The Crisis in the West Bank

[Photo Credit: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty]

By Sudip Bhattacharya

Republished from Counterpunch.

Although it’s been decades since he left Palestine, building a life for himself and his loved ones in the Austin area, memories of olive trees and hills, of family and him sharing meals under an orange sun, flowed through Ahmad Zamer on most days. Having been able to visit the West Bank a few years ago, Zamer could still hear the people conversing in the town square, the men and women sharing jokes, asking him how’s been, even as he sits in his house thousands of miles away, skyscrapers along the impeding horizon.

But that sliver of normalcy and good feeling has been replaced, rather swiftly, with the screaming of people buried under rubble, of others waking up each day, finding yet another building reduced to piles of bricks and twisted metal.

“You always hold out optimistic hope that it doesn’t happen to you, although it’s happened to us before,” Zamer explained, “But it’s been a different scale of violence now. It’s shocking,” he added, his voice drifting.

During Israel’s recent onslaught over Gaza, Zamer lost a dozen members of his family from an Israeli airstrike. He’d lose 35 on another day, snatched from him in a matter of mere moments.

Since the beginning of October, the number of Palestinians who’ve been killed are now over 20,000, with many others still unaccounted for, lost under the wreckage of buildings and homes. The Israeli state has also targeted hospitals, refugee camps, and even UN-designated zones, killing innocent women, children and men in droves.

“It’s a slaughter,” said Hatem Natsheh, a close friend of Zamer’s, and also someone who’s managed to rebuild his life in the U.S. Natsheh has remained committed to the Palestinian cause for liberation and for the creation of a secular democratic nation with equal rights for all. However, the last few months have been dispiriting and traumatic. Natsheh, like many Arab Americans, had voted for Biden in the last presidential cycle, and now have become embittered and frustrated over that choice. As a progressive, Natsheh himself remains committed to progressive cause of economic and political equality, of fighting for labor and human rights. However, the fact that the Biden administration has been insistent on delivering more military aid to the far-right dominated Israeli state, disregarding the critical situation millions of Palestinians find themselves in, has been painful to reckon with.

“It’s not been easy, I’m telling you,” he admitted, also in regards to Bernie Sanders having refused, until recently, to even mention the word “ceasefire”. As a delegate for Sanders, this has felt like a betrayal.

“At the beginning of all of it, I wasn’t doing too well,” said Jade, whose grandparents became refugees in the original Nakba and is studying to be a human rights lawyer in the Midwest. The images of children in shock, and others having been injured or killed, have stuck to her, like grime. “Seeing all the images of dead children has been difficult since my brother also died at a young age, so I know what the death of a child can do to a family. I can hear my own mother screaming while carrying my brother’s body when he was little, and I can hear that when seeing these images of other peoples’ children,” she shared.

The trauma, however, cannot be reduced to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, although the attacks themselves merit focus given the intensity of harm. What is occurring in Gaza, especially with the Israeli ground invasion, has been rightfully identified as ethnic cleansing, as another Nakba. Plans have been considered for Palestinians in Gaza to be moved into the Sinai Peninsula or to simply be dispersed around the Middle East.

Still, the Israeli imposition on Palestinian life has been targeting Palestinians generally, including those who have managed to remain in the West Bank.

Both Natsheh and Zamer speak to family members in the West Bank, who relay to them stories of harassment and fear.

“My family has added an extra lock to their doors,” Zamer said about some of his family members’ coping responses to the intensification of Israeli settler violence that’s been ongoing. Some of this violence and taking over of Palestinian land in the West Bank had been taking place prior to the latest Israeli assault on Gaza even.

Despite Israel’s recent decision to pull back its troops from Gaza, and some of its attempts to suggest Palestinians never wanted a real political solution in the region, the situation in the West Bank must not be overlooked, or allowed to be treated as marginal. Instead, the situation in the West Bank, from Palestinains being attacked by Israeli settlers to more Palestinian land also being taken, reflects the broader issue, which has always been about settler colonialism and an appropriation of Palestinian land and power.

NAKBA 2.0

According to scholars like Rashid Khalidi, himself Palestinian, the Palestinian situation is one shaped by disposition of land and resources beginning in the formation of the Israeli state in 1948, whereby Palestinians were forced off their land, herded into refugee camps, or compelled to find some form of dignified living in other parts of the region. All in all, this disposition, similar to what had been experienced by indigenous peoples in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and other parts of the globe, would mark the Palestinian people for decades to come, as a right of return to the land they once had would become a major part of their liberatory struggle and search for justice.

Khalidi writes in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,

For all Palestinians, no matter their different circumstances, the Nakba formed an enduring touchstone of identity, one that has lasted through several generations. It marked an abrupt collective disruption, a trauma that every Palestinian shared in one way or another, personally or through their parents or grandparents.

The crisis in Gaza is a very clear example of this continued disposition. Total the land and force people to flee, making it difficult for them to rebuild what little they might have had: that’s been the strategy of the Israeli state that has been targeting the dense region of the Gaza strip, as it imposes an embargo that leads to mass starvation and lack of basic resources. Once more, such strategies have echoes of previous colonial tactics, such as the British Empire’s decision to create policies that caused mass famine and economic instability across parts of South Asia at the turn of the 20th century and during WWII. This pattern would repeat across parts of Africa as well, not to mention the corraling of populations as a means of stealing more land, or as a means of punishing resistance, as was the case in Kenya after WWII, with concentration camps set up by the British colonial regime.

The West Bank has been part of this overall strategy too, even if it hasn’t faced the same level of death and starvation that we’ve seen for decades inside Gaza. Nevertheless, since the early 1990s, the seizure of land, and the surrounding of Palestinian life with Israeli state apparatus and Israeli extremists, has been its norm.

Legal scholar, Noura Erakat, stated in Justice for some: Law and the Question of Palestine,

As of late 2015, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank numbered more than 600,000, a 200 percent increase since the advent of the Oslo peace process in 1993. Israel’s settlement enterprise carves the West Bank into more than twenty noncontiguous landmasses separating approximately three million Palestinians into as many groups that stand apart from one another, thus undermining any sense of territorial contiguity or national cohesion.

Natsheh, who visited family in the West Bank in 2018, the first time in thirty years he’d been able to step on Palestinian land, remembered the joy of seeing his family, and of seeing the landscape brimming with greenery and life. Part of the experience of being back was fairly normal, as he made the rounds of meeting friends and family, of sharing experiences, of hugs, and kisses on the cheek.

And yet, even then, it was impossible not to pay attention to the Israeli settlements all around them, circling them.

“You can tell the settlers are armed,” he said, paying extra attention to his surroundings as he’d venture around, visiting and talking, getting to know the land once again. Israeli forces too were seen managing the movement of people, mainly Palestinians in the region, despite the West Bank being promoted as primarily controlled by the Palestinian Authority, and Fatah, a rival to Hamas.“If you’re Palestinian, you are being harassed by Israeli forces, by settlers, you have to go through checkpoint after checkpoint,” Natsheh described, “It’s tiring. It’s basically a form of hell.”

The beauty of the trees and the land can start to fade into a brutal routine of being targeted by the Israeli occupation forces and the monsters its occupation breeds. A sense of dread and disappointment can start to seep into you, said Natsheh.

Since early October, the pace of land being stolen, of Palestinians falling under Israeli state domination, has only intensified. As Israeli jets fire upon buildings in Gaza, Israeli occupation forces and settlers have increased their land seizures in the West Bank.

Bel Trew at the Independent writes, “Israeli human rights groups say this is the single biggest land grab since Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, and likely amounts to the war crime of forcible transfer.”

The situation for Palestinians in the West Bank has grown more tenuous, more dangerous over the recent months, with nothing set to change anytime soon. The strangulation of Palestinian life in the West Bank has been, at times, nearly unbearable, according to Natsheh and Zamer, both of whom remain in touch with family members, desperate for an end to the occupation and violence.

““There’s no freedom of movement,” Zamer said about his family’s situation in the occupied West Bank, “I talk to them every day. I worry that one day I will call them and no one will answer.” He paused. “That’s how I feel right now. It’s too much.”

VIOLENCE AS NORM

Ahmad Abusharkh, a nurse in Chicago, also has family in the West Bank. He explained how through the Palestinian authority, the Israeli government has managed to repress actions of Palestinians trying to exhibit solidarity with their kinfolk in Gaza. Although the Palestinian Authority aims to build towards Palestinian statehood, so far, it’s become a vessel for elements of Israeli control over the years by continuing its security cooperation with the IDF. Much like South Africa, the West Bank under the existing Fatah government has become what some would describe as a Bantustan, an area that’s designated for Arabs, and portrayed as somehow autonomous but is very much a sliver of land in which sovereignty has still been denied. In many ways, the West Bank has also become a place where Palestinians are corralled, rather than provided the resources and rights a group would need to be sovereign, or to live a just and dignified life.

“We have family members who are afraid to go out at night”, Abusharkh explained, “The settlers are terrorizing people and everybody knows that they will not be punished. Everybody knows that the settlers to a certain degree can do whatever they want. There’s a lot of fear in the West Bank about the way the repression and the genocide in Gaza will continue to spill over to them, will spill over to repression in the West Bank.”

In 2023 alone, 483 Palestinians in the West Bank were killed. In October, assault rifles had been distributed to Israeli settlers, eager to wield violence against Palestinians across the West Bank.

Yagil Levy, a professor of political sociology and public policy, writes about the situation inside the West Bank,

As Israeli military operations continue in the Gaza Strip, a parallel escalation of violence is unfolding in the West Bank. This includes intensified army attacks against Hamas targets and a reported increase in Palestinian fatalities. Alongside these developments, there has been a rise in violence by settlers, apparently aimed at pushing Palestinians from their homes and extending Israeli control in certain areas.

He adds,

The violence itself is not new, but two things are worth watching. As the attacks spread, there’s growing evidence that soldiers and settlers are working hand in hand. And there are signs that settlers are increasingly worried about a political shift after the war in Gaza—and trying to change the West Bank landscape while they can.

“They just go in and do whatever they want to do,” said Natsheh, speaking about the Israeli settlers feeling ever more emboldened. “They’re arresting people, blowing up houses, destroying infrastructure, bulldozing the streets. It has been miserable for the people living in the West Bank. Miserable.”

Zamer reiterated the fear that family members will also perish in the West Bank, or be driven out from their homes, left to fend for themselves.

“The pressure on them has been constant,” said Zamer, “They’ve had their olive trees taken by these right wing settlers. The settlers come out and act like hooligans, attacking people, taking property as they wish.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk stated in regards to the intensification of harassment and attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, “The use of military tactics means and weapons in law enforcement contexts, the use of unnecessary or disproportionate force, and the enforcement of broad, arbitrary and discriminatory movement restrictions that affect Palestinians are extremely troubling.”

The routine, nearly everyday, for Zamer, Natsheh and many others in the Palestinian diaspora has been to put aside time and learn about what’s been going on with family and friends thousands of miles away. It’s both a process of replenishing, as they manage to maintain connections with those they care about deeply, but of course, it’s a reminder of the constant horrors and troubles that so many have endured, and in the case of the West Bank, are set to experience for the years ahead, regardless whether a ceasefire over Gaza is finally implemented, however porous.

The reality has been the West Bank, despite it being controlled by Hamas’ rival, Fatah, and despite it being seen as nominally “autonomous”, has been a target of the Israeli settler agenda for decades now. Settlers themselves have consistently been moving into the territory, with the backing of Israeli state forces, and have the very clear intention of taking over the land completely for a greater Israel.

“We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand,” said Daniella Weiss, a settler in the West Bank, in a recent interview about her interests and the interests of other settlers like her.

“Palestinians already could not go wherever they wanted to go, it takes hours just to go from one village to the next,” Natsheh described, pulling from his own experience when visiting. “That’s just gotten worse. And that won’t change either.”

Zamer related to how things would deteriorate in the years to come, expressing fear over what comes next for the people he loves and those he may not yet but are part of the general Palestinian population. Zamer spoke, again, about the land, how beautiful it can be to simply step outside one’s home and see the orange sun peeking between the hills. Or to stroll into the farmland, the grass below looking neon green, the trees growing new limbs shrouded also in bright green colors.

“We need a one state that’s democratic and secular,” he stressed, “We need it before it’s too late.”

LIBERATION TIME

The West Bank serves as a reminder that the Israeli war on Gaza is a general war on a possible Palestinian state, and future.

Even if a ceasefire were to finally be realized, the Israeli state, so long as it remains controlled by such extremists and settler interests, shall persist in finding ways to seize more land and to find ways for more Palestinians to either be compelled to flee, or to find themselves marginalized under an expansive Israeli state.

The cultural theorist and popularizer of the term “Orientalist”, Edward Said, had written about a one-state democratic secular state in 1999, explaining,

I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.

This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples.

The only real solution then, for Palestinians too in the West Bank, is for the emergence and flourishing of such a state in that region. For years, such an idea has been relatively marginal in the U.S. and other parts of the “West”, itself a political construction mediated through myth-making and delusion. Still, the subject of Palestinian liberation, and the recognition of just how difficult life has also become for people in the West Bank, the sheer scale of Israeli settlements, has become more and more a part of the U.S. left’s discussion, as well as discussion among liberal and progressive groups. Over the years, we’ve seen the emergence of organizations such as Jewish Voices for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine.

In recent polling, an increasing share of Americans are skeptical about existing U.S. policy towards Israel. A large number of young people have expressed dissatisfaction with Biden and his abiding faith in the far-right Netanyahu administration.

“More people around the world are identifying with the Palestinian cause as a struggle against colonialism and for democracy,” Abusharkh said, as someone also deeply involved around socialist organizing and Palestinian liberation, “It’s definitely different than where the movement was several years ago even.”

The liberation for Palestine, as Natsheh describes, is a liberation struggle for all progressive forces throughout the world, from the cities and towns faced with deindustrialization and police harassment across the U.S. to the villages of Yemen struggling against Saudi oppression. The world as is, shaped by a contingent of U.S. capitalist and imperialist interests, along with their “allies” from inside Israel to the Egyptian junta, is a world rife with inequalities and extreme injustices, not to mention political instability.

“Israel would not maintain a system of domination without the U.S. maintaining a system of domination over the global south and working people,” Jade explained, “Our struggles are all interlinked. Our liberation is only guaranteed by uplifting each other.”

A world in which the West Bank and Gaza are free is a world in which the world has become far more open for more progressive and socialist horizons for the world’s majority, whether that is someone African American seeking financial stability in the American Northeast, or someone Asian American cleaning offices in Silicon Valley, or someone in the West Bank, finally free to grow as many olive trees as their heart desires.

