare are more in line with the aims of a revolutionary movement. Moreover, symbolic slaps on the wrist and stern talking to’s — petition signatures, public denouncements — needn’t be the only forms of accountability when our government actively finances and endorses acts of genocide. We can do better. Acknowledging this potential will allow us to transform labor in America, liberating ourselves and each other in the process.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Beyond the 4-Day Workweek: Unveiling the Capitalist Roots of Worker Anomie and the Quest for Meaningful Labor

[Photo credit: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images]

By Peter S. Baron

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has put forth a bill to cut the workweek to 32 hours—an effort unlikely to succeed amidst resistance from Republicans and even his Democratic party peers. His argument hinges on the undeniable truth that technological advancements have significantly boosted productivity, which could, in an ideal world, lead to shorter workweeks without sacrificing wages. Although Sanders' proposed bill faces significant hurdles to enactment, it unmistakably highlights the deliberate strategies of the ruling elite to capitalize on productivity gains, blatantly prioritizing profit maximization over the welfare of workers. This choice epitomizes the capitalist ethos that prioritizes profit over people.

Sanders is advocating for a significant change, however, the manner in which he has presented his bill avoids a confrontation with the underlying structure of capitalism, which is at the heart of the issue. This distorted framing is quintessential Sanders, exposing the superficiality of his role as the so-called "democratic socialist" within the Democratic Party.

As exemplified in his most recent proposal, Sanders typically proposes major policy overhauls but stops short of questioning or altering the foundational capitalist system itself, as if the path to social and economic justice is simply a matter of swapping "bad" policies for "good" ones. He puts forth reformist bills, masquerading them as far-reaching, lasting solutions, only for them to be dismissed as extreme by Republicans and impractical by mainstream Democrats. This charade serves to pacify the Democrats’ base by creating the illusion that the Democrats closely represent the people's interests, sidestepping the essential challenge to the capitalist system that truly reflects the people's interests. This strategy effectually tempers the rising leftist inclinations among workers and the youth, ensuring their continued support for the party by diverting attention away from its fundamental allegiance to corporate interests.

The public deserves to be told the truth: that the root of our problems lies in capitalism itself, not merely in bad policies. If framed in this way, the idea of a four-day workweek would not only become widely accepted but could also serve as a catalyst for a wider social movement aimed at fundamentally rethinking and transforming the capitalist system.

The Limits of Shorter Workweeks in Healing Capitalist Alienation

Reducing the workweek to four days, while undoubtedly a positive step in transitioning to a more humane existence, fails to address the root issue: the grotesque alienation and exploitation of workers that comes as a package deal with a capitalist economic system. Capitalism produces a fundamental disconnect between the labor of the worker and the fruits of this labor that engenders a profound sense of anomie, a term the 19th century French Sociologist Émile Durkheim used to describe the normlessness and social instability resulting from a breakdown in the connection between the individual and the community.

This anomie is not merely a byproduct of long hours, although such hours certainly are a factor. Rather, anomie is woven into the very fabric of capitalist work structures, where workers, stripped of any meaningful control over their labor or its outcomes, become cogs in a vast, soulless machine.

The introduction of a 4-day workweek, while benevolent, does little to mend the gaping wound inflicted by this alienation. It's akin to applying a band-aid to a festering sore, superficially covering the issue without addressing the underlying infection: the capitalist mode of production itself, which inherently prioritizes profit over people, exploiting labor to extract maximum surplus value.

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The Many Faces of Disconnection

In the relentless pursuit of profit, capitalism commodifies work, stripping it of personal meaning and transforming it into a mere transaction. This commodification alienates workers not just from the fruits of their labor, which are appropriated by the capitalists, but also from the labor process itself, reducing it to repetitive, uninspiring, and, frankly, boring tasks that fail to tap into even a fraction of the worker's creative potential.

This narrow focus on productivity fosters an environment where innovative ideas and creative solutions are often stifled unless they directly contribute to immediate financial gains. The loss of creative expression and the inability to see one's unique ideas come to fruition can lead to a stifling of personal growth and a diminishing sense of self-worth among workers, exacerbating the sense of anomie.

The issue at hand is not merely about reducing the working hours for those stuck in such mind-numbing jobs nor is it about crafting policies to infuse creativity into jobs. It's about reevaluating the entire mode of production, the nature of jobs deemed necessary, and the overarching structure of society. Capitalism, by its very design, is prone to producing jobs that contribute to a sense of anomie, suggesting that the system itself may be irreformable in this regard.

Dissolving Bonds: The Erosion of Individuality and Community in Capitalist Rationality

Inevitably, under capitalism, the implementation of technology and automation further alienates workers from the production process. While technological advancements have the potential to liberate individuals from menial tasks, under capitalism, they often result in the deskilling and rising specialization of labor, reducing jobs to the performance of progressively monotonous, machine-like functions. Making jobs more interchangeable intensifies concerns over job instability for workers, who find themselves entangled in a rapidly automating world.

This dehumanization of labor and the relentless commodification of time mean that workers are constantly racing against the clock, further disconnecting them from the natural rhythms of work and life. The unyielding commercialization of time transforms workplaces into arenas of surveillance and regimentation, where every task is monitored, and every minute accounted for. The blurring of boundaries between work and personal time, exacerbated by the digitalization of workspaces, means that workers are never truly 'off the clock,' leading to burnout and a pervasive sense of being trapped in an endless cycle of work.

In this environment, the sense of belonging and community that can arise from collective labor is eroded. Workers are pitted against each other in a competitive race to the bottom, where solidarity is sacrificed on the altar of individual gain. They are thrust into a relentless competition, vying for survival in an environment where job security and advancement are scarce commodities. This competitive pressure fosters an atmosphere of every person for themselves, undermining any sense of collective well-being or mutual support.

Instead of banding together, workers find themselves locked in a desperate scramble to outdo one another, often at the cost of their own and their colleagues' dignity and security. This race to the bottom erodes the fabric of solidarity that could unite workers against exploitative conditions, replacing it with a divisive pursuit of individual gain that ultimately benefits the capitalist system by keeping workers isolated and disempowered.

Workers are reduced to mere data points in a vast algorithm of production, their individuality and communal ties dissolved in the acid bath of capitalist rationality.

Towards a Radical Reimagination of Work

The rigid, top-down structures in our workplaces crush any semblance of autonomy and creativity among workers. The whole labor system is set up to strip workers of their skills and reduce them to nothing more than cogs in a giant machine, churning out profits for the few. This isn't just about stifling creativity; it's about the blatant dehumanization that props up the capitalist machine.

The disconnect between productivity growth and real wage increases only deepens the anomie. Workers are producing more and more, yet their paychecks tell a different story—stagnant or worse. This gaping disconnect between the wealth workers generate and the crumbs they're thrown isn't just unfair; it's a slap in the face. It's no wonder people feel lost and disconnected, exactly like Durkheim's warning of a society adrift.

Proposals like the one Sanders has put forth should be framed not merely as swapping out bad policy for good, but as opportunities to critically examine the system itself—a system whose very foundation undermines worker autonomy and creativity, and actively unravels the social fabric, exposing the deep-seated causes of widespread anomie. We must recognize the myriad ways the capitalist logic oppresses our humanity.

In the face of systemic assaults on the human spirit, the call for a shorter workweek, while benign, falls dramatically short. It is not merely the quantity of work that torments the “soul” but the quality and conditions of labor under the yoke of capitalist exploitation. Addressing the endemic alienation and anomie woven into the fabric of capitalist societies demands a radical reconfiguration of the values that underpin our economic systems, one that dismantles the hierarchical edifices of power and replaces them with egalitarian structures where workers can utilize their unique creative potential and have a direct say in the decisions that affect their lives. This would not only bridge the gap between labor and its fruits, mitigating the alienation and anomie endemic to capitalist societies, but also unleash the imaginative resourcefulness of the workforce, fostering a sense of community and purpose that transcends the mere accumulation of capital.

The transition to a 4-day workweek must be seen not as an end but as a steppingstone towards a more profound transformation of society. It's about reclaiming the dignity of labor, restoring the human connection to work, and constructing a world where work serves the well-being of humanity, not the insatiable appetites of capitalist exploitation. Only then can we begin to heal the deep-seated anomie that plagues our societies, paving the way for a future where work is a source of fulfillment and communal solidarity, not alienation and despair.

Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

The Stranglehold of Capital and Why We Must Break Free

[Photo Credit: Doug Mills / AP]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

The village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, like much of the United States, has an affordable housing shortage. To address this, the Village Council considered rezoning 53 acres for higher-density homes. This was controversial among Yellow Springs residents including comedy superstar Dave Chapelle, who threatened to pull his investments from the town:

”If you push this thing through, what I’m investing in is no longer applicable… I am not bluffing. I will take it all off the table.” 

It was never guaranteed that the Village Council would pass the rezoning without Chapelle’s interference, or that the plan would even make housing more affordable. But it was hardly a fair fight. Losing millions in investment dollars would transform the economic landscape of Yellow Springs. Municipal representatives could never consider the housing project on its own merits.

Strongarm tactics by capital happen on the national stage too. Shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency on a platform of “hope and change,” Emerson Electric CEO David Farr said his company would only expand in the United States if government got “out of the way.” 

Barclays CEO Robert Diamond claimed corporations wouldn’t “have the confidence to hire in the United States… until we… believe… the government, the private sector, and financial institutions are working together and connected again.” 

Bausch + Lomb CEO Brent Saunders warned that, because of Obama, multinationals are “more tentative on whether… to…invest.” 

The Wall Street Journal synthesized these sentiments, lamenting that Obama wasn’t doing enough to encourage “U.S. businesses to unleash the $2 trillion in capital they are holding.” 

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner summarized it well the following year:

“Job creators in America basically are on strike.” 

