A Feature, Not a Bug: How Henry Kissinger is a Symbol of a Broader American Imperial Rot

By Sudip Bhattacharya

As legendary English metal band Iron Maiden sang in a 1988 track, “Only the good die young. All the evil seem to live forever.” Enter Henry Kissinger.

On May 27th, 2023, the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor turned 100 years old. As Kissinger begins his second century on this planet, he remains a beloved figure within America’s political class. His multiple birthday parties were attended by many A-listers including Democrats John Kerry and Michael Bloomberg, and Republican James Baker. Yes, the elite outpouring for Dr. K — as Kissinger is affectionately known in establishment circles — is a bipartisan affair. But the exploited and colonized masses hold a much different view of the so-called diplomat.

Across the Third World, Kissinger’s legacy is that of a heartless war criminal. In the Nixon administration, Kissinger supported some of the world’s most brutal right-wing regimes in places like Argentina and Chile. He also greenlighted mass slaughters of Bangladeshis and the Timorese.

In a groundbreaking piece for The Intercept, Nick Turse analyzes formerly classified documents to uncover mass killings of Cambodian civilians during the Nixon era. Transcripts of calls unearthed by Turse prove Kissinger’s direct role in these massacres. In one particularly ominous phone conversation, Kissinger ordered a general to kill “anything that moves” with “anything that flies.”

This savage commitment to expanding American hegemony at all costs has left an indelible mark. Kissinger’s ideology is now a feature — not a bug — of the United States foreign policy establishment. So much so, in fact, that many of his diplomatic successors are even more extreme than him.

Revitalizing Empire

Henry Kissinger emerged at a time of mounting skepticisim toward American empire and the institutions that uphold it. In 1975, the Senate almost unanimously approved the creation of the bipartisan Church Committee — a body investigating security state abuses. At the same time, the Republican Party was home to the late Representative Paul Findley. The congressman from Illinois was fiercely pro-Palestine and anti-war. Findley couldn’t exist in today’s radicalized GOP, where support for Israeli apartheid and the war machine are prerequisites for membership.

Kissinger, alongside other odious characters like the Dulles brothers, represented a backlash to these currents. Dr. K was a staunch cold warrior. He believed strongly in using American military might to eliminate communism and defend corporate profitability at all costs.

And he found ideological allies in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency’s upper echelons were full of anti-communist stalwarts and other extremist elements. As Stephen Kinzer writes in Overthrow, leaders of the CIA outright dismissed anything that might interfere with the aims of American multinationals.

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While occupying America’s most powerful diplomatic posts, Kissinger was a steward of this tendency. In fact, he accelerated and intensified some of the worst pattens already bubbling within the security state. While preaching diplomacy publicly, Kissinger showed an unnerving stomach for bombings and the so-called collateral damage they caused. This earned him favor among the morally bankrupt conservative and liberal elite. In 1973, they awarded Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize despite him never meeting a war he did not like.

This underscores a reality that is fundamental to understanding Kissinger’s place in history. While Dr. K was a reaction to some currents within the American foreign policy scene, he was an intensification of others. In this sense, Kissinger was no anomaly. So much of the political establishment agreed with his ideas and participated in their implementation.

American Imperialism As a Bipartisan Project

After Nixon resigned in disgrace, and Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election, it became clear Kissinger had made an impression. On January 1st, 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter took office. Despite not occupying a spot in the opposition party’s new administration, Kissinger’s foreign policy proceeded apace. Carter even appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski — a sort of Democratic Kissinger — to be his Secretary of Defense.

Together, Carter and Brzezinski instituted policies Kissinger would have been proud of — and probably was. The duo funded the Mujahideen — and, by extension, Osama bin Laden — to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Anti-communism was the overriding imperative, even if it involved supporting theocratic armies who threw acid on women learning to read.

But the Carter administration was short-lived. The Georgia native lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. But, while Carter and Brzezinski left office, Kissinger’s legacy most certainly did not.
The hard-right Reagan personified authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and American exceptionalism on steroids. While he claimed to want dialogue with the Soviets, Reagan funded extreme anti-communist groups throughout Central America. He also invaded Grenada and toppled its government following the country’s socialist revolution.

Kissinger’s imperial fervor continued into the Clinton years. The Democratic administration of the 1990s subjected Iraq to a brutal sanctions regime, killing thousands of Iraqis through deprivation. Clinton also opted to continue the Cuban embargo, which remains in place to this day.

After Clinton came George W. Bush, whose War on Terror exemplified the Kissinger protocol: non-stop intervention and destabilization with overtures to diplomacy and the proliferation of rights and freedom. Obama then advanced this protocol further still, albeit less intensely, but was nonetheless very much beholden to military intervention. He punished the Middle East in particular with drone strikes, sanctions, and alliances with Islamic militants and the Israeli state. Not to mention that fact that Obama turned a blind eye to Saudi war crimes against innocent Yemeni civilians.

Essentially, Kissinger’s views carried forth in spirit with every subsequent administration. Ironically, too, the “Kissinger effect” has led to elements within the foreign policy establishment becoming even more radicalized than him. Contemporary US-China relations provides seemingly endless examples of this.

Both Biden and Trump officials often signal their willingness to rachet tensions with China. Mike Pompeo, who Trump appointed to head the CIA and State Department, claims Xi Jinping seeks world domination. The current Secretary of State Antony Blinken has voiced similar sentiments. During his confirmation hearing, Blinken told the Senate that “China posed the most significant challenge… of any nation.” He has also accused the country of “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” “repression,” and “crackdown[s] of basic rights.”

Kissinger sounds dovish by comparison. In a recent interview with The Economist, he stressed the importance of maintaining friendly US-China relations. Kissinger also poured cold water on some of the more gauche sinophobic hysterics. He insists Xi Jinping is not the next Hitler and that China has no plans of world domination. According to Kissinger, the Asian powerhouse does not even seek to impose its culture abroad.

a cog in a rotten system

In the end, Henry Kissinger must face justice. But we should aso view him as part of a broader network of war criminals. And that network is both continually expanding and a revolving door. Recently, President Joe Biden nominated Elliot Abrams — a man notorious for atrocities in Central America — to a federal diplomacy commission. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had made Abrams his Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela.

Those serious about overturning American imperium must address Kissinger and the forces beyond him — many of which he has inspired. True justice for the victims of United States foreign policy means nothing short of wholesale change to the entire apparatus. It is not just about punishing Kissinger but also stopping future Kissingers from ascending to power and harming more innocents.

This is a daunting task. United States progressives are already struggling to confront domestic issues, let alone global ones. Still, the task remains. To create a free and friendly world for the working class and the oppressed globally, the American empire must crumble. Its Kissingers must fall. While Dr. K may celebrate another birthday soon enough, it’s our responsibility to create a landscape that celebrates humanity instead.

Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers University. He also has a background as a reporter and continues to write for major outlets from Current Affairs to Protean and The Progressive.

Elias Khoury is the managing editor of the Hampton Institute.

A Fraternal Hand: The American Tradition of Socialist Democracy and Chinese Socialism

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

​There is a glaring paradox at the core of the American project. On the one hand, it proclaims its national self-determination with the values of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, right to revolution, and to a government of, by, and for the people. On the other hand, the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness have never been guaranteed for anyone but the white, male, capitalist class (which is slowly being racially and sexually diversified). The leading thinkers of the American project, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King Jr., have warned about the corrupting influence the interests of capital can play in preventing the concretization of these rights.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, understood that the ‘enormous inequality’ in property relations was the cause of the ‘misery [of] the bulk of mankind,’ and that, as Herbert Aptheker notes, this concentration of capital was ‘the central threat to democratic rights.’[1] In noticing how the interest of capital can turn a government of, by, and for the people into a government of, by, and for big business, Jefferson would go on to draw a distinction between the democratic man and the aristocratic man. The former, he argued, trusts the people’s will, the latter distrusts it and turns towards big business elitism. Jefferson believed the aristocratic man, if he came to dominate the American government, would undermine the ideals of the 1776 anti-colonial revolution. The first generation of home-grown socialists, flowering in the 1820s and 1830s, saw Jefferson’s prediction actualize itself in the embryonic industrialization period of the US. In the face of growing inequalities and disparities, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Cornelius Blatchley, William Maclure, Thomas Skidmore and others, developed the ideals of the declaration of independence into socialism, what they considered to be its practical and logical conclusion.

Throughout the ages, generations of American socialists have appealed to the declaration of independence to argue for socialism in a way that connects with the American people’s common sense. Leading historians and theoreticians of the American socialist tradition, thinkers like Staughton Lynd, Herbert Aptheker, W.E.B. Dubois, Eugene Debs, William Z. Foster and others, have elaborated on the subject, noting that regardless of the limitations encountered in the founding of the American experiment, it was a historically progressive event, whose spirit should be carried forth today by socialists and communists.

As the US is increasing tensions against China, leading to what many consider a ‘new cold war,’ it is important to look back at the values the American people accept, to the thinkers the American people consider their own, and to consider how different China’s practices – which our ruling class and its media constantly estrange to the American public – are from the ideals which founded our country. What we will find, I believe, is the values prioritized by the leading thinkers of the American experiment, from Jefferson to Dewey to Martin Luther King Jr., are best embodied today in Chinese socialism. This truth, in my view, should be brought forth to the American people. No longer should their consent continue to be manufactured to fight against peoples whose practices align with our ideals more than those we encounter in our own country.

John Dewey (1859-1952), known as ‘America’s philosopher of democracy,’ wrote that we must stop thinking about democracy as something ‘institutional and external;’ instead, we should treat democracy as a ‘way of life,’ one governed by the ‘belief in the common man.’[2] For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice; it has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people – what in Spanish we call el pueblo – to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey understood that this genuine form of democracy was largely inexistent in the US, where the democratic spirit is reduced to voting every four years in political elections which, as he argued, function more as a ‘shadow cast on society by big business.’[3]

In line with the long tradition of home-grown American socialists, Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders – especially the radical flank commonly known as the ‘dissenters’ – would be realized ‘only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.’[4] In the context of the US, Dewey held that this required ‘a radical change in economic institutions and the political arrangements based on them.’ ‘These changes,’ said Dewey, ‘are necessary in order that social control of forces and agencies socially created may accrue to the liberation of all individuals associated together in the great undertaking of building a life that expresses and promotes human liberty.’[5] For Dewey, in short, only socialism could make actual the radical, and for its time, deeply democratic, spirit of the declaration of independence.

A similar sentiment can be found in Martin Luther King Jr., the only American to have his own holiday (every third Monday of January). In one of his last sermons, whilst reflecting on the rights upheld in the declaration of independence, King would note that ‘if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.’ America, for King, had desperately failed to fulfill its promise, not just for the black souls it kept enchained for more than two centuries, but for all poor and working people who continued to ‘perish on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.’[6] This division was representative of what King called the ‘two Americas,’ the America of the poor working majority and the America of the few owners of big capital.[7]

Like Dives in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, King held that ‘if America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.’[8] The stranglehold monopoly capital has over the American state turned the American dream – that is, the individual’s quest for life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in harmony with the human community – into the American nightmare. No number of victories in the sphere of civil rights could change, in King’s view, the fundamentally polarizing character of the system. As King would argue years after the victories of the civil rights movement: ‘I have found out that all that I have been doing in trying to correct this system in America has been in vain… I am trying to get at the roots of it to see just what ought to be done… The whole thing will have to be done away with.’[9] For all its claims of being a beacon of democracy, for King, as Cornel West argues, ‘America’s two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative visions of oligarchic rule.’[10] Like Dewey and many others within the tradition of American socialism, King considered the values of the declaration of independence to only be universally applicable if America is able to move beyond the capitalist mode of life.

The American ruling class ignores and/or sanitizes this tradition of home-grown socialism which permeates even through the most universally admired of American figures. It wishes to hide the working class’s and oppressed people’s history of struggle in our country, for only in doing so can it perpetuate the McCarthyite lie that socialism and the values the American people accept are wholly incompatible. The truth is that, on the contrary, it is on the basis of the values the American people already accept that American socialism has developed. By showing the American people the positive role socialism has played in their national past – and how these struggles have seen themselves as continuations of the revolutionary tradition of 1776 –  the similarities in Chinese socialist construction and this unique tradition of American socialism become apparent. 