Amilcar Cabral, one of the world’s most insightful anti-colonial thinkers, stressed the interlinking of national liberation struggles with the general struggle for a more humane planet. Cabral, who led the struggle for Guinea-Bissau against the Portuguese occupiers who received support from the U.S. and other Western governments, emphasized this with as many different audiences as he could, from people in Italy, to African American activists in New York City. Cabral himself believed in the Palestine cause for freedom, aligning with his own, and with the fight against apartheid in South Africa in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, prior to when he was assassinated by Portuguese agents.

In a speech on Guinea-Bissau society to an audience in Milan, Cabral would explain,

To end up with, I should just like to make one last point about solidarity between the international working-class movement and our national liberation movement. There are two alternatives: Either we admit that there really is a struggle against imperialism that interests everybody, or we deny it. If, as we would seem from all the evidence, imperialism exists and is trying simultaneously to dominate the working class in all advanced countries and smother the national liberation movements in all the underdeveloped countries, then there is only one enemy against whom we are fighting. If we are fighting together, then I think the main aspect of our solidarity is extremely simple. It is to fight—I don’t think there is any need to discuss this very much. We are struggling in Guinea with guns in our hands, you must struggle in your countries, as well—I don’t say with guns in your hands, I’m not going to tell you how to struggle, that’s your business; but you must find the best means and the best forms of fighting against our common enemy—this is the best form of solidarity.

Such a message of solidarity is one we must have with the people of Gaza and the West Bank, with the Yemenis, with people facing deportation procedures in Pakistan, with people experiencing police aggression across the U.S., with people finding it increasingly difficult to dream after a long day of low-wage work, regardless of skill.

The struggle in the West Bank will persist, for true autonomy and freedom, and so we must continue to find a way to remain connected with that struggle, knowing full well our rights and freedoms are intertwined, as black and brown people, as people seeking liberation, and our own version of a calm afternoon peering ahead and watching the sun descend along the horizon.

REALITY LOOMING

As the sunlight snuck past the blinds, peering into the living room, Natsheh was already on his phone, staring at the graphic images of children with their eyes wide open, of older children begging for their parents and grandparents to wake up, shaking them until others finally pulled them away. Every day, when it’s still pitch black outside, Natsheh can’t help but stir, images and doubts having piled up in his gut, his body feeling pulled apart. Every day, he makes it a point to watch the videos of what’s been taking place in the land he was born and raised in, fear and anger forming sweat on his brow.

“It’s a very…” he paused, searching for the words, as the reality of the crisis loomed over us. “It’s just very surreal. Sad, and surreal. You have to go to work. You have to do what you can to get by but with all this…happening.”

For Natsheh, he is still committed to progressive politics. He is still committed to the fight for racial and economic justice, here and abroad. But the crisis, the sheer scale of it, the Israeli bombing, the fact that even certain “progressives” such as Bernie Sanders have been so slow in calling for a “ceasefire”, has weighed on him, even as he’s trying to do “normal” things, such as go to work, or cooking dinner.

As much as there are signs of people caring, and more importantly, with increasing scrutiny and condemnation of Israel by the UN, the reality remains that thousands of lives have been lost, been taken. The reality remains, according to Natsheh, that the bombings have continued, the targeting of refugee camps, and churches. The reality is that when the bombings stop, the seizure of land shall persist, and there’s always the danger that people’s attention spans might fluctuate, losing sight of the dispossession that’s been happening in the West Bank. Based on the pattern we’ve seen over the last few decades, the land dispossession in the West Bank will only increase, with the backing of the Israeli government, as the Knesset is dominated by far right demagogues eager to take direct control of the region.

“This has been a new level of violence that won’t really end,” Natsheh emphasized.

For many too, there’s the fact that witnessing all this violence, seeing it on screens, the terrible loss and pain felt by people in Gaza and the West Bank, can also serve to demoralize.

Jade talked about a video of a young boy seen crying after another Israeli attack, that being her motivation, even though on some days, it’s just difficult to absorb everything that’s going on.

“I keep him in mind,” she said, “That kid has to get out of this, to go and have a normal life, to get ice cream, to have a crush on somebody. That kid is in the back of my mind, almost always.”

Zamer insisted on how critical it is to remember the survivors, and all those who need solidarity now. Giving into pure cynicism would mean, in effect, giving up on a world that’s better for them, and best for everyone impacted by similar issues of colonialism, exploitation and domination. The West Bank too will start to have more videos being shared of more people losing their lives, losing their land. It can be overwhelming and yet, there’s no other choice but to maintain a connection and sustain a level of activism and solidarity that could save those who will survive the Israeli state apparatus and its domination.

“There are people who are still living who need us,” Zamer exclaimed. “We cannot get too emotional right now. We must keep working to save those who are still living. We must remember that.”

The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

Will shared resources always be misused and overused? Is community ownership of land, forests and fisheries a guaranteed road to ecological disaster? Is privatization the only way to protect the environment and end Third World poverty? Most economists and development planners will answer “yes” — and for proof they will point to the most influential article ever written on those important questions.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, “The Tragedy of the Commons” has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. It is also one of the most-quoted: a recent Google search found “about 302,000” results for the phrase “tragedy of the commons.”

For 40 years it has been, in the words of a World Bank Discussion Paper, “the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues.” (Bromley and Cernea 1989: 6) It has been used time and again to justify stealing indigenous peoples’ lands, privatizing health care and other social services, giving corporations ‘tradable permits’ to pollute the air and water, and much more.

Noted anthropologist Dr. G.N. Appell (1995) writes that the article “has been embraced as a sacred text by scholars and professionals in the practice of designing futures for others and imposing their own economic and environmental rationality on other social systems of which they have incomplete understanding and knowledge.”

Like most sacred texts, “The Tragedy of the Commons” is more often cited than read. As we will see, although its title sounds authoritative and scientific, it fell far short of science.

Garrett Hardin hatches a myth

The author of “The Tragedy of the Commons” was Garrett Hardin, a University of California professor who until then was best-known as the author of a biology textbook that argued for “control of breeding” of “genetically defective” people. (Hardin 1966: 707) In his 1968 essay he argued that communities that share resources inevitably pave the way for their own destruction; instead of wealth for all, there is wealth for none.

He based his argument on a story about the commons in rural England.

(The term “commons” was used in England to refer to the shared pastures, fields, forests, irrigation systems and other resources that were found in many rural areas until well into the 1800s. Similar communal farming arrangements existed in most of Europe, and they still exist today in various forms around the world, particularly in indigenous communities.)

“Picture a pasture open to all,” Hardin wrote. A herdsmen who wants to expand his personal herd will calculate that the cost of additional grazing (reduced food for all animals, rapid soil depletion) will be divided among all, but he alone will get the benefit of having more cattle to sell.

Inevitably, “the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd.” But every “rational herdsman” will do the same thing, so the commons is soon overstocked and overgrazed to the point where it supports no animals at all.

Hardin used the word “tragedy” as Aristotle did, to refer to a dramatic outcome that is the inevitable but unplanned result of a character’s actions. He called the destruction of the commons through overuse a tragedy not because it is sad, but because it is the inevitable result of shared use of the pasture. “Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

Where’s the evidence?

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels’ account of the “mark,” the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:

“[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community …

“Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the ‘common mark.’ The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. …

“At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark.” (Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels’ description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:

“[W]hat existed in fact was not a ‘tragedy of the commons’ but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities.” (Cox 1985: 60)

Part of that self-regulation process was known in England as “stinting” — establishing limits for the number of cows, pigs, sheep and other livestock that each commoner could graze on the common pasture. Such “stints” protected the land from overuse (a concept that experienced farmers understood long before Hardin arrived) and allowed the community to allocate resources according to its own concepts of fairness.

The only significant cases of overstocking found by the leading modern expert on the English commons involved wealthy landowners who deliberately put too many animals onto the pasture in order to weaken their much poorer neighbours’ position in disputes over the enclosure (privatization) of common lands. (Neeson 1993: 156)

Hardin assumed that peasant farmers are unable to change their behaviour in the face of certain disaster. But in the real world, small farmers, fishers and others have created their own institutions and rules for preserving resources and ensuring that the commons community survived through good years and bad.

Why does the herder want more?

Hardin’s argument started with the unproven assertion that herdsmen always want to expand their herds: “It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. … As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.”

In short, Hardin’s conclusion was predetermined by his assumptions. “It is to be expected” that each herdsman will try to maximize the size of his herd — and each one does exactly that. It’s a circular argument that proves nothing.

Hardin assumed that human nature is selfish and unchanging, and that society is just an assemblage of self-interested individuals who don’t care about the impact of their actions on the community. The same idea, explicitly or implicitly, is a fundamental component of mainstream (i.e., pro-capitalist) economic theory.

All the evidence (not to mention common sense) shows that this is absurd: people are social beings, and society is much more than the arithmetic sum of its members. Even capitalist society, which rewards the most anti-social behaviour, has not crushed human cooperation and solidarity. The very fact that for centuries “rational herdsmen” did not overgraze the commons disproves Hardin’s most fundamental assumptions — but that hasn’t stopped him or his disciples from erecting policy castles on foundations of sand.

Even if the herdsman wanted to behave as Hardin described, he couldn’t do so unless certain conditions existed.

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There would have to be a market for the cattle, and he would have to be focused on producing for that market, not for local consumption. He would have to have enough capital to buy the additional cattle and the fodder they would need in winter. He would have to be able to hire workers to care for the larger herd, build bigger barns, etc. And his desire for profit would have to outweigh his interest in the long-term survival of his community.

In short, Hardin didn’t describe the behaviour of herdsmen in pre-capitalist farming communities — he described the behaviour of capitalists operating in a capitalist economy. The universal human nature that he claimed would always destroy common resources is actually the profit-driven “grow or die” behaviour of corporations.

Will private ownership do better?

That leads us to another fatal flaw in Hardin’s argument: in addition to providing no evidence that maintaining the commons will inevitably destroy the environment, he offered no justification for his opinion that privatization would save it. Once again he simply presented his own prejudices as fact:

“We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust — but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.”

The implication is that private owners will do a better job of caring for the environment because they want to preserve the value of their assets. In reality, scholars and activists have documented scores of cases in which the division and privatization of communally managed lands had disastrous results. Privatizing the commons has repeatedly led to deforestation, soil erosion and depletion, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides, and the ruin of ecosystems.

As Karl Marx wrote, nature requires long cycles of birth, development and regeneration, but capitalism requires short-term returns.

“[T]he entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits, stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations. A striking illustration of this is furnished by the forests, which are only rarely managed in a way more or less corresponding to the interests of society as a whole…” (Marx 1998: 611n)

Contrary to Hardin’s claims, a community that shares fields and forests has a strong incentive to protect them to the best of its ability, even if that means not maximizing current production, because those resources will be essential to the community’s survival for centuries to come. Capitalist owners have the opposite incentive, because they will not survive in business if they don’t maximize short-term profit. If ethanol promises bigger and faster profits than centuries-old rain forests, the trees will fall.

This focus on short-term gain has reached a point of appalling absurdity in recent best-selling books by Bjorn Lomborg, William Nordhaus and others, who argue that it is irrational to spend money to stop greenhouse gas emissions today, because the payoff is too far in the future. Other investments, they say, will produce much better returns, more quickly.

Community management isn’t an infallible way of protecting shared resources: some communities have mismanaged common resources, and some commons may have been overused to extinction. But no commons-based community has capitalism’s built-in drive to put current profits ahead of the well-being of future generations.

A politically useful myth

The truly appalling thing about “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not its lack of evidence or logic — badly researched and argued articles are not unknown in academic journals. What’s shocking is the fact that this piece of reactionary nonsense has been hailed as a brilliant analysis of the causes of human suffering and environmental destruction, and adopted as a basis for social policy by supposed experts ranging from economists and environmentalists to governments and United Nations agencies.

Despite being refuted again and again, it is still used today to support private ownership and uncontrolled markets as sure-fire roads to economic growth.

The success of Hardin’s argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesn’t question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardin’s argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus.

Hardin’s essay has been widely used as an ideological response to anti-imperialist movements in the Third World and discontent among indigenous and other oppressed peoples everywhere in the world.

“Hardin’s fable was taken up by the gathering forces of neo-liberal reaction in the 1970s, and his essay became the ‘scientific’ foundation of World Bank and IMF policies, viz. enclosure of commons and privatization of public property. … The message is clear: we must never treat the earth as a ‘common treasury.’ We must be ruthless and greedy or else we will perish.” (Boal 2007)

In Canada, conservative lobbyists use arguments derived from Hardin’s political tract to explain away poverty on First Nations’ reserves, and to argue for further dismantling of indigenous communities. A study published by the influential Fraser Institute urges privatization of reserve land:

“[T]hese large amounts of land, with their attendant natural resources, will never yield their maximum benefit to Canada’s native people as long as they are held as collective property subject to political management. … collective property is the path of poverty, and private property is the path of prosperity.” (Fraser 2002: 16-17)

This isn’t just right-wing posturing. Canada’s federal government, which has refused to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in 2007 that it will “develop approaches to support the development of individual property ownership on reserves,” and created a $300 million fund to do just that.

In Hardin’s world, poverty has nothing to do with centuries of racism, colonialism and exploitation: poverty is inevitable and natural in all times and places, the product of immutable human nature. The poor bring it on themselves by having too many babies and clinging to self-destructive collectivism.

The tragedy of the commons is a useful political myth — a scientific-sounding way of saying that there is no alternative to the dominant world order.

Stripped of excess verbiage, Hardin’s essay asserted, without proof, that human beings are helpless prisoners of biology and the market. Unless restrained, we will inevitably destroy our communities and environment for a few extra pennies of profit. There is nothing we can do to make the world better or more just.

In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a similar argument as a “repulsive blasphemy against man and nature.” Those words apply with full force to the myth of the tragedy of the commons.

Ian Angus is editor of Climate and Capitalism 

Works cited

• Appell, G. N. 1993. “Hardin’s Myth of the Commons: The Tragedy of Conceptual Confusions.” http://tinyurl.com/5knwou

• Boal, Iain. 2007. “Interview: Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse.” Counterpunch,September 11, 2007. http://tinyurl.com/5vepm5

• Bromley, Daniel W. and Cernea Michael M. 1989. “The Management of Common Property Natural Resources: Some Conceptual and Operational Fallacies.” World Bank Discussion Paper. http://tinyurl.com/5853qn

• Cox, Susan Jane Buck. 1985, “No Tragedy on the Commons.” Environmental Ethics 7. http://tinyurl.com/5bys8h

• Engels, Friedrich. 1892. “The Mark.” http://tinyurl.com/6e58e7

• Engels, Friedrich. 1844. Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. http://tinyurl.com/5p24t5

• Fraser Institute. 2002. Individual Property Rights on Canadian Indian Reserves. http://tinyurl.com/5pjfjj

• Hardin, Garrett. 1966. Biology: Its Principles and Implications. Second edition. San Francisco. W.H. Freeman & Co.

• Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” http://tinyurl.com/o827

• Marx, Karl. [1867] 1998. Marx Engels Collected Works Vol. 37 (Capital, Vol. 3). New York: International Publishers

• Neeson, J.M. 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge University Press.

Gentrification as Settler-Colonialism: Urban Resistance Against Urban Colonization

[Photo from Mike Maguire / Flickr]

By John Kamaal Sunjata

Gentrification is a ubiquitous phenomenon of political economy across the United States. Residential displacement, socioeconomic exclusion, political instability, homelessness, spatial transformation, and racial segregation coincide with the marked rapidity of the gentrification (Filion 1991, Atkinson 2002, Lees, Slater and Wyly 2008, Brown-Saracino 2010, Thörn 2012, Novy and Colomb 2013, Kohn 2013, Marcuse 2015, Domaradzka 2018). Local governments have appeared too impotent to mitigate the worsening effects that gentrification has on marginalized communities as urban landscapes continue their dramatic shifts and political struggles intensify within urban centers. In the era of increased fiscal austerity and decreased fiscal activism, local governments are better equipped to expand gentrification processes than contract them. This presents a puzzle for residents, organizers, and urban decision-makers alike about how to approach gentrification, especially when there are competing socioeconomic objectives.

This paper addresses the following questions: how do we contextualize gentrification as a political phenomenon? What are some of the political challenges that gentrification could present to cities? How have urban decision-makers responded to gentrification? How does gentrification contribute to what is happening on the ground from an urban resistance standpoint? This paper argues from a Marxist framework that gentrification (a) presents racialized challenges of density, diversity, and inequality; (b) urban decision-makers have largely responded by expanding gentrification efforts; and (c) gentrification itself may antagonize urban resistance movements. This argument follows from conducting case studies of Detroit and Brooklyn, where gentrification efforts and anti-gentrification movements have been observed and documented.

Three key findings emerge from the analysis. First, the process of gentrification starts with the racialization of a city’s inhabitants (read: the justification of their displacement) through patently white supremacist framing (Zukin, 2010; Quizar, 2019). Second, gentrification produces patently racialized outcomes for non-white people (Fullilove, 2001). Third, the dilemma of gentrification as a political process and the lack of meaningful urban policy responses to gentrification from local governments has given rise to urban anti-gentrification resistance movements. This paper has four sections. This first section discusses gentrification as a political process. The second section discusses urban resistance to gentrification. The third section analyzes the cases of Detroit and New York as sites of gentrification and anti-gentrification resistance. The fourth section concludes.

Gentrification as a political process

Gentrification defined

As an aspect of political economy, gentrification has been described and empirically examined by various scholars. Neil Smith has described gentrification as “the process by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished by an influx of private capital and middle-class home buyers and renters” (Smith, 1996). Smith identifies the “rent gap,” a cycle of disinvestment and devalorization that establishes poor neighborhoods as sites of profitability, as a key factor in gentrification (Smith, 1987). Ipsita Chatterjee succinctly describes gentrification as “the theft of space from labor and its conversion into spaces of profit” (Chatterjee, 2014).

Gina Pérez comprehensively describes gentrification thusly:

…[A]n economic and social process whereby private capital (real estate firms, developers) and individual homeowners and renters reinvest in fiscally neglected neighborhoods through housing rehabilitation, loft conversions, and the construction of new housing stock. Unlike urban renewal, gentrification is a gradual process, occurring one building or block at a time. It also gradually displaces by increasing rents and raising property taxes (Pérez, 2002).

The previous scholars present valuable insights for what is a manifold political process with racial, economic, cultural, and spatial implications. This paper will rely on Samuel Stein’s definition of gentrification: “…[T]he process by which capital is reinvested in urban neighborhoods, and poorer residents and their cultural products are displaced and replaced by richer people and their preferred aesthetics and amenities” (Stein, 2019). Some have described gentrification as a net positive: it increases the number of affluent and educated persons, leading to a wealthier tax base, increased consumption of goods and services, and broader support for democratic political processes (Byrne, 2002). Others have posited that gentrification (namely, “residential concentration”) can have a beneficial effect but primarily for more educated groups (Cutler, Glaeser, & Vigdor, 2007), and may create job opportunities for the lower income residents, raise property values, enhance tax revenues, which could lead to improved social services via the wealthier tax base (Vigdor, Massey, & Rivlin, 2002). However, most of the literature points to gentrification as a net negative (Filion, 1991; Atkinson, 2002; Newman & Ashton, 2004; Lees, Slater, & Wyly, 2008; Shaw, 2008; Zukin, 2010; Brown-Saracino, 2010; Goetz, 2011).

Gentrification, as a multidimensional process, develops through some combination of three forms of “upgrading,” or renovation: economic (up-pricing), physical (redevelopment), and social (upscaling) (Marcuse, 2015). Up-pricing is the increased economic value of a neighborhood, namely the land it sits on.  Redevelopment, with respect to gentrification, is primarily a private undertaking (Marcuse, 2015). Upscaling refers to the pivot toward more affluent and educated people (Zukin, 2010). Within the United States context, “upgrades” take on a particularly racialized dynamic (Fullilove, 2001). These upgrades are led by capital employing racial segregation to secure private development (Stein, 2019).

Land is a key factor of gentrification

Land was a critical motivating factor for early American settlement (Campbell, 1959). Under a regime of racial capitalism,[1] land is a key factor in realizing both use and exchange values. Land is a both a “precondition for all commodities’ production and circulation, and a strange sort of commodity in and of itself” (Stein, 2019). Unlike other tradable or otherwise transportable commodities, land is a “fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents” (Harvey, 2013). Future rents are highly susceptible to demand- and supply-side pressures; therefore, the political economy cannot function without land prices and land markets for coordination. In treating land as a purely financial asset—an open field—for interest-bearing capital, it facilitates the circulation of anticipated surplus value production, bought, and sold according to the rent it yields (Harvey, 2018). The central contradiction of land under racial capitalism is its dual function as a collective good and commodity; a contradictory role as a site of social occupation and private ownership (Foglesong, 1986). It is on urban decision-makers to “reconcile” this contradiction for the capitalists [2] and workers. It is on the urban decision-maker to create the conditions wherein (1) capitalists can turn a profit; (2) labor power is reproduced; (3) infrastructure is maintained; and (4) basic welfare is ensured (Foglesong, 1986; Stein, 2019). The restructuring and redefinition of territorial foundations is central to the functioning private property regimes.

Private property generates dispossession

Private property [3] ownership exists at the nexus of racial capitalism. Robert Nichols argues that the “system of landed property” was fundamentally predicated on violent, legalized dispossession (particularly of Indigenous people) (Nichols, 2020). Racial capitalism reflects the “the social, cultural, political, and ideological complexes of European feudalisms” (Robinson, 2000) and institutionalizes a (colonial) regime of private property protection on that basis. Theft is generated as a recursive mechanism and “[r]ecursive dispossession is effectively a form of property-generating theft” (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Nichols, 2020). The institution of private property (especially and specifically in areas with Black people) manifests as a disjunction between the community’s use value and the exchange value of property (Pérez, 2004). Racial capitalism reproduces itself and a racist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019). In fact, race-neutral policies have been used to both “discredit and rationalize practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000). Modern American history has proven that racism can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris A. P., 1994).

Dispossession is justified by racialization

White supremacy is an underacknowledged political theory that articulates and structures the American polity. Even the origins of property rights within the United States are rooted in racial domination (Harris C. , 1993). It was the interaction of race and property that played a critical role in racially and economically subordinating Black and Indigenous people (Harris C. , 1993). Whiteness, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination (Mumm, 2017), Blackness represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession. Whiteness has, in various spaces, been “deployed as identity, status, and property, sometimes singularly, sometimes in tandem” (Harris C. , 1993). Whiteness is valorized and property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014). Whiteness functions for racial exclusion (Harris C. , 1993) and capital advancement (Roediger, 2005). Racism is a feature of white supremacy and “its practitioners exploit and renew fatal power-difference couplings” (Gilmore, 2002). Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described racism as the “practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign political territories” (Bhandar & Toscano, 2015). It limits the life prospects of people it racializes, disproportionately burdens them with the costs of a “monetized and profit-driven world” while politically dislocating them from “the variable levers of power” that may well alleviate such burdens (Gilmore, 2002).

Racialized persons, especially Black people, confront the dual designations of superhumanity and subhumanity through their livelihoods. It is white supremacy that supports the synthesis of white domination through racial capitalism, across political, economic, and cultural geography. Black people are “fungible” in that they are commodifiable, their “captive [bodies]…vessel[s] for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others” (Hartman, 1997). Black lives do not matter, the ways in which Black people’s bodies can serve white interests; however, matter a great deal. The settler-colonial logic of elimination and the white supremacist logic of Black fungibility converge around the question of gentrification (Quizar, 2019). The spatialization of race and the racialization of space is critical to the settler-colonial logic embedded in racial capitalism and the processes of gentrification (Safransky, 2014). Gentrification comes from a refusal of the would-be settlers to allow inconvenient, often racialized, inhabitants to prevent them from occupying a desired region. Therefore, much gentrification can be thought of as a “contestation of blacks and whites for urban space” (Vigdor, Massey, & Rivlin, 2002).

Urban Resistance to Gentrification

Gentrification has led to the demoralization of the people most directly affected (Chernoff, 2010). The consolidation of racialized class inequalities via accumulation through dispossession often emerges from the processes of gentrification (Harvey, 2008; Casgrain & Janoschka, 2013). It has also inspired anti-gentrification activism in response to the uncomfortable political economic pressures (Castells, 1983; Harvey, 2008; Kirkland, 2008; Zukin, 2009; Creasap, 2012). This activism often includes broad coalitions, across various heterogeneous groups and networks, united under common objectives that may apply to a variety of concrete challenges such as density, diversity, and inequality (Novy & Colomb, 2013; Domaradzka, 2018).

Urban resistance to gentrification has manifested as residents demanding a “right to the city,” wherein they attempt to assert their self-determination and autonomy by controlling their urban environment (Portalious, 2007; Pruijt, 2007). At various times and spaces, movements, organizers, and community-based groups may employ confrontation–resistance (insurrectionary/revolutionary) strategies against the state or participation–cooperation (reformist/counterrevolutionary) strategies with the state (Hackworth, 2002; Novy & Colomb, 2013). Tactics of urban resistance may include but are not limited to “the occupation of empty houses, demonstrations in favor of urban infrastructure, spontaneous celebrations, the rejection of zoning, demands concerning leisure, issues related to participation, self-management and alternative ways of everyday life” (Portalious, 2007). Any expression of urban resistance may provoke a response (or non-response) from the presiding local governing body .

There is a creative tension that exists between confrontation and cooperation strategies; some of the contradictions are antagonistic and some are non-antagonistic. The confrontation–resistance actors tend to be radical or anti-capitalist and favor insurrectionary/revolutionary postures with the local governing body, whereas the participation–cooperation actors favor a “reformed” capitalist system and dialogue with the local governing body (Novy & Colomb, 2013). Under the regime of racial capitalism, local governments prioritize and support the displacer class. This may intensify local struggles and heighten the socioeconomic contradictions. The power imbalance engenders conflict between the classes of displacers and the displacees. The city becomes a contested object “both for powerful groups and the grassroots” (Portalious, 2007). This contestation creates sociopolitical spaces for movements to confront gentrification as a force that operates for the benefit of the elites. For racialized subjects, resistance to gentrification may take on decolonial dimensions.

The Cases of Detroit and Brooklyn

The United States has a long legacy of dispossessing poorer people of adequate housing stock through racist urban planning and housing policy (Moskowitz, 2017; Stein, 2019). Gentrification relies upon legal, logistical, infrastructural, and technological capacities developed, maintained, and reproduced by the repressive and ideological state apparatuses of racial capitalism (Althusser, 2014; Stein, 2019). Local governments are structurally ordered to establish the spatial order (Stein, 2019); therefore, if the state is ordered under racial capitalism, the governing body must maintain and expand that system. Gentrification relies on severe urban divestment, which over time, creates “gentrifiable” building stock, or dirt-cheap real estate. This creates the incentive for urban reinvestment (Moskowitz, 2017; Stein, 2019). The history of American urban planning, operating under the logics of white supremacy and racial capitalism, is the purposeful spatial concentration of Black people and their subsequent divestment (Moskowitz, 2017). Few places exemplify the cycles of urban disinvestment–reinvestment like Detroit and Brooklyn. In both places, urban decision-makers have responded to the challenges of gentrification by gentrifying further.

Detroit as a site of gentrification and urban resistance

The post-World War II economic boom brought tens of thousands of Black people to Detroit where they sought economic opportunities in the industrial sphere (Moskowitz, 2017; Mallach, 2018). Detroit’s black population was 6,000 in 1910, 41,000 in 1920, 120,000 by the eve of the Great Depression, 149,000 in 1940, and 660,000 by 1970 (Mallach, 2018). The growth in the Black population coincided with white flight (Mallach, 2018): the city’s white population declined from 84 percent in 1950 to 54 percent in 1970 (Doucet, 2020). From the 1960s through the 1980s, Black families moved into the parts of Detroit vacated by former white residents (Mallach, 2018). As deindustrialization took hold, a (further) segregated landscape developed with the economic burdens falling disproportionately on Black people (Safransky, 2014). The Detroit debt crisis, along with the subprime lending crisis through “reverse redlining,” the Global Financial crisis, and fiscal austerity devastated Detroit’s inner urban core (Safransky, 2014; Mallach, 2018). Property prices rose steadily and home sales rose dramatically before culminating into a real-estate crash (Mallach, 2018). Sarah Safransky writes the following (Safransky, 2014):

In March 2014, the city began an unprecedented process of declaring bankruptcy. This decision followed Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s order that Detroit be placed under emergency management. Detroit is one of six cities in the state (all with predominantly black populations) that Snyder has deemed to be in financial crisis. Emergency managers – who are unelected – are tasked with balancing cities’ revenue and expenditure and are granted sweeping powers to do so. They nullify the power of elected officials and assume control of not just city finances but all city affairs, meaning they can break union contracts, privatize public land and resources, and outsource the management of public services (Peck, 2012, 2013).