It isn’t novel to point out the political influence of the wealthy. Even former president Jimmy Carter called the United States an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” Research shows that better-funded candidates generally win. There are basic fundraising thresholds candidates must meet to have a chance of winning. This allows the wealthy to influence who runs and wins. Even when donations don’t outright guarantee electoral success, candidates still value them and allow donors to influence policy. 

Just as ultra-wealthy benefactors control elections, a handful of companies dominate our media. “Big Tech” dictates culture by moderating the flow of information and “marketplace of ideas” that informs our political process. Corporate giants make it more difficult for voters to make informed decisions and allow relatively few people to curate and regulate public discourse. 

These problems are serious, and make our political system less democratic. They reinforce the privileged interests of the white and wealthy while disenfranchising the non-white and poor. This inequity is rooted in the undemocratic nature of our economic system, which grants certain groups not mere influence or political advantage but the ability to wield pure, unchecked power.

Who Controls Capital?

In the United States, the three richest white men hold as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined. Capital, which refers not to personal property but investment assets, is also unequally distributed. The top 1% of Americans own a majority of the country’s stocks and private businesses. The poorer you are, the more of your resources you must spend on your needs, and the more fully you rely on other people’s capital to have a job. 

Within individual companies, if an investor controls over half the voting shares, they fully control the company, rendering other investors’ capital powerless. Capital is where the real power lies, and it is controlled by a miniscule group. 

How Does Capital Work?

This tiny class of capitalists will only invest capital under certain conditions. Generally, profits are the fundamental precondition for investment, but it’s ultimately down to the investor. They can choose to do nothing with their capital or invest it in some other market, thereby exercising tremendous leverage on the rest of society.

To maintain access to goods and gainful employment, electorates are under pressure to placate capital. This immediate pressure often conflicts with voters’ long-term interests, or any political priorities beyond meeting their basic needs. Thus, politicians under capitalism must serve their constituents’ short-term demands by serving owners and investors. Otherwise, their constituents will suffer, blame them, and vote them out. 

Capitalists directly affect government activity too. First and foremost, tax revenues are almost entirely dependent on investment. Jobs are needed to generate income taxes, while businesses must sell goods and services in order to generate sales taxes. Investment is required to maintain property values and thus property taxes. When governments cannot fund their activities through taxation and turn to borrowing, they become dependent on banks and other potential creditors.

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Often, private capital directly pays law enforcement to do its dirty work. Major corporations funnel millions of dollars into police activities through police foundations. Companies including DTE, Meijer, The Home Depot, and AT&T all have representatives on the board of the Detroit Public Safety Foundation. Across the country, the largest companies in finance, tech, fossil fuels, and other industries funded the police and were represented in the institutions that raise private funds for them. 

The Power of Capital in Action

When a group of capitalists forego investing together — a capital strike — they can quickly cripple the economy. When they have common interests, and frequently voice their concerns through the business press, little direct coordination is required to set off a chain reaction of capital flight.

“Capital strike” and “capital flight” are not commonly used terms, and they almost never come up in election discourse. Capital flight is recognized as an economic phenomenon, one that can often come about as a reaction to political developments, but its political implications are rarely discussed. Some economists characterize capital flight as a “symptom of macroeconomic mismanagement” to be solved with “sensible, credible” policies.

This straightforward narrative is actually quite common when it comes to businesses’ reactions to policies. The policies are never “not what businesses prefer.” They are simply “bad policies,” which “lead to bad outcomes.” Capitalists are treated like they bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The class character of capital strikes is completely mystified and ignored. While it’s possible for certain policies to be bad for both the rich and the poor, that is not always the case. 

There are numerous examples of large-scale capital strikes forcing national governments to abandon progressive, widely-supported policies. The aforementioned strike against the Obama administration strike is one such example. Other capital strikes happened under Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Capital strikes are not limited to the United States. In the 1970s, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and members of the Social Democratic Party sought to transcend social democracy via the Meidner Plan, which would have taxed corporate profits to achieve workers’ ownership of major corporations. Fearing a capital strike, the Social Democrats diluted the plan. The plan’s namesake, economist Rudolf Meidner, described the implemented version as “a pathetic rat.” 

In France, after decades of uninterrupted conservative rule, Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand was elected president in 1981. He was allied with the French Communist Party, called for a “rupture” with capitalism, and embarked on a radical program of nationalization, wage hikes, and union empowerment. Displeased investors pulled their capital, punishing the French economy. Mitterand abandoned his radicalism, purged Communist ministers from his government, and pursued more conservative policies. 

A similar thing happened in Chile. In 1970, Salvador Allende — Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist head of state — became president. Over the next three years, wealthy Chileans and international businesses reacted with capital strikes, capital flight, and hoarding to destabilize the government and protect their own power. Allende responded with concessions to the Right but was eventually overthrown in a US-backed military coup that was justified as a response to economic instability. 

In Venezuela, the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999 was followed by dramatic increases in quality of life. Chávez lifted nearly one fifth of the population from poverty. Even opponents like the Washington DC-based Organization of American States recognized this achievement and “the eradication of illiteracy… and the increase in access by the most vulnerable sectors to basic services such as health care.”

The massive wealth held by Venezuela’s elite was being slowly redistributed, and the oil revenues that the country had relied on for decades were being directed toward the poor. As this happened, Venezuelan and international businesses began pulling their capital out of the country or holding back certain economic activities. The current Venezuelan economic crisis is, of course, complex, with an overreliance on oil, imperialist sanctions, and political instability of various origins all playing a role. However, capital flight preceded and contributed to these issues, starting at a time when the lives of Venezuelans were improving at the expense of capitalist profits and power.

Of course, national capital strikes are the exception — a “nuclear option” of capitalist control. 

Every day, capitalists and their managers make decisions regarding where to allocate resources within their businesses, or who to do business with. Whether by reflexively chasing profits or strategically leveraging their wealth, they shift wealth toward those who serve their interests.

Voters may begin to “learn their lesson,” and vote in ways that investors will reward them for, even if they end up voting for policies they do not ultimately prefer. Voters may blame some inherent flaw in leftist policies, saying things like “socialism is great in theory, but doesn’t work in practice.” And while left-wing governments have in many cases brought improvements for their people, capital strikes negatively affect their track record.

Others may recognize the power of capital over the economy, but believe it to be justified or necessary, and consciously vote in a way that reinforces this power. When left-wing governments make concessions to capital, their supporters may see it as a betrayal of the policies they ran on, and become politically inactive or shift their allegiance to another party, as happened in Sweden and France. Whether they blame the failure on economic realities, unreliable politicians, or the business owners themselves, voters will respond rationally to actions by capital, and vote in ways that avoid offending investors in the first place.

Legalized Bribery

The coercive power of capital strikes is extremely important in explaining why the rich and large corporations often get their way. But they have numerous other tools at their disposal for directing the political process:

• Rent out a lavish compound to a sitting president (or let him stay for free) 

• Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at businesses owned by politicians

• Loan politicians’ companies hundreds of millions of dollars

• Pay politicians millions of dollarsf or speeches

• Hire lawmakers and top officials as lobbyists or consultants

• Give politicians seats on corporate boards

• Give them a high-paying job at a think tank

• Sign massive book deals with Supreme Court Justices, or give them free trips

• Take a powerful judge on multiple luxurious vacations,

• Buy their mother’s home and let her live in it rent-free, pay their family member’s expensive boarding school fees, pay for their wedding reception, give them VIP access to sporting events, fund the dedication of a library wing in their honor, and fund a hagiographicmovie about them (This is all the same person)

• Own stocks while being a politician, and reap all the benefits if your political actions favor your stocks or investors at large

What Can We Do About it?

To recap, capitalism results in a tiny minority of the population controlling the means of production and distribution. This control is leveraged to reward or punish voters and governments based on how accommodating their policies are toward capital. These capitalists coordinate not just through institutions and relationships, but need not coordinate at all when their interests align. If a government threatens their profits, they will remove their capital from the government’s jurisdiction, even if the people believe they should sacrifice their profits for the benefit of society. The bounds of what is politically possible are set by the corporate sector.

Those who control wealth use it in more targeted ways to shore up this power. They systematically direct their wealth to individual politicians, or the political class as a whole, to buy their loyalty and give the politicians a stake in the power of capital.

Private businesses control the media that we consume, and the wealthy bend political campaigns, think tanks, charities, and universities to their will with donations. These institutions allow the wealthy to mask and justify their economic power, and articulate their demands to a target audience. They also give them the tools to act even when their economic power is effectively curbed.  

Considered fully, the power of capital appears unassailable, and if we work within the mainstream definition of politics, it is. Our ability to exercise political power is often reduced to participating in elections. However, electoral politics are, in many ways, a manifestation of power wielded by people outside of it, and any movement that devotes all its energy to the electoral sphere will ultimately fail when they are outmaneuvered in the economic sphere. However, understanding the ways that this capitalist power works is the first step to breaking it. 

In order to fight back against this system, ordinary people need to expand their definition of politics and operate in the same fields that the wealthy do. Recognizing that democracy is still something worth achieving is vital. Winning political power will be a bottom-up struggle. Radical labor unions will be a necessary tool for workers to challenge capital in an effective way and wield material leverage toward their political goals.

The specifics of overcoming capitalist power are far from clear. The people of this planet will have to organize themselves and develop plans for effective resistance through international collaboration and dialogue. What’s clear, however, is that no form of capitalism will allow us to experience genuine democracy. Whoever controls economic production and distribution controls everyone dependent on that production and distribution. Self-determination and democracy therefore require economic democracy.

Nathaniel Ibrahim is an organizer and elected leader in the Young Democratic Socialists of America at the University of Michigan.