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, found it condemnable to sustain poverty amidst material abundance; the rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness require the abolition of poverty for their genuine fulfillment. In just 40 years, Chinese socialism has been able to lift more than 800 million people out of poverty, abolishing that horrendous condition the capitalist mode of life makes necessary for the vast majority of people. While building a poverty-free world with common prosperity, China has been able to realize a condition for its people which looks a lot more like what the leading American minds (like Dr. King) stood for than what can be found in America itself.

As we approach the 55th anniversary of King’s assassination (which the FBI helped orchestrate), we should ask: has America – which celebrates King once a year – heeded to King’s concern for poverty and the condition of the working class? The answer is a resolute No! In no state of the US, for instance, is the federal minimum wage ($7.25) enough to survive; even if it is raised to $15 – as the democratic socialists and other progressives have called for – the minimum wage would still not be enough for a working class family to survive anywhere in the country. With stagnant wages and inflation at a 40 year high, almost 60% of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck. Many of these people are on the brinks of joining the 600,000 homeless people wandering around in a country with more than 17 million empty homes. It is not surprising, in a country where there are 33 times more empty homes than homeless people, that 34 million people, including one in eight children, experience hunger while 30-40% of the U.S.’s food supply (40 million tons of food) is wasted every year. For all the tokenization of King we find in America’s political circus, we can say that after 55 years since his state-sanctioned death, America has still not listened, and much less realized, the demands of Dr. King. However, China has!

Likewise, Dewey, perhaps the most prominent philosopher America has produced, felt that to carry forth today the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, we must deepen our understanding and practice of democracy. A mode of life where the same small group of monopolists owns most of the property, controls most of the media, and decides who gets elected and what they do when elected, can hardly be called democratic. For Dewey, we are not living up to the democratic creed if ‘democracy’ only matters every two to four years when elections come about and working people are bombarded with reasons why they should vote for one puppet of the ruling class over another. Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Xi Jinping in asserting that ‘democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.’ As Xi has noted,​

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

​One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. These ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should seem anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence, and to the leading theorists of our country who’ve developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy (which is still humbly considered a work-in-progress) is. Far from thinking about democracy in the reductive, election-only sense, China’s system of socialist democracy is embedded in ‘seven integrated structures or institutional forms (体制tizhi): electoral democracy; consultative democracy; grassroots democracy; minority nationalities policy; rule of law; human rights; and leadership of the Communist Party.’ A comprehensive study of this whole-process people’s democracy would lead any unbiased researcher to the conclusion Roland Boer has (along with a plethora of Chinese scholars) arrived at: namely, that ‘China’s socialist democratic system is already quite mature and superior to any other democratic system.’
​
Not only does the US lack this seven-tiered democratic system, but even in the one realm it does have, namely, electoral democracy, the results it produces could hardly be called ‘democratic.’ For more than a decade studies from bourgeois institutions have themselves confirmed what Marxists have known since the middle of the 19th century, namely, that the essence of capitalist ‘democracy’ is ‘democracy for an insignificant minority –  democracy for the rich.’[11] The U.S., which spreads its blood soaked hands around the world plundering in the name of democracy, has been outed as a place where the dēmos (common people) do anything but rule (kratos). As a Princeton study headed by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page shows,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.[12]

​In societies divided by class antagonisms we can never talk about ‘pure democracy,’ or abstract democracy in general; we must always ask - as Lenin did - ‘democracy for which class’?[13] The ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic freedoms’ of capitalist to exploit and oppress will always be detrimental to working and oppressed peoples. Only an all-people’s democracy (a working and popular classes democratic-dictatorship) can be genuinely democratic, for it is the only time ‘power’ (kratos) is actually in the hands of ‘common people’ (demos).
​
To claim – as American capitalists, their puppet politicians, and their lapdog media does – that the US is a ‘beacon of democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian one-party system,’ is to hold on to a delusional topsy turvy view of reality. Only by holding explicitly the idea of democracy as democracy for the rich – an oxymoronic truth which they must continue to conceal from the American public – would any part of their assessment contain truth. If democracy is considered from the standpoint of the capitalist’s ability to arbitrarily exert their will on society at the expense of working people and the planet, then, of course, the US is a beacon of this form of so-called ‘democracy,’ and China an ‘authoritarian’ regime. If instead, democracy is considered from the standpoint of common people’s ability to exert their power successfully over everyday affairs, that is, if democracy is understood in the people-centered form it etymologically stands for, and in the way leading American thinkers like Jefferson, Dewey, and Dr. King understood it, then it would be indubitable that China is far more democratic than the US (and any other liberal-bourgeois ‘democracy’).

As the US increases its anti-China rhetoric and actions – a symptom of its empire’s moribund stage – it becomes an imperative for all sane people to counter the propaganda setting the stage for, at best, a new cold war, and at worst, a third world-war. As Julian Assange – whose treatment reminds us everyday of how much the West cherishes its so called ‘individual rights’ to speech and press – once eloquently stated: ‘if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth.’

It is the duty of American communists, socialists, and progressives, to show the American people the truth; to show them that China is not the enemy of the American people, that the real enemy of the American people are those who would like us to see China as an enemy. It is not China who has our country surrounded by military bases. It is not China who is funding and inciting separatist movements in our autonomous regions. It is not China who is slandering us with baseless accusations of the most heinous crimes of genocide humanity can imagine. It is not China who is creating international military alliances a la global NATO to militarily threaten us. It is the US empire who is doing this to China. The only interests which China threatens are those of our finance capitalists, who have spent the last century impoverishing both our people at home and our brothers and sisters in the global south. China is a friend of the American working men and women; just like it is a friend of the African peoples, and the peoples in the Middle East and in Latin America, whose win-win, mutually beneficial relations in international trade with China have afforded them the ability to turn away from predatory neoliberal debt-trapping loans which have been systematically forced on them for half a century by the capitalist West.

In sum – to be faithful to the democratic creed of the declaration of independence and of the greatest minds our country has produced, we must realize today that China is not our enemy; instead, it is the place wherein the ideals which guide this democratic creed are best embodied. Instead of buying into the easily confuted lies of Western pundits, who hope we are foolish enough to accept them and dance to the drums of a war to sustain Western capitalist-imperialist hegemony, we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

References
​
[1] Herbert Aptheker, The American Revolution: 1763-1783 (New York: International Publishers, 1960), 105.

[2] John Dewey, The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953, ed. by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990), LW 14:228.

[3] Dewey, LW 6:163.

[4] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[5] Dewey, LW 11:28.

[6] Martin Luther King Jr, The Radical King, ed. and introduced by Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 246- 247. 248.

[7] King Jr, The Radical King, 236.

[8] King Jr, The Radical King, 248.

[9] King Jr, The Radical King, xi.

[10] King Jr, The Radical King, xiii.

[11] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 465. 

[12] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564-581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595
​
[13] V. I. Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1974), 249.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American PhD student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (with an M.A. in philosophy from the same institution). His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, early 19th century American socialism, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. He is an editor in Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis and in the Journal of American Socialist Studies. Carlos edited and introduced Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022). 

Revisiting Eric Williams' 'Capitalism and Slavery' and Dismantling the Accepted Narratives of History

By John Burns

Republished from Monthly Review.

When British capitalism depended on the West Indies,” Eric Williams wrote in 1938,

they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery.

Williams had no time for sentimental views on the abolition of slavery. The history he dealt in was more honest, more straightforward, and unafraid to confront the accepted narratives, wherever these might be found.

And confront he did. His 1945 work, Capitalism and Slavery, systematically destroyed the traditional, rose-tinted views of abolition in the UK, replacing the cozy and humanitarian with the cold and pragmatic, substituting empathy and egalitarianism with hard economic necessity. In Williams’s view, the United Kingdom reaped the immense benefits of slavery—for centuries, in fact—and dropped the practice only when it no longer served its lucrative purpose. To look at the facts in any other light is simply a pretense.

There are voices of humanitarianism within Williams’s work. There are voices of empathy, of egalitarianism. There are people whose consciences are clear, who’s hearts are true, people who fought against slavery and the British Empire’s grim association with it. There are all of these things because there were all of these things in real life. These voices existed in Georgian and Victorian Britain, and so they are present in Williams’s writing. It’s just that these voices, these notes of discord, were lost in a far larger choir. Those making all the noise—those who truly influenced governors and policymakers—were motivated by very different factors, such as economics, geopolitics, imperialism, and capitalism.

Williams received his early education in his native Trinidad and Tobago, then still part of the British Empire. As a student, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he excelled as a student and refined many of ideas that would characterize his later work. In 1956, Williams formed the People’s National Movement (PNM), becoming the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago that same year, and eventually led the country to independence in 1962. He continued to serve at the helm of the new nation right up until his death in 1981 at age 69, in the nation’s capital, Port of Spain.

His achievements as a freedom-minded politician and global head of state may have overshadowed his earlier work in academia, but these two aspects of his career cannot be separated. His clear-eyed and honest approach to history, and to his own people’s place within that history, shaped the path he would take in the following decades. By deconstructing UK attitudes to the slave trade, and its eventual abolition, Williams laid the foundations for dismantling British imperialism in the Caribbean. His contribution to our historical understanding, and to nationhood for Trinidad and Tobago, are inextricably linked.

Williams’s ideas are not new anymore. Capitalism and Slavery was written largely as a doctoral thesis in 1938, refined and published in 1945, and has been discussed for decades since. But Penguin’s relaunch of the book in 2022 is the first mass-market edition of the work to hit the shelves in the United Kingdom. It has, deservedly, become a bestseller.

But why does this matter now? Because we are still in danger of falling under the sway of accepted truths and fantastical narratives of history. The book is a timely reminder that history is a science that helps us better understand the culture and politics of our own age—it is not sculptor’s clay, ready to be molded into whatever shape or form best suits our own blinkered, and often prejudiced, aesthetic vision. History does not owe us anything. It is not ours to manipulate or distort.

In June 2020, the statue of enslaver Edward Colston was toppled by demonstrators in Bristol—a city that appears again and again in the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, thanks largely to the profits from the trade in sugar and enslaved people that flowed across its docks. This trade was so lucrative that Bristol became the Crown’s “second city” until 1775. It was men like Colston who helped achieve this status—hence the statue.

Colston had been, but his work as a merchant, slave trader, and subsequently, a Member of Parliament is etched into the stone upon which Bristol stands. He was almost three centuries dead by time his bronze likeness was lobbed into the Bristol Channel, and he likely had very little opinion on the matter.

Fortunately for Colston, there were plenty of people in 2020 who did have opinions on the matter. History—their history—they cried, was being erased. The “armies of wokeness” and “politically correct groupthink” were destabilizing the proud heritage of the United Kingdom, they claimed. Sure, Colston traded in slaves, but it was a different time, and Colston was a great man—a true hero of the city and its people—not to mention the criminal damage, public order offenses, or the rights of the sculptor himself.

This is an example of historical distortion and manipulation at work, pursuing ends that are nothing short of racist. History has provided us with a figure—Colston—whose great wealth led to the rise of one of the UK’s most important cities. History has provided us with the facts regarding the sources of that wealth—the slave trade; the theft of dignity from our fellow human beings. History does not provide us a way with which we can separate the two—we cannot have one without confronting the other. Erecting a statue to Colston—celebrating Colston for his efforts and his achievements—means erecting a statue to the slave trade, too.

Nor does history provide us with icons who are beyond reproach. By searching history for unimpeachable icons—symbols of a particular set of values or ethics—we are destined only for failure. If, in response to our disappointment at finding flawed human beings in lieu of the pristine icons we seek, we resort to mythologizing and hagiography, we play a very dangerous game, indeed. In another of the twentieth century’s great social texts, Women, Race and Class, Angela Y. Davis examines the relationship between feminist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the “women first, negroes last” policies of Democratic politician Henry Blackwell.

Blackwell spoke in support of women’s suffrage in the South, asserting that “4,000,000 Southern women will counterbalance 4,000,000 negro men and women”, retaining the “political supremacy of the white race.” Davis writes about the “implicit assent” of Anthony and Stanton to Blackwell’s racist logic as she explores the troubling and complex nature of women’s suffrage during its gestation.

Like Williams and his deconstruction of accepted beliefs regarding abolition, Davis’s analysis of racist attitudes in the women’s suffrage movement leads to an awkward confrontation. Stanton and Anthony made incredible contributions to the rights of women in the United States, and this should never be forgotten—but to turn a blind eye to the gross inequality that formed the backdrop to the movement is to deny this injustice altogether, leaving us with a flawed and incomplete understanding of our own history.