By 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau reported the Black population at about 526,644 (79 percent) and the white population at about 97,825 (15 percent) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019). When Detroit cratered, a space for gentrification opened. Detroit was described as a “New American Frontier” (Renn, 2011) and the incoming, usually white, residents were described as “urban pioneers” settling into “urban homesteads” (Quizar, 2019). For decades, the imagery around Detroit—the Blackest large city in the United States—centered around decaying abandoned architecture—the implication being “emptiness” and “vacancy” (Doucet, 2020).

Whiteness, in the Detroit context, acts as a tool to invisibilize Black residents, delegitimize their rights to spatially occupy political, economic, and cultural geography, and advance capital. Now that white people are resettling the city they had once abandoned, Detroit is making a “comeback” and it is the “New Brooklyn” (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). White people’s presence—along with their advanced buying power and aesthetic choices—confers “legitimacy.” It is white people who are “saving” Detroit from the failures of Black leadership and Black underproductivity (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). The majority Black population is devalorized (or dehumanized) in favor of the “empty” urban landscape in the “empty” city they occupy (Safransky, 2014; Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). L. Brooks Patterson, the county executive of Oakland County, was asked by The New Yorker what should be done about Detroit’s financial woes. He answered, saying, “What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn” (Quizar, 2019). The logic of elimination and Black fungibility are present even in the words and actions of one of the premier urban decision-makers. The racialization of Black Detroiters and the genocidal framing facilitates the processes of gentrification: accumulation through dispossession.

There is a long history of Black Detroiters engaging in political struggle, including ground-level mobilizations that connect America’s history of settler-colonialism with anti-Black racism, as manifested in Detroit’s patterns of gentrification (Quizar, 2019). Detroit’s Black neighborhoods have been described by anti-gentrification activists as “colonized Indigenous land and sites of Black containment, displacement, and resistance” (Quizar, 2019). The urban resistance movements in Detroit have used a blend of confrontational and participatory strategies. Urban resistance in Detroit has looked like residents, activists, and academics mobilizing research to counter positive narratives about gentrification (Safransky, 2014; Doucet, 2020). Many Detroiters have engaged in mutual aid projects and extended their communities of care (Safransky, 2014). Some have held anti- foreclosure and -eviction protests and demanded that negligent landlords “take care of land and buildings.” (Safransky, 2014). Some activists even engaged in more radical tactics such as squatting empty houses wherein families had been recently evicted (Safransky, 2014).

Brooklyn as a site of gentrification and urban resistance

New York’s Black population grew rapidly in the 20th century. It was not until the 1950s, the majority stopped living in Manhattan and shifted to Harlem (Chronopoulos, 2020). The legacy of redlining played a tremendous role in developing what would become Black Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020). Between 1940 and 2000, the white population of Brooklyn declined by 67 percent; the Black population increased by 682.9 percent (Chronopoulos, 2020). White residents, “anxious” about the changing racial composition, fled for Staten Island, New Jersey, or Long Island (Osman, 2011). White Brooklynites tried everything they could to force non-white residents out, particularly neighborhood defense (Chronopoulos, 2020). According to Themis Chronopoulos:

Neighborhood defense included real estate agents and landlords who resorted to unofficial discrimination and refused to rent or sell housing to minority populations; financial institutions that denied mortgages and other loans to minority populations trying to relocate or open a business in a white neighborhood; white neighborhood residents who verbally and physically harassed minority residents who managed to rent or buy a property or youths who attacked minorities attending schools or using the public spaces of white neighborhoods; and the police that hassled minorities because they were frequenting white neighborhoods. In a general sense, neighborhood defense was an effort to maintain the racial exclusivity of white neighborhoods during a period of political mobilizations by African Americans demanding equality.

The legacy of neighborhood defense has ensured that racial segregation still defines Brooklyn today. White supremacy as structured through housing, financial, and employment discrimination—de jure and de facto, as well as the maldistribution of resources, public goods, white terrorism, police brutality, racially-biased sentencing, and a dearth of socioeconomic mobility, has had a lasting adverse effect on the livelihoods of Black Brooklynites directly and indirectly affected even to the present day. By the late 1940s, Black people were the majority of downtown Brooklyn, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, Bedford Stuyvesant, and Crown Heights (Woodsworth, 2016). As a result of persistent real-estate blockbusting, East New York’s population flipped from overwhelmingly white in 1960 to overwhelmingly Black in 1966 (Chronopoulos, 2020). White Brooklynites engaged in neighborhood defense and spatial separation projects to prevent Black Brooklynites from “spreading” to other areas, but by 1980 most whites had abandoned Black Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020).

Today, Brooklyn has 2.6 million residents (if it were a city, it would be the fourth largest in the United States) and 788,00 Black people—more Black residents than any city in the United States except for New York and Chicago (Chronopoulos, 2020). Despite this, the movement of middle- to upper-middle class white people has contributed to patterns of racial segregation and gentrification (Wyly, Newman, Schafran, & Lee, 2010; Shepard, 2013; Hyra, 2017). White Brooklynites have disproportionately benefited at the expense of Black Brooklyn. [4] Black fungibility is exemplified; the contagion of Blackness was historically spatially limited to protect white Brooklynites’ capital investment before white flight but meticulously expelled to expand white Brooklynites’ capital investment via gentrification.

Brooklyn, beset by the political challenges of deindustrialization, gentrification, globalization, has been a site of smaller scale contestations (Shepard, 2013). Residents have resisted rezoning efforts by drafting alternative “community plans” (Shepard, 2013). Brooklyn has been the site of urban resistance from wide coalitions of actors, from organizers, artists, global justice activists, and anti-war demonstrators (Shepard, 2013). Brooklynites have resisted evictions by engaging in eviction defense at the local level, protesting the development of big box stores, and developed community gardens, and fought police brutality (Shepard, 2013). Overall, the erosion of militancy has undermined effective anti-gentrification resistance within Brooklyn (Chronopoulos, 2020).

Conclusion

Gentrification has restructured and reconstituted urban space, reproducing new zones of privatization, exclusion, and homogenization (Kohn, 2013) via the racialized logics of elimination and Black fungibility. It induces urban instability and crises at the global urban scale, as real estate developers search for creative ways to maximize profit through and above antagonistic forces at the local level. The limited geographic investments that are tied to geospatial localities creates local dependence for firms, local governments, and residents (Cox and Mair 1988). Urban instability and crises are inherent to racial capitalist political economy; however, local governments may navigate by ensuring that the most politically disempowered, typically racialized, persons absorb the brunt of the economic burdens (Smith, 1996; Stein, 2019; Burden-Stelly, 2020). Black people are disproportionately displaced and dispossessed by gentrification in urban spaces as they occupy an identity of accumulation and deaccumulation (Burden-Stelly, 2020). This feat of racial capitalist political economy is accomplished through Black people’s structural location as simultaneously indispensable and disposable racialized subjects (Harris C. , 1993; Quizar, 2019; Burden-Stelly, 2020). The disposability, exchangeability, and expendability of Black people via purposive campaigns of dehumanization and devalorization accelerates the gentrification process, especially in the cases of Detroit and Brooklyn.

The devalorization of Black people for urban private property has been a constant feature of American racial capitalism since Black people ceased being legal chattel (Harris A. P., 1994). Thus, cities are “saved” when white people presumably “rescue” the urban centers and the decaying architecture from “Black underdevelopment, mismanagement, and underproductivity” (Quizar, 2019; Doucet, 2020). So, gentrification within the American context, functions as a more benign form of ethnic cleansing wherein racialized people are evacuated from urban centers; it may be presented as the result of non-violent market forces despite evidence to the contrary. Gentrification exacts “spatialized revenge” against the inconvenient racialized inhabitants of urban centers (Smith, 1996).

Racialized people may develop class consciousness because of the disruptions created by gentrification (Cox & Mair, 1988). Class consciousness among the racialized may be an altogether natural affair as “[r]ace is the modality in which class is lived.” (Hall et al., 2013). This class consciousness may develop into urban resistance against the political forces that allow gentrification to continue. The mobilization of resistance occurs as cleavages develop among the urban political establishment and opportunity for successful urban resistance manifests (Pruijt, 2007). As gentrification continues, contradictions emerge; gentrification as a phenomenon possesses both the conditions for its expansion and its contraction. The success of urban resistance movements against what is effectively urban colonization; however, is not guaranteed.

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Notes

[1] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalued and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[2] Although the capitalist class makes up what Marxists refer to as the ruling-class, there still exists contradictions within the ruling-class about certain objectives and interests, especially with respect to gentrification. Neil Smith once noted this, saying, “to explain gentrification according to the gentrifier’s actions alone, while ignoring the role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agencies is excessively narrow.” A business owner may want their workers (who are also tenants) to have affordable housing because it reduces the likelihood that workers would demand raises. Real estate developers would dislike “affordable housing” as that puts a constraint on their ability to maximize profits on rental properties. There are a lot of competing interests to consider and an uncareful conflation of capitalist interests could lead to unanalytical analysis.

[3] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

[iv] [4] This paper, drawing upon Chronopoulos’ article, What’s Happened to the People?” Gentrification. Journal of African American Studies, 549-572., defines Black Brooklyn as “Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, East New York, Canarsie, Flatlands, East Flatbush, Flatbush, parts of Bushwick, and parts of downtown Brooklyn.

Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men

[Pieter Bruegel the Elder : The Harvesters (oil painting from 1565)]

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

“I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to purchase and inhabit the earth.”

—Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1550[1]

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

—Karl Marx, 1867[2]

The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”[3]

Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.

The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift from commons-based to private-profit-based farming was not accepted easily — in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.

Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded as king by Edward VI, then only nine years old. For the next six years, actual political power rested with a regency council, headed by the Duke of Somerset until 1549, and by the Duke of Northumberland from late 1549 until Edward’s death in 1553.

Somerset and Northumberland were strong protestants who wanted the English church to move farther from catholic doctrine and practices than Henry had allowed. To promote that, the law outlawing heresy was repealed and censorship was relaxed, beginning a period that has been called “the first great era in the history of English public discussion.”[4]

Liberal protestants took advantage of that opening to campaign vigorously, not just for religious reform, but against sin and corruption in society at large, particularly the erosion of traditional economic values. Their powerful condemnations of greedy landlords and merchants circulated both as books and sermons addressed to the wealthy, and as inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides that were sold in city streets.

They don’t seem to have acted as an organized group, but their speeches and writings clearly reveal the presence of a strong current of anti-capitalist opinion in England in the mid-1500s. Because they focused on the common weal — common good — historians have labelled them the commonwealth men.

Cormorants and greedy gulls

R.H. Tawney’s 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains the best account of the complex connections between social and religious criticism in Tudor England.

“It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.

“In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine.”[5]

The great sin they condemned was covetousness — the desire to accumulate ever more wealth. Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, condemned landlords’ greed in general, and enclosure in particular, in a sermon preached before the King and other worthies.

“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. For what here before went for twenty or forty pound by year, (which is an honest portion to be had gratis in one lordship of another man’s sweat and labour) now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year. … Too much, which these rich men have, causes such dearth, that poor men, which live of their labour, cannot with the sweat of their face have a living …

“These graziers, enclosers and rent-raisers, are hinderers of the King’s honour. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.”[6]

Those views found support in the country’s top ruling circles. The Book of Private Prayer, prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and other officials of the established church in 1553, included a prayer “For Landlords.”

“We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of those that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they remembering themselves to be Thy tenants may not rack nor stretch out the rents of their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines. … Give them grace also … that they … may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house and land to land, to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their lands, tenements and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[7]

One of the most vehement critics of greed and exploitation was the London-based printer and poet Robert Crowley, who offered this explanation for the 1549 peasant rebellions.

“If I should demand of the poor man of the country what thing he thinks to be the cause of Sedition, I know his answer. He would tell me that the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I can not tell who; men that have no name because they are doers of all things that any gain hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly devoid of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.

“Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition! They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons! No custom, no law or statute can keep them from oppressing us in such sort, that we know not which way to turn so as to live.”[8]

Condemning “lease mongers that cancel leases on land in order to lease it again for double or triple the rent,” Crowley argued that landlords should “consider themselves to be but stewards, and not Lords over their possessions.”

“But so long as this persuasion sticks in their minds — ‘It is my own; who shall stop me from doing as I like with my own as I wish?’ — it shall not be possible to have any redress at all. For if I may do with my own as I wish, then I may suffer my brother, his wife, and his children toil in the street, unless he will give me more rent for my house than he shall ever be able to pay. Then may I take his goods for that he owes me, and keep his body in prison, turning out his wife and children to perish, if God will not move some man’s heart to pity them, and yet keep my coffers full of gold and silver.”[9]

Back to the feudal

While no one can doubt the sincerity of their criticism of the rich, the commonwealth men were also “united in denouncing the rebels, whose sin could never be justified even if their grievances could.”[10]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose denunciation of wealth accumulation is quoted at the beginning of this article, also, in the same sermon, condemned “unlawful assemblies and tumults,” and people who “confound all things upsy down with seditious uproars and unquietness.” “God in his scriptures expressly forbids all private revenging, and had made this order in commonwealths, that there should be kings and governors to whom he has willed all men to be subject and obedient.”[11]

Speaking of the 1549 rebellions, Latimer declared that “all ireful, rebellious persons, all quarrelers and wranglers, all blood-shedders, do the will of the devil, and not God’s will.” Disobedience to one’s superiors was a major sin, even if the superiors were themselves violating God’s laws. “What laws soever they make as concerning outward things we ought to obey, and in no wise to rebel, although they be never so hard, noisome and hurtful.”[12]

Immediately after condemning landlords as cormorants and greedy gulls, Crowley told the 1549 rebels that they had been misled by the devil: “to revenge wrongs is, in a subject, to take an usurp the office of a king, and, consequently, the office of God.” The poor should suffer in silence, awaiting royal or divine intervention.

Like the nineteenth century “feudal socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized three centuries later, the commonwealth men were literally reactionary — they wanted “to roll back the wheel of history.” “From the ills of present-day society this group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills.”[13]

As historian Michael Bush says, the commonwealth men “showed concern for the poor, but accepted the need for poverty.”