Resistance is Ugly: Palestine, Israel, and the Nature of Struggle

By RJ Park

October seventh, for Israel, marked a point of no return. After demonstrations by their own civilians against the country’s lack of commitment to democracy, they have now been faced with the other side of their oppressive regime. Perhaps in an attempt to win over their dissatisfied civilians in the face of a ‘greater evil’, Prime Minister Netanayahu has refused to mince his words on what he believes Palestine’s revolutionary brewings mean for his country and the people therein, stating that Hamas, the lead organization in this recent wave of resistance, has ‘launched a murderous surprise attack against Israel and its citizens.’ [1] Clearly, he does not view this conflict as a mere addition to the ever-expanding list of violent encounters between Israeli and Palestinian forces. This is a battle for the existence of Israel and, at the same time, the necessary non-existence of Palestine that is a required qualifier for the success of the entire Zionist project. [2]

For Palestine, decades of relocation, colonization, and outright murder by the hands of Israel’s military branch, the IDF, has stockpiled tensions to an unbearable degree. They have tried to be diplomatic with Israel, to no avail. They have tried to protest peacefully, and were gunned down in the streets. [3] They have tried forceful forms of resistance, and were brutalized more harshly than they had been ever before. [4] It is clear why the only path forward seems to be a full-scale overthrow of the government which has kept them under its boot heel for the better part of the past one-hundred years. That is a difficult conclusion to disagree with.

Yet for all the vocal support of Palestine that has emerged from across West’s political landscape, denunciation of Palestine’s actions in their ongoing struggle with Israel seem to be gradually gaining acceptance. This is expected of more conservative politicians and social critics, most of whom never endorsed Palestine in the first place. However, similar (occasionally identical) critiques have been adopted by individuals who previously supported Palestine in their ongoing struggle against the Israeli government. As soon as Palestinian groups like Hamas began resisting their occupation with violence, however, this support dissipated, and the same people who had called for their independence accused them of deliberately killing civilians, a claim which is a verifiable organization concocted for the sole purpose of playing into the Zionist trope  of barbaric Palestinians attacking innocent Israelis. This version of events implies that Israel’s citizens have nothing to do with the oppression of Palestinians, who are actively seeking wanton violence against Israel and all its inhabitants in order to satisfy a mindless drive for vengeance. 

When observing the history of Palestine’s struggle against Israel, both sides of this claim fall apart. Firstly, those who willingly leave their country of origin in order to live in Israel cease to be ‘innocent civilians’ the moment they step foot into the country, which is built upon occupied territory. Instead, they become active colonizers of Palestinian land, engaging in a form of violence that, although less direct, is no more forgivable than the violence enacted against Palestinians by the IDF. Secondly, it is impossible for Palestine to be the aggressor in their fight against Israel. Since they are the ones being actively oppressed, all that they do is in retaliation to that oppression. Any violent action they take is a component of their war for liberation, and their violence can only be understood in this context. Separating this violence from the history of violence committed against them by Israel does nothing but enhance Israel’s narrative of continual victimhood, which is essential to their ongoing war against Palestine.

But why have some of the most progressive voices in mainstream American politics succumbed to this narrative so easily? It seems that years of exposing Israel’s excessive use of force, their violation of human rights, and, most-relevantly, their tendency to deceive the international community by posturing as an oppressed minority despite being the most powerful country in the Middle East would have primed these politicians to be wary of any claims by Israel that their safety - not the safety of the Palestinian people - was under attack. Obviously, though, this has not been the case. These politicians have, at best, simultaneously denounced both the actions of Hamas and the IDF and, at worst, singled out Hamas as being especially malicious and bloodthirsty while excusing the actions of Israel.

Although there are many reasons for this trend, electability is a large factor. A person is a politician in the West so long as they can be elected to public office, and, as such, Westerners - including politicians themselves - view politics as a matter of marketability instead of principle. It does not appear at all odd for most of them to see a politician support a cause (such as the liberation of Palestine) while critiquing the means through which that very same cause is pursued. A degree of separation is considered acceptable between vocally supporting something and actually supporting something if the former is popular and the latter is not. 

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Observing that politicians maintain these contradictions within their individual political views goes a long way to explain why Western governments are regularly faced with deadlocks on a systemic level. Rather than electing representatives that believe in and pursue certain goals with a definite plan in mind, representatives are elected because they espouse certain beliefs without having formulated an overarching plan to put those beliefs into action, out of fear that the specifics of such a plan may have convinced less people to vote for them. So, when they actually inherit the responsibilities they were elected to wield, they have no actionable promises to fall back on. They act based on what they think will match public opinion, not what they think will help the public.

Politics do not operate like this the world over. In places like Palestine, in which the government is ostensibly subservient in the face of a military and political powerhouse like Israel, politics is a matter of on-the-ground change, not dealings in bureaucracy. Politics is a matter of life and death, not a popularity contest. Politics, ultimately,  is a very real, very definite thing, experienced consciously by every Palestinian each time they are reminded that they are in the process of being colonized, which they are reminded of fairly often. While, to the bourgeois West, political views can be divorced from the external world, Palestinians do not have this luxury. A conversation of mild disagreement between two moderates, one who leans conservative and one who leans liberal, could never take place between a Palestinian and an Israeli. The views they express are too closely tied to the nature of equality, the rights of man, and the validity of the Zionist project to be discussed in casual conversation. 

Many Western politicians, on the other hand, feel entitled to have such casual conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on behalf of the Israelis and Palestinians. No matter which group one supports, if this support is artificial, spurred on by a desire to be elected more than anything else, results in demeaning one group or the other (or both) for not living up to Western standards of compromise and decency. 

This view is rooted in sheer ignorance, namely ignorance of the fact that the Zionist project, from its inception, was explicitly hostile and violent towards Palestinians. Conflict between Israeli settlers and Gaza natives is not a recent development, emerging out of a difference of opinion as to which group is entitled to the land, in which neither opinion can be said to be more or less valid than the other. Zionism emerged as an unabashedly colonialist entity, with the intention of transforming Palestine from an Arab-majority country to a European-majority country, not through mutual agreement, but by force. Quoth Vladimir Jabotinsky, a 20th-century Zionist ideologue: ‘If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf…Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.’ [5] Clearly, the presence of violence in the establishment of Israel was never considered avoidable. Early Zionists knew that they were entering land in which other people lived, knew that those people would not be pleased with them dominating that land, and knew, because of this, that they would have to use force in order achieve their desired outcomes, yet chose to do so anyways. The recent outburst of retaliatory violence against Israel by Hamas is miniscule when compared to this decades-long ‘colonizing adventure,’ but the furious violence of Israel, which is inherent in Zionism itself and made manifest not only in military oppression by the IDF but also through avenues like property redistribution and cultural suppression, is usually ignored by the West, which will only ever briefly take note of it when it is too indefensible to gloss over. Meanwhile, the much smaller-scale violence of Palestine, which is born out of a desire for national liberation, is framed as a threat not only to Israel’s very nationhood but as a mad annihilation of innocent lives. 

All of this defamation of Palestine’s fight for freedom, all of this critique and harmful rhetoric about its methods of resistance is, once spoken by Israeli demagogues, absorbed uncritically by Western political voices, even those which outwardly express support for Palestine. The disconnect of their political imagination from the actual situation in Palestine is so severe, that, when they claim to endorse Palestinian liberation, the image they have in their mind is one of diplomacy and calm discussions in congressional halls. The actuality of liberation, the pain, the suffering, the violence, the death, comes as a surprise to them. Their fantasy of a wave of peaceful protests, meetings between community leaders, and, perhaps, an international summit of some kind being all that it takes to restore relations between the two countries (as if an amicable relationship existed in the first place) suddenly disappears before their eyes. In its place are shocking images of bombings and burning helicopters, and they are so shocked to find that the political process they imagined is not how any country can ever or will ever gain true, long-lasting freedom that they are inclined to accept the first explanation for all this chaos that somebody offers them. Unfortunately, this explanation tends to go as follows: ‘Israel is facing unprovoked attacks by Palestinian radicals.’

It is not hard to see that this explanation, beyond being overly simplistic, is also outright incorrect. In response, one may be inclined to search for an explanation through which middle ground can be found within this complex issue. Despite many popular maxims, though, the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis does not constitute a ‘complicated situation’ with ‘valid claims emerging from both sides.’ In the words of political commentator Michael Brooks: ‘It's not a complex issue. That's the big thing. It's super simple. There's one group [Israel] that has enormous power. It's the most powerful country in the Middle East. It's backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity. It is never held accountable for anything. So, there's no symmetry in the relationship, period.’ As much as American politicians may claim to  represent a reasonable middle-ground on the issue of Palestinian liberation, this proposed ‘middle-ground’ does not and can not exist. When Israel uses violence on Palestinians, it is oppression. When Palestinians fight back against Israelis, it is self-defense. That much is certain. 

Notes

[1] Dahman, Ibrahim. Gold, Hadan. Iszo, Lauren. Netanyahu says Israel is ‘at war’ after Hamas launches surprise air and ground attack from Gaza, sec.7

[2] Kayyali, Abdul-Wahab. Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins, p.110

[3] al-Mughrabi, Nidal. Israeli forces kill three Gaza border protesters, wound 600: medics, sec.1

[4] McGreal, Chris. Army pulls back from Gaza leaving 100 Palestinians dead, sec.1

[5] Jabotinsky, Vladimir. The Iron Law, pg. 26

A Brief and Imperfect Explanation of Dialectical Materialism

[Pictured: Konstantin Yuon’s painting, New Planet, which commemorated the Bolshevik-led October Revolution in Russia.]