This approach—this honesty, this meticulousness—is found within the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, too. This is not simply an attack on the white establishment of the United Kingdom and their forbears in the heyday of the empire; this is a methodical analysis of the key drivers behind the rise and fall of the British slave trade. Williams’s work is certainly not an attack on abolition—a critical moment in establishing of a better world for all human beings—but neither does it seek to perpetuate false ideas of who and what made the moment of abolition a reality.

Two centuries before the slave trade reached its peak, the very concept of slavery was decried by the uppermost echelons of power in the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth I herself said that enslavement would “call down the vengeance of heaven,” and yet, by the eighteenth century, all sorts of mental gymnastics were deployed to justify the trade. Church leaders, Williams said, proposed that slavery could bring “benighted beings to the chance of salvation,” while conservative thinker Edmund Burke—himself a rigorous supporter of religion’s place in society—expounded on the slaveholder’s right to maintain ownership of “their property”, that is, the human beings they had paid for. It seems ethics and morality are not absolutes, and can be manipulated to support economic prosperity.

When such leaps of logic and desperate justification can support the rise of the slave trade, why should these moral contortions suddenly cease? Why should the voices of humanity win the day, defeating the barbarism of trans-Atlantic slavery and achieving a resounding—if delayed—moral victory? The answer is simple: they didn’t. Williams foreshadows the eventual collapse of the trade by presenting the views of contemporary economists Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, who declared the trade to be expensive and inefficient. In the end, it would be economics, not ethics, that would defeat the United Kingdom’s plantations and slave ships.

If the going was good, the slave trade would continue, no matter how many horrific acts were perpetrated on the shores of Africa and on the islands of the Caribbean. When the market stopped being profitable—when the fiscal engine driving slavery forwards started to cough and sputter—the trade would cease. The laws of business and enterprise, as cold and inhuman as they are, were far stronger than any moral outrage.

More than eight decades have gone by since Williams completed his doctoral thesis, and it is pleasant to think that we have moved on a great deal since those days. After all, Williams was then a subject of the British Empire. Now, the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago—along with the citizens of other former colonies—are free to determine their own path in the world. In 1965, the United Kingdom passed the Race Relations Act, outlawing discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”—a positive step towards a better, more welcoming nation.

But we should not wrap ourselves too tightly in this comfortable blanket of pleasant thought. In 1968, three years after the Race Relations Act was passed, Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech in Birmingham. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, division and discrimination led to violent flashpoints as riots ripped through urban centers. In 1993, the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence exposed the systematic racism at the core of UK policing. In 2018, the so-called Windrush Scandal, overseen by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, saw immigrant UK citizens stripped of their rights and their dignity. The fight against discrimination and prejudice is far from over, and no amount of historical airbrushing can compensate for this.

This is why Williams’s work is so relevant today: It reminds us to question the comforting and convenient narratives of accepted history. Twisting historical narratives to fit our own agenda—to reflect our own view of what Britain represents—is deceitful at best, and dangerous at worst. A more critical, clear-eyed, analytical approach to the past is necessary if we are to truly understand the challenges of the present.

John Burns is a freelance writer and editor from Nottingham in the United Kingdom, now residing in Yunnan, southwest China.

Sources

• “Collections Online: British Museum,” Collections Online | British Museum. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 2020).

• Samuel Earle, “‘Rivers of Blood’: The Legacy of a Speech That Divided Britain,” Atlantic, April 20, 2018.

• “Edward Colston Statue: Four Cleared of Criminal Damage,” BBC News, January 5, 2022.

• “Eric Williams,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Chris Matthews, “Purge of Edward Colston’s Name in Bristol Continues,” Daily Mail Online, April 27, 2022.

• Matty Edwards, “‘A Monumental Moment in History’: Cable Readers React to the Colston 4 Being Cleared,” Bristol Cable, April 22, 2022.

• “Race Relations Act, 1965.” Legislation.gov.uk. Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin Books, 2022).

Blood in the Bank: Hidden Profits of American Slavery and the Call for Reparations

By Youhanna Haddad

During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders declined to support reparations. He instead proposed instituting programs to help “distressed communities” in general, believing this indirect approach to compensation to be superior. “There are better ways to [repay blacks] than just writing… a check,” Sanders insisted.

But the patchwork of social-democratic reforms that comprised the Senator’s presidential platform are wholly insufficient to this task. To see why, we must scientifically analyze the role chattel slavery played in the construction of the United States. Doing this leads us to an obvious and inescapable conclusion. As Karl Marx himself observed, “Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

Origins of Bondage

In what is now the United States, chattel slavery developed primarily to produce agricultural commodities. Europeans constructed race to justify the creation of a class in permanent bondage, forced to work the vast estates they’d amassed through genocide of the indigenous population. Millions of slaves kidnapped and transported to the New World harvested cash crops like cotton, coffee, sugarcane, and tobacco. They did so, of course, under unimaginably toilsome and oppressive conditions. Sugarcane production, for example, entailed such dangerous conditions that deaths among slaves outnumbered births. Slaves were forced to produce sugar until their health crumbled, necessitating constant importation of additional slaves to keep plantations profitable. 

The need for labor pervaded the colonial economy. Even large portions of white immigrants came to address this demand through the system of indentured servitude. Nearly half of European immigrants arriving in the colonies came in this manner. Upon arrival, they began a stint of hard and often degrading labor for paltry wages. However, within several years of starting their contracts, these servants would become free citizens. They were then entitled to “freedom dues” from their masters, which typically included land or money. Despite the unsavory terms of the contract, servitude was largely an opportunity for Europeans seeking access to land and wealth unavailable in their homelands. Their contracts allowed them to become settlers without needing capital as a prerequisite.

Despite the exploitative character of indentured servitude, it is utterly incomparable to chattel slavery. Only the former included an element of voluntariness, and the chance to improve one’s economic situation. Indentured servants typically chose to sign their rights away. Of course, this was often done under coercive conditions. Nevertheless, indentured servants had opportunities that slaves were never granted. And the option to leave for the New World is one servants would have only chosen if they believed their life would improve in the colonies. Marxist historian Christopher Hill alludes to this in his 1967 book Reformation to Industrial Revolution:

“For many of the early settlers servitude was a temporary phase through which one worked one’s way from freedom to land-ownership.”

Indeed, many emancipated servants would go on to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. In 1629, for example, nearly 17% of members in “Virginia’s House of Burgesses [were] former indentured servant[s].” This mobility led Marx to remark that classes in early America “continually change[d] and interchange[d] their elements in constant flux.”

The ability to ascend economically, however, was enjoyed almost exclusively by whites. Conversely, Africans in the New World faced maximal exploitation, generation after generation. Aside from limited exceptions, until 1865, they could not escape enslavement and subsequently died in shackles. Europeans benefiting from this racial caste system were well aware of its titanic productive capacity. As British merchant Malachy Postlethwayt noted in 1745…

“Is it not notorious to the whole World, that the Business of Planting in our British colonies, as well as in the French, is carried on by the Labour of Negroes, imported thither from Africa? Are we not indebted to those valuable People, the Africans for our Sugars, Tobaccoes, Rice, Rum, and all other Plantation Produce?”

Calculating the Theft

Scholars have spilled a lot of ink trying to estimate the dollar value of labor stolen from black slaves. Considering the breadth of industries involved, and the interconnected nature of markets, such a figure is exceedingly difficult to calculate. However, by summing the hours of labor performed by American slaves, policy scholar Thomas Craemer produced an estimate. He concluded that “the present value of U.S. slave labor… ranges from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion.” in 2009 dollars. Adjusted for 13 years of inflation, the range is $8.2 to $19.6 trillion in today’s money. The upper limit of Craemer’s estimate is therefore roughly equivalent to America’s entire gross domestic product!

If we utilize Craemer’s upper limit and think that black Americans today should be compensated for the value of their ancestors’ labor, they’re each owed a whopping $467,000. Even the lower limit still comes in at around $195,000. And this by no means covers all of the profits derived from the institution of slavery.

Banks, for example, lent vast sums of money to productive plantations and profited off the interest. The shipping industry got rich from building and selling slave ships. Insurance corporations grew wealthy from insuring the shipments of slaves and the products of slave labor. Furthermore, the explosion of the textile industry was facilitated by the abundant supply of cotton picked by slaves. Great Britain was considered the titan of textiles in the early industrial period with over half of British cotton imports produced from American slave labor.

We must recognize the variety of ways in which capitalist development benefited from chattel slavery. Ignoring them suppresses proper academic investigation of questions pertinent to racial justice. The colonial project as we know it would’ve been impossible without the forced labor of millions of African slaves. And that has strategic implications for how society should try to rectify the historical and ongoing oppression of black people.

Ramifications of Ignorance

Particularly since the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr., the American political establishment has tried to co-opt the black liberation struggle. Every February, school children are taught that black leaders look down from heaven with approval at a nation that never went beyond piecemeal reforms to address gross historical injustices. This mischaracterization of the black liberation struggle and its leaders is only possible due to misunderstanding the function of slavery. From Bernie Sanders to Mitch McConnell, American politicians do not wish to see the reappropriation of stolen wealth to black people. To do so would acknowledge the incredible economic benefit slavery provided to the nation and, more importantly, force the beneficiaries to pay compensation.

In essence, the effort to downplay the role of slavery in American development is a matter of legitimacy to the United States regime. Obscuring the role of slavery in American development allows liberals to falsely assert that “liberal-democratic values” are the root of American exceptionalism. This erroneously whitewashes history with the self-congratulatory implication that European ideologies, rather than African labor and Native land, built the world’s most successful empire. In order to eradicate capitalist pseudo-history from the realm of fact, we need to tirelessly examine how exploitation is the real engine of growth in capitalist development.

While reparations alone would not end global capitalism, it is always necessary and beneficial to explore the economic contributions of every exploited group. The unrecognized domestic labor of women, the wage slavery in factories of the Global South, the historical theft of trillions of dollars in assets from the Global South — this is the hidden life force of capitalist states. Without recognizing these contributions, it is impossible to materially analyze history to the benefit of the masses.

In our mission to end capitalism, the vast majority of our allies are the highly exploited masses of Africa and Asia. Their exploitation is still financed through the reinvested wealth created by African slaves. Connecting these struggles is an essential prerequisite to building the durable, international, class solidarity of the colored masses needed to end capitalism once and for all.

The Unwakeable American Dream

By Jack Ely

For many, to varying degrees, picking the next president (or nearly any elected official) feels analogous to deciding which doctor is best fit to care for a terminal patient. Their job is merely to mediate the impending decline, to maintain all the basic life processes so long as that patient can go on existing without ever hoping for more health than what they precariously still cling to. The terminal nature of this condition, however, can never be openly acknowledged without fracturing the ideological fantasy that maintains our collective reality as Americans. But over the last few decades the Settler-Capitalist mythology that imbued the cultural consciousness of the 20th century has developed into something else entirely, a form of hyper-reality. The lofty, idealistic language of past American leaders remains as popular as ever, yet detached from anything real. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with the American Dream, an ideal rooted in a past that never was and speaks to a future that will never be. The promise of economic security and upward mobility that so many White, “Middle-Class” Americans enjoyed in the decades following World War II remains as ubiquitous as ever within the political ethos of both major parties, yet strays further and further from the actual experience of workers today. My goal is not to dive into the specific causes of this phenomena, as there is already plenty of existing research that can explain them far better. What I am interested in are the philosophical implications of this shifting material landscape and how they’ve reverberated across our social reality in the 21st century to deliver us to our current political moment.

At the forefront of both of the last two presidential elections has been the question of “How did we end up here?” Many in the media and general public alike opt for a top-down chain of causality, attributing the dismal selection of candidates on both sides to an institutional decline in our political system. There are several problems with this kind of moralizing, the first of which being that the bygone, golden era of party politics that both Republicans and Democrats wish us to believe we’ve strayed away from never really existed to begin with. We saw this with the media’s incessance on exceptionalizing Trump as some sort of uniquely depraved and corrupt deviation from past GOP presidents of the likes of the Bushes and Reagan. In reality, Trump only differed from them on the surface. Behind all of his outsider rhetoric and populist eccentricity, Trump largely governed like any standard Neoliberal of the past 40 years. In fact, the material damage sanctioned by his administration was rather mild compared to his Republican predecessors, yet George W. Bush receives cushy media coverage with the blood of a million Iraqi citizens on his hands, while Ronald Raegan still remains nationally beloved despite his numerous domestic and international crimes. Perhaps Trump was ostracized to the extent he was because he ripped the mask off and showed us who the ruling class is and always has been. Rather than a deviation from the norm, Trump is American Capitalism personified in its most crude form, stripped of all its niceties and decorum. If that is true, then what does that make Biden? 