“Without exception they subscribed to the traditional ideal of the state as a body politic in which every social group had its place, function and desert. … They pleaded with rulers to reform society, and proposed various means, but not by changing its structure. Their thinking was paternalistic and conservative. Although they censured the nobility, it was for malpractices, not for being ruling class.”[14]

English protestant reformers in the mid-1500s “inherited the social idea of medieval Christianity pretty much in its entirety,” so their views were “especially antithetical to the acquisitive spirit that animated the emerging society of capitalism.”[15]

In the 1500s, Tawney wrote, “the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages.”[16] What shocked and frightened the commonwealth men was not just poverty, but the growth of a worldview that repudiated “the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves.”

“That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”

The wolf-pack creed they were fighting, Tawney commented ironically, was “the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.”[17]

A Losing Battle

The commonwealth men were eloquent and persuasive, but they were fighting a losing battle. The aristocrats who owned most of England’s farmland and controlled the government could tolerate public criticism and ineffective laws, but not anything that actually threatened their wealth and power. They blamed the 1549 rebellions on the critics, and quickly ousted the Duke of Somerset, the only member of the regency council who seemed to favor enforcing the anti-enclosure laws.

What remained of the commonwealth campaign collapsed after 1553, when the catholic Mary Tudor became queen and launched a vicious reign  of terror against protestants. Some 300 “heretics,” including Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake, and hundreds more fled to protestant countries on the continent.

Capitalist practices already had a strong foothold in the countryside in the 1540s, and they spread rapidly in the rest of the century, without regard to what Christian preachers might say. “Forms of economic behavior which had appeared novel and aberrant in the 1540s were becoming normalized virtually to the point of being taken for granted.”[18]

For landowners who wanted to preserve their estates, that shift wasn’t a choice. It was forced on them by changes beyond their control.

“Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1640 prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose approximately sixfold. … [This] put an unusual premium on energy and adaptability and turned conservatism from a force making for stability into a quick way to economic disaster. Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were, and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”[19]

As a result, the trends that Latimer and his co-thinkers opposed actually accelerated, and their vision of a reborn feudal paternalism was replaced in ruling class thought by what historian C.B. MacPherson calls “possessive individualism” — the view that society is a collection of market relations between people who have an absolute right to do as they wish with their property.[20] That view has remained central to all variants of capitalist ideology, down to the present.

Parliament never passed another anti-enclosure bill after 1597, and the Stuart kings who succeeded the Tudors in 1603 only gave lip-service to protecting the poor from enclosure. “Commissions were issued from time to time for the discovery of offenders, but their crimes were pardoned on payment of a money fine. The punishment of enclosers had degenerated into a revenue-raising device and little else.”[21]

As Christopher Hill writes, in the century before the English Revolution, ruling class attitudes toward the land changed radically. “No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[22]

But only the rich had decided that land privatization was a good idea. The poor continued to resist that weird undertaking, and for some, the objective now was communism.

To be continued …

Notes

I have modernized spelling, and occasionally grammar and vocabulary, in quotations from 16th and 17th century authors.

[1] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 196. The date 1550 is approximate.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 742.

[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 2001), 178.

[4] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), xiii.

[5] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Angelico Press, 2021 [1926]), 140-41.

[6] Hugh Latimer, “The First Sermon Preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549,” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

[7] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 81-2.

[8] Robert Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 132-3.

[9] Robert Crowley, “An information and petition against the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 162, 157.

[10] Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 159.

[11] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 192, 193

[12] Hugh Latimer, “The Fourth Sermon upon the Lord’s Prayer (1552)” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) https://ccel.org/ccel/latimer/sermons/

[13] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, (International Publishers, 1976) 494, 355.

[14] M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Edward Arnold, 1975), 61.

[15] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), 248.

[16] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 135.

[17] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 146-7.

[18] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 202.

[19] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1965), 188, 189-90.

[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962).

[21] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.

[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.

A Modest Proposal for Global Egalitarianism

By Hank Pellissier

Editor’s Note: The ideas and proposals expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Hampton Institute.

Walking under the freeway past the homeless encampment, you hear a voice, “I need 50 cents.” Ignoring the beseecher, you scan the news on your smartphone: Jeff Bezos now has $300 billion. Ahead, you see a struggling woman forced into an ICE van, next to signs promoting two candidates you despise but realize will control your future.

Does society have to be like this?

No. This essay will present an option, grounded in justice and liberty.

Global Egalitarianism is a political philosophy structured on the moral ideal of truly establishing all human beings as equals. 

We believe that concept, don’t we? All humans are equal in importance. This maxim inspired American and French revolutions, abolition of slavery, the women’s suffragette movement, gay rights, and every effort to overthrow a tyranny. 

All People Are Equal is the compassionate principle of modern, democratic civilization - we embrace this belief and expect others to react with anger if this ethos is violated. 

Earth should be an Egalitarian Planet. But it isn’t. 

Equality is distant dream today due to economic, social, and political institutions that divide rich and poor, powerful and powerless, bordered nations from bordered nations. 

In our 2020 world, people aren’t equal. The power of a rural, single mother in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is insignificant compared to a man addressing his cabinet at 1900 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. 

• The richest 1% earn 26.3 times more than the bottom 99%.

• There are 2,095 billionaires, but 71% of people live on less than $10 a day.

• There are more slaves on Earth than ever before.

• One person has visited every nation on Earth but millions have never been out of their village.

• 750 million people would emigrate, if they could.

• 52% of people are dissatisfied with their democracy, and 71 nations aren’t democratic.

• 4.5 million Americans have PhDs, but 775 million people in the world are illiterate.

Let us obsolete these depressing statistics and establish global egalitarianism instead, using the tools of Wealth Redistribution, Open Borders, and Pure Democracy. 

WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION

Robin Hood is an egalitarian champion because he ‘robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.’ Many others - like Juraj Janosik (Slovak folk hero), Phoolan Devi (‘Bandit Queen’ of India), and Jose Mujica (President of Uruguay) conducted illegal philanthropy similar to the fictitious yeoman of Sherwood Forest. Today the most laudable proponent of wealth redistribution might be Kshama Sawant of Seattle; she spearheaded the movement for $15/hour minimum wage and she’s presently seeking to nationalize Amazon.

“Redistribution” evokes fear and rage in the upper class; clutching their pearls they hiss, “I worked hard for my money” despite 60% of US wealth being inherited. Most middle income people also bristle when ‘leveling’ is considered - it’s derided as communist thievery to support ‘lazy people.’

Truth is, economic history is a long tragedy of powerful entities enriching themselves by stealing from the poor and middle class. Ethical people are appalled that peasants worked 4 unpaid days a week for their landlord, but today’s situation, where Warren Buffett ($82.47 billion) pays less taxes than his secretary is identically unjust.

The rich don’t need all their money; they just buy unnecessary toys with it, like 169 cars, or giraffes ($40,000 - $80,000) and platinum Arowana fish ($300,000), or a kitchen remodel every three years. I know a man living alone in a $40 million house; his beach town has 147 homeless people. Money doesn’t even ‘buy happiness’ - researchers discovered that more wealth simply creates more want. 

The “Happy Nations” list exhibits the smallest divide between rich and poor. Happy Nations have a smaller ratio between CEO & worker salaries - in #1 Finland the average CEO salary is $99,515 - in #18 USA it is $820,616.

How rich or poor would everyone be if wealth was divided equally, amongst the world’s inhabitants? What’s the PPP per capita? The answer is $17,110 - similar to China and Costa Rica. Plus - if the world had ‘open borders’ - economists estimate global wealth would elevate 50%—150%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just double the first figure, for $34,220 - a digit between the economy of delightful Slovenia and popular Portugal. 

This figure would lift 2.7 billion people out of their present-day poverty, and of course, lower spoiled others to a more modest standard of living. Solid gold toilets would lose their customers - egads!

How can money be redistributed? Multiple methods exist; let’s quickly discuss a few:

Reparations - Fairness requires that assets stolen from a region are returned, in full, even if the assets were stolen many years ago. Unpaid labor should also be recompensed. It’s evident that Africans and Diasporans of African descent deserve retribution for the enslavement, exploitation, and colonization of their continent. India also deserves to be paid back ($45 trillion?) for the precious treasures the British overlords robbed during colonization, plus the 15-29 million Bengalis who starved to death in the World War II era famine, due to food diverted by Winston Churchill. Similarly, the Dalits (untouchables) deserve compensation from their oppressors for the subjugation they’ve endured. 

Armenians and Greeks deserve reparations from Turks; Congolese deserve reparations from Belgium (King Leopold enslaved the populace on rubber plantations and killed 10 million); South Africans deserve reparations for apartheid; Native Americans deserve reparations from European invaders; Jamaica deserves reparations from Britain; South Korea deserves reparations from Japan; Vietnam deserves reparations from the USA; Serbia deserves reparations from NATO, and Haiti deserves reparations from France. 

Land Reform - Property is overly-owned by the already-prosperous, who enrich themselves further via rentals and extracting resources. Revolts are launched to distribute land fairly, but not often enough and they aren’t always successful. (Model land reforms occurred in Cuba and South Korea.) Oftentimes, land reform is stymied by foreign powers who want to continue gorging themselves with the status quo. Guatemalan and Chilean leaders, for example, wanted land reform but were overthrown by USA-instigated coups. 

Land could be distributed equally, globally. The figures on this are fantastic. If 7.8 billion people divided all the habitable land on Earth, there’d be 2.3 acres per person, claims a University of Texas study.

The Federal Land Dividend strategy of Zoltan Istvan is also worth considering. His idea is to lease USA public land (the government owns 40% of USA acreage, worth $150+ trillion) to provide $1,000 month dividends to citizens. This proposal is a fusion of UBI, Nationalization, and Land Reform tactics. 

Nationalization - Public ownership of a region’s resources and industries is a sure-fire way to equitably distribute profit. Norway’s nationalization of its North Sea oil serves as an exemplary example; the profits guarantee the citizenry with free health care, free education, and pensions. Similar situations are evidenced elsewhere: Bolivia nationalized gas, petroleum, hydroelectricity, and lithium - the latter move led to Evo Morales’s ousting in a coup engineered by US shenanigans. Cuba nationalized all private businesses and factories, including 36 US-owned sugar mills; this led to its decades-long pariah status. Chile nationalized copper; Mexico and Venezuela nationalized oil; Pakistan nationalized steel mills; Quebec province in Canada nationalized hydroelectric; Sri Lanka nationalized tea, rubber, and cocoa; Italy nationalized Italia airlines; India nationalized banks, etc. 

Nationalization exists worldwide, but still, only a small fraction of resources are publicly owned. Far more could be done. The Socialist Alternative party has an egalitarian agenda: they want the 500 biggest corporations in the USA to be publicly owned. Nationalization is fairer than today’s system where products are created by billionaires who pay workers demoralizing salaries. (Apple workers in China work 60 hour weeks for low pay in unsafe conditions). 

Taxation - Progressive income tax, wealth tax, property tax, inheritance tax, sales tax, value-added tax (VAT), and other levies can be used to encourage wealth redistribution. The USA rich were taxed up to 91% in the 1950’s, an era with far better economic equity than today. French economist Thomas Piketty believes “billionaires should be taxed out of existence”; his viewpoint is supported by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “No billionaires”, in my opinion, is a very permissive limitation. I personally think no one needs more than $10 million - this easily guarantees you ‘never have to worry about money again.’

Wages - Minimum wage and maximum wages policies can be used to level the financial field. Luxembourg has the highest minimum wage in the world per nation - $14.12 an hour - but in the USA, that’s topped in at least 17 cities that offer $15/hour or more. If personal wealth, globally, was capped at $34,220 annually, as I previously suggested, $20/hour in a 36-hour work week would be sufficient. Maximum wages only exist in Cuba - this strategy was voted on in Switzerland in 2013 but it failed to pass, receiving just 34.7% of the vote. An obviously target for maximum wage limits is the USA, where corporate CEOs are paid 361 times more than workers.

Universal Basic Income - UBI has accelerated quickly from ‘crazy idea’ to ‘practical solution.’ Early implementations in Canada, Namibia, Finland, Alaska and Stockton, California, suggested its potential. Andrew Yang campaigned for President with UBI as his signature goal. 20th century proponents like Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon suggest UBI’s major party appeal; Libertarians also appreciate its ability to reduce welfare bureaucracy. UBI guarantees citizenry - either all or selected segments - a monthly check to spend as they please. The Covid-19 pandemic sharply increased interest in UBI; by September 2020 policies were planned for Spain and 20-30 USA cities. 

Corporate Sharing & Worker Power - Germany gives workers significant representation in management, with 50% of the supervisory board of directors elected by labor. Their seat at the table guarantees they won’t be mistreated, like warehouse workers at Amazon, who are automatized and “treated like robots” - or at Tesla, oft-accused of racial hostility and discrimination. Strong unions also provide “higher wages, better benefits, increased economic mobility, and reduced poverty.”

Communes & Cooperatives - Numerous egalitarian communities exist, where members live and work together, sharing labor and profit from their enterprises. Examples include Twin Oaks Intentional Community in Virginia, Hutterite colonies in Canadian and US prairie states, and kibbutzim in Israel. Cooperatives and collectives also thrive worldwide, with research indicating they are more productive than hierarchal companies. Spain has more than 18,000 co-operatives, a legacy from the anarcho-syndicalist movement that preceded the Spanish Civil War. 

OPEN BORDERS

Open Borders are essential in creating Global Egalitarianism. Allowing free and easy immigration to every corner of the planet will deliver these benefits:

• People with specific job skills can relocate to an area where their potential can be maximized.

• People seeking education in their field of interest can move to receive the training they want.

• Commercial items can be transported easily without punitive tariffs and inspections.

• Economists claim Open Borders would elevate global wealth by 50% - 150%. This seems obvious: today millions are unable to produce their potential because they live in environments unsuitable to their skills.

• People with an aversion or disinterest in the culture of their homeland can relocate easily to other cultures where they can intellectually and emotionally thrive.

• People trapped in an overpopulated region or an area ‘going underwater’ due to climate change, can settle smoothly into a safer or less-crowded geography.

• Dangerous mindsets like patriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia will be avoided if everyone can relocate internationally, establishing cordial relationships across the globe.

• War between hostile nations will become increasingly rare if individuals see themselves as global citizens, instead of warriors for a single state.

• Understanding and empathy for all humanity will be elevated if borders are eliminated. Today’s demarcation of WE vs. THEM promotes dehumanization and suspicion of the ‘other.’

• 10. Cultural forms and intellectual ideas will flourish if access is enhanced.

Arguments against Open Borders are listed below, with rebuttals. 

Criminals will escape their homelands and invade unsuspecting neighboring nations!