By Peter F. Seeger

Dialectical Materialism is a foundational principle of Marxism. This concept, along with Historical Materialism and Marxist Economics, are known as the three “component parts of Marxism.” Surprisingly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not write extensively on the idea of “Dialectical Materialism” during their lives. It was long after Marx’s death and only after Engels’ death that manuscripts could be compiled into Engels’ “The Dialectics of Nature.”

Materialism

Materialism is the philosophical opposite of idealism, which grounds itself in the concept of only one material world. Idealism believes that existence is inseparable from human perception and that reality stems from the mind. A helpful example of this Idealist thinking is Rene Descartes’ quote, “I think; therefore, I am.” In this idea the subjective thought is what confirms existence and subjective thought precedes objective existence. A materialist would rather say “I am; therefore, I think,” showing that the objective existence precedes the subjective perception of reality. Like Dialectics, the philosophy of materialism can be seen as far back as the ancient Greeks of Anaxagoras (c.500 - 428 BC) and Democritus (c.460 - c.370 BC). Marx was known to have been inspired by early materialists like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.

Materialism posits that matter objectively exists independently of whether we subjectively perceive it. “Materialism in general recognizes objectively real being (matter) as independent of consciousness, sensation, experience… consciousness is only the reflection of being, at best an approximately true (adequate, perfectly exact) reflection of it.”[1] Since matter exists whether we perceive it or not, then matter must precede subjective perception. Although Marx’s materialism, is not a rigid materialism and must be combined with dialectics to form the full theory followed by Marxists.

Dialectics

The concept of dialectics has existed for centuries. Philosophers like Plato demonstrated an idealist form of dialectics which functions like a conversation. One person presents an argument (a “thesis”), and another presents a counterargument (an “antithesis”). Through conversation, dialogue, and counterargument, the two achieve a better understanding and more correct solution to their issue, a “synthesis.” The “synthesis” then becomes the “thesis” again and will always have an “antithesis” to counter it. This simplified explanation is often used to explain idealist dialectics but is not true to the dialectics that Marx would have been familiar with as a member of the Young Hegelian Society.

Marx and Engels were followers of Hegel and learned an immense amount from the philosopher. Vladimir Lenin also praised Hegel for his ideas on dialectics and even encouraged the reading of Hegel for all Marxists. Although Hegel is the basis for Marx and Engels’ dialectics, Hegel is an idealist and therefore dissimilar to Marx’s Dialectical Materialism in that way. Dialectics, to Marxists, "is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought."[2] There cannot be a slave without a master, an exploited without an exploiter, nor a proletariat without a bourgeoise; therefore, they must appear at the same time due to their dependency on the other and in a unity of their opposites.

Dialectical Materialism

Engels’ writings on Dialectical Materialism are where Marxists receive the bulk of this concept. Engels determined three laws of Marxist Dialectical Materialism: (1) The unity and struggle of opposites, (2) the transformation of quantity into quality, and (3) the negation of the negation.[3] Briefly going through these one by one is useful for this complicated theory.

(1) The Unity and Struggle of Opposites:

“The law of contradiction in things that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.”[4] Every object is made up of two contradictory aspects that together make up the whole in unity and in contradiction. This constant state of opposites is never ending, in constant motion, and always changing; this is also known as the law of contradiction. This is, to Marxists, scientific and can be observed in nearly every field of science. “In mathematics: plus, and minus; differential and integral. In mechanics: action and reaction. In physics: positive and negative electricity. In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms. In social science: the class struggle” between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.[5] This leads Marxists to look to the material world around them and find the core contradictions within society to best understand how it functions.

A contradiction is “when two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity or an event.”[6] Within a contradiction there are aspects of the contradiction, which are the two forces that both function in opposition and unity. The term “Contradiction,” itself is rarely used in Marxism in the singular form because there is a never-ending number of contradictions found in everything, not just capitalism. A common misconception is the belief that Marxism believes in a one size fits all approach to societies and cultures, but inherent in the concept of a contradiction is the understanding that everything has its own internal and external contradictions that determine its resolution.

An example of this complex idea may be found using contradictions as applied to a rock and an egg. Within both objects there are internal contradictions inherent to each’s existence, (erosion or the need for specific conditions for a healthy birth) but both would react and resolve differently when acted upon by the same external contradiction. If you apply the specific temperature to the rock and the egg you may end up with a chicken or a warm stone. The resolutions of these contradictions are dependent on not just the aspects of the contradiction, but the contradictions within the aspects themselves.

The final point on contradictions is that while the concept is universal, i.e., it can be applied to areas outside Marxism such as in nature, it also comes with the belief that there is a “principal” or “primary” contradiction[7] that determines or influences the current or “secondary” contradictions in the world. This “principal” contradiction, according to Marxists, is the class contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. An example of a “secondary” contradiction influenced by the “principal” contradiction could simply be the competition between businesses for profits.

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(2) The Transformation of Quantity into Quality:

Gradual quantitative changes in society give rise to revolutionary qualitative changes. Since all matter is always in motion and changing, these changes function as a quantitative change until it gives rise to a qualitative change which fundamentally alters the matter into something materially different. The implications of this concept show the basis for why or how revolutions occur.  True change only comes from qualitative change. For example, water remains a liquid while it gradually cools down, but there is a certain point where the quantitative change of the temperature creates a qualitative change when the water becomes ice. When applied to the social sciences, according to Marxists, the quantitative changes represent the contradictions in capitalism and the qualitative change would be a revolution. Marxists view matter as interconnected, in perpetual motion, and always changing. Darwin’s theory of evolution grounds this idea in the sense that evolution shows the interconnectedness of matter and its perpetual change. Not only does Darwin’s theory of evolution imply the interconnectedness and constant change of all matter, but also shows that this process has been ongoing for billions of years, processes of dialectical development between contradictory or opposing forces.

Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods. For instance, the contradiction between proletariat and the bourgeoisie is resolved by the method of socialist revolution; the contradictions between the working class and the peasant class in socialist society is resolved by the method of collectivization and mechanization in agriculture; contradiction within the Communist Party is resolved by the method of criticism and self-criticism.[8]

(3) The Negation of The Negation

This concept can be simply explained as when the new supersedes the old. Before the quantitative changes lead to the qualitative transformation, this is the first negation. The second negation occurs at the time of the qualitative transformation.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual property, as found in the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common the land and the means of production[9]

This “negation and transformation” is not meant to mean that the “new” is devoid of any aspects of the old. This is paramount in understanding the ongoing struggle that will continue during a socialist transition. Marxism believes that in the social sciences, once societies have qualitative changes, remnants of the old society will still exist and will have to be governed by the laws of the new society. After feudalism, slavery was still within the society although the new system was built from the old system of slavery for labor. Further, once feudalism was superseded by capitalism old remnants of feudalism remained including landlords and slavery. Even under socialism, the remnants of capitalism will still exist in society. This shows that the qualitative change is also in constant motion and in contradiction with itself which must be resolved for the long-term goal of communism.

These laws make up the foundations of dialectical materialism: all matter is interconnected and always changing due to the dialectical forces of contradictions within society, and this posits the inevitability of a qualitative change from capitalism to socialism.

Notes

[1] Vladimir Lenin, The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-38.pdf. pp. 266-67

[2] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Foundations 26 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C26-Anti-Duhring-1st-Printing.pdf. pp. 152

[3] Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1954).

[4] Mao Zedong and The Redspark Collective, Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction: Study Companion, New Roads 4 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2019), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/N04-On-Contradiction-Study-2nd.pdf. pp. 2

[5] Lenin, The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin. pp. 136

[6] David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London, England: Oxford University Press, 2014). pp. 1

[7] In Marxism the principal contradiction is not fixed. Through history the principal contradiction will change and be foreign to contemporaries.

[8] Zedong and The Redspark Collective, Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction: Study Companion. pp. 28-29

[9] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, III vols. (UK: Penguin Classics, 1990). pp. 929

Decolonisation Isn't Pretty Or Complicated: When Violence Is Humanising

By Derek Ford

The first pro-Palestine demonstration called after the latest counterattack by a host of Palestinian forces on October 7, endorsed by Students for Justice in Palestine, the ANSWER Coalition and others, put matters very plainly:

Today, we witness a historic win for the Palestinian resistance: across land, air, and sea, our people have broken down the artificial barriers of the Zionist entity, taking with it the facade of an impenetrable settler colony and reminding each of us that total return and liberation to Palestine is near. Catching the enemy completely by surprise, the Palestinian resistance has captured over a dozen settlements surrounding Gaza, along with many occupation soldiers and military vehicles. This is what it means to Free Palestine: not just slogans and rallies but armed confrontation with the oppressors.

Of course, the colonisers do not want to hear such realities and hypocritically condemn them as ‘violent’ and ‘terrorist.’ In Indianapolis, we had to keep our coalition together in the face of the fear-mongering by both Democrat and Republican politicians. Unfortunately, many on the academic ‘left’ – already predisposed to conciliatory readjustments – continue echoing the same talking points as the State Department.

Henry Giroux, for example, contends that ‘The reach of violence and death in Israel by Hamas is shocking in its depravity and has been well-publicised in the mainstream media and in other cultural apparatuses.’ For a ‘critical’ scholar, it should instinctively raise questions when one finds truth in the pro-Zionist media and cultural outlets and remains merely satisfied with noting the ‘one-sidedness’ of such coverage. Giroux goes further still, calling us to do more than ‘exclusively condemn Hamas’s atrocious violence as a violation of human rights’ and to hold Israel’s apparently asymmetrical violence to equal condemnation. ‘Refusing to hold all sides in this war to the standards of international law is a violation of human dignity, justice and democratic principles,’ Giroux proclaims.

Palestinian resistance: Armed love

I recommend revisiting Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he unequivocally denounces such false equivalences. ‘Never in history,’ he writes, ‘has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators if they themselves are the result of violence?’ It is rather the oppressors who trigger violence and ‘not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror.’ Furthermore, the counter-insurgency of the oppressed, the ‘violence’ or ‘terror’ they wield, is in reality ‘a gesture of love.’

