Union Politics: The Contradictions of a Capitalist Labor Movement

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Duplicitous U.S. Constitution: How An Autocratic Legal Document Became A Sacred and Incontestable Scroll

[Photo credit: MPI/Getty Image]

By Tim Scott

Republished from Dissident Voice.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

We live in a nation founded within a prevailing story line that characterizes the United States as being an exceptional, enlightened and charitable nation. A nation that is a “beacon of light…in every corner of the globe,” generated by the ethos of the American Dream, based on the values and ideals of liberty, justice, fairness, equality and democracy for all.

We also live in a nation that was established to be an empire, whereby imperialism and settler colonialism are endlessly justified and promulgated by an underlying cultural narrative which ascribes whiteness to morality, and by extension a nation bestowed with a divine right to lay claim—at will—to the lands, resources and bodies of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. A nation where private property rights are akin to natural rights, therefore framing capitalism, no matter how brutal, with benevolent intent and thus inviolable. These structural foundations, which are rooted within the barbarism of chattel slavery and the brutality of gender oppression, constructed an enduring national culture defined by genocide, dispossession, white supremacy, anti-blackness, heteropatriarchy, misogyny, social inequity and wealth inequality. Over three centuries later, despite significant efforts by resistance movements to transform it, this underlying national culture persists; entwined within an era where mass surveillance, mass incarceration, unprecedented wealth inequality and unending militarism are perversely justified as imperatives to preserve freedom, democracy and the mythical “American Dream.”

The contradictions between the nation’s mythologies and actual practices are inherent to—and effectively serve to preserve—the cultural, political and economic foundations of the United States. They are indicative of a nation that was founded by an opulent minority of white men who believed that they alone had a God-given right to freedom and prosperity and thus constructed the structural means to protect their wealth and power from a dispossessed demos and to justify the subjugation and exploitation of entire groups of people. Their design for the new nation was based on what economist Joseph Stiglitz refers to as the “interplay between ideologies and particular interests.” As such, the white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies of the wealthy, slave-owning Christian men who founded the nation were fused with free market ideology, the engine for the emerging interests of industrial capitalism. Within this design and from the outset, the founders intended for government to serve as the executor of these violent and undemocratic ideologies and interests.

As many political, legal, and history scholars have acknowledged, the U.S. Constitution was constructed to be an ideological and legal document intended to secure the interests of the virtuous and enlightened gentry who—like royalty—considered themselves to be ordained with a natural right to rule the nation in perpetuity. The founders’ declarations and ensuing constitution promoted an overriding myth or “origin story” that defined the new nation as a unified whole, engaging in a virtuous republican mission whereby, according to John Adams, “all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws.” Democracy was therefore (falsely) equated with the ideology of republicanism, whereby the nation’s citizenry was promised equal rights under the law and the inalienable rights to liberty. It is within this context that individual sovereignty and private property were intended to be protected, according to John Adams, from the “tyranny of the majority” (i.e., the “mob rule” of a direct democracy).

In effect, the founders constructed the intersecting cultural, political and economic instruments that would permanently advance the interests of a wealthy white minority through institutionalized and impervious methods of domination and extermination. Thus, the origin story generated by the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were never intended to be all inclusive. This also holds true to Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, which states:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Instead, the civil and political rights within the U.S. Constitution were restricted to focus exclusively on individual and property rights—for some. This design sought to undermine the possibility for the establishment of universal and equal participation in all spheres of life (participatory parity), not only between the ruling elite, their agents and those they subjugated, but more importantly amongst and between subjugated groups. Thus, complex interdependencies, chains of democratic equivalences, meaningful deliberative processes and solidarities that could threaten the power of the ruling elite were intentionally defused. The founders’ discourse and origin story myths were intended to serve as empty signifiers, having very different meanings and values with regard to who they apply to and how they were to be operationalized. Thus, the discourse of republicanism was ascribed with the interests of the nation’s white male Christian aristocracy and to a lesser degree to their citizen agents who occupied the white middle-class. However, the narrative of life, liberty and equality was never intended to pertain to everyone else.

During the nation’s infancy, when disorder and uncertainty were widespread, the founders’ myths served to define in totality a positive and fully sutured national identity, establishing a foundation for social practices and ideological representations that were instrumental in the social construction of reality and subjectivity for the nation’s white citizen subjects. This set forth a process whereby socialization and identity formation were based on the ideological shaping of a cultural imaginary, constituted through what political theorist Chantel Mouffe referred to as the logic of equivalence, which is “to create specific forms of unity among different interests by relating them to a common project and by establishing a frontier to define the forces to be opposed, the ‘enemy.’” Initially this “common enemy” was the tyranny of the British monarchy, and subsequently took many forms—the tyranny of majority rule, the threat of the “savage Indian,” the emancipation of slaves, Blackness, Mexicans, recognition rights for women and notions of equity and equality in general. Over time and as the empire expanded, the enemy would include any group—or any idea—that posed a threat to the nation’s prevailing power structures.

Despotic ideologies such as this reject the historical conditions by which social relations are constructed, instead representing them as outside of history, as inevitable and natural, while disguising their underlying belief systems as common sense facts. According to Anne Makus, presenting events and practices as ahistorical truths allows problematic events to be framed as unproblematic and a “natural” consequence of society. By losing their postulational status, beliefs are transformed into narrative truths that are immune to differing accounts of events.

Ultimately, the ideological function of the founders’ origin story myths, cultural imaginaries and their corresponding discourse or “narrative truths” resulted in a what Cultural theorist Raymond Williams describes as a “complex interlocking of political, social and cultural forces” known as hegemony.

A Revolution for “Great and Overgrown Rich Men”

Historian Gary B. Nash documented how, for over a century prior to the American Revolution, an elite class of white male landowners, slaveholders and large-scale merchants dominated the political, economic and cultural landscape of the thirteen British settler colonies. In 1770, Boston’s top 1% of the population owned 44% city’s wealth. In the late 17th century the wealthiest 10% of all colonists owned approximately 47% of all the wealth; and by 1775 the wealthiest 10% owned roughly 65% of all the wealth. During the 18th century approximately 30% of all British colonists were free white men, with about 50% of those men owning land, though most of them did not own enough land to be considered wealthy. Approximately 20% of all colonists were Black slaves, and 50% were poor white indentured servants.

At the outset, the privatization of land in the British settler colonies occurred through the genocidal project that is settler colonialism and later through the transfer or privatization of state (“public”) land. According to historian Meyer Weinberg and economists Engerman & Gallman, seized land was often awarded to individuals and families based on their location to power and influence within seats of government and became the basis for commercial pursuits and further accumulation of private wealth. Increasingly during the 18th century, land acquisition and allocation was sold for profit and speculation.

As documented by historian Howard Zinn, the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, the first and second Continental Congress and Continental Army Officers primarily came from the landed gentry of British settler colonial society. With high unemployment and hunger fueling class upheaval following the French and Indian War (1754-1763), aristocratic colonial leaders faced the prospect of waging war against Britain, while also “maintaining control over” the discontented “crowds at home.” During the delegates elections for a convention to frame a Pennsylvania constitution in 1776, a Committee of Privates (composed of white working class enlisted militiamen), “urged voters to oppose ‘great and overgrown rich men” for “they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.” According to historians Young, Raphael and Nash, these sentiments led the Committee of Privates to draw up a bill of rights for the convention stating, “an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.”

According to Zinn, the populist discourse of the Declaration of Independence, which declared the right to “popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks,” proved to unite large enough numbers of white settler colonists to actively rebel against Britain. This propaganda-based document was highly effective in shaping popular opinion by appealing to the yearnings of disenfranchised white settler colonists as a means to unite against a common enemy. Of course, large populations were left out of the populist cause elicited by the Declaration of Independence; namely Black slaves, Native people and in many regards white women. This reality would only become further institutionalized following the War of Independence. It would also turn out that the aristocratic founders were indeed “apt to be framing [class] distinctions in society” as many white working class militiamen had feared.

As Historian Gordon S. Wood explained, in 1776, immediately after issuing the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, a committee of the Second Continental Congress was charged with drafting the first U.S. Constitution known as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. It was signed by Congress in 1777 and ratified by representatives from all thirteen states in 1781. The Articles established the U.S. to be a confederation of sovereign states, with appointed representatives from the thirteen states making up a national government. Under the Articles the national government was composed of a legislature consisting of one house in which states had equal voting power. There was not an executive branch or a general judiciary. This new national government was charged with overseeing domestic relations with Native tribes, international diplomacy and conducting the war with Britain.

According to Charles A. Beard, at the end of the War of Independence in 1783, establishing a cohesive economy and infrastructure overseen by common laws proved to be difficult under the decentralized system of government outlined by the Articles of Confederation. This was especially challenging during a time of economic instability due to immense war debt. Congress lacked the authority to tax and collect debt directly, to stabilize legal tender and regulate commerce since state legislatures were often unresponsive to these demands, operating without legal restrictions or judicial oversight.

For many former colonial noblemen known as Federalists—who made up a majority in most state legislatures and the Continental Congress—the Articles of Confederation were failing to secure the protection and advancement of their personalty or personal property (movable assets). Many southern plantation owners were also Federalists since their wealth was also largely held in personal property (including slaves) and therefore tied to the same economic interests as northern merchants and financiers. According to Beard, this aristocratic class of large-scale farm owners, merchants, shippers, bankers, speculators, and private and public securities holders believed that a more powerful federal government was required to protect their economic interests.

A minority coalition within the Continental Congress whose economic interests were primarily tied to real (landed) property were known as Anti-federalists. This group of white wealthy male freeholders, small business owners and middle-class, tenant and debtor settler farmers equated concentrated federal power with British rule and therefore preferred a weak central government that would not “tread” on individual rights and state sovereignty.

A Constitution for “The Minority of the Opulent”

As Michael Cain and Keith Dougherty documented, the eruption of Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 only strengthened the Federalist cause. This indebted settler farmer rebellion against the state of Massachusetts was fueled by high taxes and farm foreclosures in western Massachusetts, a mounting crisis that was sweeping across the new republic. Noah Brooks chronicled how General Henry Knox, a major public securities holder, wrote to George Washington in response to this “desperate debtor” rebellion of farmers, laborers and Revolutionary War veterans:

The people who are the insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes – But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is ‘That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and for justice, and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth.’ In a word they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws, which are easily effected by means of un-funded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases whatever.

As Beard explained “the southern planter was also as much concerned in maintaining order against slave revolts as the creditor in Massachusetts was concerned in putting down Shays’ ‘desperate debtors.’” This proved to be a precarious time for the new nation’s elite, which was exalting the virtues of freedom, liberty and democracy while simultaneously taking action to establish new and improved systems of domination. Insurrection was indeed a clear and present danger to the post-war aristocracy within this decentralized and tumultuous landscape.

In 1787 the Federalists in Congress called on state legislatures to send delegates to a Convention in Philadelphia for a single and stated purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. Members of Congress quietly went to Philadelphia, with a majority of them intent on constructing a federal government powerful enough to protect their class interests. The first order of business, according to Gerald J. Fresia and Robert W. Hoffert, was for the convention delegates to agree to a secrecy clause concerning their decision-making deliberations. As reported by Beard, the delegates were not only acting to protect their personalty interests from foreign competitors, but as importantly, against the threat the domestic unpropertied masses posed to their wealth and power.