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is not the mastermind behind the violent acts he carries out; his family takes advantage of his mental impairment to force him into killing for them. It’s also heavily implied that the Sawyer family are displaced slaughterhouse workers who kill in order to continue their way of life and means of subsistence. In many ways, Leatherface can be seen as a sympathetic character who is as much a victim of his family and circumstances as the people he slaughters. For Joe Biden, the mask he wears may be symbolic, but it is just as crude and disfigured as the one Leatherface wears of human skin. Like the Sawyers, the American ruling class grows increasingly desperate as they cling to an unstable status quo, the only difference being they are the architects of this instability rather than its maddened victims.

What Trump offered was a bombastic alternative to the glib, sanitized politics that came to represent the Neoliberal order, even if this alternative was itself a different form of masquerade. Nonetheless, his defeat by Joe Biden, narratively, was a ‘return to normal’. Yet, as I alluded to earlier, there is a sense that this normal can no longer exist. They can piece the mask back together, but the cracks can no longer be ignored. Joe Biden exemplifies this desperation to maintain this reality so acutely because for so many years he was the ideal personification of it; the traditional White moderate with an All-American charm who made a career of bolstering the Imperial and Carceral industries while tempering the public's expectation that any real or meaningful change is possible. Additionally, his proximity to Obama (whom Democrats truly long for) made him the obvious Neoliberal torch bearer to take on Trump. However, the Biden of today far better reflects the Late-Capitalist decay that we find ourselves in, contrary to the Pre-Neoliberal idealism that cloaks his administration. He appears as an anachronism, a relic of a past only accessed through fading memories much like the abandoned remnants of industrial America that litter our roadsides. And in his lassitude, the exhausted breath of a dying political order can almost be felt.

Still, Trump and Biden seem to have only warped America’s ideological mythos. Ruling class ideology still remains potent as ever in shaping our reality in this country, and no amount of cracks seem likely to change that anytime soon - regardless of how unpopular the last two presidents have been. In fact, that may only be reinforcing it, as the 2020 election had one of the highest voter turnouts in history. But why, in a time when faith in our government is so low, does its grip on power remain so strong? Here I turn to Slavoj Žižek’s insight on how ideology functions under Postmodern Capitalism - “Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (Žižek 33). Many supporters of Biden (especially young people) had a sort of weary, begrugended attitude in doing so - a choice between the ‘lesser of two evils’. What matters is not whether that wager was true, rather why so many people unequivocally accepted voting for any form of ‘evil’ in the first place. The politics of cynicism that we find ourselves living in today seem to be even more subordinating than any form of propaganda that authoritarians could hope to devise. As Žižek pointed out, Nonbelief  is the prevailing ideology of Neoliberalism, and it does all the work of propaganda without us ever realizing it. No matter how much we disavow the ruling class in our beliefs, we still support them in our actions - which ultimately produces an even more totalizing form of control. 

Despite this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those of us who’ve grown up in 21st century America still hold a very different image of it than our parents do. If Nixon and Vietnam fractured the ideological consensus of post-war America, today’s younger generations have grown up in the chasm left in its wake. Endless imperial war and presidential scandals seem to us almost banal - as Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The waning patriotism and political pessimism among young people in response may be justified, but it also presents a new problem in the form of cynicism. We’ve seen one crisis after another, all directly caused or exacerbated by the Imperial rot unfolding all around us. Yet we remain as disengaged and detached as ever, transfixed in a near catatonic gaze on the endless stream of attention grabbing media bites informing us of the latest horrible event that deserves our outrage. 

Accordingly, two horrific massacres just recently unfolded in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX. The discourse surrounding these uniquely American forms of pathological violence has been trite to say the least. Lost in the clamor over guns, video games, and mental illness is the reality that those factors by themselves are not enough to explain what’s happening to the degree it has here. Only in a country as deeply alienated, hyper-individualistic, and foundationally violent as America could these seemingly unthinkable acts be so commonplace. Mass shootings, especially ones as gut-wrenching as the one at Robb Elementary School, clearly provoke a more visceral and outspoken reaction. It often feels like the solutions are right in front of us and all that stands in the way is legislative action from our political leaders. But once again, this brings us to the Sisyphean predicament at the forefront of all aforementioned issues; the American ruling class is not interested, nor capable of reconciling the inherent contradictions within our country. To do so would mean to unravel the Settler-Capitalist fabric of the nation itself, which is antithetical to their class interests and roles in maintaining those very power structures. 

In light of this, it's no wonder why so many (young) people feel hopeless that things can change. The America we’ve grown up in has made it nearly impossible to go on believing in the fantasies told to us about it, yet we remain ideologically imprisoned to the very structures we know are broken. Neoliberalism’s greatest triumph is how thoroughly it’s managed to obscure and weaken our collective capacity to envision a different, better world. Even the Anti-Capitalist Left falls victim to this lack of political imagination far too often, and our task moving forward shouldn’t simply be to try and recreate past forms of struggle. We’ve reached an inflection point in American politics with Donald Trump and Joe Biden. However, we can’t, and shouldn’t wish for a return to Obama-era politics that do nothing more than mask the underlying reality playing out in this country. As Fascists try to drive us off a cliff, the Democratic party has done nothing but pave the road for them. Now, in the face of ecological collapse and every other imminent crisis at bay, our hopes will have to lay outside of the ballot box and in new forms of collective political struggle. 

Citations

Desilver, Drew. “Turnout soared in 2020 as nearly two-thirds of eligible U.S. voters cast ballots for president”. Pewresearch.org, January 28 2021, https://pewrsr.ch/3oAN3MB

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso Books, 1989. 

American Fascism: The Men, the Money, and the Myth

By J. Richard Marra

On May Day 2016, well before the election of Donald J. Trump, the Boston Globe published, "'Never forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting."[1] In it, Jeff Jacoby worries about its implications for a world experiencing a resurgence of violent right wing political extremism. For American Marxists, the timing may seem ironic. On the day of global celebration for the working class, they are reminded of both the horrors of fascism and their duty to unceasingly oppose it.

Marxist and other commentators appreciate the toxicity of fascism. However, their explanations regarding its features, organization, and operations differ. Each has enriched our understanding, while also introducing a disconcerting complexity and diversity. Accordingly, anti-fascists should aim at simplicity when considering historical fascism and Trump's 'neofascism."

The libertarian commentator George Will understands:[2]

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of "fascism" than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.

Furthermore, there are problems regarding recognizing fascism and justifying claims about specific political regimes. James P. Cannon recognized this in 1954 with reference to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy: [3]

Those who would judge specific American forms of fascism too formalistically by the European pattern, arbitrarily limit capitalist aggression against the workers’ movement in two forms:

They see the democratic form by which the workers are suppressed through strictly legal measures in accordance with the law and the Constitution—such as the Taft-Hartley Law, formal indictments and prosecutions for specific violations of existing statutes, etc....

On the other side they see the illegal, unofficial forms of violence practiced by “stormtroopers” and similar shirted hooligans outside the forms of law, as in Italy and Germany. This is characterised as fascist.

This kind of illegal violence under the outward forms of law has a distinctive American flavour; and it is especially favoured by a section of the ruling class which has very little respect for its own laws....This is, in fact, an important element of the specific form which American fascism will take....

Depending on one's perspective, contemporary fascism might appear nowhere, or anywhere. It is nowhere in the sense that Hitler and Mussolini are dead; and America's immigrant detention camps aren't as horrific as Auschwitz. Yet, it can emerge anywhere because capitalism is everywhere, and capitalism is its necessary and structural accomplice.[4] Given the right theorizing, many current capitalist regimes can exhibit fascist characteristics. For Will, fascism can occur anywhere because truculence toward liberal institutions and manners is common in social climates of political polarization and arrogance.

Three methodological problems contribute to the confusion. Consider, first, Lawrence Britt's[5] list of the identifying characteristics of fascism. Its items accurately capture salient features and establish a domain of likely candidate governments. Unfortunately, they don't supply an explanation regarding how any of these, or all of these, characteristics structurally realize the fascist form of governance. Lacking context, lists of attributes can become scattered and unwieldy, and fail to account for time-sensitive social and political contingencies, as Cannon anticipates. In addition, methodologies, and the theories supporting them, evolve over time. Although their theoretical "hard core" remains resistant, subordinate features may change. This may lead to reevaluations of the fascist-ness of political regimes. Finally, although Marxism, unlike capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to fascism, both are nevertheless liable to analytical bias. Will's commitment to capitalism prevents him from even mentioning it. He strips contemporary fascism of its theoretical and historical significance, dismissing it as merely a problem regarding hostile personalities.

To avoid these problems, this account will keep largely to operational matters, focusing on structures and functions. Parsimony is exercised in establishing necessary and sufficient characteristics, and explaining such features will help us introduce context. To do so, it proposes three fundamental structural components: Governance, economy, and ideology. Following Brecht and Lund, it suggests that capitalism plays a central role in the emergence and operations of fascism. However, unlike some Marxists, this analysis stops short of characterizing fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. Accumulation remains the prime purpose of the capitalist modes of production employed within fascism. Nevertheless, capitalists must routinely acquiesce to state requirements, which conveniently include protecting and advancing profitability. Both capitalists and fascists are keenly aware that workers, unions, and communists can negatively affect accumulation and the capitalist state. This mutual need is addressed by managing unprofitable class conflict through the establishment of state-run "corporations."

The Three Characteristics of Historical Fascism

When taken together, the following three necessary characteristics, involving both structural and ideological (especially nationalistic and religious) components, sufficiently define fascism.

1. Governance: Unitary and authoritarian national state controlled by a despotic "Leader."

2. Economy: State control of the economy through a system of sector-based corporations comprised of capitalist enterprises and labor.

3. Ideology: Traditionalist mythology justifying an exclusive moral exceptionalism in governmental affairs imported from 20th-century Futurism.

The key to recognizing fascism lies in appreciating how these characteristics synergize into a unique system of governance. With this in mind, let us now examine each more deeply.

Governance: The Leader Principle

The fascist state functions according to the "Leader Principle."[6] The "Leader" (aka Der Fuhrer, Il Duce) is the single sovereign authority over the state and its people. He/she stands atop a hierarchy of sub-leaders that govern the state's political and bureaucratic organizations. All sub-leaders pledge total obedience to all superiors, but always and primarily to the Leader. The fascist leader is not merely a person, but the ultimate manifestation of a state dynamically driven by its moral "will." In this way, the leader and the state are structurally and functionally identified. Mussolini writes, "the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State...." For Mussolini and Hitler, those consciousnesses, wills, personalities, and morality are theirs.

Economy: The "Third Way"

The leader dictates the structure and operations of the second necessary feature of fascism, an economic system called the "The Third Way." To understand the Third Way, let's compare how capitalists, communists, and fascists manage the class struggle that Mussolini denies.

Capitalists are attentive to class struggle, especially when it interferes with profits. They know that profit comes from their private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of labor. They understand that class struggle between owners and workers is a fact of capitalist social life. Capitalists understand that every rise in workers’ standards of living — living wages, pensions, healthful working conditions — are not only costly, but are costs that directly subtract from their profits. Thus, since workers will naturally demand such benefits, capitalists work continuously to weaken the political power of workers and unions.

For communists, class struggle is a symptom of capitalist social relations; yet they recognize that it is also a tool for working-class liberation. Their aim is to eliminate private control of the forces of production, while relocating ownership across the entire society. "Come the revolution," society will become classless. With the end of class struggle, a democratic economy is established that serves collective economic planning, and the physical and psychological well-being of workers.

Fascists place the needs of the state over all other national constituencies, including both capitalists and workers. This requires minimizing conflict between these two classes. To do this, fascists merge capitalist enterprises and unions into corporations, pairing them according to distinct economic sectors. Each corporation represents a sector of the economy wherein capitalists and labor are collectively bureaucratized, with all power vested in a state governed by an authoritarian leader.