For Giroux, however, Hamas’s heroic attack on October 7 is ‘brutal and heinous’ and ‘horrific.’ To be fair, he acknowledges that Israeli Occupation Forces have murdered more children than ‘Hamas.’ Yet he swiftly returns to the equation, arguing that both Israel and Hama are united by ‘the violence done against children,’ which is apparently ‘used simply as a prop to legitimate and continue the war and the ongoing death and suffering of children, women, and civilians.’

Simultaneously, in the article titled ‘Killing Children: The Burdens of Conscience and the Israel-Hamas War,’ Giroux commands us not to equate Hamas with Palestine. Fair enough; no single entity represents an entire people. Yet Hamas is one of many resistance forces operating under a united front, along with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Resistance Committees, the Al-Quds Brigades and countless others. This is beside the point: those of us in the US have absolutely no business telling the colonised how to resist colonisation, nor what armed groups should resist and on what grounds!

One wonders what such academics would have written about Nat Turner’s historic 1831 rebellion in Virginia. In August of that year, Turner led a group of six slaves to freedom. They killed their slaver, Joseph Travis and his family before traversing plantations to free more enslaved Africans by force. Along the way, ‘free’ Blacks joined their army of about 70 people.

They took money, supplies and weapons as they moved and eliminated over 55 white slave owners and their families. Their violence was not altogether indiscriminate, and, in fact, Turner ordered his troops to leave the homes of poor white people alone. Still, they killed children in their march towards freedom.

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Should we remember this remarkable uprising as a tragedy to be condemned, albeit less so than the violence of the slavers? No! We celebrate Turner’s rebellion as we do all revolts of the oppressed worldwide throughout history!

Their violence was humanising, a necessary measure to prevent them from enslaving others and part of a long tradition of insurrection that ultimately overthrew chattel slavery in the US.

No demonisation of the oppressed

After an amazingly long chase, once the slavers found and killed Turner, the white supremacist papers condemned him and his motley crew for their barbaric violence. How would you respond? ‘Yes, it was terrible, but slavery is worse?’

Things are different today. All imperialist wars are for ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights.’ So it was with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Libya, Syria, you name it. In each instance, the propaganda is quickly absorbed by our critical intellectuals. I remember Noam Chomsky endorsing UN Resolution 1973, put forward by the ‘saviours’ of humanity like Italy and the United States on March 17, 2011, imposing a ‘No-Fly Zone’ over Libya. Of course, this only applied to the Libyan air force, not to the US and its NATO allies.

There was relentless propaganda about an ‘impending massacre’ in Benghazi when, in reality, the small armed uprising was on the verge of defeat by the massively popular (and, it goes without saying, flawed) Jamahiriya government of Moammar Gaddafi. It turns out there was no impending massacre, nor was there any validity to the accusations of ‘mass rape.’

The same is true of October 7, 2023. As it turns out, the Israelis massacred their own people. The air force admitted one commander ‘instructed the other fighters in the air to shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence, and at a certain point also attacked an IDF station with trapped soldiers in order to help the fighters of Navy commando unit 13 attack it and liberate it.’ Yasmin Porat confirmed the Israeli army massacred civilians after the courageous Hamas counterattack and, moreover, said Palestinian resistance forces who ‘kidnapped’ her did not treat her inhumanely and did not intend to murder her.

For those with a cursory knowledge of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine, this is not surprising.

No purity in the fight against oppression

Let’s imagine that the lies told by the State Department and distributed by their stenographers in the media were all true. Even then, why would anyone in the US or any imperialist nation that is currently sponsoring the Israeli genocide feel any need to ‘condemn’ or even denounce the heroism of those fighting back?

The answer is simple: standing up to the demonisation campaign is difficult, especially early on. Yet how many have heard the endless outrageous lies used to dehumanise primarily Black and Brown heads of state, governments, militaries, and populations? The real question is: how many of us have heard the retractions? How many of us have questioned our national chauvinism and privilege? Why would anyone entertain the notion that Hamas wants Israel to continue bombing its people and infrastructure?

It goes without saying that I don’t share a political allegiance to Hamas, and neither do the myriad forces uniting with them to defend their people – and the people of the region and world – from the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel!

Moral purity is an idealism only those cloistered in their academic offices can afford. Still, it’s a waste of money. I guess, at the very least, it shows us what critical academics are willing to criticise the oppressors and not the oppressed. Me? I’m unequivocally and proudly on the side of the oppressed.

Bob Dylan at the Villa Diodati

By David Polanski

Not traditionally understood as a gothic artist, the writings of Bob Dylan nonetheless embody what David McNally identifies as the genre’s most radical functions: to offer unsettling imagery and subversive narratives as a means to “disturb the naturalisation of capitalism” (a system wherein “individual survival requires selling our life-energies to people on the market”), and to counter Liberalism’s denial of such “quotidian horrors” by insisting instead “that something strange, indeed life-threatening, is at work in our world” – that “something is happening” and we need to know exactly what it is. From the depraved American landscape of 1965’s “Tombstone Blues” (wherein Jack the Ripper “sits at the head of the chamber of commerce,” and government officials seek to ritualistically resurrect Paul Revere’s horse), to the apocalyptic Eden of 2006’s “Ain’t Talkin” (whose Milton-esque protagonist wanders the world seeking vengeance against greedy speculators and the god-like elites who’ll “crush you with wealth and power”), Dylan has spent more than sixty years wielding the very same “armoury of de-familiarising techniques” that McNally attributes to Shelley, Marx and other gothic artists in an effort to undermine “the structures of denial that dominate conscious life in modernity,” and to remind his fans that life under capitalism will never be anything less than “bizarre, shocking, monstrous.”

As capitalism now lumbers through its most zombified phase, it is perhaps no coincidence that Dylan’s most recent engagement with the genre is also his most overt: 2020’s “My Own Version of You,” an unconcealed retelling of Frankenstein that mirrors Shelley’s allegorical use of the creation of physical life to represent the political construction of Liberal humanism (and its crude distinction between the “species of man” and the “race of devils” that must be annihilated if the bourgeoisie are to sleep well at night). Like Shelley’s “Victor,” Dylan’s narrator believes he has struck the ideal balance between dispassionate methodology and “decency and common sense” (that his naked self-interest is “for the benefit of all mankind”), and like Victor, Dylan’s narrator views human history as an arc that bends directly towards him, one whose greatest tragedies (which he and Victor both identify as slavery in the ancient world and the colonization of the Americas) could have been prevented had the leaders of such times felt “the way that I feel.” Most damningly, both characters freely confess their intent to create not merely a new human, but a new conception of what it means to be human – in Victor’s case, “a new species” possessed by a childlike devotion to him as their father; for Dylan’s narrator, someone akin to a “robot commando,” someone who’ll play the piano for him, make him laugh, then deliver the heads of his enemies on a silver tray.

Yet, whereas Shelley’s then-Modern Prometheus fixated on the corruption and politicization of the physiological sciences, Dylan’s target is more technocratic in nature, his narrator an embodiment of those today (such as Steven Pinker, Cass Sunstein, and the cast at Vox.com) who practice a reanimated form of 19th Century scientism. Scientism, as Jackson Lears explains, represents a grotesque “redefinition of science” from “an experimental way of knowing” to “a source of certainty,” one that that “ruthlessly pares down complex events to a single mechanistic causal explanation,” and whose disciples not only reject “the traditional tools of humanistic inquiry” (e.g. “archival research, close reading, attention to variety”) but also “any attempt to understand the mind through introspection.” These qualities are on abundant display in Dylan’s narrator, who believes his master plan to be free of “insignificant details,” who considers himself immune to the vulgar passions of the lowly masses, yet who cannot help but confess to the imperious urges that linger beneath the surface of his calculations and his spreadsheets (“I pick a number between one and two/and I ask myself what would Julius Caesar do”). Later, Dylan’s narrator indulges in a sadistic fantasy wherein Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx – two figures whose concepts clash violently with the scientistic approach – are being tortured in hell, whipped with a “raw-hide lash” until the skin is torn “from their backs.”

However, to focus solely upon Dylan’s forays into gothic terrain, or even upon his more overt critiques of our technocratic overlords (from the number-crunching imperialists marked for death in “Masters of War,” to the “Chicago-school” economists – also marked for death – in “Workingman’s Blues #2”) is to miss the haunted forest for the gnarled trees. As I demonstrate in a forthcoming article in Peace, Land, and Bread, the near-entirety of Dylan’s body of work has been infused with an artistic and a political consciousness that is diametrically opposed to the counter-revolutionary reformism at the heart of the Liberal tradition. Whereas the historical origins of Liberalism are “aristocratic” in nature (developed in response to the French Revolution and the events of 1848 as a means to discourage the “dangerous classes” at home and abroad from “interfering with the process of capital accumulation”), Dylan has spent his sixty-two year career casting his lot not with “ye gifted kings and queens,” but with “The Wretched of the Earth, My brothers of the flood,” composing songs that call upon the dispossessed masses to reject the political ideologies designed to defend the predominate order, to boldly and perpetually reinvent our personal and political perceptions of the world, and to accept the reality that violent resistance is required to liberate ourselves from a world that is (by design) “ruled by violence.” Although it is unlikely that Dylan embraces a revolutionary ethos as part of his personal identity (he’s become quite the corporate lackey in recent years, and his 1983 defense of the colonization of Palestine represents an ethical lapse impossible to ignore), he has nonetheless fulfilled his duty as an artist by exploring fields of perception and emotion that exist beyond his own intellectual and spiritual boundaries. As such, we can identify innumerable parallels between the anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian, and relentlessly unsettling spirit of Dylan’s six-decade body of work, and the “revolutionary consciousness” that voices such as Marx, Mariátegui, and George Jackson (to whom Dylan composed a loving ode in 1971) have all deemed a prerequisite to the invention of more communal forms of political relations.