James Madison receives endless accolades for his enlightened roles in the founding of the United States, including the title of “Father of the Constitution.” Like most of the founding fathers, Madison was explicit in his undemocratic aims for the new nation. As documented by Steve Coffman, during the construction of the U.S. Constitution, when deliberating over two of the pillars of a substantive democracy—universal suffrage and the equal distribution of resources— Madison argued, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure,” and “agrarian law would soon take place,” one that distributes land to the landless. Therefore, according to Coffman, Madison argued, “our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country” through the protection of property rights. More explicitly, Madison went on to pronounce, “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests” thus making the charge of government “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

According to the Yale University political theorist Robert A. Dahl and author Daniel Lazare, under the terms of the Articles of Confederation, which was the law of the land during the Philadelphia Convention, the 1787 Constitution was, in fact, an illegal usurping. The Articles were clear in stipulating that there had to be unanimous approval of all thirteen states to approve constitutional change. Yet those who attended the Philadelphia convention unilaterally changed the ratification rule to nine states, which was by no coincidence the number of states that initially ratified the Constitution of 1787. This strategic and unconstitutional move on the part of the Federalists in Congress was an attempt to work around the significant opposition from Anti-federalists. Lazare went on to claim, “the assertion that ‘We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America’ implies a right not only to create new frames of government but to abrogate old ones when they are no longer serving their purposes.”

Dahl and Beard point out that when it came to choosing delegates for the Philadelphia Convention, a large body of aristocrats were selected by state legislatures that were elected according to suffrage laws requiring “high property qualifications” relating to taxpayer status aligned with the amount or worth of one’s real property and/or personalty holdings. According to Beard, when delegates for the Convention were chosen, “representatives of personalty in the legislature were able by the sheer weight of their combined intelligence and economic power to secure delegates from the urban centres or allied with their interests.” Beard went on to explain, “Thus the heated popular discussion usually incident to such momentous political undertakings was largely avoided, an orderly and temperate procedure in the selection of delegates was rendered possible.” In essence, the majority of the new nation’s inhabitants and citizens were intentionally excluded from participating in the construction of the United States Constitution.

According to Coffman, when voting rights for citizens of the new nation were being decided, James Madison expressed his concern that if they were extended “equally to all…the rights of property or the claims of justice may be overruled by a majority without property.” John Jay, a Federalist “founding father” and a member of Congress who went on to become the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is famous for making the intent of the Constitution even more explicit by boldly stating, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” During deliberations on voting rights, James Madison expressed his belief that “freeholders of the country would be the safest depositors of republican liberty.” Within this context, Madison went on to caution his peers to consider the imminent rise of the industrial working-class and the threat they would pose to the nation’s “opulent” minority:

In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of, property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation: in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands.

Madison also expressed his concerns that if given suffrage rights, the ominous industrial masses could be coerced or bribed into doing the bidding of divergent ruling class political ambitions. As Madison put it, the unpropertied, “will become the tools of opulence & ambition.” Clearly one of Madison’s primary concerns was how the expansion of suffrage could undermine his desires to create a republican fiefdom.

Gouverneur Morris was an influential “founding father” and close ally of Madison who is often called the “Penman of the Constitution.” According to legal scholar Jennifer Nedelsky, Morris’s vision of the new nation was similar to his peers in that “public liberty” should not involve “direct participation in government.” Instead, according to Nedelsky, in Morris’s plan “the people… were not, in effect, to govern… they would choose their representatives and have the influence over them that frequent elections brought… [and] ‘in the course of things’ people would elect the great and wealthy as their representatives.”

An enthusiastic student of political economy, Morris was known for tirelessly working to ensure that the interconnected pillars of economic and political power of the new nation would be impermeable. In doing so, Morris envisioned and aggressively advocated for a market economy, one with a federal government that was constituted with the legal framework to ensure its permanency. Nedelsky went on to document how Morris was known for his “unqualified positions” that:

illuminate some of the most important and contested issues in American political thought: the status our Constitution accords… to private property, the relation between the values of republicanism and those of capitalism, and the distribution of economic and political power our system fosters.

While the Constitutional Convention’s secrecy clause conveniently provided cover for its authors’ anti-republican and anti-democratic intentions, Madison’s unapologetic and forthright style reveals how the Constitution was, in its own words, “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” Accordingly, Gordon S. Wood, explained, “the source of their difficulties came from too much local democracy, and that the solution was to limit this local democracy by erecting a more aristocratic structure over it.” The designers did allow for a semi-popular lower house of congress, yet counterbalanced with the advent of the U.S. Senate, which was to be elected by state legislatures with rotating terms of six years. The Senate should then be composed of, as Madison put it, “a portion of enlightened citizens whose limited number and firmness might seasonably interpose against impetuous councils.” According to Parenti, the founders often referenced the virtuous qualifications of “enlightened citizens” and “men of substance,” which served as code for those with the right race, gender, aristocratic breeding, wealth, education, and experience that bestowed one with a God given right to rule.

In all, seventy-four delegates were appointed by states to attend the Constitutional Convention while only fifty-five showed up, with many anti-federalists refusing to attend and a number leaving as it progressed, with others refusing to sign in protest. Rhode Island declined to send a delegate. Anti-federalists accused the Federalists of working to reproduce an order similar to the British Crown. In the end, this small group of opulent white men proceeded to draft the U.S, Constitution, which according to historian Gordon S. Wood, “was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period.”

As documented by Wood, a number of Anti-Federalists agreed to ratify the U.S. Constitution only on condition that a bill of rights was included as a means to put limits on federal power. Federalists in Congress begrudgingly agreed, despite their opposition to the idea. Federalists were concerned that by making certain rights explicit “the people” would expect protections for those rights alone, thus limiting future interpretations of the Constitution. James Madison in particular felt that a declaration of such rights would be “parchment barriers” (superficial protections) and wanted to rely on the sturdier measures already in place. According to professor of political science Michael P Federici, by parchment barriers, Madison meant:

…the relationship between the written and unwritten constitutions. There are paper boundaries and limits, what the Framers called “parchment barriers”, and there are unwritten boundaries and limits that are not so much legal as they are cultural, ethical, and religious. The preservation of a constitutional order depends, to a great extent, on the preservation of the unwritten boundaries and limits.

From Madison’s perspective, the great protectors of the private rights of the opulent against an organized majority included the “extent of territory” spelled out in the Constitution which separated people geographically; along with the “multiplicity of interest” between the classes. To Madison these classes included, “those who are without property…those who are creditors, and those who are debtors… [a] landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…actuated by different sentiments and views.” According to Madison:

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure…the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

Always the brilliant political operative, Madison took on the task of drafting a bill of rights with the belief that the disorderly demand for such rights was on the one hand a grave problem, yet also presented an opportunity for a strategic solution. His proposed amendments were jubilantly ratified in 1791, effectively thwarting Anti-Federalist efforts to alter the Constitution while successful garnering loyalty for the Constitution from “the great mass of the people.” According to the U.S. Constitutional scholar Robert A. Goldwin, by engendering a sturdy “national sentiment” in support of the Constitution, Madison:

…took the decisive step toward establishing an independent force in the society, a devotion to the Constitution powerful enough to restrain a malevolent majority. Madison saw that the proposed amendments could make the Constitution universally revered…he saw the Constitution itself, not the amendments, as the sturdy barrier to fend off majority oppression and defend private rights. A bill of rights added to the intact Constitution would bring to it the only thing it presently lacked – the support of the whole people.

Madison not only outwitted the Anti-Federalists, but more ominously, he constructed a highly effective hegemonic instrument whereby the Bill of Rights would be widely considered as a sacred and uncontestable scroll embodying the epic virtues of U.S. democracy.

A Government “Over the People”

According to Goldwin and Kaufman and Blau and Moncada at its core, the U.S. Constitution outlines all the things the federal government cannot do, known as negative rights. Paul Finkelman describes the difference between negative and positive rights as being “freedom from” versus “freedom to.” According to Charles Fried, “a negative right is a right that something not be done to one, that some particular imposition be withheld.”

Simply, the founders encoded negative rights into the U.S. Constitution to ensure that government would protect the property rights bestowed upon “the minority of the opulent” by divine authority. In doing so, according to Cass Sunstein, negative rights bolster the ideology and rule of law of free-market capitalism. In terms of the founders’ Constitution, Sunstein interprets the intent of negative rights in important ways:

Most of the so-called negative rights require governmental assistance, not governmental abstinence. Consider, for example, the right to private property. As Bentham wrote, “Property and law are born and must die together. Before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.” As we know and live it, private property is both created and protected by law; it requires extensive governmental assistance. The same point holds for the other foundation of a market economy, the close sibling of private property: freedom of contract. For that form of freedom to exist, it is extremely important to have reliable enforcement mechanisms in the form of civil courts.

Cornell professor of law Laura Underkuffler also emphasized in 2003 that the “idea of the Constitution as a charter of negative rights – and of the right to the protection of property as simply one of those rights – is an entrenched feature of American political and legal discourse.” New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Gezim Bajrami confirmed in 2013, “Time and time again, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no affirmative constitutional obligations to the public.”

According to Finkleman, positive rights necessitate “affirmative obligations on the part of government to fulfill the right.” Therefore, positive rights enable a nation-state’s constitution to guarantee a political economy that prioritizes egalitarianism in the social, political, cultural, economic and environmental realms. Positive rights enable government to proactively intervene to ensure universal and equitable access to a living income, housing, holistic education, health care, nutritious food, clean water and a healthy and sustainable environment. Positive rights can empower (not hinder) government to forcefully protect individuals and groups of people from forms of domination and targeted violence. As CeÂcile Fabre emphasizes, a nation-state constituted by positive rights would need to guarantee “that a democratic majority should not be able to repeal these rights and that certain institutions, such as the judiciary, should be given the power to strike down laws passed by the legislature that are in breach of those rights.”

Instead, the founders constructed the U.S. Constitution to forever deter emancipatory strivings and collective interests that are inherent to egalitarian societies.

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The Bill of Rights only reinforced negative rights based prohibitions on Congress concerning intervention in the press, speech, religion, assembly, bearing of arms, etc. By doing so, these purported “civil liberties” fortify the Constitution’s undemocratic foundations and its primary function of harnessing the majoritarian menace to further buttress, both legally and ideologically, the primacy of property rights. As Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals stressed in 1983, “the Constitution is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties… The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that Government might do too little for the people but that it might do too much to them.”

According to Daniel Lazare, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights assign responsibility for civil liberties to the Supreme Court, essentially relieving the semi-elected branches of government, chiefly Congress “institutionally irresponsible” and civil liberties “de-politicized.” Lazare went on to explain:

Thus was born the peculiar rhythm of American politics in which politicians or the people at large go on periodic rampages in which they lynch, terrorize, and generally trample democratic rights until they are finally brought up short by the courts. Then everyone involved congratulates themselves that the system has worked, that the abuse has been corrected, that the majority has been reined in— until some new eruption sets the cycle going again.

Furthermore, the rights of speech, press, assembly, etc., are the means by which the commercial and propertied class instills their ideological, political, economic and social agenda via a free-marketplace of ideas; whereby access is determined by one’s wealth, race, gender, religion and influence. Not coincidentally, the Bill of Rights only applies to federal and state government action, not to the actions of private business and its agents. All in all, “the commons” became the property of the opulent.

According to Michael Parenti, the U.S. Constitution created a form of government and a political system that prevented “the people” from finding horizontal cohesion and instead “was designed to dilute their vertical force, blunting its upward thrust upon government by interjecting indirect and staggered forms of representation.” To do so, according to historian Morton White, a system of checks was constructed to safeguard against Madison’s expressed fears of “agrarian attempts” and “symptoms of a leveling spirit” by “the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.”

The Autocratic First Amendment

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is widely heralded as the foundational gem of the Bill of Rights and the unambiguous signifier of “American Freedom and Democracy” It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

However, it can also be regarded as one of the most duplicitous instruments of U.S. hegemony.

In 1799, Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth made it clear that based on English common law, “this country remains the same as it was before the Revolution.” Eight years earlier, with this understanding, the founders applied English common-law when drafting the First Amendment, specifically in terms of the doctrine of “no prior restraint.”

In 1769 William Blackstone, the celebrated “compiler of English law” and major influence on the founding fathers, explained the doctrine of no prior restraint:

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every free man has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity.