   — Easily preventable. Access to international travel can be denied to those with a criminal record.

Immigrants from impoverished lands will migrate and seize all the best jobs in foreign lands.

   — Studies indicate most people choose not to move. Example: residents from the impoverished state of West Virginia ($24,774 per capita) seldom relocate 500 miles to the wealthy state of Connecticut ($76,456 per capita). This objection also lacks the morality that global egalitarianism requires. Is it ethical to deprive someone of livelihood because they didn’t grow up as your neighbor? Should their value be lessened because they’re categorized with the subhuman label of ‘alien’? Thirdly, immigrants are generally hired in employment niches the natives lack sufficient numbers to fill. Example: USA needs computer engineers, who are subsequently hired from China, India, Russia, etc. 

Local Culture will be destroyed. 

   — This is the weakest argument of all, as anyone who has eaten a juicy fish taco in Minnesota can testify. Culture survives because it provides joy and speaks to the human condition. Ghanaians celebrate both Christian and Muslim holidays, because they’re all fun. Music, art, cinema, literature and cuisine always borrow across borders: Cubism was inspired by West African masks; the violin (invented in Italy) is instrumental in Chinese concerts; spicy peppers, originating in Peru, are essential in Korean cooking; Nobel Prize novels and Oscar-winning films are applauded everywhere. 

PURE DEMOCRACY

Global Egalitarianism requires huge improvement in politics so all people are truly equal. Most democracies in the world are terrifically flawed; many have been re-classified as ‘oligarchies’ - rule by the rich. Pure Democracy is a goal no nation has yet attained, or is even close to. Achieving this has to be done incrementally. Below are suggestions in approximate order:

• Abolish Anti-Democratic Institutions. Many systems today subvert the will of the majority. These institutions need to be eliminated, or drastically reformed. In the USA this initial step requires abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College, electing Supreme Court justices, and transferring commander-in-chief powers from the President to the House of Representatives.

• Campaign Finance Reform. Political contests need to be publicly-financed - no outside money at all. Candidates abusing this must be disqualified.

• Abolish Lobbyists. Politicians cannot accept funding or favors from corporations and special interest groups; this obviously influences their votes. Washington DC needs to cleanse itself from all potential bribery.

• Ranked Choice Voting. This helps select politicians the majority can at least tolerate, and it eliminates the need to vote for ‘the lesser of two evils.’

• Adopt the Parliamentary System. Presidential government (adopted by 52 nations) is far less democratic than the Parliamentary system, enjoyed in 102 nations. The Parliamentary system enables smaller party representation, it reduces the power of the Executive branch, and it encourages multi-party collaboration.

• Encourage Secessions. Individual political power is elevated if the citizen belongs to a smaller group. A voice is more likely to be heard if it is one voice out of 100,000 - 10,000,000 instead of one voice out of 300,000,000 - 1,300,000,000. Eight of the Top Ten “Most Democratic Nations” have 10 million people or less, and none has more than 35 million people. To guide the world towards this, support separatist groups in Catalonia, Galicia, Flanders, Scotland, Chiapas, California, Texas, and Darfur - and support the desire of Berbers, Kurds, Yakuts, Batwa, Canarians, Balinese, Karenni, Assamese, Uygurs, Punjabi, Rwenzururu, and dozens of other ethnicities to govern themself.

• Demand Initiatives and Referendums (also known as Proposition or Plebiscites). “R & I’s’ provide ballot measures to the citizenry, so they can directly vote on reforms advanced by other citizens. (Surprisingly, 24 states do not even offer this option) Switzerland and Ireland offer the most referendums in Europe. In Asia, The Philippines is prolific with plebiscites.

• Poli Sci Education Required? Fear of ‘mob rule by idiots’ is often just elitism, but it would be alleviated if citizens has to pass information and logic tests for the right to vote.

• Abolish Politicians. Representative democracy is flawed because politicians are often narcissistic, authoritarian, and corrupt. If direct democracy referendums are in place, there’s no need for conniving intermediaries.

• Emulate Rojava Communalism - Rojava - the Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Syria - governs itself with a ‘communalist’ structure, designed by American political philosopher Murray Bookchin. Rojavans enjoy enormous power at the community level; its ‘bottom-up system’ provides a voice to everyone. The long-term goal of communalists is to organize Earth’s inhabitants into thousands of self-governing communities that are intrinsically linked into non-competitive, ever-large confederacies.

CONCLUSION

Do you find these utopian ideas preposterous? Science fictional? A wonky, cringe-inducing re-write of John Lennon’s “Imagine’?

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Disillusionment with the status quo, twinned with social media, can create rapid change.

Global Egalitarianism is the future we need.

References

Introduction

Jeff Bezos - $300 billion https://www.ccn.com/jeff-bezos-300-billion-amazon-becomes-worlds-8th-largest-economy

Global Egalitarianism https://globalegalitarianism.wordpress.com/about/ https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_96 https://simoncaney.weebly.com/global-egalitarianism.html

equality inspires revolutions, etc. https://www.nps.gov/revwar/unfinished_revolution/01_all_men_are_created_equal.html

richest 1% earn 26.3 times more than bottom 99% https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/07/29/5-mind-blowing-statistics-about-the-richest-1.aspx

2,095 billionaires https://indianewengland.com/2020/04/forbes-releases-34th-annual-list-of-global-billionaires-includes-several-indians-and-indian-americans/

71% of people live on less than $10 a day https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/08/news/economy/global-low-income/index.html

more slaves on Earth than ever before https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/slaves-time-human-history-article-1.3506975

One person has visited every nation on Earth https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/man-has-visited-every-country-in-the-world/

750 million people would emigrate, if they could https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx

52% of people are dissatisfied with their democracy https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/02/27/satisfaction-with-democracy/

71 nations aren’t democratic https://www.reference.com/world-view/countries-democracy-8f9e05f7d96a76e7

775 million adults are illiterate https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/global-rate-of-adult-literacy-84-per-cent-but-775-million-people-still-cant-read/article4528932/#:~:text=There%20are%20775%20million%20people%20in%20the%20world,in%20their%20footsteps%20because%20they%20aren%27t%20attending%20school

Wealth Distribution

Juraj Janosik (Slovak folk hero) https://www.slavorum.org/juraj-janosik-legendary-slovak-thief-turned-hero/

Phoolan Devi (‘Bandit Queen’ of India) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Phoolan-Devi https://medium.com/@mishra18tanvi/phoolan-devi-the-real-bandit-queen-of-india-2fb09b35d17f

Jose Mujica (eventual President of Uruguay) https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/jos%C3%A9-mujica-uruguays-robin-hood-guerrillas-9066

Kshama Sawant of Seattle - $15/hour minimum wage https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/05/kshama-sawant-seattle-socialist.html

nationalize Amazon https://theoutline.com/post/6587/nationalize-amazon-make-bezos-our-bitch?zd=1&zi=ys72jrku

60% of US wealth inherited https://evonomics.com/americans-get-rich-stay-rich/

peasants had to work 4 days a week unpaid for their landlord http://www.lordsandladies.org/serfs.htm#:~:text=The%20daily%20life%20of%20a%20serf%20was%20dictated,the%20lord%27s%20mill%2C%20and%20pay%20the%20customary%20charge.

Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than his secretary is identically unjust https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/338189

unnecessary toys… like 169 cars https://www.thethings.com/priciest-cars-jay-leno-owns-and-cheapest/

giraffes ($40,000 - $80,000) https://www.exoticanimalsforsale.net/giraffe-for-sale.asp

Asian Arowana fish ($300,000) https://nypost.com/2016/06/05/this-fish-is-worth-300000/

beach town has 147 homeless people https://www.latimes.com/socal/daily-pilot/news/story/2019-10-01/aliso-viejo-denounces-federal-judges-statement-alleging-it-dumped-homeless-in-laguna-beach-shelter

more wealth simply creates more want https://www.livescience.com/10881-global-study-money-buy-happiness.html

“Happiest Nations” https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurabegleybloom/2020/03/20/ranked-20-happiest-countries-2020/#29f843517850

#1 Finland the average CEO salary is $99,515 https://www.payscale.com/research/FI/Job=Chief_Executive_Officer_(CEO)/Salary

#18 USA it is $820,616 https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/chief-executive-officer-salary

per capita income - $17,110 - similar to China and Costa Rica https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/

Open Borders - global wealth would elevate 50% - 150% https://openborders.info/utilitarian/#:~:text=Utilitarian%20justifications%20for%20open%20borders%20hinge%20on%20the,economic%20production%20%28see%20our%20double%20world%20GDP%20page%29

Reparations

Africans deserve reparations https://nehandaradio.com/2020/05/25/tafi-mhaka-europe-should-pay-reparations-for-colonising-africa/

India deserves reparations https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33618621

Dalits (untouchables) deserve compensation https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/india-dalits-reservation-representation-suraj-yengde-6523483/

Armenians deserve reparations from Turks https://ahvalnews.com/armenians-turkey/turkey-may-face-reparation-demands-after-us-recognises-armenian-genocide-turkish

Greeks reparation from Germany https://breakingnewsturkey.com/world/greece-demands-germany-pays-war-reparations

Congolese reparations from Belgium https://www.africanexponent.com/post/9792-will-belgium-ever-apologize-to-drc-and-pay-reparations

South Africans reparations for apartheid https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/south-africa-reparations-for-aparthied

Native Americans reparations from European imperialists https://study.com/academy/lesson/native-american-reparations.html

Jamaica reparations from Britain https://moguldom.com/189262/jamaica-wants-britain-to-pay-billions-in-reparations-for-slavery/

South Korea reparations from Japan https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-17/japan-korea-and-the-tquestion-of-how-to-pay-for-historic-wrongs

Vietnam reparations from the USA https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/18/opinion/the-forgotten-debt-to-vietnam.html

Serbia reparations from NATO https://europediplomatic.com/2019/09/15/moscow-suggests-us-reparations-for-yugoslavia-bombings/

Haiti reparations from France https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/haiti-reparations-france-slavery-colonialism-debt/

Land Reform

Cuba land reform https://cubaplatform.org/land-reform

South Korea land reform https://www.economist.com/asia/2017/10/12/for-asia-the-path-to-prosperity-starts-with-land-reform https://www.iol.co.za/capetimes/opinion/sa-could-model-its-land-reform-on-the-success-achieved-in-south-korea-10450729#:~:text=South%20Korea%E2%80%99s%20land%20reform%20is%20regarded%20as%20one,impact%20on%20agricultural%20productivity%2C%20which%20later%20sustained%20poverty-reduction

Guatemalan coup https://www.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/pdf/historylabs/Guatemalan_Coup_student:RS01.pdf

Chilean coup https://foodfirst.org/publication/agrarian-reform-and-counter-reform-in-chile/

7.0 billion people divide Earth - 2.3 acres each https://foodfirst.org/publication/agrarian-reform-and-counter-reform-in-chile/

The Federal Land Dividend - Zoltan Istvan https://www.businessinsider.com/basic-income-with-federal-land-dividend-2017-7

Nationalization

Norway nationalization https://mg.co.za/article/2011-09-08-oil-together-now-nationalisation-lessons-from-norway/

Bolivia nationalization https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/bolivias-nationalization-oil-and-gas https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bolivia-power-nationalization-idUSTRE64013020100501

Bolivia coup engineered by US for lithium https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/morales-claims-orchestrated-coup-tap-bolivia-lithium-191225053622809.html

Cuba nationalizes 36 US-owned sugar mills http://en.cubadebate.cu/news/2015/08/10/cuba-nationalizes-us-companies/

Chile nationalized copper https://www.chemeurope.com/en/encyclopedia/Chilean_nationalization_of_copper.html

Mexico and Venezuela nationalized oil https://www.yahoo.com/news/brazil-venezuela-mexico-three-ways-nationalize-oil-150004780.html

Pakistan nationalized steel mills https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/pakistans-nationalized-steel-mills

Quebec nationalized hydroelectric https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/hydro-qubec-why-nationalize-the-electricity-sector

Sri Lanka nationalized tea, rubber, and cocoa http://teasrilanka.org/history

Italy nationalized Italia airlines https://www.businessinsider.com/alitalia-nationalized-by-italy-history-2020-3

India nationalized banks https://www.oneindia.com/feature/full-list-of-nationalised-banks-in-india-2718000.html

Socialist Alternative wants the 500 biggest corporations in the USA to be publicly owned https://www.socialistalternative.org/about/

Apple workers in China work 60 hour weeks for low pay in unsafe conditions https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/electronics/9174900/Apples-Chinese-staff-work-60-hours-a-week-independent-audit-finds.html

Taxation

US rich were taxed up to 91% in the 1950’s https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-taxing-wealthy-americans/

Thomas Piketty “billionaires should be taxed out of existence” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/12/billionaires-should-be-taxed-out-of-existence-says-thomas-piketty.html

‘no billionaires’ - Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/24/politics/bernie-sanders-ultra-wealth-tax-billionaires/index.html https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/02/aoc-billionaires-should-not-exist/

$10 million - ‘never have to worry about money again.’ https://www.getrichslowly.org/is-10-million-enough/ 

Wages

Luxembourg minimum wage - $14.12 an hour https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-countries-with-the-highest-minimum-wages.html

USA 17 cities with at least $15/hour minimum wage https://time.com/3969977/minimum-wage/

vote in Switzerland 2013 failed, receiving 34.7% of the vote https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/switzerland-votes-against-cap-executive-pay

USA CEOs are paid 361 times more than workers https://popularresistance.org/why-are-ceos-paid-361-times-more-than-their-average-employees/

Universal Basic Income

UBI in Canada https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/mincone-experiment-in-dauphine-manitoba

UBI Namibia https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/ubi-in-nambia

UBI Finland https://basicincome.org/news/2019/04/finland-further-results-from-the-famous-finnish-ubi-experiment-published/

UBI Alaska https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/alaskaubi

UBI Stockton, California https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-02/stockton-extends-its-universal-basic-income-pilot

UBI Martin Luther King Jr. https://www.egalitarianplanet.org/martin-luther-king-jr

UBI Richard Nixon https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/richard-nixon-ubi-basic-income-welfare/

Libertarians UBI https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income

UBI Spain https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-universal-basic-income-coronavirus-yang-ubi-permanent-first-europe-2020-4

UBI 20-30 USA cities https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/08/08/universal-basic-income-gains-momentum-in-america

Corporate Sharing and Worker Power

Germany worker representation - 50% of the supervisory board of directors https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-08-24/why-german-corporate-boards-include-workers-for-co-determination#:~:text=Wherever%20on%20that%20spectrum%20your%20views%20lie%2C%20it,or%20require%20some%20such%20form%20of%20employee%20%E2%80%9Cco-determination.%E2%80%9D

Amazon workers “treated like robots” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-workers-protest-unsafe-grueling-conditions-warehouse

Tesla accused of racial hostility and discrimination https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-12/tesla-workers-claim-racial-bias-and-abuse-at-electric-car-factory

Union benefits https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy/reports/2016/06/09/139074/unions-help-the-middle-class-no-matter-the-measure/

Communes and Cooperatives

Twin Oaks Intentional Community in Virginia https://www.twinoaks.org/

Hutterite colonies http://www.hutterites.org/

Kibbutzim https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-the-kibbutz-movement

collectives more productive than hierarchal companies https://cccd.coop/news/%EF%BB%BF-worker-cooperatives-are-more-productive-normal-companies

Spain 18,000 co-operatives https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2012/mar/12/cooperatives-spain-mondragon

Open Borders

Open Borders General Info https://openborders.info

Open Borders elevate global wealth 50% 150% https://openborders.info/double-world-gdp/

USA imports computer scientists   https://www.prb.org/usforeignbornstem/

Cubism inspired by West African masks https://www.pablopicasso.org/africanperiod.jsp

Pure Democracy

Abolish Anti-Democratic Institutions https://hankpellissier.com/sixteen-reforms-to-improve-usa-democracy

Ranked Choice Voting https://www.fairvote.org/rcvbenefits#:~:text=%20Benefits%20of%20Ranked%20Choice%20Voting%20%201,more%20voices%20are%20heard.%20Often%2C%20to...%20More%20

Superiority of the Parliamentary System https://lebassy.blogspot.com/2006/07/superiority-of-parliamentary-system.html

“Most Democratic Nations” https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy-countries

Separatist and Secessionist groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secession

24 states do not have Referendums and Initiatives https://ballotpedia.org/States_without_initiative_or_referendum

Switzerland and Ireland offer the most referendums in Europe https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/switzerland-held-9-referendums-already-2016-11727#:~:text=Switzerland%20has%20been%20holding%20referendums%20since%20the%2018th,to%20the%20polls%20more%20often%20than%20the%20UK.