That being said, a gothic approach to the topic of “Bob Dylan” allows us not merely to identify Dylan as a slayer of Liberal demons (a snake in the garden of the capitalist world order), but to cast a tormenting light upon the uniquely vampiric realm of Bob Dylan critical studies, a realm long haunted by un-dead practices and presumptions, and long teeming with bourgeois scholars who have spent decades draining the revolutionary spirit from Dylan’s body of work. Whereas, for example, my recent paper for Affirmations: of the Modern positions Dylan’s intertextual engagement with biblical and so-called “Classical” literature as a systematic critique of the autocratic beliefs that pervade such texts, tenured fuddy-duddies such as Raphael Falco, Richard Thomas, and Christopher Ricks depict Dylan’s relationship to ancient literature as fundamentally reverent (as Dylan honoring, rather than interrogating, the Western world’s imagined cultural heritage). Quite similarly, whereas my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread identifies within Dylan’s writings a fundamental rejection of the American political project (demonstrating how Dylan frames American history as a “Godot-like nightmare,” and America itself as “exceptional only in its propensity for sadism”), Dylan Review founder Lisa O’Neill-Sanders depicts Dylan’s writings as concerned not with America’s systemic and foundational rot, but with mere acts of “injustice,” while Graley Herren imagines Dylan as waging a “battle” on behalf of something Herren terms the American “freedom movement” (an arch of history, Herren claims, propelled not by revolutionaries such as Dylan muse Jackson, but by reformist icons like “Lincoln, the Kennedys, and King”). Most damningly, whereas I identify “My Own Version of You” as a gothic critique of corrupt scientific inquiry and Liberal hubris, a who’s who of prominent “Bobcats” (Michael Gray, Paul Haney, Laura Tenschert, and Dr. Thomas yet again) have reduced it to a winking communiqué from Dylan to his fans as to the nature of his creative process (“a literary Frankenstein,” “Dylan’s ars poetica,” a “personal” reflection of “the obsessive pursuit” to “put the parts together and create something new,” as well as an opportunity for Dylan to vent his sadistic “grudges” against Freud and Marx).

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Far more troubling, however, are the attempts by influential ideologues such as Greil Marcus, Cass Sunstein, and Sean Wilentz to redirect (in a most Orwellian manner) Dylan’s anti-systemic, anti-authoritarian gaze away from the Liberal/capitalist order that has reigned predominate for the entirety of Dylan’s life and career, and subsequently towards those of us who have embraced the oft-criminalized perspectives of the anti-colonial and anti-capitalist Left. Wilentz, for example, begins his Bob Dylan in America with a tortured parallel between Dylan’s evolution as a songwriter and the personal journey of composer Aaron Copland (with whom Dylan has no substantial relationship) from youthful Communist flirt to “staunch political Liberal,” then spends the next three-hundred pages depicting Dylan as a kind of counter-revolutionary troll (as warning fans of the danger posed by “high-toned intellectualism,” as whitesplaining the true nature of inequality to the experienced activists at the “March on Washington,” and as hoisting an American flag in Paris in ‘66 so as to teach the future participants of May ‘68 a lesson about the real America). As for Sunstein, his recent keynote address at the 2023 World of Bob Dylan conference offered a strategically reductive portrayal of the revolutionary organizations active across the globe throughout the 1960s (one that erased their respective histories, methods, and goals), then positioned these now-indistinct “political movements” (many of whom were directly influenced by Dylan’s artistry) as the monochromatic antithesis to Dylan’s freewheelin’ spirit. Last, but never least, Marcus injected his influential The Old, Weird America with sentiments as jingoistic as anything uttered by the Trumpian Right, depicting the America of the 1960s as haunted by the spectre of nihilistic radicals hell-bent on rejecting democracy, rock n’ roll, apple pie, and the “covenant with God” established at Plymouth Rock, then portraying Dylan (in defiance of such devilry) as delving into the archives of the American folk tradition so as to resurrect a long-buried “national experience” without which (Marcus breathlessly warns) “all bonds” will be “dissolved,” and “people will begin to kill each other, even their own children.”

Like Edmund Burke before them, who co-opted gothic tropes in his Reflections on the Revolution in France so as to slander the radicals with “charges of cannibalism, sorcery, grave-robbing and alchemy,” Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz appropriate Dylan’s revolutionary spirit for counter-revolutionary ends – and like Burke, their arguments are a bluff, premised on the presumption that no one will call them out for their rhetorical distortions or dearth of historical or textual evidence. Unfortunately for Burke, that’s exactly what Thomas Paine did in his Rights of Man, offering what David McNally describes as a “deliberate provocation” wherein aristocratic landowners were portrayed as “cannibal-monsters,” and the revolutionary forces presented as “slayers” of such spoiled, snooty beasts. Fortunately for Marcus, Sunstein, and Wilentz, the realm of Dylan studies has long represented a safe haven for those harboring reactionary or otherwise counter-revolutionary sentiment (with nary a Jacobin, nor even a Girondin in sight).

It was not until recently, for example, that the decades of “racism, misogyny, [and] homophobia” espoused by influential biographer Clinton Heylin was met with a substantial public rebuke (by Laura Tenschert, in fact), and my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread represents the first systematic rebuttal of the crude manner in which Gray, Heylin, Marcus, Wilentz, Peter Doggett, Will Kaufman, and others have for years sought to dismiss Dylan’s ode to George Jackson (and to delegitimize Jackson himself). More to the point, there exists within Dylan studies a creeping anti-intellectualism, as evidenced, in large part, by the growing antipathy among Dylan scholars towards the practice of critique. Critique, as Robert Tally notes, represents the rigorous, yet thoroughly joyous (and unabashedly political) practice of “careful reading, considered meditation, and creative speculation” through which we “affirm our collective and individual freedom,” and “imagine alternatives to our intolerable circumstances” (and without which we allow the “crassly utilitarian” opponents of the humanities “to set the terms of the debate”). Amid the political violence, existential risk, and “boundless mystifications” that mark these modern times, Tally rightly declares that the denizens of our scholarly institutions should be loudly and proudly calling for “more critique, more theory, and indeed more critical theory.” Within the un-dead dominion of Dylan studies, however, a parade of prominent figures have adopted postcritical postures centered around “surface reading,” “thin description,” and reader-response criticism, and all for the supposed benefits of the “ordinary” fan. Sean Latham, for example, has suggested there may be no “way of understanding” Dylan’s songs other than “within the moment and context of performance itself,” Anne-Marie Mai has offered a Felski-inspired call for scholars to produce “emotionally engaged,” chatroom-esque depictions of our relationship to Dylan’s music, Douglas Brinkley has decried (without offering a single example for us to scrutinize) “a new wave of over-intellectualized critical writing” that he believes has “mummified” Dylan’s artistry, and Raphael Falco has positioned his Dylan Review (the only peer-reviewed journal focused on Dylan studies) as an Edenic utopia devoted to the promotion of “coeval” perspectives as opposed to critical “quibbles” (with Falco going as far as to warn fellow scholars of the intrusion of devilish figures bearing “glozing promises” that we may yet obtain what Falco claims is “too much knowledge”). Even Heylin-slayer Tenschert has accompanied her otherwise laudable efforts to expand Dylan’s fanbase with vague denouncements of unnamed elites who have supposedly “over-intellectualized” Dylan’s music and rendered him inaccessible to younger fans (claims which echo the faux-populism of the postcritical crowd, along with the tendency of Felski and company to conjure elitist, tweed-suited strawmen with which to do battle).

So what is to be done?

In no uncertain terms, to consider the realm of Dylan studies by way of a gothic perspective is to cast aside any and all delusions of reform, and approach the matter instead as one would approach the nosferatu itself: with a sharp stake (“hardened by charring it in the fire”), a heavy iron hammer, and murderous intent. As such, my scholarly project aims not merely for the resurrection of Dylan’s long-buried revolutionary attributes (from his gothic inclinations, to his relationship to George Jackson, to his intertextual repurposing of ancient colonial and imperialistic texts for decolonial and decapitalist ends), but for the ruthless critique of the practices and practitioners most responsible for this act of critical and political vivisepulture. My recent article for Affirmations: of the Modern (one which analyzed Dylan’s six-decade engagement with the Garden of Eden motif in relation to the revolutionary theories of Franco Berardi) represented an initial volley, and my forthcoming paper on the intimate and multifaceted relationship between the respective writings of Dylan and George Jackson will pour copious amounts of fuel on this purifying fire. A monograph on such subjects will follow in due time, along with battles fought on other fronts (reviews, conferences, and online debates when appropriate), with the goal being nothing less than the utter decimation of Bob Dylan critical studies as we know it today.