Thus, the First Amendment follows the directive of no prior restraint by prohibiting government from forbidding a “free man” from expressing the “sentiments he pleases before the public.” Yet, if the government determines such “sentiments” to be seditious libel after the fact, prosecution is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. As Howard Zinn put it, to this day the First Amendment under no prior restraint has an important caveat in that:

You can say whatever you want, print whatever you want. The government cannot stop you in advance. But once you speak or write it, if the government decides to make certain statements “illegal,” or to define them as “mischievous” or even just “improper,” you can be put in prison.

This little known yet significant twist on American freedom of expression not only criminalizes dissent after the fact, it also serves the purpose of having a powerful chilling effect in advance. Zinn goes on to explain how, “An ordinary person, unsophisticated in the law, might respond, ‘You say you won’t stop me from speaking my mind–no prior restraint. But if I know it will get me in trouble, and so remain silent, that is prior restraint.”

Yet, in the subsequent two centuries, the U.S. federal government (including the Supreme Court) has also successfully restricted freedom of expression in advance under the rationale of “national security,” most often relating to those who attempt to expose the nation’s nefarious covert and undemocratic activities around the globe. While the First Amendment is explicit in that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” just seven years after Congress passed the amendment, Congress turned around and did just that in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts.

President John Adams and other Federalist leaders expedited the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts under the rational that French and Irish revolutions would spark an egalitarian revolution at home, incited by French and Irish immigrant agitators and foreign spies. Feeding this narrative, a Federalist newspaper of the time claimed Jacobin (egalitarian) French tutors were attempting to corrupt America’s youth, “to make them imbibe, with their very milk, as it were, the poison of atheism and disaffection.” Long-time Massachusetts politician and Federalist Harrison Gray Otis declared in 1797 that he “did not wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments” and landing in the U.S. “to cavil against the Government, and to pant after a more perfect state of society.”

The Alien Acts included “An Act Concerning Aliens” (enacted June 25, 1798, with a two-year expiration date) which authorized the president to deport any resident alien considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Alien Acts also included “An Act Respecting Alien Enemies” (or Alien Enemies Act), which was enacted on July 6, 1798 (with no expiration date), authorizing the president to detain and deport resident aliens whose home countries were at war with the United States.

Enacted July 14, 1798, with an expiration date of March 3, 1801, the Sedition Act applied to U.S. citizens, authorizing the prosecution, imprisonment or large fine of any person who:

…shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government.

As Zinn pointed out, “the Sedition Act was a direct violation of the Constitution. But here we get our first clue to the inadequacy of words on [“parchment”] paper in ensuring the rights of citizens.”

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was revised and further codified by Congress with the passing of the Espionage Act of 1917. This reaffirmation of the duplicitous nature of the founders’ Constitution and governing structures was intended to stifle growing resistance against social conditions domestically and the expansion of U.S. imperialism, particularly on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I. The Espionage Act of 1917 in part read:

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, shall wilfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall wilfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

As a means to more effectively crush growing dissent domestically, in 1918 (after the U.S. entered WWI) the Sedition Act was passed as an amendment to the Espionage Act, further restricting free expression. It read in part:

Whoever, when the United States is at war… shall willfully make or convey false reports, or false statements… or incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct… the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, or… shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States… or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully… urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production… or advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than 20 years, or both.

During World War I, federal prosecutors enacted the Espionage Act in over 2,000 cases. While no convictions resulted from charges of spying or sabotage, 1,055 convictions resulted from prohibitions on free speech under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, largely targeting labor leaders, civil rights activists, Black and leftist journalists and publishers, war critics, pacifists, anti-conscription activists, socialists, communists, anarchists and civil libertarians.

In 1919 the Supreme Court actively safeguarded the Espionage Act against constitutional challenges in Schenck v. United States. This case involved Charles T. Schenck, the secretary of the Socialist Party of America, who was convicted by a lower court under the Espionage Act after engaging in counter military recruitment activities by distributing leaflets that encouraged prospective military draftees to refuse military service. The first side of Schenck’s leaflet argued that the Conscription Act (the draft) violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude and was a “monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few.” It urged recipients to “petition for the repeal of the act” because the war was being spun by “cunning politicians and a mercenary capitalist press.” Schenck appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that his First Amendment rights were violated. The Court ruled against Schenck, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. stating:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Thus, the well-known legal rationale against “falsely shouting fire in a theatre” became a metaphor for the limits of free speech in America, namely serving as code against dissent that disrupts U.S. hegemony. Schenck went on to serve six months in a federal prison.

During the same period, the U.S. Supreme Court also upheld the conviction of labor leader and Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was charged under the Espionage Act for making an anti-war speech in 1918. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. This was not the first time Debs had been imprisoned for his “un-American” activities, yet the Espionage Act served its purpose in making it easier to silence Debs (and other dissidents), hopefully once and for all.

The Supreme Court case of Stokes v. United States (1920) involved the prosecution of reproductive rights and labor activist Rose Pastor Stokes, who was given a ten year prison sentence for simply writing in a local newspaper, “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”

In 1917 Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, the publishers of the Black political and literary magazine The Messenger, were arrested under the Espionage Act when they wrote:

Our claim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times… Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently, the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.

Some Supreme Court decisions that reinforced the Espionage and Sedition Acts did not target radicals or dissidents. One such case involved the United States v. Nagler in 1918, which led to the conviction of the Assistant Secretary of State for the State of Wisconsin, Louis B. Nagler. Nagler was prosecuted after simply telling a group of YMCA or the Red Cross canvassers for the war effort who showed up at his office door, “I am through contributing to your private grafts. There is too much graft in these subscriptions. No, I do not believe in the work of the YMCA or the Red Cross, for I believe they are nothing but a bunch of grafters.”

In the case of the United States v. The Spirit of ’76, Robert Goldstein, the producer of the patriotic Revolutionary War movie The Spirit of ’76, was charged under the Espionage Act in 1917 for his film’s graphically unfavorable portrayal of Great Britain, which was America’s primary World War I ally. Federal prosecutors charged that Goldstein had deliberately made a pro-German movie to impugn America’s ally, incite disloyalty and obstruct military conscription. Goldstein who was Jewish (Anti-Semitism was rife in the U.S.) and of German descent, claimed that his intent in making the film was to make money and boost the patriotic mood of the country. He was given a ten-year prison sentence and fined $5,000.

The Sedition Act was repealed in 1921 while the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1917 have endured into the 21st century. According to Emily Peterson, “The Espionage Act is so vague and poorly defined in its terms, that it’s hard to say exactly what it does and does not cover.”

Diluting the Impact of Popular Sentiments

The Constitution dictates that an Electoral College, not the general electorate or a majority of citizen voters, will choose the U.S. president. Within this undemocratic scheme, voters are actually casting a vote for presidential “electors” tied to the major elite political parties of each state, the numbers of which are based on the number of state Congressional seats. These electors are collectively known as the Electoral College. According to Article II of the Constitution, “Each state shall appoint, such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.” Translation: state legislatures, not citizens within a state, decide which presidential candidate will receive the state’s electoral votes. These appointed electors, who make up the anonymous Electoral College, are in essence political establishment insiders, who are subject to lobbying efforts, and in many states can roguely decide who they vote for, or if they will even vote at all. According to FairVote, for a presidential candidate to win an election within this system, one must receive over half of the Electoral College votes (in the 21st century, that would be 270 electoral votes out of the 538 national electors). The result is that presidential elections are largely symbolic exercises intended to keep the masses tied to the established order, where the democratic principle of one-person one-vote is prohibited.

As Dahl and Lazare point out, the U.S. Supreme Court was established to exist outside of any form of democratic deliberation and public scrutiny. Instead, imperious and impervious Supreme Court justices are appointed for life by a president and confirmed by a semi-aristocratic Senate (to this day), of which was chosen by state legislatures until 1913. The more popularly elected (yet also largely wealthy) House of Representatives were excluded from these deliberations. This leaves the Supreme Court—the least democratic branch of government—responsible for deciding if and how the rights of the masses are recognized and dispersed, while “elected” representatives stand idle. Accordingly Lazare notes, “rallying behind the Supreme Court” means “rallying behind the Constitution in toto” and “ignoring the constitutional system’s many unsavory aspects.”

The founders’ crafty and abstruse power-sharing arrangement made it difficult to determine where true authority lay, be it in Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court or the citizenry at the municipal, state or federal level. As Lazare put it, instead of having a form of government that would serve as “an instrument that ‘We the People’ would create and shape to further our own rule” the Constitution solidified a system of government intended to “create and shape the people in order to further its own rule.” Instead of being a government “of the people” it would be a government “over the people.” Parenti goes on to explain that in keeping with their desire to disenfranchise the majority, the founders included these “auxiliary precautions” that were “designed to fragment power without democratizing it.” Parenti goes on to explain:

In separating the executive, legislative, and judiciary functions and then providing a system of checks and balances among the various branches, including staggered elections, executive veto, Senate confirmation of appointments and ratification of treaties, and a bicameral legislature, they hoped to dilute the impact of popular sentiments. They also contrived an elaborate and difficult process for amending the Constitution.

Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution plays a crucial role in the founders’ undemocratic design by requiring a process whereby a proposed Constitutional amendment has to first pass a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate, or through a convention called by Congress based on a request from two-thirds of the states. If a proposed amendment successfully traverses its way through either pathway, it then has to be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures. As University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner describes it, “Any proposal to amend the Constitution is idle because it’s effectively impossible… an amendment requires a supermajority twice—the pig must pass through two pythons.” Two hundred years later, after 11,539 proposed amendments, only 27 have been ratified. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments which expanded status rights to former slaves, passed only because the defeated and occupied South was strong-armed into ratifying them, yet as examined later, were not compelled to enforce them. Between 1870 and today only 12 amendments have been enacted, with the last one taking 203 years to be ratified. Posner goes to point out how this labyrinth has led to a reliance on begging the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution in new ways by hiring “lawyers to formulate their proposals as already reflected in the Constitution rather than argue that the Constitution got the position wrong and so should be changed.” According to Gordon Wood, the very concept of democracy was hijacked and appropriated by the U.S. Constitution in that:

By the end of the debate over the Constitution, it was possible for the Federalists to describe the new national government, even with its indirectly elected president and Senate, as “a perfectly democratical form of government.” The houses of representatives lost their exclusive connection with the people. Representation was now identified simply with election; thus, all elected officials, and, for some, even those not elected, such as judges, were considered somehow “representative” of the people. Democracy rapidly became a generic label for all American government.

In addition to the undemocratic federal government, all 50 states would, in time, establish state constitutions modeled after the federal constitution (to varying degrees), with legislative and executive branches that are semi-popularly elected to develop and administer policies and laws; with state Supreme Courts that preside over legal appeals. State constitutions also establish mechanisms for local governance at the county, municipal or township level where voters popularly elect some variation of town or city managers and/or councils to make and administer local policies and ordinances. It is at the municipal level that the more direct forms of democracy were possible, at least for white men. The town meeting model, where all eligible voters meet to make local governance decisions and elect officials to implement their decisions, was a common form of local governance during the 18th and 19th centuries. State and municipal governments also have a sordid history concerning suffrage rights, often disenfranchising groups of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender.

The original Constitution left complete discretion to individual states in determining voter qualifications, rules on absentee voting, polling hours and election funding. In most states there is a lot of leeway given to counties in crafting their own ballots, designing and implementing their own voter education programs, deciding how they will handle overseas ballots, the ability to hire and train poll workers, choosing polling locations and in how to maintain their voter registration lists.