The fascist leader principle is a relatively simple structural and operational conception, which any authoritarian state, fascist or otherwise, can implement. However, fascism couches the principle within a worldview that rejects the ideological foundations of both impotent liberal democracy and Marx's materialist sociology. [7]

...the liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results...the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production...if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

To summarize, the ultimate aim of capitalism is to end class struggle by subjugating the working class. The ultimate aim of communism is to end class struggle by eliminating the capitalist class. The ultimate aim of fascism is to corporatize the capitalist class and eliminate a collectivized working class through the formation of an absolutely supreme leader and state.

Ideology: The Nasty Superman

Fascism has three ideological pillars. The first concerns mythology. Mussolini's fascism is nothing without a myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.[8]

The existential conception of fascism lies in an identification of a heroic people with its leader and national mythology. Consider the two fascist "philosophers" Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Evola. Rosenberg served as the Nazi Party's Commissar for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education between1933 to 1945. Among his "scholarly" accomplishments is "The Myth of the Twentieth Century,"[9] a uniquely turgid and mind-numbing justification of Nazi anti-Semitism and Aryanism. Julius Evola, one of the founders of 20th-century traditionalism, enjoyed a continuing relationship with Hitler, high-ranking Nazis, and Mussolini. He took Rosenberg's work seriously enough to critique it his "The Racist Conception of History."[10] With Mussolini, myth and tradition join: "Tradition certainly is one of the greatest spiritual forces of a people, inasmuch as it is a successive and constant creation of their soul."[11]

The second foundation of fascism involves not bigotry but nastiness, its truculence finding its roots early 20th-century futurism. Evola enjoyed a brief artistic and philosophical relationship with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Movement. This connection is important because it exposes the second, and little remembered, ideological foundation of fascism.

Futurism speaks: [12]

...we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.

We wish to destroy the museum, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian malignancy.

We wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman.

This political grandiloquence finds translation in five of Britt's characteristics: distain for human rights, scapegoating, hostility toward intellectuals and artists, militarism, and sexism. These attitudes and behaviors are not Trump's alone. These come from Marinetti's Futurist Aristocracy (1923), edited by the Italian Futurist Nanni Leone Castelli. Marinetti influenced Mussolini, a person many worldwide view as the epitome of the aggressive and spontaneous futurist hero.

Mussolini the futurist:[13]

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest....

[Fascism]... repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism....war [sic] alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies....[14]

For fascists, traditionalism and futurism are tools for cultural atonement, redemption, and political power. The cultural historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke[15] appreciates Evola's and Trump's ideological poison. Fascism:

 ...speaks directly to those who reject absolutely the leveling world of democracy, capitalism, multi-racialism and technology...[Traditionalists] acute sense of cultural chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal.

It is not surprising that Steve Bannon, an Evola enthusiast and Trump's past political advisor, boasts, "I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."[16] Bannon's Lenin isn't a Marxist, but he is a futurist.

Fascism's third necessary ideological feature is a moral "exclusive exceptionalism" in public policy and international relations, particularly justified by its traditionalist mythology. The fascist state claims the exclusive moral right to do what it wishes: no individual, group, or other nation can assert the same right.[17] Antonio Salazar, a former Portuguese prime minister and authoritarian corporatist, explains: [18]

The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its goal without meeting complications or obstacles.

And for Adolph Hitler: [19]

It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad....

The Three Characteristics of American Fascism

Governance: The Fascist Presidency

Since the Civil War, America has enjoyed reasonably stable governance. It's democratic republic, separation of powers, and presidential term limits constrain the rise of tyranny. Capitalism is thoroughly imbedded in its politics, ideology, culture, and religion. It's culture celebrates freedom, democracy, multiculturalism, personal individualism, and egalitarianism; suitably framed in a comforting mythology. It's religious doctrines profess kindness, compassion, and equality among persons.

Taken together, these blessings provide Americans with a deep sense of self-identity and exceptionalism. They also offer few prospects for the rise of a hell bent authoritarian Fuhrer. Yet, for opportunists like Donald Trump, the 2016 election provided just the right circumstances for a heroic self-actualization.

Trump's fascist handler Steve Bannon has a plan. It begins by peddling a well-known TV reality superstar and billionaire entrepreneur as a national hero for the 21st century. He is marketed as a blessed, unconventional, and unrelenting savior. His operatives then inject him into a rapaciously neoliberal capitalist party. That party seizes the opportunity to both deflect growing criticism from disgruntled workers still suffering from the 2008 capitalist crisis and a ballooning wealth gap, while simultaneously safeguarding capitalist profits. Republican spin masters publicly celebrate him in their corporate media, offering him a shot at the Presidency.

Once this leader controls the executive branch, and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the Supreme Court, an American fascism will command absolute political authority. It can control national production and labor policy, thus removing class struggle from the political equation. This tactic takes advantage of an increasing centralization of power in the executive branch.[20] This situation is significantly different from the weak power structure at the top of the unstable Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany. Trump will exercise his authority, claiming the exclusive right to do what he wishes, and remain unaccountable. Since this impulsive and aggressive fascist leader is the incarnation of the state, all governmental policy and functions obediently follow suit. Anything or anyone getting in the way will be eliminated.

Trump is a worthy inheritor of Mussolini's political persona. His distain for human rights, scapegoating, sexism, hostility toward intellectuals, and militarism is indisputable. His immigration policy, islamophobia and racism, glorification of sexual molestation, anti-science rhetoric, and massive defense spending all herald a potential American Fuhrer.

Economy and Ideology: Steve Bannon’s 'Third-Way'[21]

Steve Bannon's fascism maximizes the operational efficiency of its governance, and coincidently the profitability of capitalism, through their fusion with the ideology of White-supremacist Christianity. The leader commands a Third Way that subjugates capitalist enterprises and labor under his control through corporations, in order to ameliorate class conflict. Capitalists in this new theo-economic state[22] will enjoy growing profits as before, as workers endure neoliberal social and labor policy that reduces their political presence. Workers will live insecure existences living on subsistence wages, fearing illness, and defaulting on their college loans. They will work more hours, save little, and receive fewer benefits.

In contrast to historical fascism, the American form benefits from an enduring capitalist program to weaken labor. Trump is elected on a day when worker participation in unions is historically low.[23] The Taft-Hartley Act, and the damage done through its original anti-communist provision, continues to block mass revolutionary efforts by workers. There are few mass demonstrations and street battles like those in Germany and Italy during the early decades of the 20th century.[24] More recently, the Supreme Court Citizen's United and "right to work" rulings impair union fund raising and organizing. Trump's truculence toward both organized labor and Wall Street is consistent with a politic that abhors class struggle.

All of this comes with Bannon's traditionalism and Judeo-Christian ethos: [25]

...look at the leaders of capitalism at that time [late 19th- through the 20th-centuries], when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the [their] faith,...the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored....I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

...[S]hould we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?"

Bannon imagines America as a restored Judeo-Christian and capitalist nation with Trump as its leader. He revives and consecrates Americans as a new saintly and capitalist volk. The leader leads, and capitalists and workers reap the benefits. Value added: Everyone achieves salvation and immortality, as they are actualized in the form of the fascist state. For Bannon, "What Trump represents is a restoration — a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism.[26] This restoration carries the Cross, is wrapped in the American flag, and struts to the tune of a uniquely garish form of exclusive exceptionalism. MAGA emerges as a pathologically narcissistic demon in the form of Trump's exclusive exceptionalism:

They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s like incredible.[27]

Conclusion

George Will places the intersection of futurism and fascism within the broader context of European Enlightenment:[28]

Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism: the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.

George Will correctly distinguishes "Trumpism" as a populist fad from communism as a political doctrine:[29]

Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.

Trumpism...is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.

Fascism is interesting precisely because it offers a compelling doctrine, a powerful system of governance, and is doggedly persistent over time and space. But, it's also rare. Unfortunately, small samples resist generalization. Cultural, geographic, and historical variables make comparisons difficult. While Marxists understand that the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism can lead to fascism, they don't often synchronize with other potent proto-fascist interventions. Fascism requires a unique convergence of causes and conditions. Economically, a major crisis of capitalism, significant economic distress among workers, a burgeoning wealth gap, and strong anti-union sentiments and policies prevails. There is a social climate of fear and hostility regarding vivid internal and external threats; citizens distrust distant and detached governance. They are mesmerized by a nativist and nationalist mythology energized by mythic traditions and beliefs. The spark that ignites the inferno of fascism comes as a uniquely clever and hell-bent futurist demagogue.

It is astonishing that an otherwise intelligent species would establish such profligate stupidity, wastefulness, and destructiveness as a system of governance. But it is here and continues to threaten humanity. History begs that we never forget what fascism represents, what it does, and what it takes to remove it from our presence.

Notes

[1] Jeff Jacoby, "'Never Forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting," Boston Globe, May 1, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/30/never-forget-world-said-holocaust-but-world-forgetting/59cUqLNFxylkW7BDuRPgNK/story.html (accessed June 5, 2021).

[2] George Will, "The difference between Trumpism and fascism," The Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-difference-between-trumpism-and-fascism/2020/07/09/377ae76e-c208-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html (accessed June 8, 2021).

[3] James P. Cannon, "Fascism and the Workers' Movement," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication March - April, 1954, The Militant, https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1954/mar/15.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[4] See Bertholt Brecht, "Fascism is the True Face of Capitalism," Off Guardian, Original publication 1935, https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/01/fascism-is-the-true-face-of-capitalism/. (accessed June 23, 2021). Ernest Lund, "Fascism Is a Product of Capitalism," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication Labor Action September 27, 1943. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/erber/1943/09/fascism.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[5] Lawrence Britt, "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism," Free Inquiry Magazine, 2003, https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.pdf (accessed June 5, 2021). See also umair, "Are Americans (Really) So Dumb They Don't Know Fascism When They See It?," Eudiamonia, April 6, 2019. https://eand.co/are-americans-really-so-dumb-they-dont-know-fascism-when-they-see-it-34cae64efa72 (accessed May 29, 2021).

[6]  "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression," A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005, http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DOCNAC3.htm.

[7] Benito Mussolini, "What is Fascism?," Marxist Internet Archive, Reference Archive, Original publication 1932, Italian Encyclopedia, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mussolini/works/fascism.htm. (accessed September 4, 2021).

[8] Franklin Le Van Baumer, ed., Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 748.

[9] Alfred Rosenberg, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Internet Archive, Original publication 1930,  https://archive.org/details/the-myth-of-the-20th-century-alfred-rosenberg/mode/2up (accessed September 4, 2021).

[10] Andrew Joyce, "Review: Julius Evola's 'Myth of the Blood: The Genesis of Racialism,'" Occidental Observer, September 18, 2018, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/18/review-the-myth-of-the-blood-the-genesis-of-racialism/ (accessed June 9, 2021).

[11] Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)," World Future Fund, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm (accessed September 10, 2021).

[12] N. L. Castelli, ed., Futurist Aristocracy (Rome: Prampolini, 1923).

[13] Le Van Baumer, op. cit.

[14] Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)."

[15] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

[16] Seth Millstein, "13 Quotes From Steve Bannon That Show The Toxic Worldview He Took To The White House," Bustle, August 18, 2017,

https://www.bustle.com/p/13-steve-bannon-quotes-that-paint-a-diabolical-worldview-he-took-to-the-white-house-77612  (accessed May 24. 2021).

[17] Charles L. Stevenson, "Value-Judgments: Their Implicit Generality," in Ethical Theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century, ed. Norman E. Bowie (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 13 - 37.

[18] "Corporatism," Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, August 30, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism.

[19] Louis Paul Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 11–12.

[20] "The Concept of the Imperial Presidency," UKEssays, May 16, 2017,  https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/the-concept-of-the-imperial-presidency-politics-essay.php (accessed September 6, 2021).

[21] Here, I allude to the fascist self-branding of being fundamentally opposed to both capitalism and socialism, offering a third way of social organization. See Roger Eatwell, "The Oxford Dictionary of Political Ideologies," Oxford Handbooks Online, edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, December 2013,

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199585977-e-009 (accessed September 6, 2021).