Rojava Communalism https://itsgoingdown.org/the-communes-of-rojava-a-model-in-societal-self-direction/ https://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2020/08/20/the-two-faces-of-kurdistan/ https://roarmag.org/essays/communalism-bookchin-direct-democracy/

Murray Bookchin https://www.britannica.com/biography/Murray-Bookchin

The Garifuna in Honduras: A History of Pillage and Dispossession

By Yanis Iqbal

Originally published at Green Social Thought.

Amid the current Covid-19 pandemic, the Garifuna community of Honduras is experiencing state-sponsored violence and regulated repression. On July 18 2020, heavily armed personnel of the Police Investigation Department (DPI) barged into the house of Alberth Sneider Centeno, Garifuna president of the land community of El Triunfo de la Cruz, and abducted him. Later, the same armed group kidnapped Suami Aparicio Mejía García, Gerardo Mizael Rochez Cálix and Milton Joel Martínez Álvarez, members of the OFRANEH (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), and a fifth person, Junior Rafael Juárez Mejía. The General Confederation of Labor (CGT) has issued a statement saying “that the kidnapping of these people is motivated by the activity of the Garifuna people in defense of their ancestral lands and the rights of Afro-indigenous and indigenous people in these territories.”

The Honduran Solidarity Network (HSN) has similarly stated that “There are powerful people and businesses that have every interest in terrorizing the Garifuna communities in Tela Bay including Triunfo de la Cruz. Snider Centeno was an outspoken leader fighting against the global tourist industry allied with powerful and wealthy families in Honduras. Centeno was defending his community's collective and ancestral land rights. An investigation into the Honduran government's role in not only the kidnapping but also the context in which the kidnappings occurred, is absolutely necessary and important. The Honduran government has violated the Garifuna's land rights for decades.”

From the statements issued by CGT and HSN, it is clear that the kidnapping is not a regionally restricted event. Rather, it is an act involving myriad actors, both national and international. For example, DPI, the armed group responsible for the kidnapping, is a police force which is economically supported by the US State Department’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. With American assistance, the DPI has enormously expanded and by 2022, it is expected to have 3,000 personnel or 12% of the entire Honduran force.

Furthermore, the authoritarian alacrity with which the state has suppressed protests against the kidnappings betokens that there is something deeper of which the government is afraid. These peaceful protests were carried out by the residents of El Triunfo de la Cruz, Sambo Creek, Nueva Armenia and Corozal on Highway CA-13 and demanded that the 5 Garifuna activists be returned alive. In order to understand the underlying factors which are shaping the dynamics of violence and intimidation against the Garifuna community, we need to take a look at the historical backdrop against which it is occurring and understand the path-dependent nature of present-day happenings.

The Garifuna people are a community who find their existential roots in the soil of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. In 1675, a ship carrying Mokko people, slated to be enslaved, was wrecked near Saint Vincent, an island in the Caribbean. These people settled in the Caribbean island and resolutely resisted colonialist attempts by the French and British. Inspired by the heroic courage of the indigenous people in Saint Vincent, enslaved Africans escaped from the clutches of colonialism and arrived at the Saint Vincent Island. Through the intermixing of enslaved Africans and Caribs-Arawaks, the Garifuna subjectivity was produced which moored its identity in a revolutionary fight against the savagery of slavery and cruelty of colonialism.

While the Treaty of Paris of 1763 granted to Britain the Saint Vincent Island, the Garifuna people fought against colonialism for 34 long years. It was only in 1797 that the British were able to colonize the island of Saint Vincent, segregate the intermixed population and deport the darker colored Mokko to the island of Roatan, off the Northern coast of Honduras. Initially, the Garifuna community faced a lot of xenophobia and Ramon de Anguiano, the intendant governor of Honduras, had suggested that “all this coast be left clean of blacks...before they multiply further…in order to remove them from this Kingdom a people only good for itself [and] useless for our works”.

Later, it dawned on the Spanish officials that they could exploit the expendable bodies of black workers for mahogany tree cultivation and banana production. The Spanish considered the Garifuna as “diligent in agriculture, incessant in the work of cutting exquisite woods, like ‘fish in the water’ for fishing, skillful sailors, and brave soldiers. By virtue of their physical constitution they are strong and robust; for them, these climes are healthy, and they multiply in great numbers—wherefore they are very suitable for populating the immense wastelands of this coast with benefit to the state, and for forming settlements along the roads, which are so sorely lacking.”

Despite the evident exploitation of Garifuna workers by colonial trade, the community’s territory remained protected. The low population density of the coastal territories ensured that Garifuna people continued to cultivate their ancestral lands at least till the late twentieth century. But beginning in the 1990s, Garifuna land ownership got jeopardized as private investments in activities such as coastal tourism, housing and palm oil production became dominant. Dressed in development, these trade activities pulled to pieces the indigenous culture of the Garifuna people.

While the Garifuna people are present in four different countries (Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala), Honduras has the largest Garifuna population at an estimated 250,000 people located primarily within 48 coastal and island communities. For money-grubbing barons, this meant that “development” required enhanced efforts in Honduras where stronger and sterner techniques would have to be used to subjugate such a large population and conquer their large territory. This type of development was initiated in the 1990s, the age of neoliberalism and Washington Consensus, and the Garifuna labeled it as la maldición – the curse.

In 1992, the government passed the 1992 Law for the Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector (LMA) which “promoted foreign and domestic investment in agriculture by accelerating land titling and enabling land cooperative members to break up their holdings into small plots to be sold as private lands.” The Congressional Decree 90-90 supplemented LMA by making foreigners eligible for purchasing coastal lands for tourism.

Earlier, the Honduran constitution had restricted such a free-flowing movement of foreign capital through article 107 which had enunciated that “The land of the Republic, municipal, communal and private property situated on the border zones with neighboring states and on the shores of both oceans for 40 kilometers inland, and the islands, cays, reefs, cliffs, and sand banks, may only be acquired and possessed by Hondurans by birth or corporations made up of only Honduran stockholders and by state institutions, punishable by annulment of the respective title or contract.” Now, any foreign capital seeking to build tourism project is allowed to purchase lands within 40 kilometers of the coast.

Impact of Tourism on the Garifuna People

The Honduran government, apart from instituting the Congressional Decree 90-90, has also passed the Tourism Incentives Law in 2017 which has given a number of benefits to tourism in Honduras: touristic initiatives are exempt from taxes on profits for 15 years, taxes on construction-related activities for 5 years and are provided with the freedom to not pay custom duties and tariffs tax for 10 years. These incentives are paying off as international tourism spending increased from $685 million in 2016 to more than $700 million in 2017. While the pockets of select-few Honduran elites and foreign businessmen get filled to the brim, the unsavory side of tourism is being delicately obscured: As European and American “recreational investors” visit Honduras, the Garifuna people get whipped by the scourge of suppression.

According to Christopher A. Loperena, “Tourism, like mining, is an export-based industry, since the products (e.g. hotel stays, package tours, air and ground transportation) are mostly marketed to, and consumed by, foreigners….Touted as sustainable development, the “industry without smoke” entails the intense commodification of natural and cultural resources, giving rise to recurrent conflicts between subsistence based producers and elite investors.” In Honduras, a number of tourism-related conflicts have arisen between the Garifuna collectivity and politically powerful capitalists and international organizations.

In 2007, for example, “Garifuna land between San Martin and Santa Fe was sold by Omar Laredo, president of the Garifuna community, to a local businessman. There was a community consultation in which it was agreed that about 20 hectares would be sold. The businessman paid $5000 to the president of the Garifuna community and then immediately sold the land for US$20,000 to Randy Jorgensen [a Canadian investor]. Without community consultation, however, the amount of land sold had increased to 53 hectares. According to INA [National Agrarian Institute] surveys done later, Jorgensen then actually fenced-in 62 hectares.” In a similarly shoddy manner, lands belonging to the villages of Cristales and Guadalupe were usurped by Canadian investors and the entire village of Rio Negro was evicted to make way for the construction of “Banana Coast” cruise ship port, a project of the Life Vision Properties, a company owned by Randy Jorgen.

John Thompson, a close friend of Randy Jorgensen, while arguing for the benefits of the cruise terminal in Rio Negro, said that “This cruise ship terminal is vitally important to this entire town . . . all these people are going to lose everything that they could possibly have here because of this. Because he’s [referring to Jorgensen] about to give up and go home. And then we’ll be left on our own, with no money, no cruise ships, no passengers, no airport. Nothing. That’s it. So these people are killing the golden goose.” No one apparently knows what else was left for the Garifuna to lose. With the loss of ancestral territories, Garifuna lose everything and according to Miriam Miranda, the coordinator of OFRANEH, “Without our lands, we cease to be a people. Our lands and identities are critical to our lives, our waters, our forests, our culture, our global commons, our territories. For us, the struggle for our territories and our commons and our natural resources is of primary importance to preserve ourselves as a people.”

Eco-tourism, a sub-category of tourism related to the visiting of fragile and endangered ecosystems, is a “green” way of dispossessing Garifuna people and attracting tourists to sanitized places, purged of little impurities called “indigenous people”. The Honduras Caribbean Biological Corridor (HCBC), part of the larger Mesoamerican Biological Corridor (MBC), is one such example of eco-tourism which uses “neoliberal conservation” to build purified (cleansed of indigenous people) eco-tourist destinations. The Jeanette Kawas National Park, present with the HCBC, covers over 70,000 hectares in Tela Bay and houses the Garifuna communities of Miami, Barra Vieja, Tornabe and San Juan. In this national park, intermittent bans are constantly placed on fishing and the areas of cultivation have also been reduced. In the Cayos Cochinos Marine Protected Area (MPA), similar restrictions have been placed on the extraction of marine life, leading to clashes between the inhabitants of Chachahuate, a Garífuna fishing village, and the state security forces.

In both the instances, the “environmentally conscious” policies of the government have undermined the Garifuna’s primary subsistence strategy i.e. fishing. Apart from being the economic foundation of the Garifuna group, fishing is the main protein source for the Garifuna living in the Tela Bay. Moreover, the limiting of land cultivation in the JKNP shows how indifferent capitalists are to the exceptionally viable agricultural practices of the Garifuna people. According to a local Garifuna individual, “We don’t use fertilizers because we don’t want to offend the earth. What do we do? There is a model of working, it’s called Barbecho. We work five years in one area, then we let it ferment and fertilize, and then we occupy another space. This is why our property is collectively owned. Because we need this space, which relates to our functional habitat … so the cultural and ancestral life we are accustomed to can continue. Rights are collective; there is no private property in our way of thinking.” In order to utterly uproot this anti-capitalist idea of land ownership and use, imperialists are effectuating “green grabs” i.e. the violent dispossession of lands in the name of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Instead of overtly and barbarously displacing Garifuna people from their lands, a green grab strategy uses the ideological integument of nature conservation to viably and ecologically expel them from their lands.

Through the deliberate destabilization of existential paradigms, eco-tourist projects are excluding Garifuna people from the ecologies in which these indigenous individuals are embedded. CA Loperena calls this “Garifuna Otherness” which is “packaged as a good to further the development of the Caribbean coast as a tourist destination. Garífuna subsistence practices, including fishing, are not contemplated within national development imaginaries, since environmental foundations view these activities as a threat to the touristic potential of protected areas and the sociospatial order pursued by the Honduran government.”

The Violence of Palm Oil

Honduras is the biggest exporter of palm oil in Central America. In the last two decades, its production has increased by 560%, making it the third largest producer in Latin America and eight largest in the world. This productivity increase has been propelled by a favorable global context where both demand and supply are consistently ballooning. From 15 million tonnes in 1995, global palm oil production has increased to 66 million tonnes in 2017. In response to this rising demand for palm oil, Honduras too expanded its production, exporting almost 50% of its palm oil. While countries such as China, India, USA and Netherlands indifferently import palm oil for manufacturing cosmetics, soaps, toothpastes and consumer retail food, the Garifuna community in Honduras is paying a heavy price for the production of these goods.

Vallecito, a Garifuna ancestral land in the municipality of Limón on the north-east coast, is an appropriate example for depicting the dispossession and disruption which has accompanies palm oil production. In this area, “the INA [National Agrarian Institute] handed out new titles to new ‘settlers’ who promptly sold them to the palm oil magnates. In this area alone, the Garifuna communities went from owning 20,000 hectares to 400 within a decade.” An important and strategic player in this chain of dispossession was Miguel Facusse, a Honduran business magnate labeled by locals as "the palm plantation owner of death”.