Over time (between 1870 to 1972), with the enactment of the 14th, 15th, 19th 23rd, 24th and 26th Constitutional Amendments, various forms of legal discrimination were explicitly prohibited when establishing qualifications for suffrage. It is still legally permissible for states to deny the “right to vote” for other reasons and many have effectively done so as a means to continue to disenfranchise groups of people based on race, ethnicity and class. The 17th Amendment, which enabled U.S. Senators to be directly elected, did not result from popular democratic strivings. Instead, it resulted from pundit and legislator frustrations over corruption, instability, conflict and deadlock due to the indirect process hampering legislative efficiency. In her book Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters, Victoria Bassetti sums up suffrage rights this way:

The original document establishing our government acknowledges and weaves slavery deeply into our society. Women cannot vote. Two of the three major federal officers, President and Senator, are not voted on by the people. And there is not a right to vote in the Constitution. The word ‘vote’ appears in the Constitution as originally drafted only in relation to how representatives, senators, and presidential electors perform their duties. Representatives vote. But the people’s vote is not mentioned.

The Bill of Rights did not change this fact. Over two hundred years later the Supreme Court appointed George Bush to be president, and in the process reaffirmed this point in their decision by stating, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.” The double rub here is that the court was referring to a citizen’s rights to vote for Electoral College electors, not the right to vote directly for a presidential candidate.

While allowing citizens to feel as though they have a voice in the political system, the form of “democracy” outlined in the Constitution is clearly designed to impede the citizenry from determining both domestic and foreign policy. Ultimately, the founders crafted a system that allowed select groups of people to have the right to citizenship, privileging a smaller proportion of them to indirectly choose the best “men of substance,” filtered through narrowly prescribed partisan commitments as a means to preserve the wealth and power of the post-revolutionary ruling class. Within this constitutional framework, hegemonic cultural scripts tied to institutional authority perpetuate systemic inequities. In a constitutional republic without positive constitutional rights that mandate parity of political participation and economic redistribution, whilst remedying existing cultural prohibitions on recognition and representation rights; social equity and economic equality will persistently be denied, undermined and contested.

“Unfit to associate with the white race”

One can choose to believe the various cultural myths about how the freedom loving founders despised slavery, but did not work to end it based on a variety of factors, including: timing, not wanting to disrupt a widely accepted and profitable institution, and the need to accommodate the southern plantation system. No matter the rationale, the truth is that it was not in the founders’ political and economic interests to do so, nor is there evidence that they had the moral capacity to end one of the most horrific enterprises in human history. What is clear is that the U.S. Constitution was written to protect slavery while empowering slaveholders in numerous ways. This was demonstrated by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s boastings in front of the South Carolina House of Representatives following the Constitutional Convention about how slavery was secured within the Constitution:

We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them [slaves], for no such authority is granted and it is admitted, on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution, and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states.

As documented by Barbara Fields, the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, states were allowed to count three-fifths of their slaves in apportioning representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College. This effectively increased the political power of southern states and thus granted greater protections for the institution of slavery. This disproportionate political power through the Electoral College led to Thomas Jefferson’s 1800 presidential win. The Constitution also had a provision (fugitive slave clause) that aided slaveholders in recovering fugitive slaves, particularly those who sought sanctuary in “free” states and territories. It protected slave-owners rights to human property and made the act of aiding a fugitive slave a constitutional offense. The Second Amendment is also considered to have been, in part, a means to protect slave-owners from slave insurrections.

Another Constitutional provision focused on the highly lucrative enterprise that was the Atlantic slave trade. It read in part, “[t]he migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 1808.” It also allowed for “a tax or duty” to be “imposed on such importation…” for as long as the trade remained legal. This did not mean that slavery was to be abolished in 1808, but only that the import of new slaves would be discontinued.

As with settler colonialism, America’s domestic slave trade is the story of the founding of the United States. As many scholars have documented, including Du Bois, McInnis and Finkelman, the slave trade was a major economic engine, which fueled the prosperity of the new nation, with profits from enslaved people flowing to many locations in the North and South. Traders and slave owners throughout the South profited by selling human property while others profited from the forced labor it provided in the cotton and sugar fields. So did intermediary suppliers along with carriers in the steamboat, railroad and shipping industries. Naturally, northern capitalists profited as investors in banks in the exchange of money for people as did the companies that provided insurance for the owners’ investments in enslaved labor. So did foreign investors in Southern securities, some of which were issued on mortgaged slaves. The hub of the nation’s cotton textile industry was based in New England, where “enlightened” gentry enriched themselves from the misery of southern slave labor.

Following its Constitutional mandate, the Act of 1807 was the legislation that officially ended U.S. participation in the international slave trade, but not the domestic slave trade. It levied heavy fines and possible imprisonment on those who attempted to import slaves to the United States. This piece of legislation was underfunded and often not enforced, and when it was enforced, it was another source of revenue with its stiff fines and valuable legal merchandise. These realities enabled a smaller yet profitable human smuggling industry to exist in the U.S. until the middle of the 19th century. When illegal smugglers were caught, their human merchandise was seized and sold to U.S. slave owners (Du Bois, Fehrenbacher and Finkelman). The Constitution would continuously be used until the Civil War to defend the institution of slavery from federal intervention and actions taken by an increasingly militant abolition movement.

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled on the Dred Scott v. Sanford case, based on Scott’s lawsuit to gain his and his family’s freedom in the slave state of Missouri after they had previously lived in a free state and territory. In delivering the majority decision against Scott, Chief Justice Roger Taney held that under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, Black people “could never be citizens of the United States.” Taney explained that when the Constitution was ratified, Blacks were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit.”

The standing of free Black Americans under the Constitution remained vague for decades to come. The Bill of Rights did not defend free Black Americans from municipal and state laws intent on depriving them of (parchment barrier) Constitutional rights. This cultural and legal reality set the stage for Jim Crow laws in the South and its manifestations nationwide into the 21st century.

In an 1852 Fourth of July speech, the formidable Fredrick Douglas called out the true nature of the institution of slavery in the United States:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Conclusion

While the Bill of Rights and a few subsequent amendments have provided some democratizing effects, they have strictly been limited to affirmative remedies for injustices (instead of transformative remedies associated with dismantling). These tend to be reformist in nature and as Nancy Fraser frames such measures, are “aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them.” Affirmative “remedies” are thus akin to negative rights and often come from state and private powers making limited and ultimately temporary accommodations to justice-seeking collective struggles, frequently through the utilization of disruptive tactics and strategies. In contrast, the inherently violent cultural, political and economic structures that are protected by the U.S. Constitution prohibit transformative remedies intended (analogous to positive rights) to eliminate the root causes of social inequity and economic inequality. According to historian Howard Zinn the American Revolution and its resulting Constitution, “was a work of genius” in that it “created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.”

At its core, the U.S. Constitution was designed to safeguard a settler colonial society overseen by the supreme laws of capitalism, Christianity, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. By doing so, it entrenched deep structural disparities in participation that subvert collective strivings for social, economic and political justice. This denial of the basic means and opportunities for all inhabitants of a society to directly contest and deliberate as equals violates the very nature of public reason, the principle by which liberal democracies define themselves (as the U.S. defines itself). Moreover, for a society to be authentically democratic—as an essential determinant of justice—parity of participation is required to serve as the idiom of public contestation and deliberation whereby status equality and the equitable distribution of wealth can be attained. This would require a constitutional framework derived from the principles and practices of participatory parity, where positive rights as well as equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are indisputable.

With the advent of the U.S. Constitution and its consolidation of cultural, political, and economic power; slave owners and “captains of industry” alike were made to feel more secure knowing that a state or territorial governor could rely on a swift federal response when domestic disturbances was beyond the control of local police and state militia (Beard).

With the arrival of the 19th century, mercantilism and the smaller agrarian economy of the settler colonies of the U.S. were quickly being toppled, largely influenced by the 1776 publication of Scottish economist Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s magnum opus became the recipe for free-market capitalism, and is said to have been enthusiastically embraced by the founders of the new republic, and became the ideological and structural framework for the U.S. political economy. In Wealth of Nations Smith affirmed, over a decade prior to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, that a, “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

Decades after the drafting of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams proudly declaring, “from 15 to 20 legislatures of our own, in action for 30 years past, have proved that no fears of an equalization of property are to be apprehended from them.” Indeed, the U.S. Constitution was serving its purpose in guaranteeing that inequality would remain the supreme law of the land—at an increasing rate—far into the future. In the decades ahead, as industrial capitalism flourished and the settler colonial empire expanded, so would U.S. nationalism, constructing a base and superstructure Jefferson and his peers could have only dreamed of; one that would perfectly buttress the despotic structures they deeply embedded within their beloved Constitution.

Claudia Gay and "First Ones" in an Empire of Lies and Annihilation

[Pictured: Harvard University. Credit: BLOOMBERG]

By Kwaku Aurelien

The January 2nd announcement of Claudine Gay’s resignation from the position of President at Harvard University has caused quite a stir in American society, especially in the context of our current historical moment and the immense pressure under which Gay made her decision. Black Americans of prominence such as Jemele Hill took to social media in the short aftermath of the news coming out to defend Gay’s credentials against those who would label her an “Affirmative Action hire,” someone who made it to their position on the basis of their race rather than on merit. There are also tweets such as the one by Marc Lamont Hill below, reading, “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.”

In response, I have a few questions for Professor Hill. For one, after all the publicized scrutiny Claudine Gay was subject to, why should a Black woman, or any Black person for that matter, want to be President of Harvard University? Is it because of the name brand value of Harvard University? How much should that matter to Black people given the hell we just saw one of our own go through in what is supposed to be a position of power? But more importantly, what does a Black woman being President of Harvard University do for Black people, or for the Black student population at Harvard, one member of which wrote in this astounding piece for the Harvard Political Review how they’ve been questioned on how they got into the university, and on how they’ve called for Harvard to stop its commemoration of slave owners and profiteers.

Malcolm X is famous for saying, “The White man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.” My question to Marc Lamont Hill is, will a Black woman being the President of Harvard guarantee real justice for its Black students by making it more inclusive and benevolent towards them, or will that Black woman be nothing more than a symbol? 

The below clip is from a 1992 lecture delivered at Florida International University by Kwame Ture. If you don’t know him by that name, you may know him by his original name, Stokely Carmichael. In the clip, Ture — a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panther Party, a founder of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) during the Civil Rights Movement, and a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) upon moving to Africa — points out a gross contradiction within the Black community which persists to this day. Black people, who historically protest and battle against injustice as a mass, advance in American society strictly as individuals. Ture is adamant that if Black people struggle as a mass, the way to measure the progress of Black people in America is to evaluate whether or not the Black masses have advanced.

Advancement is measured qualitatively, not quantitatively; it is measured by the quality of life enjoyed by the Black masses, not by how many Black people do X or do Y. If the masses have not advanced, there is no progress at all. As Ture sees it, the advancement of Black individuals to prestigious jobs and positions has caused wool to be pulled over the eyes of those individuals. They become big-headed, and come to believe that by virtue of them being in their prestigious position, they are advancing the entirety of Black America.

At first listen, you might hear Ture say that there has been no progress for Black people since the 60s and think it’s a gross exaggeration of where we are and how far we’ve come. But what if I told you that, in 2008, PBS released a four-hour series called Unnatural Causes and an accompanying Health Equity Quiz, which showed that Black males in Harlem, New York had a lower life expectancy than males in Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world? Or what if I told you that the median wealth of Black Americans may fall to zero by 2053 assuming current trends continue?