To identify the spiritual and intellectual predecessor to this approach is to look no further than Huey Newton’s gothic-tinged depiction of “Ballad of a Thin Man” as a scathing deconstruction of the voyeuristic impulses of the white bourgeoisie toward Black America (as well as a celebration of the terror experienced by such oglers when they realize that those they gawk at view them as the real freaks), along with his portrayal of Dylan’s “Mr. Jones” as representative of the politicians, cops, and businessmen who “cause the conditions which make it necessary for people to go to these lengths to survive,” then “pay to see the performance the people put on.” Just as Newton rightly identified decolonial and decapitalist attributes that exist in Dylan’s writings regardless of Dylan’s awareness or intent (then thanked Dylan for all his music meant “to the Black Panther Party, and to [he and Bobby Seale] personally”), I seek to map the uncharted radicalism of Dylan’s artistry in a manner unbeholden to Dylan’s personal beliefs or approval, and I express my solemn debt to Newton for the still-smoldering critical trail he blazed. Along the same lines, the ideal modern model for this project is undoubtably Andrew Culp’s remorseless reclamation of the legacy of French theorist Gilles Deleuze from claws of reactionary factions such as the Israeli army, Silicon Valley shills, and Slavoj Žižek. Just as I aim to wrest Dylan’s artistry away from those who have recast him as a prophet of positivity, a guru of Liberal universalism, an apolitical humanist, and a bearer of the torch of Western civilization itself, Culp boldly confronts those who have reduced Deleuze to “a naively affirmative thinker of connectivity” (“the lava lamp saint of ‘California Buddhism’”) with the tormenting vision of “a different Deleuze, a darker one,” a Deleuze discovered only “when we escape the chapel choir of joy for the dark seclusion of the crypt” (a wild-eyed voice in the wilderness advocating a “revolutionary negativity” through which we wish “a happy death” upon the “calcified political forms” that sustain the capitalist world-system).

More to the point, the spiritual and intellectual antithesis to my project is undoubtably the postcritical utopia that is the Dylan Review. In addition to his pastoral vision for this particular publication, Raphael Falco actually had the nerve to ask fellow scholars (in the journal’s inaugural issue, no less) to consider whether the act of “systematic study” might hasten the “death” of Dylan’s influence as an artist, or would otherwise stifle the capacity of Dylan’s music to produce “spontaneous experiences of shared intimacy” between himself and his listeners. With such a reactionary foundation, it should surprise no one that the Dylan Review has come to embody a kind of intellectual “safe space” wherein amiable but critically mundane ruminations on Dylan’s artistry mingle with regressive efforts to immortalize the un-dead practices and presumptions that have long-haunted this critical realm (especially as they relate to Dylan’s intertextual practices and his relationship to political topics). It likewise came as no surprise to me (but I needed to be able to say that I tried) that when I submitted to the Dylan Review in 2020 an early draft of my forthcoming paper for Peace, Land, and Bread (an unapologetically “systematic study” of Dylan’s relationship to George Jackson, one which most assuredly met the journal’s stated expectations for rigor, structure, and originality, and which spoke directly to their call for papers regarding "the special topic of political authority and race in Dylan’s work"), I was informed by one of its editors that the draft had not merely been rejected, but had been deemed unworthy of even being sent out to reviewers. Far more telling than the rejection itself was the journal’s refusal to justify their decision, with the editor in question responding to my query with an assertion of the journal’s right to reject submissions (as if I was contesting such an obvious point), as well as a declaration of its desire for confidentiality. Evasions of this nature, of course, are reflective of the trepidation universal among those who construct such arcadian states, whose borders are invariably porous. To put it another way (to put it in terms that Falco might understand), such a fair foundation he has laid whereon to build their ruin.

Accordingly, I stand on the lookout for lost souls laboring within this fragile Xanadu whose minds might be excited by the prospect of the decimation of Dylan studies as we know it – and as always, I will continue to find allies among those on the front lines of the global struggle against climate change, fascism, and all the other horrid by-products of capitalist development. Although there is much to admire, for example, in the efforts of Tenschert, Harrison Hewitt, and Rebecca Slaman to use social media to cultivate a more youthful and diverse cohort of “Bobcats,” the (almost entirely) depoliticized manner in which they approach Dylan’s artistry flies rather brazenly in the face of the political awakening and radicalization that has transpired in recent years among this planet’s youngest generations (developments which have, unsurprisingly, caused ruling class elites such as Sunstein so much consternation, and which inspired no less than three Dylan scholars – Marcus, Wilentz, and Gregory Pardlo – to attach their names to the deeply reactionary 2020 “Harper’s Letter”). The youngest and most open-minded among us are increasingly recognizing that our species no longer has the luxury of mere political reform, and as such, are increasingly embracing (as the most direct and practical path towards a more humane, sustainable future) the kinds of “love-inspired,” thoroughly egalitarian, and unapologetically confrontational approaches associated with the decolonial and decapitalist traditions. Bluntly put, a radical Dylan is a relevant Dylan to the next generation of scholars and fans, and thoughtful, well-meaning folks like Tenschert, Hewitt, and Slaman would be wise to realize that no amount of social mixers, amiable podcasts, or Dylan-themed karaoke nights (however lovely such things may be) can compare to the comforts of revolutionary comradeship and the pleasure of knowing we will leave this world far better than we found it.

So, comrades (and future comrades), let us get on with it. Let us sharpen our stakes, and polish our pitchforks, and whatever other pointed metaphors may apply, and do the work that must be done (and do it together). Or as Dylan once so darkly declared, “this is how I spend my days – I came to bury, not to praise.”

Is Marxism "Leftist"?

By Kate Woolford

Republished from Challenge Magazine.

A Marxist approach to leftist moralism

Many self-styled communists view Marxism-Leninism more as a set of moral and ethical values than a science firmly grounded in material reality. To them, Marxism is the ultimate embodiment of liberal and ‘progressive’ values, while those with more conservative values are nothing more than ‘chauvinists’ who should be excluded from the cause. 

However, this moral interpretation of Marxism is inconsistent with Marx’s own understanding, which asserts that the driving force behind human society is contradictions between classes, rather than a moral dichotomy of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. In this respect, Marx did not abstract capitalism outside of its historical context but instead showed that it could be both historically progressive and regressive depending on its stage of development. Within its early stages, the progressive nature of capitalism is tied up with its need to constantly revolutionise the instruments of production, the relations of production, and therefore also the whole relations of society. This, in turn, replaces the scattered, less-effective feudal mode of production with capitalist production and allows production to be carried out at an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless, as capitalism matures, and the proletariat grows into a fully developed class concentrated together in huge numbers, a contradiction arises between the social process of production and the private ownership of production. 

The contradictions inherent within capitalism are demonstrated through recurrent crises, during which huge amounts of goods and machinery are needlessly destroyed and wasted. Capitalism’s incompatibility with the future development of society can only result in a revolution led by the class capable of bringing about a higher mode of production, that is, the modern working class. Therefore, the inevitability of the socialist revolution is not tied up in capitalism’s moral shortcomings, but on the objective laws governing the development of human society. 

In a similar vein, Engels criticised, “every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law on the pretext that the moral world too has its permanent principles which transcend history and the differences between nations”, and disapproved of a theory of morals “designed to suit all periods, all peoples, and all conditions” arguing that “precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere applicable.” Both Marx and Engels upheld that the communist movement unified workers based on the material conditions of their life; their nation, their workplace, and their commonly experienced exploitation as proletarians, not on the basis of a shared set of moral values.

Therefore, those within the communist movement who uphold their personal morals as eternally and indisputably correct, or, even worse, seek to elevate their personal morals to the position of communist morals in general, clearly do not view morals in a materialist way. Nor do they approach it in an anti-imperialist way, with notions of moral superiority giving way to imperialist interventions on the countries alleged to be morally inferior, often on the basis of their cultural and religious values.

What is Marxism?

Marx understood that changes in society, like changes in the natural world, are far from accidental and follow certain laws. This understanding made it possible to work out a scientific theory of human society; to study why it is the way it is, why it changes, and what changes are to come. The scientific method of Marxism, dialectical materialism, regards the world as both a living organism in a state of constant development and composed of matter existing beyond human perception. 

Like all sciences, Marxism is based on the material world around us. Therefore, it is not a finished theory or a dogma, but must be continuously applied to new conditions, new problems, and new discoveries to draw from them the correct conclusions. The value of Marxism lies in its ability to form conclusions capable of changing the world, just as all scientific discoveries can be used to change the world. 

Defining Left and Right 

While Marxism historically belongs to the definite left tradition, that is, it finds much of its origins in the Jacobin radical left of the French Revolution, today’s leftism is understood more as an indefinite set of moral values than a clearly defined ideology. 

Delineating what values belong to the left and what values belong to the right is a challenging task given that these terms mean different things within different contexts. One study found that conservatism can be associated with a left-wing or right-wing orientation depending on the cultural, political, and economic situation of the society in question. Another study found that, within the former Soviet republics, “traditionalism, rule-following, and needs for security are more strongly associated with the old (left-wing) ways of doing things than with right-wing preferences. It is also possible that openness would be associated with a right-wing political orientation in Eastern Europe, rather than with a left-wing orientation, as in the West.” In other words, in the former Soviet republics, the Soviet Union is often associated with values the West considers to be right-wing. 

In this respect, understandings of left and right are subjective and vary widely depending on time and place. Therefore, it is important to clarify that this article will be considering values associated with modern “leftism” in the West today. The cultural values considered in this article are liberation through love, openness, and equal rights, and the policy matters considered are equality, government intervention, and high taxes. 

Love and inclusivity

Notions of love as an all-liberating force find popularity among leftists, an outlook prevalent among 18th and 19th-century philosophers and revitalised during the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s. Engels, however, criticised the “religion of love” and, in the End of Classical German Philosophy, denounced Feuerbach’s idea that mankind could be liberated through love alone instead of the economic transformation of production. To Engels, the idea that love could function as a reconciling force for all differences “regardless of distinctions of sex or estate” had no plausibility. 

Despite what leftists proclaim, the act of loving one another, including beyond traditional boundaries, does not inherently constitute a revolutionary act. Engels reinforced this idea in On the History of Early Christianity, which disapproved of the pacification of Early Christianity and its transformation from a revolutionary, working-class religion of “undiluted revenge” into a petit-bourgeois religion of “love your enemies, bless them that curse you.”