[22] Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

[23] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016 Union Membership In The United States, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[24] Mack Harden, "What is Taft-Hartley and Why Is It Bad?," Emergency Workplace Organizing, April 5, 2021, https://workerorganizing.org/what-is-taft-hartley-and-why-is-it-bad-1291/. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[25] J. Lester Feder, "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World," November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world (accessed June 8, 2021).

[26] James Hohmann, "The Daily 202: Bannon will be the id, Priebus the super-ego in Trump’s White House," The Washington Post, November 14, 2016,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/11/14/daily-202-bannon-will-be-the-id-priebus-the-super-ego-in-trump-s-white-house/58292237e9b69b6085905df2/ (accessed May 31, 2021).

[27] Katie Reilly, "Donald Trump Says He 'Could Shoot Somebody' and Not Lose Voters," Time, January 23, 2016,

https://time.com/4191598/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters/ (accessed May 21, 2021).

[28] Will, op. cit.

[29] Ibid.

American Slavery and Global Capitalism

Pictured: Weighing cotton in Virginia, circa 1905 (Detroit Publishing Co. via Library of Congress)

By Edward Liger Smith

Edward Baptiste’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism attempts to provide a material analysis of the development of Slavery in the United States leading up to the Civil War. In doing so he reveals the origin of capitalism, and Western Economic Supremacy, to be the Southern Slave Plantations, who provided Northern and English Capitalists with an endless supply of cheap cotton, picked by the hands of slaves. As Eric Foner of the New York Times said in his review of the text in 2014 “American historians have produced remarkably few studies of capitalism in the United States” (Foner). Given the lack of analysis that has been done on the development of Capitalism in the United States, The Half Has Never Been Told, serves as an incredibly useful tool for American socialists who seek to understand the historical development of Western Capitalism, so that we may destroy it, and reconstruct a superior system.

Let us first quickly review Marx’s concept of Surplus Value, and his critique of Political Economy, in a manner that hopefully avoids putting the reader to sleep.

A common attack often levied at modern day economists, is that their field of study seems to have no place for historical analysis. To most Western Economists, capitalism’s laws are viewed as “natural.” The field has given very little thought to the historical development of capitalism, or the systems which predated it. In the 1800s, Karl Marx found this to be a major flaw in the works of Classical Economist David Ricardo. Marx argued in Capital Vol 1 “Ricardo never concerns himself with the origin of surplus-value. He treats it as an entity inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and in his eyes the latter is the natural form of social production” (Marx 651). Marx makes this critique of Ricardo, after he himself first laid out a lengthy history of the development of capitalism in Europe, which took place over hundreds of years. Marx’s analysis of production shows us that surplus value, or excess value beyond what society needs for survival, is not present in all modes of human production historically, nor is it exclusive to the capitalist mode of production. Marx draws our attention to the Egyptians, who’s advanced agricultural infrastructure allowed their society to produce what was needed to survive, while using their leftover time to construct giant pyramids in honor of the Egyptian monarchs. The pyramids themselves would be considered “surplus value”, however, they do NOT constitute the specifically capitalist form of surplus value. This is because the Pyramids were produced to show the power of monarchical rulers, and not to make money for a capitalist through their sale on a market. The domination of Private Property owners and giant global commodity markets would take years of development before coming about. Only after years of struggle between classes would capitalists finally wrench the means of production from the hands of monarchical rulers. These specific historical developments led to a change in how Surplus Value is produced. Now, rather than producing what is needed to maintain society, before using any extra time to construct surplus commodities for the monarchy, Surplus Value is produced through capitalists hiring workers, who then add value to a commodity, before selling that commodity on a market, at a price above it’s actual value. Under this capitalist mode of production, the creations of the working class, beyond what is needed for the survival of society, becomes the property of the capitalist class. This excess property appropriated by Capital is Surplus Value within a capitalist mode of production.

In his studies, Marx also found that the capitalist mode of production develops uniquely to every country and geographic location. In Capital, he often jumps around the world to look at the development of capitalism globally, but primarily narrows his analysis to the development of capitalist production in Europe. Here, Marx observed the rapid development of privately owned textile factories. An analysis of the productive output of these factories showed they had been producing commodities at an ever-increasing rate. This output of commodities was maintained and constantly increased by throwing young girls into the factories en masse. If girls died of overwork or succumbed to diseases contracted in the horrid factory conditions, capitalists looked to the newly created mass of unemployed workers to hire a replacement. Additionally, the machinery of production was constantly being improved. Factory owners were now competing with one another to sell the maximum number of products possible. The winners of this newly emergent capitalist competition were those who could produce the most while paying their workers the least. Capitalism becomes a race to produce surplus value, with no regard for the effects it has on the class of workers.

During the time of capitalism's original development, the textile capitalist’s most important raw material was cotton. Thankfully for these European capitalists, they would find an abundant source of cotton at ever affordable prices directly across the Atlantic Ocean.

Edward Baptiste’s The half has Never Been Told may as well be a contribution to Marxist theory for those of us living here in the US, the world’s capitalist stronghold. Upon its release, Baptiste’s book was lambasted by those who Marx would have referred to as ‘bourgeois economists.’ One article from The Economist was removed after the Publication received backlash over their critique that “Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the white’s villains” (The Economist). Perhaps economists in the United States have not yet been made aware that the capitalist mode of production they claim to study so closely developed slowly out of a system of chattel slavery, which specifically targeted those with black skin. However, someone should make these folks aware that throughout the 19th-century, capitalists in the Northern United States, Europe, and anywhere else the capitalist mode of production had taken hold, were profiting greatly from cotton picked by black slaves in the southern United States. Despite what our modern-day economists would have you believe, black people were in fact victimized by white owners of capital. These white landowners did all they could to commodify the black body in order to create for themselves an endless source of labour power. This labour could theoretically provide capital with an endless source of surplus value, so long as that labor could be combined with land, which of course was quickly being acquired through the genocide and forced removal of native populations.

Painstakingly conducted research from Baptiste and others reveals Southern Slavery to be its own specific mode of production. So, while Southern Slavery had unique elements which made it distinguishable from Capitalism, they also shared many of the same features. Therefore, the class of Southern slave owners did not have the same motivations as the previously mentioned ruling class of Egypt, who also produced goods under relations of slavery. Instead, plantation owners in the south were subjected to the same market forces as their capitalist counterparts in Europe. Slave owners produced incredible amounts of surplus value through selling their cotton on a world market which provided endless demand for their commodity. Unlike Egyptian enslavers, the surplus value of southern plantation owners did not come in the form of giant stone creations, or sculptures to the gods. The surplus value appropriated by enslavers instead came in the form of money. Much of which was then reinvested in expanding production through purchasing more slaves, plantations, and land. This money used to make more money is what Marx labeled as ‘Capital.’

The endeavors of these Southern enslaver capitalists were heavily financed by banks in Europe and the Northern United States. These financial institutions simultaneously bank rolled massive campaigns of forced removal or genocide of Native peoples, aimed at divorcing them from the land and allowing market-based production to expand. The Native people’s own unique Mode of production had to be destroyed in order to make room for the production of capitalist’s surplus value. The enslavers of the United States essentially functioned as capitalists, subject to the same market forces as the factory owners who Marx studied in Europe. However, plantation owners held a unique economic power that would come to be enforced by the state. This power was the legal ‘right’ not just to commodify human labour power, but the source of that labour power. Human Beings. Through the legal commodification of human beings with black skin, Southern Enslavers used the labor of black bodies to produce obscene quantities of cotton. The sale of these commodities on the Global Market allowed plantation owners to accumulate massive hoards of wealth, and continue their expansion by endlessly investing capital. The brutality of these enslavers was either ignored or justified by capitalists around the globe who saw the South as an endless source of cheap cotton.

Black slaves existed under relations of slavery, while also being subjected to market forces that are usually associated with capitalism. These specific economic conditions incentivized white plantation owners to subject those who toiled in their fields to some of the most horrific crimes in human history. Similar to European capitalists who were consistently working children to death in order to maximize output, Southern slave owners sought any methods possible to increase the quantity of cotton they could produce. Because slave owners had legally enforced ownership of the physical bodies in their labor force, torture became the primary method used to force slaves into increasing the speed of cotton production. Baptiste draws on an analogy from former Politician, and fierce ideological advocate of slavery Henry Clay, who describes a “whipping machine” used to torture enslaved people and make them work faster. Baptiste explains it is unlikely the whipping machine was a real device that existed in the Southern United States.  He instead argues that the machine is a metaphor for the use of torture which was the primary technology used by enslavers to increase their production of cotton. While technological innovations such as the cotton gin allowed for an increase in the amount of cotton which could be separated and worked into commodities, far less technology was developed to aid in the process of actually picking the cotton. Therefore, in order for slave owning capitalists to increase the speed of cotton picking on their plantations, the use of torture was systematized and ramped up to an unimaginable degree. Torture was to the slave owner, what developments in machine production were to the factory owner: a tactic for continually increasing the Rate of Exploitation, or the quantity of commodities produced by a given number of workers, in order to produce an increased number of goods for sale on a market, which brings the capitalist his surplus value.

There are many ways in which capitalists can increase their rate of exploitation. The specific function of the whipping machine was to increase what Marx called the ‘intensity of labour,’ i.e., an increase in the expenditure of labour and quantity of commodities created by the workers within a given time period. For example, a slave owner hitting a field worker with a whip until the worker picks double the cotton. This would be an increase in the intensity of labour. There are many ways for capitalists to increase the rate of exploitation without increasing intensity of labour. Two common techniques used by non-slave owning capitalists at the time were increasing the productivity of their machinery and increasing the length of the working day. As was discussed previously, very few technological innovations were created in the realm of cotton harvesting during the time of Southern Slavery. Additionally, the Slave Owners already had free reign to work their labour as long as they pleased, and an extension of the working day would serve them no purpose. Slave owning capitalists had a choice to either give up their pursuit of surplus value or use torture on a mass scale to increase the speed at which their workers produced. Of course, the capitalists chose torture, and the market rewarded those capitalists who refined their torture techniques the furthest. Market competition compelled most all Southern capitalists to adopt torture as an incentive of production or be pushed out of business by those who did. The innovation of the market at work!

Slavery would only die in the United States after a long and protracted struggle between opposing classes culminating in the Civil War. Baptiste details this struggle in his book and in the process refutes the utopian historical myth that the labor of slaves was simply less efficient than wage-laborers, which is what led to the implementation of capitalism. Baptiste instead shows how Northern Capitalists came into a political conflict with the Southern Enslavers. Northerners began challenging the southern capitalist’s unique ‘right’ to own human beings. By the Civil War plantation owners had long been expanding into Mexico while continuing to steal land from Native Americans. Now running low on conquerable land, the enslavers sought to expand their control to various US colonies, or even extend slavery into the Northern US. This brought Southern Slave Capital into a direct conflict with Northern Capital.

By 1860 The North had developed a diversified industrial economy, albeit with the help of cotton picked by slaves. The South on the other hand had seen moderate industrial development, but mostly served as a giant cotton colony for the rest of the world’s capitalists. This limited diversification in the cotton dependent Southern economy and left them slightly less prepared for war. This, among other factors, allowed the Union to win the Civil War replacing slave relations with capitalist ones. Additionally, the Slaves and many workers who hated the Southern Plantation Oligarchy would take up arms and join the Union Army. We see in the civil war the intensification of struggles between classes, which reached its climax in armed conflict between the warring classes.  Whether he’s done so intentionally or not, Edward Baptiste’s history of slavery has provided great evidence for Karl Marx’s theory that struggles between classes are what drive history through various modes of production.

For those of us living in the United States who wish to wage a struggle against our current mode of production, the history of Southern slavery is necessary to understand. Marx conducted his historical analysis of the development of Capitalism in England with the explicit goal of helping workers to understand their current situation and how to change it. Similarly to Marx, American socialists have the imperative to understand the historical development of our own capitalist mode of production. A history that shows without question that the propertied class in this country has consistently used race as a tool for maximizing their own surplus value. The commodification of a specific race being the ultimate form of this. Today, capital seeks to sow racial divisions among the diverse mass of working people. This is done to distract the labourers of society from the forces of markets, our relations of production, and designed to maximize our exploitation for the enrichment of a small number of people who do not work, the capitalists. The union army destroyed the uniquely evil mutation of capitalist production that was southern slavery. Let us continue this struggle today by attacking capitalist production at its roots, and take power from the class who exploits us, and the markets which throw our lives into anarchy.