Taking those, among other, things into consideration, was Ture really that far off? Even if he was, the individualist way of thinking he criticizes falls apart under close inspection, and it is a way of thinking we must collectively abandon in this new year. If Claudine Gay’s experience has taught us anything it is that, in 2024, Black people still have no institutional power in America. Gay took office as Harvard’s first Black President on July 1, 2023, and by the second day of 2024, she resigned amidst the internal and external scrutiny levied her way. No Black organization in this country has power comparable to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which put its own tweet endorsing Gay’s departure from Harvard. With no institutional control, there is no way for Black people in positions of power to effectively own those positions. The position is not a right, but a privilege that can be yanked away at a whim. A good example I can provide is the wave of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives which came about as a direct consequence of the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Those initiatives are largely getting rolled back, corporations’ alibi for their withdrawal being that they have come under economic and political pressure from the right wing. I say none of what I say as an indictment of Claudine Gay, but rather as a call to action for my Black readers to demand better alternatives for themselves. Or alternatively, to put our heads together so that we may create better alternatives for ourselves.

There are Black faces in high faces worth condemning; however, therein lies the meaning of the title of this article: “Claudine Gay and ‘First Ones’ in an Empire of Lies & Annihilation.” Amidst a genocide in Gaza armed and funded by the United States government, within that government are the First Black Woman Vice President; the First Black Secretary of Defense, a Raytheon board member supposed to have been recused from the company for four years; and the First Black White House Press Secretary.

Palestinians, who have demonstrated solidarity with Black Americans against police violence on numerous occasions amidst their ethnic cleansing, had to listen to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman and President Biden’s Ambassador to the United Nations, say that Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions has no place at the UN, and more recently to veto a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza with an unconditional release of all hostages on behalf of the United Empire. They have had to watch Karine Jean-Pierre attack Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC when it was convenient only to now be the one of the most visible spokespeople for an administration whose belligerence against them is finally making Americans pay attention to their plight.

It behooves us to care about the Palestinians’ plight, because the violence visited on them comes back to do us harm here at home. Black activists in Atlanta against the construction of “Cop City” have for years highlighted the relationship between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. GILEE is a policing exchange allowing for training between various sects of Georgia police and the IDF. One of the grosser tactics the IDF has exchanged with Georgia police under GILEE is firearm “racking.” To inspire fear, Israeli officers will draw the slide on their gun all the way back and then quickly release to send off a misfired round. This is what is being taught to Georgia officers, and you don’t have to be woke to know that Georgia’s Black residents are the ones who are going to be harassed the most with this behavior. Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, is a Black man, who identified as a progressive in the 2021 mayoral election, but who now pushes Cop City forward despite the sheer opposition to it from Weelaunee Forest communities, which are predominantly Black and/or low-income.

I tend to agree with the tweet below. The summer of 2020, which should have been an inflection point in this country’s history, became an opportunity upon which many Black people, middle class Black people especially, capitalized. “Black excellence,” which should have been a meaningful phrase illustrating the very best qualities of the Black community, became reason for Black individuals to perform acts they would nominally criticize White people for doing. These types will say that Black death has become commodified, and in the same vein become profiteers themselves.

“Black excellence” has become an effective tool in alienating Black individuals from the larger Black community. Take Claudine Gay; her role as university president effectively alienated her from the Black student population, members of which felt as though their right to free speech was unprotected and that they were easy targets of doxxing for their pro-Palestine advocacy. “Black excellence” has also made it exceedingly difficult for bourgeois Black folk to empathize with the plight of the Black poor and working class because they have developed opposing class interests and are unable or unwilling to put themselves in the shoes of those who don’t have what they have, and who bear the biggest burden of racism. I say this as a member of the Black middle class, mind you.

Too many of us have been or are all too eager to become Buffalo Soldiers for Empire, and we need to be called on it. Because if we intend on demonstrating true solidarity with Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere, as so many are now claiming to do in their Instagram stories, it starts with us scrutinizing the role of Black faces in high places in perpetuating American imperial crimes.

We must acknowledge that our freedom fighters – which include names like Kwame Ture, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur – never wanted this for us. These individuals opposed imperialism not only on the grounds that our struggle is interconnected with those the world over, but also on the grounds that making war is morally reprehensible. They understood that humanity is indivisible, and that one segment of humanity being discriminated against automatically diminished the rest. They fought to elevate us, so that we could elevate humanity. Proof of which, in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), Martin Luther King stated, “The wealthy nations of the world must promptly initiate a massive, sustained Marshall Plan for Asia, Africa and South America. If they would allocate just 2 percent of their gross national product annually for a period of ten or twenty years for the development of the underdeveloped nations, mankind would go a long way toward conquering the ancient enemy, poverty.” This would represent a constructive use of the United States’ vast resources, and it is indicative of the type of work we should be fighting for in the modern day. It is up to us now to follow the path our ancestors laid out for us, but we can only do it by honoring what they truly stood for, rather than just paying lip service to it.

We have to have the courage to speak truth to power, without regard for the consequences we think it may have in our social and professional lives. After what just happened to Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, what excuse do any of us have to be afraid?

Kwaku Aurelien is a student at UConn School of Law and an intern for Friends of the Congo (@congofriends on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook), a Washington D.C. based advocacy organization for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whose Touré is This?

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

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

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

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

Footnotes

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

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

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

Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?

By Carlos Garrido

Republished in modified form from the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis.

The question we are exploring today — the divorce of intellectuals from the working class — is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution [1]. The first thing to interrogate is what is presupposed in formulating the problem in such a manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual we have in mind.

The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have their lots tied to the dominant social system. They function as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie — the class enemy of most of humanity — and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of their class enemies. In the same manner Karl Marx described the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Antonio Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook — one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those who light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

But these intellectuals — the traditional intellectuals — are not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes — those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Friedrich Engels noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” who raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the W. E. B. Du Boises, the Herbert Apthekers, the Juan Marinellos, the Michael Parentis, and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, aligned their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power. 

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated? 

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, omit important aspects of the conversation. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery [2]. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us. 

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split.

We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible Lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school, they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.  

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshiping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debt, are told that — even with a PhD — they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to pay back the accumulated debt. They are told — specifically those with radical sensibilities — that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they mustn’t waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work — that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously paywalled journals or university editorial books — is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down. 

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask:

“Do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?”

“Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?” 

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the gods of resume evaluations.

“Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment?”

“Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorship, to teaching seven classes for half the pay of full professors who teach three?”

“Do you want to condemn your family to debt slavery for decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Re-proletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors. 

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of “radicals” writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism. 

Here it is!, the young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders — a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally sought to combat. 

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith.” Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backward rabble they must educate — and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables?

Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, woke to LGBT and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc., aren’t they backward? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go deliver them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much. 

I have presented the stories which are all too familiar to those of us still working in the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working-class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people. 

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? A blackballed Du Bois got to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School. Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, became the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Political Affairs. Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, the 1950s United States? 

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm. It is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure radical scholars are not forced to toe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will persist. 

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction. 

They are subjects of a tragedy. As G. W. F. Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here, a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.” 

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy — revolutionary and academic. Within existing institutions, there can be no reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the setup of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.” 

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counter-hegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions like the Hampton and Midwestern Marx Institutes, the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop and others. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They, just like everyone else, have bills to pay. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity to financially support both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have examined today. 

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban-American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

Footnotes

[1] For more on the indispensability of subjective conditions to social revolutions, see the last chapter of the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

[2] For more on imperialist efforts to create an inorganic left intelligentsia, see the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War, and Gabriel Rockhill’s forthcoming book, The Intellectual World War.

[3] In the last couple of decades, scholars like Anthony Monteiro (fired from Temple University for not toing the bourgeois line of the African American Studies department) and Norman Finklestein (“unceremoniously kicked out” of Hunter College for his pro-Palestine work) have been blackballed from the academy for their anti-establishment views. 

[4] China here is undoubtedly the only one capable of filling the shoes of the Soviet Union. Yet it has failed to meet the Soviet standard of international proletarian solidarity

Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

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DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.

Theoretical and Practical Self-Determination of Indigenous Nations in the Soviet Union

By Nolan Long

Introduction: Indigeneity in the Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was home to huge swaths of nationalities, including numerous Indigenous nations, many of which were located in Siberia. The Russian Empire, which preceded the Soviet Union, engaged in the systematic oppression of all minority nationalities, while promoting Great Russian nationalism. [1] As a result, it was a prime issue for the Bolsheviks to address national woes and relations. The Leninist approach to nationalities enshrined the equality of nations, opposed nationalism, and supported the unconditional right to self-determination. This right bore a special class character; in essence, the working and exploited classes of Indigenous nations gained the right to self-determination, not the ruling classes. The practical policies of the Soviets largely lined up with their theoretical outlaying, suggesting good faith on the part of the state towards the Indigenous peoples of the USSR.

One aspect of the Soviet approach to nationalities is that indigeneity, as such, was not expressly considered. While Indigenous nations were, in some cases, afforded special privileges, [2] Indigenous groups were firstly seen as minority nationalities, not as Indigenous nationalities. But it was because of the positive Soviet policy toward minority nationalities that Indigenous rights were, in some sense inadvertently, protected. The Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed Indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to flourish and experience a relatively high quality of living and independence, despite the lack of direct recognition of that indigeneity.

Indigenous groups in the Russian SFSR existed primarily in the North and the Far East. [3] Under the policy of the Russian Empire, the Indigenous peoples of these lands were negatively affected by the tsarist government. They were subjected to European diseases, resource extraction, settler colonialism, and induced alcoholism. [4] Contrastingly, the Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was based on development, socialism, and the right of nations to self-determination.  This essay deals with Soviet Indigenous groups generally while occasionally looking at the Yakut for specificity. The Sakha/Yakut are an Indigenous group in Siberia who, during the Soviet era, maintained their ancient cultural practices (such as reindeer breeding) while also industrially developing under Soviet policy. [5] The Yakut had their own autonomous region, which allowed them to maintain their own culture. [6] Soviet policy stated that Indigenous groups with a population over 50,000 were to be recognized as ethnic minorities, rather than Indigenous as such. [7] However, the Indigenous groups with populations over this threshold (including the Yakut) were allowed to assemble into ASSRs with the right to self-determination. [8] The Soviet approach was complex due to this mutual recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, and the lack of recognition of the status of certain Indigenous groups. This dichotomy necessitates a study into the theoretical policy of the Bolsheviks.

The Theoretical Marxist-Leninist Approach to Nationalities and Self-Determination

In 1914, V.I. Lenin wrote, “self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.” [9] It is undeniable that the Soviet conceptions of nations and self-determination differed significantly from the Western ones. [10] J.V. Stalin added to this definition: “the right to self-determination means that only the nation itself has the right to determine its destiny, that no one has the right forcibly to interfere in the life of that nation, to destroy its schools and other institutions, to violate its habits and customs, to repress its language, or curtail its rights.” [11] This conception mapped out the later Soviet practice, which allowed for the political independence of Finland and the Baltic states shortly after the Russian Revolution, even while the Western nations opposed Soviet support for self-determination. [12]

Western opposition to the self-determination of nations, in the Soviet sense, was opposition to the emancipation of Indigenous and minority nations from tsarist rule, as well as opposition to socialist sovereignty. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred argues that the Western model of sovereignty is incompatible with Indigenous governance methods/structures. Indigenous governance is traditionally without absolute authority, hierarchy, or classism. [13] In comparison, the Soviet model of sovereignty, derived from its theory of nations and the right to self-determination, seems to be more compatible with Indigenous society and governance, given its tendency towards class abolition.

But while Finland, the Baltic states, and others gained their independence on the basis of Soviet support for self-determination, none of the many Indigenous nations did. Whether this is because the Bolsheviks opposed the rights of Indigenous nations to secession, or because these nations did not want to secede, is undeniably a debated topic. However, the evidence seems to show that Indigenous groups (at least their previously exploited classes) supported the new government. For example, communists were at work in the Yakutia working-class and peasantry. [14] So, while they did not become independent, the Indigenous nations generally seem to have been in support of the new Russian Soviet Socialist state nonetheless.