Between 1970 and 1989, Facusse had expropriated a large number of Garifuna lands to plant African palm, a product necessary to sustain his prosperous company Dinant which sold detergents, soaps and foodstuffs. In 1989, OFRANEH started a land recuperation campaign, aimed at retrieving an ancestral plot of 1600 hectares that 6 Garifuna cooperatives had cultivated. After sporadic and violent clashes between Dinant’s private security forces and Garifuna activists, the land was finally granted to the latter in 1989 by INA. But this gain was soon reversed by the 1992 Agricultural Modernization Law that, in a period of 5 years, planted African palm in 28,000 hectares of Garifuna land. The Vallecito region too experienced the pressures of palm oil predation as Facusse again arrived in the Vallecito cooperatives in 1995 and initiated his palm oil violence. The INA, after much Garifuna activism, chose to extend its administrative sinews and in 1995, restored the stolen lands. Not demoralized by consecutive failures, Facusse came to Vallecito in 1997 and planted African palm on 100 hectares of Garifuna land. OFRANEH, in response to this intrusion, took this land case to the Honduran court and surprisingly, was able to expel Facusse from that piece of land.

The constant cycle of dispossession in Vallecito continues till the present-day, despite the fact that a 2012 INA survey had confirmed Garifuna ownership of specific lands and had asked Facusse to evacuate the region. In 2019, it was found that armed groups carrying high-caliber weapons were patrolling Vallecito, cutting security wires, randomly shooting at community members and raiding the beach everyday with motorcycles. The Honduran poet Chaco de la Pitoreta’s poem “Ode to the African Palm”, written a few years back, lyrically expresses the current situation in Vallecito:

You came when we least needed you

and remained longer than we expected.

You displaced the ancestral kapok tree that used to

rise upon my fields

and shook off the maize that filled my plains…

Oh, African palm!

neither white, nor black…

red and bloodied.

You are not from the…peasants

nor from Honduras or Central America.

You are of the looters that ruin us,

of Facussé and his killers.

Challenging Development

With the kidnapping of Garifuna people in Honduras, the thick mystificatory veil of development is slowly peeling off. For decades, the Honduran Garifuna community has been culturally compressed and tyrannized into accepting development. The current kidnappings belong to that concatenation of development-oriented cold-bloodedness. Miriam Miranda, while delivering a speech in New York during the September 2014 People’s Climate March, said that “The time has arrived to question the model of ‘development’ that has been imposed on us in these last decades. We cannot accept nor perpetuate this supposed development which doesn’t take into account or respect nature and the earth’s natural resources...We act NOW against the culture of death that we are being condemned to by the grand corporations of death and transnational capital.” In the current conjuncture, we can’t remain silent on the development which has kidnapped Garifuna people and depredated the entire community. The time has come to challenge development.

Yanis Iqbal is a student and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published by different magazines and websites such as Monthly Review Online, ZNet, Green Social Thought, Weekly Worker, News and Letters Weekly, Economic and Political Weekly, Arena, Eurasia Review, Coventry University Press, Culture Matters, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Countercurrents, Counterview, Hampton Institute, Ecuador Today, People’s Review, Eleventh Column, Karvaan India, Clarion India, OpEd News, The Iraq File, Portside and the Institute of Latin American Studies. 

The History of Education as Colonial Apologist: A Marxist Critique

By Curry Malott

The three interrelated premises of historical development (i.e. the satisfaction of needs, the creation of new needs, and with them, the growth of the size and complexity of society), for Marx and Engels, are universal aspects of history that always exist despite mode of production, mode of cooperation, or degree and form of productive development.

Within capitalism the creation of new needs is driven by the capitalists' quest for expanding capital. The global expansion of capital was already presupposed by its emergence. The colonization of what would become the U.S., for example, represents one of capital's chief moments of primitive accumulation. This paper examines the way history of education texts have dealt with this fundamental aspect of the global expansion of capitalism. I argue that the genocide of America's Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands have been downplayed in the history of education, even within Marxist approaches. This paper therefore argues that this shortcoming represents an unfortunate distortion of Marx who wrote extensively on how the European capitalist conquerors ruthlessly waged war on Native North America. Marx's last works, his ethnographic notebooks, focused on Native American societies and what they have to offer in terms of social existence after capitalism. The correction of so-called Marxist and traditional history of education texts is fundamental for building a socialist movement in the twenty first century based on the self-determination of oppressed nations and national minorities (i.e. true to the international solidarity of the Marxist-Leninist tradition). However, in responding to history of education texts that align themselves with the work of Marx I do not address their most common charges (i.e. functionalist economic reductionism), but rather, I focus on what I believe is their capitulation to the capitalist conquest of the Americas. As a result, this work, in my estimation, departs from some of Marx's more relevant and important insights for transforming capitalist relations into socialist ones in the contemporary era.

Marx's dialectical approach to constructing historical narratives always takes as its place of departure a critical engagement with existing narratives refracted through the light of empirical evidence and systematic reasoning. The error made by most history of education texts is that the connections between the settler-state, colonialism, and the uniquely capitalistic quest to perpetually expand capital are either loose and undeveloped or they are treated as separate, mostly unrelated spheres or aspects of human society. What follows is a critique of history of education texts' engagement with the colonial era. The following critique of history of education textbooks demonstrates the fields' disconnection with Indigenous studies. I present the analysis as a chronological history of the history of education and point to how its shortcomings can be overcome through an engagement with Indigenous studies (see, for example, Coulthard, 2014; Mohawk, 1999; Venables, 2004).

The Colonial Era

The discovery of America was another development of the desire for travel and discovery awakened by the Crusades. (Cubberley, 1919, p. 11)

This quote from Elwood Cubberley's 1919 history of education book represents a combination of what the late educational historian Michael Katz (1987) describes as an approach that seeks "superficial causes" (p. 140). Katz argues that this approach "signals a retreat from any attempt to find a principle or core within a social system," consequently, "the levers of change remain obscure" (p. 140). Clearly, Cubberley's explanation for European expansion and colonial pursuits as the result of a thirst for adventure can be described as "superficial." Cubberley's larger discussion of the history of education is unapologetically Euro-centric. We can observe this legacy of pro-capitalist Euro-centric apology reproduced in history of education textbooks in the decades following Cubberley. Vassar's (1965) history of American education text offers an example:

The missionary organizations were far more successful in their endeavors among the Negroes than among the Indians…in this great crusade…developing honest hard working Christian slaves…A large population [of Native Americans were] not slaves [adding to the difficulty of educating Indians]. (pp. 11-12)

While Cubberley's (1919) Euro-centrism stems from his glaring omission of even the mention of a Native American presence, Vassar's (1965) narrative is equally Euro-centric implying that the assimilation of Native Americans and Africans into bourgeois society represents a "great crusade." That is, Vassar presents colonialism, a process that led to centuries of physical, biological, and cultural genocide, as a positive force. Unfortunately, the racism and white supremacy of traditional bourgeois historians was either not discussed by the Marxist historians, or they themselves reproduced it. Consider:

The Western frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white adventurers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out-out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, p. 3)

I present Cubberley (1919) and Vassar (1965) next to Bowles and Gintis (1976) to demonstrate both the difference and continuity between traditional education historians and so-called Marxist education historians on the issue of colonialism/Westward expansion. As previously suggested, Bowles and Gintis' somewhat apologetic statement on the colonization of the Americas is not a position they borrowed from Marx for Marx was well aware of the barbaric destructiveness the expansion of capital had on the non-capitalist and non-Western societies it expanded into.

What is most obvious here is Bowles and Gintis' empathy for the children and grand-children of the expropriated peasant-proprietors of Europe who were "chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers" (Marx, 1867/1967, p. 734). The acknowledgement of the destructive and oppressive nature of capitalism here represents a clear break from the corporate apologist narratives that have dominated before and since Bowles and Gintis (1976). However, at the same time, there is a haunting silence within Bowles and Gintis' narrative seemingly more interested in the fate of immigrant laborers than the ancient tribes and confederacies that continue to struggle for national sovereignty within a colonial present that can too easily seem perpetual or permanent. This exclusionary tendency within much of the Marxist tradition, despite the contrary testimony of Marx's own work, has contributed to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the contributions of Marx.

Even progressive education historians in the 1980s and beyond continued to reproduce colonialist narratives. Button and Provenzo (1983/1989), for example, after explaining the colonization of the Americas as the result of a growing middle-class gaining wealth from a period of "peace, prosperity and trade" (p. 6), portray Native Americans as the helpless, primitive victims of progress:

The Native Americans…belonged to hundreds of tribes with almost as many different languages. In general, they had little in common with one another and did not unite to resist the settlement of their lands by the early colonists. The existence of numerous rivers and harbors, of a moderate climate, and natives unorganized for resistance, made North America splendid for colonization, if not for immediate exploitation. (p. 6)

Button and Provenzo (1983/1989) seem to offer this short passage as their explanation for the disappearance of Native Americans on the Eastern seaboard-an assumption that is patently false. Even more recent history of education texts written from progressive, constructivist perspectives too often reproduce the old colonial narratives. For example, it is astonishing that a book published in 2013 called Education and Social Change (Rury, 2013) would continue to depict American Indians or Native Americans as primitive victims helpless against the powerful onslaught of Europe's superiority.

Fortunately, there exists other history of education texts offering some diversity of narrative. For example, and to their credit, Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner (2009), in the fourth edition of their text, American Education: A History, reassess the old narrative reproduced by Boers (2007), arguing, instead, that the colonies were not established with the intention of building a new society, but rather, were a business venture, that is, an investment opportunity. To understand the first New Englanders' relationship with pre-existing indigenous confederacies, it is important to remember that the colonists faced the continent and its communities as religiously-mediated investors who came from a pre-existing English capitalist society that had long been primitively accumulated and normalized and naturalized traditions of private property and a market in human labor.

In Jamestown, VA, the continents' first permanent English settlement established in 1607, relied on a friendly relationship with the local Powhatan Confederacy for their own survival and for the success of their investment. However, the capitalist purpose of the colony, and thus its very existence, presented a major barrier to peace. At the same time, renowned American Indian historian, Robert Venables (1994), makes a compelling case that, before dissolving, the relationship between the colony and the Powhatan Confederacy was mutually beneficial.

…The London Company's investment in the highly profitable tobacco plantation business relied on peaceful relations with the local Powhatan Confederacy. Tobacco farmers supplied Powhatans with trade goods in exchange for food, which allowed colonists to invest their labor in the cash crop not worrying much about food. Powhatan's access to trade goods allowed them to grow stronger and defeat their rivals to the west thereby gaining access to trade with the copper-producing Indians of the Great Lakes (Venables, 2004, pp. 81)

Clearly, Venables does not see the Powhatans' as helpless victims, but as savvy negotiators committed to their own national interests. However, because of the labor-intensive nature of tobacco production and because of its profitability as a use-value, by 1619 a Dutch ship brought the first shipment of African slave-laborers to Virginia to keep pace with the demand for labor. Because of these reasons, it also made more sense to focus labor on tobacco production and continue to rely on the Powhatans for food. Consequently, fifteen years after their arrival, the colonists continued to rely on the Native communities for food, which might not have been a problem, but their numbers were forever growing, therefore placing increasing pressure on the Powhatan's food supply.

The colonists also came to the Americas with an old racist ideology stemming from an invented, Christian-related, European identity (Mohawk, 1999), which resulted in a long legacy of colonists viewing and treating Native Americans as inferior. Consequently, it was not uncommon for colonists to disregard Powhatan national authority and settle land without compensation or consultation, leading to tension and conflict with Native communities. Perhaps one of the last straws was the colonialists' plans to establish an Indian college, which American Indians saw for themselves no advantages. It was understood that adopting the settlers capitalistic ways would give the elites among the new settlers a major advantage by stripping the Powhatans of their own economy and means to satisfy and expand their needs. If the foreign capitalist becomes the ruler of the land, then the American Indians would forever be subordinate in the relationship. Eventually, having their land-base, food supply, culture, and very existence threatened, the Powhatans decided to terminate the colony. Commenting on this decision Venables (2004) explains:

In 1622 Powhatan warriors, intimately familiar with colonists routines from being their primary food vendor, simultaneously struck 31 locations across a 70 mile area killing nearly 350 of a population of 1200. (Pp. 81-82)

In the aftermath, hundreds of settlers sailed back to England. Cut off from their food supply as many as five hundred more colonists died of starvation that winter. As a result, James I took over the London Company's investment. That is, having been operated as a private venture for the first 17 years, Virginia, "became a royal colony in 1624 and control transferred to the Crown appointed governor" (Urban & Wagoner, Pp. 18). While this was an important development, following Venables and other historians, the ten years of bloody war that followed and the ways Indian policy were forever transformed (from co-existence to extermination), have had far more serious implications for the fate of the indigenous communities in North America. According to Venables (2004), "the 1622 attack did more than merely define future Indian policy in Virginia as one of conquest…It encouraged an already existent English colonial attitude of racial superiority" (p. 84). For example, after learning of the Powhatan war, the Pilgrims in Massachusetts erected a fort fearing the Narragansetts. However, the struggle for the Eastern seaboard was ultimately determined in 1633/1634 as smallpox wiped out Indians in a massive epidemic. Puritans, as might be expected, viewed this unintentional genocide as an act of God. Governor Winthrop:

If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts, why did he drive out the natives before us? And why does he still make room for us by diminishing them as we increase? (Quoted in Venables, 2004,Pp. 89)

Following conquest, which was not the result of European superiority, but was made possible by an accident, settler-state policy toward indigenous communities has consistently eroded indigenous independence/sovereignty. A new Marxist history of education must therefore not only rethink the past, but it must embrace the national sovereignty of Americas' first nations as part of the movement for a socialist alternative to capitalism.

References

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.

Boers, D. (2007). History of American Education Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Button, H.W. & Provenzo, E. (1983/1989). History of Education & Culture in America: Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Coulthard, G.S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.

Cubberley, E. (1919). Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital. Volume 1. New York: International Publishers.

Mohawk, J. (1999). Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World. Sante Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing.

Rury, J. (2013). Education and Social Change: Contours in the History of American Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Urban W. & Wagoner, J. (2009). American Education: A History (Fourth Edition). New York: Routledge.

Vassar, R. (1965). Social History of American Education: Volume I: Colonial Times to 1860. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company.

Venables, R. (2004). American Indian History: Five Centuries of Conflict & Coexistence: Volume I: Conquest of a Continent 1492-1783. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.