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The same principles Engels applied to the “religion of love” can be applied to the leftist values of openness and inclusivity. The proponents of these ideas suggest that the working class should be accepting and accommodating to the ideas, values, traditions, and mindsets of everyone, including the class exploiting them. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels deemed this position as belonging to the “socialistic bourgeoisie,” and criticised the belief “that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.” Therefore, Marxism has little to do with absolute ‘inclusivity’ and notions of ‘liberation through love’, making it distinct from the leftist counterculture movement borne out of the 1960s and 70s. 

Equal rights

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Marxism is its stance on the concept of equal rights. Despite the prevalent use of ‘equal rights’ as a leftist buzzword, Marx’s work, the End of Classical German Philosophy, outlines that, within bourgeois society, equal rights are, in fact, formally recognised. However, social satisfaction does not depend upon equal rights but material rights – and “capitalist production takes care to ensure that the great majority of those with equal rights shall get only what is essential for bare existence.” In this respect, if the interests of classes in conflict are irreconcilable, the material rights of one class impede on the material rights of another. Therefore, better conditions are not brought about through platitudes of equal rights, but through material rights and the abolition of classes. In Anti-Dühring, Engels traced the origins of the demand for “equal rights” to the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism. During this period, the bourgeoisie called for the abolition of “class privileges” and the proletariat demanded the abolition of classes themselves. 

Furthermore, while leftists uphold equal rights on the basis that all people, by virtue of being human, should be treated the same, Marxism recognises that, within class society, individuals do not relate to each other solely as humans but also as members of a class. In this respect, during the epoch of capitalism, the bourgeoisie uses the state apparatus to suppress the working class. Likewise, during the epoch of socialism, the new state apparatus is used by the working class to suppress the bourgeoisie. 

Moreover, socialism and communism does not seek to enforce complete equality in the everyday life of members of society regardless of how driven and hardworking one might be compared to another. As per Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.” Thus, Communism allows for individuals to enrich themselves over others, so long as this enrichment does not come at anyone else’s expense. Therefore, it is a widespread misconception that hard works reaps no reward under socialism and communism – in fact, hard work can only truly be rewarded under socialism and communism.

The state and taxes

Another policy often associated with leftists is ‘big government’, that is, that the government should play a more active role within society. However, as Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, as the proletariat raises itself to the position of ruling class, it sweeps away the conditions of class antagonisms and classes generally, abolishing its own supremacy as a class. At this stage, the state, which functions as an organ of class domination, becomes obsolete as classes do not exist. Consequently, communism does not necessarily involve government intervention into the personal lives of members of society. While the early stage of socialism requires a strong state to centralise production and defend the gains of the revolution, as socialism develops, the state is increasingly stripped back.

In practice, efforts to shift power away from the state into the hands of the people is reflected within Mao Zedong’s little red book, which was published and distributed with the aim of strengthening the peoples understand of Marxism, thus empowering them as the real movement in charge of building a communist society – bottom up, not top down.  

Leftists also often advocate for high taxation as the grand solution to all domestic problem without realising, however, that the scale and direction of taxation is determined first and foremost by the class characteristic of the state. 

Under capitalism, the state serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, and is parasitic in that it sustains a superfluous class of individuals who do not produce material value for society such as the bourgeois police; the military; the whole judicial apparatus; members of parliament, who get paid disproportionately high salaries; etc. Additionally, the state revenue necessary for war and overseas military bases is generated through taxing the working class, while monopolies pile up war profits. Only a fraction of revenue is allocated to production, and to things like the maintenance of roads, railways, buildings, hospitals, schools, etc. 

On the other hand, under socialism, the state serves the interests of the working class and functions mainly to administer economic life. The socialist state is concerned with the production and distribution of goods, the advancement of the wellbeing of working people, and the maintenance of a limited military apparatus to protect the gains of the revolution. 

In the Civil War in France, Marx described the Paris Commune as having made the “catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government – a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state functionalism.” The ‘cheap government’ of socialism is financed partly through state owned industry and trade, money which would overwise be retained as private profit under capitalism, and partly through taxation. However, as the state becomes stripped back to the minimum of its functions, taxation is still considerably low as there is no superfluous, parasitic class living off the state as there is under capitalism. 

Furthermore, in the Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx stated that “taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else.” Therefore, as socialist society progresses towards communism and the state, along with its government machinery, gradually withers away, high taxes cease to have an economic basis. For example, no great war machinery is necessary under communism as the international community has a shared future with common interests. In this respect, while a heavy income tax serves as a progressive demand within capitalist society, socialism and communism eventually leads to a society free from the burden of high taxes on working people. 

As the writings of Marx and Engels do not align with, or go beyond, many leftist cultural and economic values, the idea that Marxism is a leftist ideology in the popular understanding of the term should, at the very least, be questioned. Marxism should instead be upheld by communists as a scientific method of analysis existing outside of the political spectrum.

Kate Woolford is the editor of Challenge.

The Imperative to Organize: What Palestine Needs from Us Now

[Photo Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu, AP]

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso and Salma Hamamy

On October 7th, the Islamic Resistance Movement — a Palestinian political and military organization based in Gaza better known as Hamas — began a multi-faceted attack against the settler colony of Israel. The operation included aerial rocket launches and on-the-ground operations. The attack marked only the latest bout of Palestinian resistance against the sieges, occupations, and ethnic cleansing campaigns that have fundamentally characterized the Israeli state, an entity built on these very atrocities since its founding in 1948. With a dreadful immediacy, Israel responded to the attack in kind, and then some.

The war crimes and genocidal exploits that have unfolded since the fighting began are too multitudinous to list in full. But suffice it to say that Israel has unleashed an endless shower of hospital and school bombings — collective punishment galore. As of December 18th, Israel has slaughtered almost 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 70% of whom were women and children. Meanwhile, the Israeli death toll stands at about 1,200. 

Immediately following October 7th, the United States predictably offered Israel — its client state — unconditional support. Soon thereafter, they expanded the gesture by offering military contributions and punishing domestic dissent. In contrast, the American public has largely opposed their government’s pro-Israel posture. An estimated 300,000 protesters marched on Washington in support of Palestine last month. The event featured speakers such as writer Mohammed El-Kurd, musician Macklemore, and lawyer Noura Erakat. It brought together groups from 22 states including California, Illinois, and New Jersey. Two of the largest labor unions in the country — the United Auto Workers and the American Postal Workers Union — have voiced their support for a ceasefire in the region.

Waves of pro-Palestine advocacy have overtaken social media, much to the chagrin of executives and algorithmic gatekeepers. Popular methods of demonstrating solidarity also include calling, emailing, and faxing politicians, donating to pro-Palestine organizations and humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, boycotting pro-Israel companies, and attending protests and direct actions such as strikes and walkouts. These tactics have all made major headway in nurturing a greater collective consciousness in the United States that supports the Palestinian cause and feels evermore compelled to apply liberatory praxis wherever systemic oppression rears its hegemonic head.

Meanwhile, the situation in Gaza worsens by the hour. The twice-renewed humanitarian pause that began on November 24th ended on December 1st, doing little to ameliorate the displacement, destruction, and brutality that Israel has subjected Gazans to for over two months now. The moment demands an additional layer of action on the part of comrades living outside the occupied territories. Beyond the more traditional forms of activism, we must also embody the organizer spirit in our daily lives. In other words, allies of the Palestinian cause must view our various social relationships and networks as breeding grounds for heightened awareness and collective action. 

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Individualized actions done in unison may spark a wave. But organized actions done in community build a tide. As agents in this transformational moment, we now have a responsibility — to our Palestinian comrades and to ourselves — to organize our immediate surroundings, ensuring that no stone goes unturned. Workplaces, friend groups, family units, neighborhoods, and the like all provide pre-established groupings within which communal awareness and collective action can grow. Beginning with the most promising group, the first step is to start organizational conversations with fellow group members.

These interactions can take many forms, such as further publicizing one’s support for Palestine, pushing back against pro-Israel rhetoric and apologia, wearing clothing that physically depicts solidarity with the Palestinian cause (e.g., keffiyeh), etc. But, generally speaking, the aim is to establish an accurate conception of the individual’s stance on the issue in question, making sure to note any potential gaps in knowledge or qualities that stand out as particularly ripe for agitation. These gaps may include an ignorance of Palestinian history, American ties to Israel, or Israeli ties to imperialist efforts abroad. Ripe points of agitation may include intersecting issues (e.g., the role of co-opted queer liberatory rhetoric in Israeli propaganda), points of reference (e.g., Israeli settler-colonialism as compared to its American counterpart), or personally relatable phenomena (e.g., labor exploitation as seen in both the occupied territories and the United States political economy).

Such efforts will provide a clear portrait of the group’s relationship to said issue. With this layout in mind, subsequent organizing conversations and broader discussions of majority opinion can begin. The hope is that, as this process unfolds, group consciousness will gradually increase, previously unaddressed imperatives will become glaringly obvious, and collective action will inevitably form. From here, discussions to determine group-wide initiatives will become ever more commonplace, until they eventually culminate in a collective decision to pursue a democratically agreed-upon program. 

This organizational method embodies the full meaning of collective action where the reach of individualized initiatives falls short. It penetrates our existence as atomized subjects of imperial capitalism by forcing a collectivization of ideology, commitment, and praxis. It also creates a sociopolitical infrastructure through which we can continue to wield collective action going forward, whether it be for Palestine or for any other issue.

The engagement with the Palestinian cause we’ve seen from Americans in the last couple of months most definitely comprises a host of noteworthy waves, many of which have significantly toppled political affiliations and institutional prestige across sectors. But, now, only the embodiment of an organizational spirit by each and every one of us will do the work of constructing a tide — one that may just push us over the revolutionary edge into a world where Palestine is free, from the river to the sea. 

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Salma Hamamy is a Palestinian student-activist and the president of the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at the University of Michigan, known as Students Allied for Freedom and Equality.

The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.