The Leninist approach recognized the necessity of nations to be able to pursue their own paths of development and to protect their own cultures.  This doctrine was derived from two related sources: fighting Great Russian nationalism [15] and adhering to proletarian internationalism. [16] Great Russian nationalism was that of the dominating nationality, of the ruling class of the Russian Empire. As the Bolsheviks believed in the equality of nations, [17] they believed in the necessity of fighting this nationalism in tandem with their struggle against Russian tsarism and capitalism. Proletarian internationalism is the belief that the working classes of all nations should share a sense of brotherhood in their mutual struggles against their respective ruling classes. Resultingly, Lenin believed it was in the interests of the Great Russian proletariat to struggle against the oppression that their bourgeoisie imposed upon minority nations. [18] “The Leninist position is made up of two intersecting tendencies: an internationalist outlook, and a support for the right to self-determination.” [19]

The Bolshevik leaders said relatively little about indigeneity. Rather, they focused on the ‘national question,’ and thus viewed Indigenous nations as minority nationalities in most cases. Consequently, the Soviet Indigenous policy was bound up in the national policy. Lenin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive special status, but he “asserted the absolute, unconditional right of peoples to self-determination, including secession from a future socialist state.” [20] Stalin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive political independence, but said that all minority nationalities (thus inclusive of Indigenous groups) have the right “to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy…[and] the right to complete secession.” [21] This silence on the question of Indigeneity is at least partially attributable to the fact that the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party existed well before the modern centrality of Indigenous rights and politics on national and global stages. Nonetheless, the Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to experience cultural development and protection, and levels of independence unparalleled in the Western world.

The Question of Class

Both Lenin and Stalin made it clear that the right to self-determination had a class character. Lenin wrote that the proletarian approach to self-determination “supports the bourgeoisie only in a certain direction, but never coincides with the bourgeoisie’s policy.” [22] The Russian proletariat, he said, should support the right of the oppressed nationalities to form their own state, as this right opposes Great Russian nationalism. [23] Stalin also made it clear that the right to self-determination does not mean that the socialist state should support every aspect of that national independence, at least when its independence puts it under bourgeois rule. [24] Bedford offers a concise summation: “whether support for the cultural aspirations of an ethnic group is in effect supporting the Indigenous bourgeoisie against the proletariat, or is serving to further the revolutionary struggle is the definitive question.” [25]

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The Indigenous nations of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union did, of course, have class relations, though they were quite different from those of the rest of the country. “Soviet authorities admit that the working class in Yakutia was few in numbers and contained almost no industrial proletariat.” [26] The Soviets, thus, had to consider the question of class differently in the Indigenous nations than in the non-Indigenous ones. Firstly, the principle of self-determination had to be analyzed; it was found that the workers and other exploited classes of Indigenous Yakuts were in support of the Russian Revolution. [27] However, the ruling classes of Yakutia, including the kulaks, were “stronger in Yakutia than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.” [28] Given these class conditions, the Bolsheviks found that self-determination belonged to the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie, and aided the exploited Yakut classes in throwing off their ruling classes over a long period of time. Soviet intervention in Yakutia was not based on a policy of eliminating the Indigenous culture, but on removing the bourgeoisie from their culture.

Stalin addressed the question of culture and nationality: “the unity of a nation diminishes…owing to the growing acuteness of class struggle.” [29] The common culture between the proletariat and bourgeoisie of a nation is weakened by the development of capitalism. This evidences the Bolshevik claim to eliminating bourgeois cultural elements from Indigenous nations while not attacking the culture or people as a whole. For example, Shamans in Yakutia, identified as part of the ruling classes of that nation, were “chastised” as “being responsible for the ‘backwardness and ignorance’ of Indigenous communities.” [30] As such, given the material conditions of the Indigenous nations of the Soviet Union, self-determination took a proletarian character rather than a bourgeois one.

The Reality of Indigenous Self-Determination in the Soviet Union

As previously mentioned, the Soviet government put certain structures in place to ensure the special rights of Indigenous nations/individuals. “For example, if there were regions for hunting or fishing, those territories went to the Indigenous people right away on a natural basis without any constraints.” [31] The Committee of the North was a Bolshevik Party organ that “persuaded the Soviet government to extend certain special privileges to northern peoples,” including exemption from taxation and conscription. [32] Indeed, while Indigenous groups underwent some degree of change, [33] such as a ‘proletarianization,’ they were largely allowed to maintain their cultures and regular ways of life. “In the northlands, the indigenous people continued to be nomadic, everywhere the peasants depended largely on hunting and fur-trapping.” [34] The Indigenous Dargin people of the Caucasus “preserved their traditional Sufi-influenced Islamic practices and endured less government pressure [to adhere to atheism].” [35]

While the Soviet government attempted to include Indigenous nations in the worker culture of the USSR, their relatively lax approach to Indigenous culture demonstrates some level of good faith. Furthermore, Davis and Alice Bartels argue that “all national and ethnic groups were radically changed as a result of Soviet state policy,” [36] not just Indigenous groups. Industrialization, collectivization, educational opening, and the liberation of women were new and radical concepts for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups. [37] As such, these policies were not aimed at otherizing one group, or anything alike. Rather, such policies were aimed at national development and socialist construction.

The Soviets outwardly supported the cultural development and autonomy of Indigenous nations in more explicit ways. “Soviet policy [was] to encourage the development of national cultures and preservation of the native languages.” [38] Samir Amin writes that “the Soviet system brought changes for the better. It gave…autonomous districts, established over huge territories, the right to their cultural and linguistic expression.” [39] This cultural and linguistic expression included “the creation of written forms of [Indigenous] languages and educational programs in northern languages.” [40] The Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was not one of assimilation, but allowance for autonomy (derived from self-determination) in the realm of culture.

Indigenous groups also had political rights which were reflective of their right to self-determination. “Stalin specified that each nationality should man its own courts, administrative bodies, economic agencies and government by its own local native peoples and conduct them in its own language.” [41] Lenin likewise argued that it was of great importance to create autonomous regions in Russia. [42] Soviet practice largely lined up with Leninist theory. Directly after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party released the Declaration on the Rights of Peoples of Russia, “which guaranteed the right to self-determination and the abolition of religious and ethnic discrimination.” [43] Skachko, an academic expert on Siberian Indigenous groups, wrote in 1930 that the Soviet state did not intend to keep Indigenous peoples “as helpless charges of the state in special areas reserved for them and isolated from the rest of the world…On the contrary, the government’s goal is their all-around cultural and national development and their participation as equals.” [44]

Conditions were not perfect for Indigenous nations in the Soviet Union; they experienced some drawbacks as a result of Soviet policies, sometimes due to the lack of recognition of indigeneity. “In 1917, the Yakut/Sakha people constituted 87.1% of the province’s total population.” [45] However, by the end of the Soviet era, the Indigenous people made up only 33% of the population. [46] Beyond the settlement of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples, another drawback was that traditional Indigenous occupations had been “disrupted by industrial and resource development” by the late 1980s. [47] This is, however, at least partially attributable to the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev was not a Leninist, meaning he did not follow the preceding Soviet approach to nationalities.

The Soviet government “established a system to transfer capital from the rich regions of the Union (western Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, later the Baltic countries) to the developing regions of the east and south.” [48] By providing aid for the newly autonomous Indigenous republics, the Soviets were expressly supporting their development. Beyond this aid, Indigenous political systems were manned by members of the nation itself. The Soviet policy of korenization (nativization) “sought to fill key management positions with Indigenous representatives.” [49] This policy was implemented because “leaders of the governing Bolshevik Party considered Great Russian chauvinism as a major impediment to economic and social development because it turned a blind eye to the national/social aspiration of the many peoples and nationalities in the Soviet Union.” [50] This policy allowed Indigenous nations to develop on their own terms while remaining within the Union, allowing them to express their self-determination without needing to exercise their right to secession.

While it is true that the Indigenous nations did not secede from the Soviet Union, two facts remain that prove that the Soviet state supported the independence of these nations; firstly, these nations were allowed to organize into Autonomous Republics which exercised a large amount of self-governing, even relative to the Soviet state and the Republic states. [51] Second, these nations still (at least theoretically) had the right to self-determination. [52] It is arguable, then, that the Indigenous nations of the USSR merely never exercised the right to cessation due to their support for the Soviet system/government.

Conclusion

In the capitalist Russian Federation, Indigenous peoples are significantly worse off than under the USSR. Russia has not yet adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, [53] nor the ILO Convention 169. [54] Contrastingly, the Soviet Union was often at the forefront of international efforts to recognize Indigenous-centred issues, including the push to recognize cultural genocide in UN documents. [55] While Indigenous groups are formally protected by the Russian Constitution, the enforcement of these protections is often inadequate, leaving these groups in a precarious position where unemployment and poverty rates are high. [56] Whereas the Soviets funded the education of Indigenous languages, the Russian Federation now funds Russian-language schools in these regions, seriously threatening Indigenous languages. [57] Especially in view of the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the modern Russian Federation, the Soviet policies towards Indigenous nations continue to be vindicated.

In their theoretical and practical approaches, the Soviet state was relatively open, egalitarian, and accommodating to the Indigenous groups that lived within its borders. Relative at least to the Western nations, the Soviet Union, existing only until 1991, was consistently measures ahead in its policies towards indigeneity. [58] While not explicitly recognizing the concept of indigeneity in all Soviet Indigenous groups, the state nonetheless provided them with sufficient autonomy for their cultures to be preserved and developed. While imperfect, the Soviet approach was admirable in its own time, to say the very least.

Endnotes 

[1] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[2] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[3] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. ix.

[4] Ibid., p. 16-22.

[5] Ibid., p. x.

[6] Ibid., p. 1.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 4.

[10] Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” p. 494.

[11] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[12] Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940.” p. 52.

[13] Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “‘Sovereignty’: An Inappropriate Concept.” p. 323.

[14] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[15] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 48.

[16] Ibid., p. 91.

[17] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[18] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 31.

[19] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[22] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 25-26.

[23] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 29-30.

[24] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[25] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 109.

[26] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., p. 39.

[29] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 35.

[30] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[31] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[32] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 30-31.

[33] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[34] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 36.

[35] Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War.

[36] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 4.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 51.

[39] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[40] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 5.

[41] Ibid., p. 8.

[42] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[43] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 29.

[44] Ibid., 30-31.

[45] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 7.

[46] Ibid., 8.

[47] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. xii.

[48] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[49] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 6.

[50] Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.”

[51] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 11.

[52] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 6.

[53] Representatives of the Republic of Sakha. “An Appeal from the Representatives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).”

[54] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[55] Mako, Shramiran. “Cultural Genocide and Key International Instruments: Framing the Indigenous Experience.” p. 183.

[56] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[57] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[58] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 295-296.

Bibliography

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Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940: An Appraisal.” Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1982, pp. 51-72. jstor.org/stable/40918186?seq=2

Bartels, Davis A., and Alice L. Bartels. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.

Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1994, pp. 101-117. cjns.brandonu.ca/wp-content/uploads/14-1-bedford.pdf

Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (eBook). Oxford University Press, 2021. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190076276.003.0001

First Peoples Worldwide. “Who Are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?” Cultural Survival, 2014. culturalsurvival.org/news/who-are-indigenous-peoples-russia

Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” Ethnicities, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2003, pp. 491-507. jstor.org/stable/23889868

Kirby, E. Stuart. “Communism in Yakutia – the First Decade.” Slavic Studies, Vol. 25, 1980, pp. 27-42. eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/5096/1/KJ00000113076.pdf

Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.” Monthly Review, 2022. mronline.org/2022/10/21/ukrainian-nationalists-have-long-history-of-anti-semitism-which-the-soviet-union-tried-to-combat/

Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. Red Prints Publishing, 2022.