Edward Liger Smith is an American Political Scientist and specialist in anti-imperialist and socialist projects, especially Venezuela and China. He also has research interests in the role southern slavery played in the development of American and European capitalism. He is a co-founder and editor of Midwestern Marx and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. He is currently a graduate student, assistant, and wrestling coach at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.

Bibliography

The Economist. “Our withdrawn review "Blood Cotton."” The Economist, 5 September 2014, https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2014/09/05/our-withdrawn-review-blood-cotton. Accessed 29 06 2021.

Foner, Eric. A Brutal Process. New York Times, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/books/review/the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist.html. Accessed 02 07 2021.

Marx, Karl. Capital Volume I. Penguin Classics, 1976. 3 vols.

Decolonization and Communism

By Nodrada

Republished from Orinoco Tribune.

“We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.”

-José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance,” José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology¹

While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions of decolonization are similarly limited. Although the transition from analyzing psychological or “discursive” decolonization to analyzing literal, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications.

Settler–colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism. The colonizers seek primarily to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism. Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it may vary. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States in analyzing local ideas of settler-colonialism and decolonization.

Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization.

On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settler-colonialism no longer exists. In their view, to identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and to identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions is divisive and stuck in the past. They believe that settlers no longer exist, and Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency.

On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that Euro-Americans are eternally damned as settlers, and cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely.

Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still struggle for their rights to sovereignty within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly legally recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.² This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying concrete life for abstract aims as a result.

An atomistic, individualist worldview is what undergirds the view of settler-colonialism as over and of contemporary Euro-Americans as being just as indigenous as Indigenous peoples. When settler-colonialism is seen as an individual responsibility or guilt, we are left with a very crude concept of it.

The denialists of settler-colonialism assume that it must be over, because the colonization of the Americas is apparently over. Thus, they think that modern Euro-Americans cannot be blamed for the sins of their forefathers, since individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for things which happened outside of their lifetimes. Guilt in this conception is an assessment of whether an atomistic individual is responsible for extremely specific crimes, such as participating in something like the Paxton Boys’ ethnic cleansing campaign in 1763 Pennsylvania.

The same ideological approach characterizes the other side, which obsesses over the individual status of “settler” and micro-categorizing the contemporary residents of North America within an abstract concept of settler-colonialism. They argue that having the individual status of “settler” means one is eternally damned, one is marked as a specific person by the crimes of a social system always and forever. This hefty sentence has high stakes, thus the obsession with categorizing every unique case within a specific box.

Neither of these approaches offers a successful insight into settler-colonialism. Instead, they project the thinking of European bourgeois liberalism. The individual is defined in an atomistic way, in their characteristics, rights, crimes, and so on. The individual as a node on a web of social relations is totally out of the question here. Yet, that is how we must think if we wish to understand settler-colonialism and, therefore, abolish it.

To focus primarily on categorizing atomistic individuals, instead of focusing on social relations, loses sight of the true engine of settler-colonialism. It is not that individuals choose one day to behave brutally, or that it is simply the nature of a specific people. Instead, it has very concrete historical motivations in the global system and the rise of settler-colonialism within it. For example, North American settler-colonialism was motivated significantly by the land hunger of capitalists who grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton, which were sold on the world market. Thinking in broad, structural terms is important in order to avoid reductive analyses and approaches.

While the side which focuses on damning individual Euro-Americans certainly have land in mind while thinking about this subject, they have a static and simple concept of land. In their minds, settlers are settlers because they are present in a certain place, to which a specific Indigenous group has an abstract, moral right to exclusive habitation in. To put it simply, their thought process is “if X person is in Y place, which belongs to Z people, then they are a settler.”

They do not understand the social relation of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, which extends into the aspects of ecology, history, spirituality, etc. That is, Indigeneity as itself a social relation. Indigenous peoples explicitly refer to their nations and homelands as relations. Their relation to land is not to land as an abstract thing, but to specific spaces that are inseparable from their specific communal lives.

In the context of describing his people’s history, Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Lakota) said in Our History is the Future:

“Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.”³

Identity and mode of life in communalist societies is specific to spaces, because keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of these spaces is a basic guiding logic of life. Because land is a relative, there was and is significant resistance among Indigenous peoples to the settler seizure of land and commodification of their non-human relative. The European bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was more concerned with what value could be extracted from the land, their worldview being based in abstract concepts of Right, Justice, Liberty and so on.

The faction in question does not understand settler-colonists as part of social relations which seek to negate that communal land social relation for concrete aims. They lack broad perspective, they only see society as a collection of atoms, falling into micro-categories, bundled together.

Having critiqued these two views, we can now give a better idea of how to properly approach the category groupings involved in analysis of settler-colonialism.

Indigeneity is defined by continuity of long-standing communal relations and identities indigenous to a certain region. Relation to a specific homeland or region is important to this, but the loss of direct ties to land does not necessarily negate Indigeneity. Rather, the continuity of belonging to a certain ‘mode of life’ and community is key.

A settler is one who is outside of these relations, and plays an active role in the negation of these Indigenous relations. A settler is not merely a settler because they are foreign. Rather, they are a settler because of this active negating role.

To play an active negating role does not necessarily mean one personally enforces colonial laws. Instead, it means that one directly benefits from their participation in the destruction of these relations, such as by gaining residencies or employment at the expense of those land-relations. An important aspect of being a settler is being a socio-political citizen of a settler-colonial society. This means that, in law and in social practice, one has the full rights of belonging to the settler-colonial nation, and is recognized as such in ideology.

Many analysts of settler-colonialism, such as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), use a third category in their analysis: arrivants.⁴ Arrivants are those who are part of social structures which dissolve those land-relations, but lack the citizenship and agency of settlers. An example of this would be Filipino debt peons. They cannot fully belong to the settler structures, in practice or in ideology, but they are still part of those structures. In North American history, these groups have at various times been explicitly excluded from the potential to own property or obtain full legal citizenship. Said citizenship was directly defined around whiteness, first de jure, and later de facto.

These categories should be treated in a nuanced way, as tools to understand a concrete society and history. We should avoid trying to bend reality to fit abstract categories. Otherwise, one assumes these categories are destiny. One assumes that Indigenous peoples cannot be part of settler-colonial structures, or that all settlers are eternally damned and cannot overcome their social role.

In history, there are many examples of Indigenous peoples participating in settler-colonial processes, such as with Tohono O’odham warriors participating in the Camp Grant Massacre against Apaches, or the Indigenous Vice President Charles Curtis sponsoring assimilation and allotment of communal lands. There are also examples of people without full socio-political citizenship participating in these processes, such as with Black Buffalo Soldiers fighting on the front lines of Manifest Destiny.

There are also examples of Euro-Americans defecting to Indigenous societies in order to escape bourgeois “civilization.” Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted and adopted as a child by a Comanche war band. Texas Rangers, who had massacred her adopted relatives, had to force her to return to Euro-American society. While adopted Euro-Americans remained Euro-Americans, inclusion in those communal relations transformed them. Instead of playing a negating influence on the part of bourgeois society, they became participants in Indigenous relations. To be a settler is not destiny, but is a status which can be negated through a revolutionary transformation of society. In a word, through decolonization.

To obsess over policing micro-categories is not helpful for understanding or fighting settler-colonialism. Being conscious of it is important, but the key is to focus on broad social structures. The way we alter individuals is by altering social relations, and the way we fight for Indigenous sovereignty is by abolishing the negating forces in society. To successfully treat a disease, one must keep in mind the body as a system rather than a simple collection of parts. The same applies to society.

Settler-colonialism in North America is the conflict of two social forms, one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘god’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a whole.

The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or anything like having a social relation with a place. Instead, they seek to cut off the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities, so that they can be abstracted into an exchange-value.

The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this system on Indigenous peoples.⁵ In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place. In the communal systems, unlike capitalism: land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value, people live off the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon.

The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the government and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.⁶

This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extended to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.⁷ In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a future as wage-laborers.

The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism posits individuals in an atomistic way, without considering them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, and so on. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights they have apart from society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors.

This abstract thinking, individualism, and competitive view makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they have to for the working class’s living.

They only concern themselves with concrete things as far as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social.

By contrast, the communal view of individuals which is characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply to the obsession with satisfying the god of abstract capital by feeding it concrete sacrifices. The key to this worldview is keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, the ecology, the spirits, etc.

The latter view has a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach, Marx said:

[…]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.⁸

Further, Marx was very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by self-interested bourgeoisie, who have no concern for humans, animals, or ecology.

Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce what the world runs on establish social control of this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. Once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people contribute to the social product instead of anyone exploiting anyone else, they will have established a communist society.

The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.⁹ The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.”

This had precedence with people such as Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it.

This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity.

Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism. To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction.

Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims on the basis of the world colonialism has brought. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves intact the negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people.

In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the defense of bio-diversity. They are staunch protectors of the earth, of their ways of life and of their relation with the earth. They resist capitalist primitive accumulation, defending their sovereignty, daily. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale.

Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send Euro-Americans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistoric, inscribed into the DNA of people. Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones.

In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program.

To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Native.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is part of a process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign. Rather, it means that we must destroy the capitalist society which drives these antagonisms.

This decolonization also necessitates a conscious revolution in ideology as part and parcel of social transformation. As discussed, communalist societies have a strong sense of concrete locality, of specificity according to a space and the relations of that space. Capitalism seeks to negate that in favor of universalist abstractions. Communism must take the universalizing capitalism has engaged in and place it on a concrete, conscious basis.

We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans and with ecology, must be overcome.

Communism is the abolition of the present state of things on the basis of existing premises. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the relation of decolonization to communism.

The Christian Right and The Spirit of Fascism

By Werner Lange

In his classic text on religion and society, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, German sociologist Max Weber forcefully argues that the Protestant Reformation and laissez-faire capitalism share an ideological commonality as well as a geographical and historical one. The work ethic, inherent to all variations of Protestantism, formed a rational moral code which envisions idleness as sinful and industriousness as a categorical duty, even divine calling, for labor and capital alike; time, for both, is money, one in the form of wages and the other in the form of profit. Unlike Marx, Weber myopically failed to see any contradiction, or even conflict, between these two, at least not in the early stages of capitalism. Nevertheless, at the very end of his analysis, Weber gives voice to the possibility of a “mechanized petrification” of both Christianity and capitalism in the future, particularly within the United States.[1] That possibility has become reality.

There is nothing left of the Protestant ethic in the petrified Christian Right of today. In fact, there is nothing ethical about this ossified body of right-wing zealots hell-bent on replacing what’s left of American democracy with a totalitarian theocracy within a Christian iron cage. In both ends and means, the Christian Right manifests a uncanny symmetry with the spirit of fascism marked by an obsession deeply embedded in both to thoroughly cleanse society of perceived filth by any means necessary, and return a contaminated culture to its mythological purity and glory.

“The Return” was even the official name of a massive Christian Right rally on the Mall in Washington D.C. strategically held 40 days before the presidential election of 2020, the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing.  This marathon 11-hour event was attended by over 200,000 devotees of the Christian Right, viewed by millions more and addressed by nearly 100 leading Christian fascists and Zionists, including Vice President Mike Pence. Though officially identified as “A National Day of Prayer and Reconciliation”, this marathon 11-hour “sacred assembly” was in reality a religious extension of the 2017 fascist “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The overriding message at both events was a strident call for America to cleanse itself of decadence and change its destined trajectory from tragedy to triumph. Setting the ominous tone at this Christian Right rally in late September was the featured speaker “prophet” Jonathan Cahn:

“We are standing at a most critical hour. The hour is late. A great nation is hanging in the balance, and a civilization begun thousands of years ago is hanging in the balance. We’ve witnessed the falling away of that which was founded on the Word of God; we have watched the advancing of darkness, the progression of an agenda that increasingly wars against the ways of God and increasingly threatens the Gospel itself…We’ve come here in repentance for our sins, the sins of the Church, for our nation and then for our world; and for the end-time revival of which the Scriptures speak. We’ve come here because we’ve been called to come here. And we gather because we’ve been appointed to do so. For this is an appointed gathering at the appointed place, at the appointed time by the hand of God.” (The Return USA, the return.org)

The passionate calls for repentance at this Unite the Christian Right assembly were not directed at the many participants and viewers, all of whom likely smugly believed they belong to the saved and sanctified. The demands to repent of social sin (especially emphasized by nearly every speaker, were the “sins” of abortion and socialism) were directed against the infidels, that mass of unsaved liberals infesting society with their secular humanism and ungodly actions. Should voluntary repentance and return to godly ways not be their choice, then the only alternative for the godly and patriotic is to forcibly cleanse society of the ungodly traitors. That is precisely what several terrorists in the January 6 fascist putsch called for:

“Everyone in there [the US Capitol] is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building” (terrorist Peter Stager,case 1:21-my-57, document 1-1).