Mako, Shamiran. “Cultural Genocide and Key International Instruments: Framing the Indigenous Experience.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2012, pp. 175-94. jstor.org/stable/24675651

Representatives of the Republic of Sakha. “An Appeal from Representatives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).” Cultural Survival, 2022. culturalsurvival.org/news/appeal-representatives-republic-sakha-yakutia-united-nations-office-high-commissioner-human

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All Black Feminisms Ain't Created Equal

[Pictured: At an event in late April, 1979, Barbara Smith, with megaphone, protests nine murders of black women that took place in the first months of the year. Photograph by Ellen Shub / Courtesy the Estate of Ellen Shub]

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

My initial introduction to radical feminist politics was through convoluted, often antagonistic online discourses, where past works of radical feminists are engaged, discussed, and ultimately flattened. Audre Lorde has always been among the most popularly referenced Black feminists cited online, for example, but always for her gender critical analysis (which could be used as fodder in heated discourse) and never for her anti-imperialist analysis. It’s much easier for one to gain attention and retweets through cherrypicking her words on gender and sexuality, but much less popular to dive into her works on the imperialist U.S. invasion of her homeland Grenada whose revolution emphasized the role of women in society, for example. Only through study and organizing did I begin to distinguish between the social media driven “cannon” of  Black feminism, and the realized concept of revolutionary feminisms.

Revolutionary African feminism (oftentimes used interchangeably with radical Black feminism) is understood as a feminist ideology that seeks to fundamentally transform and decolonize societal structures, and eliminate all forms of patriarchy and gender-based oppression. Through a material structural analysis, consciousness-raising, and collective action, it emphasizes the need for systemic change by examining the ways that power structures, social institutions, and cultural norms perpetuate gender-based oppression.

Learning of the concept of “two colonialisms” pushed forward as both idea and praxis by the women of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) changed how I began to understand an approach to feminism that approached gender equality on the basis of its broader anti-colonial and revolutionary goals. This was not simply the inclusion of women in the protracted armed struggle for independence from Portuguese colonial forces, but a true decolonial process of understanding how colonialism managed to dupe both African men and women, and how intimately linked the struggle against patriarchy was to the struggle against imperialism. African men and women were tied together in a dialectic relationship, which enhanced the need for proper strategy and cooperation among the two. In other words, the revolution in Guinea Bissau required not just an emphasis on developing a new man, but a new woman as well. Their struggle could not afford to be waged on the basis of “men vs. women”, but instead, everyone against the reactionary colonial culture of the past, toward the development of a Revolutionary African Personality. Bissaun revolutionary Teodora Gomes summed it up best when she said “You cannot isolate the liberation of women in circumstances such as ours because there is one goal for our society— which is to transform it step by step.”

However, revolutionary feminist ideals in the West have been largely co-opted and assimilated into mainstream liberal frameworks, losing their transformative potential. Radical liberal (rad-lib) Black feminism has diluted many core principles and objectives of revolutionary feminism, such as notions of bodily autonomy and gender equality. While revolutionary African feminism seeks to challenge and dismantle structural inequities and power dynamics, when it is liberalized, priorities shift to individualistic perspectives and experiences, focusing on personal empowerment rather than addressing broader systemic issues. This shift has undermined the collective action and solidarity necessary for achieving meaningful social change and liberation, effectively de-politicizing a once revolutionary and collective ideology. By emphasizing personal choices and empowerment without critically examining the broader socio-political context, rad-lib Black feminism has diverted attention away from structural inequalities and systemic injustices while convincing millions that their personal experiences are the systemic issues themselves, and therefore that an examination of personal experiences suffices for an analysis of structural issues of capitalism. Moreover, it has shifted discourse away from deep examination of the colonial-capitalist state itself as an entity responsible for perpetuating patriarchy.

This shift and co-optation, of course, can be traced back to the negative impacts neoliberal capitalism has had on African social movements within the U.S in general, but revolutionary feminism, specifically. Neoliberalism’s focus on individual success and self-advancement through engagement in the capitalist market and consumption, centers personal gain over collective liberation, diluting the collective goals and transformative potential of revolutionary African feminism. Neoliberal capitalism exacerbates the oppressive systems that revolutionary feminism seeks to dismantle, including economic exploitation, endless privatization, and state abandonment. At the same time, neoliberal capitalism encourages a class of African women to lean into exclusionary approaches, like failure to consider class, which perpetuates inequalities and reinforces power imbalances. It is important to critically examine and challenge the negative impacts of neoliberal capitalism on revolutionary African feminisms which made this co-option of the ideology possible, seamless even.

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While it is true that rad-lib Black feminism overlooks the specific challenges faced within and by colonized communities, it has unfairly been attributed to the framework of ‘intersectionality’. It is important to note that the negative impacts associated with intersectionality do not stem from the framework itself, but rather from misapplications of it as exemplified with the “oppression olympics” style misinterpretation of it. Intersectionality has provided a valuable framework for understanding and addressing systemic discrimination specifically within legal systems, pushing for more inclusive and just legal frameworks and practices, but has somehow also been made a one-size-fits-all framework because it recognizes how different forms of discrimination and oppression intersect and overlap.

As such, the framework has been flattened to mere identity reductionism, the essentializing of identities, which  reduces individuals to a set of fixed characteristics or experiences. By reducing identities to a singular focus, such as gender alone, rad-lib Black feminism has failed to fully address the unique struggles and experiences of colonized women. Additionally, without the clarity and larger context of being situated within a revolutionary ideology, rad-lib feminism often weaponizes the framework of intersectionality to uncritically engage in gender-essentialism.

Furthermore, in the midst of neoliberal austerity policies, which African women bear the brunt of due to privatization and reduced investments in public services and social safety nets, rad-lib feminism has proven wholly inadequate. The systemic barriers, upheld by neoliberalism, undermine the goals of revolutionary African feminisms by hindering efforts to address the root causes of structural inequalities that impact the lives of African women. Rad-lib Black feminism has become increasingly regressive, inadvertently focusing narrowly on notions of sexual liberation, the “girl boss”, etc., and not anything that would shift the material conditions of African working women (i.e. access to healthcare, education, affordable housing, and social safety nets).

Rad-lib Black feminism has defanged a principled movement of revolutionary African feminisms by co-opting the language and militant imagery of individuals like Assata Shakur, while ignoring their larger objectives. This is made abundantly clear when observing the practices of decolonial feminisms across the Third World inspired by the practices of Revolutionary African feminisms. The Fundación Entre Mujeres (FEM) in Esteli, Nicaragua explores the relationship between feminism and agroecology, women, and seeds to develop a specific bottom-up approach to empower women of the peasant class as Campinsinas Feministas (distinct from working class). Inspired by the revolutionary decolonial feminism practiced on the continent (like with the women of the PAIGC), the FEM places an emphasis on what they understand to be “Managua feminism” (mainstream rad-lib) vs the feminism that they practice. The women are clear about the radical alteration of power relations necessary, promoting the articulation of women in the community through local committees and agroecological networks, communication, community, and environmental defenders. 

In an interview with Stephanie Urdang, author of the book Fighting Two Colonialisms, Teodora Gomes says:

“The struggle for the liberation of women has to be done in different ways. First of all, women must fight together with men against colonialism and all systems of exploitation. Secondly, and this is one of the most fundamental points, every woman must convince herself that she can be free and that she has to be free. And that she is able to do all things that men do in social and political life. And thirdly, women must fight in order to convince men that she has naturally the same rights as he has. But she must understand that the fundamental problem is not the contradiction between women and men, but it is the system in which we are all living.”

Taking on labels like ‘feminism’ is not a matter of rigidity, but clarity. Radical ideology requires challenging and transforming structures of power that perpetuate inequality, including colonial legacies and imperialist practices. How we identify politically is meant to provide important insights and tools for understanding and addressing the complex, intersecting forms of oppression that impact African women and all colonized people.

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

Death, the Crisis of Meaning, and Capitalism

By Carlos L. Garrido

Republished in modified form from Midwestern Marx.

The Moving finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Death as the Nexus for the Possibility of Meaning in Human Life

In This Life, philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that:

To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost.

Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in Book Five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity who detains Odysseus for seven years). On the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return to them. 

In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism) [1], where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding.” 

Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society, our dominant mode of experience is having. We are what we have and what we consume. In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into cōnsūmere, ergo sum (I consume, therefore I am). The world presents itself as a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment — whose real and well-hidden telos [2] is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities — becomes life’s prime want. An island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good — a heavenly island. 

But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why? 

Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but — insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality — it would have also been meaningless.

Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life. It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning.

Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives.

As Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) in Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 masterpiece Troy says: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.”

The Crisis of Meaning and Bourgeois Finitude 

While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient.

We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago, the acronym that grasped the American zeitgeist was “YOLO,” which stood for “you only live once”. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness [3] was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once?  

But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor) [4]. These are profound crises at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life.

In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. Even things like chronic illness, which we often take to be a result of genetics or some other form of a “bad luck of the draw,” are in many cases traceable to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, these illnesses are anything but arbitrary and normal. In fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible. For instance, a 2019 study in Cancer Research found that “women with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were found to have twice the risk of ovarian cancer as women with no known trauma exposure.” Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world.” This is, in essence, another way of describing the same crises Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century. It is a crisis precisely because it is not “normal,” it is a separation rooted in our historically constituted mode of life. 

In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus [5] in those few hours of the days were — although feeling the lingering effects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements — which studies have shown take up, on average, four years of our lives — is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst. 

Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class is undoubtedly among the most indebted in history. This debt slavery, which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in Capital III the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself.” This has ushered into world-history a new form of super-exploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, doubly, or, super-exploited.

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How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society. But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe, these crises?  

A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications.” The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism?” Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt — either consciously or not — the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities.

A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions the sciences are forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the “hard” sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be “above” philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies.” 

“Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science.” A regrounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and — necessarily — a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails [6]. 

Finding Meaning in the Struggle for a New World 

The crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of “culture” or “individual accountability.” While the crisis manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order. 

This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. Most of it merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining “cultural” in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this — to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality. 

It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. On the fringes of quotidian society, there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives.

However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against the system that produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in history have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, Vladimir Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying. 

But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rubble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction. We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future free of poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, Director at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024).

Footnotes

[1] Epicurus’s hedonism has little to do with how we understand the concept today. Today, the hedonist is understood to be the person who concerns themselves with the basest pleasures of the body. The image of someone in a bubble bath, drinking sparkling wine, eating chocolate-covered strawberries usually comes to mind. However, for the Epicurean school of hedonism, pleasures and pains are of different kinds. There are natural, necessary, and vain pleasures we encounter. The goal of the enlightened pleasure seeker is to distinguish amongst these — to avoid those immediate pleasures that cause pain in the long run (e.g., drugs, unhealthy food, etc.), to contain the natural desires to a rational limit (e.g., sex, while natural, if not taken in moderation can lead to sex addictions, and this takes this natural pleasure to the point of ‘“pain”), and to recognize those immediate forms of pain that might actually lead to pleasure in the long run (e.g., exercise, medicine, etc.). All in all, the Epicurean enlightened hedonist will, in their actions, look a whole lot more like they’re following an Aristotelian virtue ethic than the base hedonism we encounter today.

[2] Its end, goal, purpose, highest good, etc.

[3] This term is not limited to its sexual connotation but refers to any notion of liberty” that operates through the abandonment of necessity — a state of lawlessness, an absence of social rules.

[4] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article.

[5] A neologism that describes the turning of human beings into “consumerist animals” in modern bourgeois society.

[6] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones; there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (see: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”)

Ambiguity In An Art World Shaped By Capital

[Pictured: The author’s painting, entitled “The Bench Sitters”]

By Ian Matchett

“You can’t be Neutral on a moving train”

- Howard Zinn 

I am standing in front of an assemblage of found objects, culled from a midwestern city ravaged by capitalism and racism. The pile has been helpfully located here by an artist with support of the local billionaire’s philanthropic foundation, and a private art school in the suburbs. The artist’s statement informs me that the work is about the possible importance of these objects in the past, before they were abandoned, he wants me to consider how the objects were theoretically important to someone once. I’m confused because these are not trinkets from ancient Rome, many of the people who abandoned them are likely still alive, and the reason they were abandoned seems inextricably connected to the billionaire who paid for the show. I move along to a second piece, a display of books about the apocalypse. The artist's statement again offers insight, saying that they find the books interesting because the apocalypse has never come. I turn and look back at the shards of shattered lives that the artists had piled up with the help of the billionaire. It seems that the apocalypse came for those people. Their worlds ended and broke. Perhaps it doesn’t count if the apocalypse didn’t affect the rich people. Perhaps the next apocalypse will. The artist's statement assures me that the meaning is in the uncertainty, the billionaire’s logo bids me farewell as I leave.

Ambiguity is a key tool of the artist. The use of unresolved imagery and open metaphors allows for artwork to incorporate collaboratively constructed meaning, built by both the artist and the viewer. This allows the artists to deepen and expand their craft- developing a broad range of approaches to connect with an audience beyond direct literal representation. However when we look around at the post modern context, something seems to have gone wrong with this tool. What was once uncertain meaning has become in many cases intentionally oblique artworks, at best requiring an advanced degree to appreciate, and at worst offering little more than their own lack of clarity as a thesis. Today, the art world seems to have fetishized ambiguity: celebrating inscrutability for its own sake, regardless of the effect on the piece- and seem almost to value a failure to communicate with a mass audience as the highest form of work. It seems worth at least briefly investigating the effects of this trend, try to understand why it may be playing such a role at this moment in history, and offering a lens to understand and critique not ambiguity as such, but this trend of fetishized inarticulate artistic production.

In the modern art world, so completely dominated by capital: from foundations, to galleries, auction houses, collectors, tax loopholes, and media; excessive ambiguity seems to abdicate the construction of meaning not to the individual viewer, but to these very capitalist institutions. The artist allows capital to construct and guide the meaning of a piece far beyond any mythologized individual interaction between viewer and artwork. Taken from this perspective ambiguity risks creating art that simply allows the meaning of culture to be even more shaped by the rich and stamped with their world view. 

I am personally invested in the role of artwork in helping shape and transform the world, how it can support working class emancipatory politics, and inspire communities engaged in this struggle. This is obviously not the only goal of art, however, judging by present discourse in the art world, it appears to be a deeply undervalued one. Empowered by this broad indifference, I hope to offer not a complete conclusion, but to at least reassert a key avenue of critique.

To begin we must generally define what we mean by “Ambiguity.” For the purposes of this critique I identify ambiguity as the quality of uncertain meaning or subject in a piece of artwork, and the endorsement of this uncertainty by the creator. As stated above, at its best ambiguity allows an artwork to elevate beyond pure depiction, or a single viewpoint, and create a space where the perception of the viewer helps create the piece. Sometimes this creates a specific interpretation but just as likely it can make the uncertainty and quest for meaning a living part of the work. All of this is perfectly reasonable and indeed critical as a tool of the artist. A career of artwork that speaks in one voice and offers no space for engagement is less that of an artist and more of an advertiser. The quarrel then is not with ambiguity as such, but the more specific role it plays in the socio-economic context of the modern art world. 

It is difficult to define a clear line between the use of ambiguity by any one artist, and the more general trend of fetshized ambiguity. This is in part because the difference occurs not just at the level of the individual creator, but at the structural level- what works are purchased, funded, rewarded, and discussed by the broader art world. The break arises when ambiguity becomes not a tool for engaging an audience member, but to distance them from the artwork, to enforce a division between an elite who “gets” the piece, and the masses who are increasingly deflected from engagement. Rather than creating space for the audience to collaboratively craft meaning, fetishized ambiguity seems intent upon alienating or distancing a significant portion of the audience, in order to make what can often boil down to fairly shallow points about the uncertainty of modern life. Some of this is visionary complex work to be sure, but it seems worth questioning the inherent elitism of this approach, its widespread popularity among the institutions of the art world- and its intention in an art world already so deeply imbued with divisions class and power.

As with all aspects of cultural production, ambiguity functions in a matrix of several variables, and its meaning must be evaluated in this context. Key factors include: the relative visibility of the artist in society, the socio political system of artistic production and validation, and the overall reproductive system of the society at large. Thus, as the visibility of the artist in the society escalates, or the system artistic production is more captured by a specific class interest, or the political moment becomes more tenuous, the issue of ambiguity must be critiqued with more precision. In this context, the tool of ambiguity can overtake the overall mission of artwork- becoming fetishized into an end in it’s own right in order to serve specific class interests. This tendency is similarly conditioned by the very same social/political factors such as methods of display, popularization, materials costs, scale etc. that condition production as a whole. The question is not one why artists are creating ambiguous work, nor why their work is increasingly fetishizing ambiguity, this but why this tendency is being rewarded by the capitalists in control of the artistic sphere.  

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In our present moment then, we must engage with how the art world functions and the role that fetishized ambiguity might play in this system. The art world in capitalist society is controlled not by the public, artists, critics, or even curators- but by capital. This is a point made by many fabulous scholars, though I am most influenced by Mike Davis essays, and Chin Tao Wu’s book “Privatizing Culture.” Through this scholarship, we can understand the art world less as a site of artistic production than of capital accumulation, appreciation, and tax avoidance. As a site of capitalist production, it has faced the same escalating investment as any industry, with capital propping up key galleries, expensive artistic experiences or traveling shows, and private foundations as key value and taste making institutions. A huge amount of artistic labor is done on speculation, never rewarded by collectors/foundations uninterested in its output, or by communities too under resourced to support it. 

Under capitalism the “art market” is concerned with the production of commodities that meet the needs of it’s consumers — who, be it through the foundation, gallery, or direct patronage, are the rich. Art becomes less about expression and more about developing either speculative value on the art itself OR a variety of side benefits be it to increase the value of a real estate holding, improving the patrons’ image, or helping avoid taxes. There remains a portion of this that is artistic production, attempting to explore human experience, emotions, history etc. but this role is increasingly eclipsed by the role of accumulation and commodification that has developed to serve the broad goals and needs of the rich. While the rich may also patronize specific works of a radical, or particular voice, these exceptions prove the broader structural rule of the modern art world- creating imagery in the service of capital. It is in this context that the fetishization of ambiguity must be evaluated for it’s purpose and role in the art world- which is to say in the goals of the rich. 

So why does artwork that fetishizes ambiguity serve the goals of the rich? In the context of capitalist production, art is valued as a site of surplus value production, cultural capital, and to obscure value from the state. None of these goals is invested in the content of the work- and in fact many of them may be harmed by work with a specific viewpoint that makes it unappealing to other wealthy buyers, particularly when coming from new artistic voices without pedigree that can be banked upon. A Jackson Pollock painting thus is more easily sold and resold by various investors (the word collector here seems to give them too much credit) than is a piece with a more clear, enunciated, or challenging content. Particularly once key taste making foundations and funders have funded and popularized his work. Thus ambiguity serves to increase the transferability of an artwork- no just allowing the rich to control it’s messaging, but to complete the transformation of artwork into a transferable token of wealth- a goal potentially undermined by political stance and clarity of purpose of the artists.

This fetishization of ambiguity is even more particularly interested, not just in the ambiguity of message- but in an ambiguity of solutions. Political artwork has long proved perfectly capable of being incorporated as yet another commodity to be incorporated into the value circuits outlined above. While it may suffer some limitations as a commodity that more formalistic or abstract work does not (narrower market, negative reception etc.) it can still be metabolized to this system and its goals. Where the line of demarcation is more starkly apparent however, is on the ambiguity of solutions about the political problems we face. The reason for this is not overly complex- living as we do within a capitalist society characterized by the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority in order to benefit the wealthy- many solutions that fundamentally address the problems we face are tied up with doing away with this system, and by extension the rich as a class. Artwork that clearly asserts this fact and communicates with a working class audience not only doesn’t serve the goals of the rich, but actively inverts the distancing of modern art, alienating the primary force creating and shaping the art world: wealth, and reaching out instead to a mass audience. Criticism is acceptable, collectible, and profitable, so long as the artist does not begin to reach for solutions, and/or so long as those solutions remain unconnected from the working class. 

When a piece of artwork is created, it is not released into an abstract individualized world, but rather into a web of social relationships constructed by capital and history. To release an ambiguous piece, in a context where the audience, spaces, language, and reward structures are all inextricably linked to and shaped by capital, is to risk handing over the task of interpretation to the rich. What institutions frame the work, what “public” views it, and what interpretations are crafted and elevated all become conditioned by a specific capitalist class, race, and gender analysis. In this context, is a gallery that relies upon the Gilbert foundations likely to show work that points out the exploitative/feudal relationship he has built with the city and its people; and If it does, will the gallery prioritize this critical interpretation if given the space to avoid doing so by the ambiguity of the piece and the artist’s stance? 

The point is not that ambiguity is a bad tool- it is that constructing an art world around the fetishization of ambiguity does not put the artists into dialogue with an independent audience, but rather into a dialogue with a disproportionately rich, white audience in an art world shaped by the rich. Ambiguity then becomes a tool for the rich to shape meaning in such a way as to continue their primary goals of profit expansion, and shaping our understanding of reality so as to limit the alternatives to the status quo. What’s more, we should perhaps be more sketical of an ambiguity that repeatedly asks questions with researchable answers, or invite us to once more contemplate the complexity of life.

So if the problem is not with ambiguity as such, but with the broader structures of wealth, where does that leave us? I would hesitate to fully prescribe a solution to such a vast and structural issue- however the very scale of the forces involved does suggest a first step: enter into a community practice. Socially conscious art can not be made in isolation, and an individuals distanced observations will all too frequently retain a voyeuristic shallow quality. Join a party, an organization, a reading group, a union, your block club- the point is to enter into the life of the masses, not attempt to interpret your community in isolation.

Beyond this, it would be foolish to try and prescribe some sort of universal formula for how to approach ambiguity as an artist. It seems better to hold a few questions in tension as we produce work- a lens to critique how and why we are choosing to use ambiguity in our work. Why are you choosing to use ambiguity in your work? Are you uncertain about the question you are asking? Have you done enough research to make a meaningful statement? Does your work stop at asking “what is happening?” Or does it invite the viewer into a process of imagining and building the future? Who will see this work, and in what context? What readings of the work will be most empowered by that audience and venue? 

Finally, there is the issue of the artist who stands behind the work. While it is no substitute for creating work that is able to communicate, artists must use as much of their platform as possible to explicitly combat a softening or limiting of their work by the art world. This does not mean self martyrdom by refusing to ever make money, or ever have your work engaged with by the art world, but it does mean being explicit about your values when in these spaces- and not deriving our value as artists from these spaces. Again this approach becomes meaningful and possible only as the artist roots themselves in their community and the actual work of understanding the world. The struggle to produce impactful work does not end when the artist sends their work out into the world- it continues as long as capital dominates the institutions and structures that interpret culture.

Despite all of this ambiguity remains a critical tool. The future is full of uncertainty, and art has a huge role to play in helping us as we struggle toward a future that we do not yet know. Ambiguity, framed as a collaboration with a working class audience to develop new meanings for our work and our world- this is a key place for this type of artistic ambiguity and exploration in our world. What we must abandon, or at least interrogate far more critically, is the ambiguity of analysis, of alternatives, of struggle. Neither artists nor the working class more generally needs yet another discussion of “what does it mean to pay rent and live in a world of ruthless exploitation, imperialism, and ecological collapse,” rather we need artwork that is helping us all engage with what me must do about these facts: a decisive shift from endlessly reflecting “what is happening” and toward the new horizons of “what is to be done?”

Ian Matchett is an organizer and artist working in Detroit. His art can be found on his website.