“We’re not putting up with this tyrannical rule; if we got to come back and start a revolution and take all of these traitors out, which is what should be done, then we will” (terrorist Damon Beckly, case1:21-mj-60, Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, p.5)

“We’re not going to merge into some globalist, communist system; it will not happen. There will be a lot of bloodshed if it comes down to that, trust me” (terrorist Jon Schaffer, case 1:21-mj-94, Statement of Facts, p. 3)

Among the 75 arrested terrorists identifiable as Christian was Micheal Lopatic of Pennsylvania, a very devout Catholic and former Marine, who also repeatedly called for the execution of key Democratic leaders on a series of social media posts prior to January 6. On the day after the 2020 presidential election, Lopatic posted a “CALL TO ARMS” on his Facebook account which depicted two dead birds identified by him as “Joe and Kamala”. This was followed by more posts depicting dead birds he had killed and named their dead bodies after several prominent elected liberals. On New Year’s Day, he issued another call to arms: ASSEMBLE ON THE CAPITOL JANUARY 6TH, 2021, UNITED WE STAND, GO FORTH AND WE FIGHT” (Motion for Pretrial Detention, case 1:21-cr-35). And fight he did. Among the 7 counts of federal law violations charged against Lopatic were two serious felony offenses. He continually punched an officer of the Metropolitan Police Departments; ripped off the body-worn camera of another; and engaged in other acts of physical violence in and around the US Capitol. So egregious was his behavior that US attorneys concluded “the defendant was involved in some of the most violent assaults on law enforcement officers that occurred on January 6, 2021”, and that he “has demonstrated a tendency toward violence and  willingness to impede and obstruct the right and lawful function of government” (Memorandum in Support of Pretrial Detention”, case 1:21-cr-35)

In stark contrast to these charges, members of his parish, St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Lancaster, presented an entirely different portrait of Lopatic in their 19 letters of support pleading for his pretrial release (Response by Michael Lopatic re Motion for Pretrial Release, case 1:21-cr-35): “He is a man whose heart is ablaze with the love of God”, wrote one parishioner, “A man of character, of deeply held beliefs in the sanctity of life (the supreme issue in our world today), he has not a violent bone in his body”. Another also claimed to “have never known him to be violent our hurtful to anyone”, but does know him “to speak his mind”, especially about defending “life-in-the-womb”. Other parishioners called attention to his service as a church usher, a religious educator for children, and a chaperone for Catholic youth attending annual summer retreats at the highly conservative Franciscan University in Ohio. One physician and fellow parishioner states that Lopatic “loves God very much and wants to do the right thing in God’s eyes”; another flatly states of this terrorist that “He has a  strong faith in God and uses Jesus and the Bible as his compass”. If so, then that compass for this pro-life Christian fascist was surely broken on January 6 and obviously well before. His pretrial release was denied, and he remains incarcerated.

Yet his case is illustrative of the extent to which rabid opponents of abortion rights within the Catholic community have joined their evangelical Protestant counterparts in a fascist crusade. In a revealing January 6 interview broadcast on LifeSiteNews, part of the growing fascist propaganda internet news services, evangelical terrorist Leo Kelly of Iowa, openly admits to violating the law that day, but repeatedly and rhetorically asks “What are you supposed to do?” when the people have been betrayed and the election stolen: “At some point there’s enough illegal behavior and there’s enough crimes against the Constitution being committed by elected officials, so what are you supposed to do? Nobody in the courts will listen or take a look at the evidence”. Kelly was among the gang which invaded the US Senate Chambers and joined in a bizarre prayer which “consecrated it to Jesus” and made “an appeal to heaven”, which for him, was “the ultimate statement of where we are with this movement”. He concluded this 7-minute interview by declaring, in true evangelical form: “I’m redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ; there’s no judgement that stands against me. God will judge us” (man who entered Capitol tells his story, LifeSiteNews, January 6, 2021).

The “blood of Jesus” figured prominently in the mindset of other Christian terrorists arrested for their assaults on January 6. Joshua Blanks of Alabama said he was led by the “Spirit of God” to invade the US Capitol and that he “wanted to get inside the building so I could plead he blood of Jesus over it”. Once inside the Senate Chamber, he praised the name of Jesus on the Senate floor, adding that was “God’s goal ( al.com, 1/24/21; 1/28/21). Another Christian fascist, Michael Sparks of Kentucky, claims to be the first one to enter the US Capitol through a broken window. At his booking, he wore a T-shirt prominently displaying the word “Armor of God” and citing Ephesians 6:11 (Statement of Facts, case 1:21-cr-87). Sparks is a member of the Franklin Crossroads Baptist Church in Cecila, a  Southern Baptist congregation, which states as its mission a commitment “to reaching people through the blood of Christ”.

One of the more popular hymns within evangelical circles is “What Can Wash Away My Sin” with the repeated refrain of “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus”. As such, this hymn and host of biblical passages (e.g. 1 John 1:7) upon which it relies for authority, simply echo a plea for purity, a cleansing. However, when that refrain is weaponized into a prayer of “pleading the blood of Jesus”, there is a qualitative shift in meaning and purpose, one in full harmony with the fascist obsession for power. As one megachurch evangelical pastor (Pleading the Blood, jackhayford.org) expressed it: “Pleading the blood of Jesus is a heaven-given response that grants us a license to stand in dominion over the works of hell.”  For Christian fascists “works of hell” is synonymous with all forms and expressions of liberalism or any other descendant of  The Enlightenment. On January 6, pleading the blood of Jesus in and over the US Capitol was the functional equivalent of pleading for the blood of all there and beyond whom the Christian fascists label traitors.

None other than the most grotesquely dressed miscreant in that fascist mob, the fake shaman Jacob Angeli, gave voice to this function in his evocative evangelical prayer delivered by a bullhorn from the Senate Chamber dais after he had bellowed out some animalistic cries from the gallery. In one of the most bizarre scenes in Congressional history, this heavily tattooed self-described QAnon shaman, fervently led his fellow fascists in the Senate Chamber in a weaponized prayer of thanksgiving while Congressional members themselves were held in protective captivity in floors below.:

“Jesus Christ! We invoke your name! Amen! Thank you, Heavenly Father for bringing us this opportunity…[paused to take off his horns and skull cap as others removed their caps and reverently bowed heads; closed eyes; or raised both arms]

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for granting the inspiration needed to allow us in this building; to allow us to exercise our rights; to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, communists, and globalists that this is not their nation; that we will not allow America, the American way, the United States of America to go down.

Thank you, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God for filling the chamber with your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. Thank you, divine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Creator God for blessing each and everyone of us here and now. Thank you for surrounding us with the divine white light of love, protection, peace and harmony.

Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors in our government. We love you! In Christ’s holy name we pray! Amen![2]

There is, of course, nothing shamanistic about this prayer. It comes straight out of the evangelical playbook, and there is nothing authentic about the acclaimed shamanism of its deliverer. Angeli is a fraud. In fact, the entire MAGA mob was marked by pervasive fraud. All were faux patriots; many were faux Christians; and at least two were faux Jews affiliated with the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. No Muslims or members of Eastern faith traditions are known to have participated in the domestic terrorism of January 6, or even stood among the tens of thousands who attended Trump’s Save America Rally on the ellipse.

Christian fascists and fascists without any religious affiliation, exclusively white and mostly male, monopolized this utter disgrace. Fortunately, they do not constitute anywhere near a majority in our increasingly diversified society. Nevertheless, the Christian Right and the Spirit of Fascism, a marriage forged in hell, remains a potent force with a divorce nowhere in sight. Given the largely anemic status of the American Left, the most we can currently hope for is that this diabolical union is childless in the short run, and then rendered totally impotent culturally and politically in the fullness of time.

Notes

[1] Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, Dover Publications, 2003,p.182

[2] “A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege”, The New Yorker, Jan. 17, 2021

The Tragedy of the American Carceral System

By Aneesh Gogineni

On January 31st, 1865, abolitionists countrywide celebrated as the 13th amendment narrowly passed in the 39th Congress of the United States. Taught in American schooling systems through a very whitewashed, watered-downed version of history, most Americans view the 13th as the ultimate blow to slavery set us on track to the illusion in which we live now, where conditions seem equal for all on the surface level. Similarly, many Americans believe that legal segregation stopped after the Civil Rights act. However, both of these conclusions indirectly forwarded to the population by American schooling are far from the truth.

The 13th amendment provided a loophole to maintain and mask the subjugation deemed necessary by capitalism to exploit labor and prevent class solidarity by removing any perception of a problem with capitalism but rather shifting it to criminals. Section 1 of the text of the 13th amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The text rules slavery and involuntary servitude illegal in all instances EXCEPT that of punishment for convicted criminals. In this new era of Reconstruction, white capitalists needed a new method of legal subjugation of black people to distract white workers and continue implicit racial biases. And thus, the Prison Industrial Complex was born.

Since its inception, the Prison Industrial Complex has not served to protect our communities but rather has served to protect property and subjugate minority populations. Through the Jim Crow era, the prison industrial complex did what it does best — incarcerate large populations of black people. However, heading into the 1970s and 80’s as policies were becoming more progressive, prison populations globally and domestically were dropping. Crime rates and the need for law enforcement/imprisonment were very low. Incomes arguably the worst president of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan. As Reagan introduced trickle-down economics and the drug war, prisons were built in California although the crime rates were dropping. As Reagan criminalized marijuana, crack cocaine, and all drug “abuse”, he was able to drastically alter our incarceration rates. Through methods like supporting the Contras, a far-right drug organization stopping socialist change in Nicaragua through having them SELL DRUGS TO BLACK COMMUNITIES IN LA. This is one example of the true impact of the War on Drugs. It justified Reagan and the CIA intervening throughout Latin America, exploiting the resources and labor of workers in the Global South, and then incarcerating millions of black people in the US. Through laws like the 3 strikes law, America was able to justify its mass incarceration of predominantly black people and low-income workers throughout the US.

The 13th amendment has allowed slavery and Jim Crow to manifest themselves within the prison industrial complex. Prisoners work for hours a day with almost no pay. They live in horrible conditions and have no true education or rehabilitation. They have no true chance of re-entering society with a second chance. Reminiscent of Jim Crow, released felons cannot vote, don’t have access to the same housing benefits, job benefits, unemployment, etc. This essentially screws them over and incentivizes them to commit more crimes. Therefore, the US has the highest reincarceration rate in the world, nearing 50%. This has become an industry (thus the label “Prison Industrial Complex” as a critique of the system). With private prison corporations like CoreCivic (formerly the CCA) teaming up with the Drug Enforcement Administration to imprison black people, these corporations have capital incentive to imprison people. This results in tragedies like judges being paid to sentence black teens to longer sentences so that the corporations can make money. The problem extends farther than just carcerality, but also within our capitalist systems that lead to inevitable exploitation of workers subjugated in these conditions. This system justifies these carceral systems within the US.

This rotten system has evolved and maintained its dominance through “acts of purity.” By enacting superficial police and prison reform like body cameras, this reform has justified and legitimized the system without attacking the true roots of the system. Thus, we must aim for more radical means to infiltrate/abolish the system than simple reform. Abolitionist justice involves more than attacking carceral systems head-on, but rather dealing with the root cause of this very problem. Through wealth redistribution, education, and programs like AdvancePeace or CureViolence, Abolitionists must engage in these radical means as a method to reach ultimate abolition of these systems. Social programs and services must also happen simultaneously as abolition as a means of empowering the workers of the world to reach the ultimate end goal of communism/socialism.

Notes

For more information and in-depth analysis on issues of carcerality, these two books are wonderful sources.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorBlindness— by Michelle Alexander.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e0185311e0373308494e5b6/t/5e0833e3afc7590ba079bbb4/1577595881870/the_new_jim_crow.pdf

Are Prisons Obsolete — by Angela Davis

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angela-y-davis-are-prisons-obsolete.pdf