The Appalling Reality Of Child Labor

By Josh Crowell

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

Child labor has been on the rise since at least 2018. The recent New York Times article ignited a firestorm that has led the Biden administration to create a task force within the Department of Labor as an attempt to deal with this crisis. However, the reasons these children are being exploited is due to a lack of government oversight to begin with. The Department of Health and Human Services has failed to keep proper records of unaccompanied minors as they are placed with sponsors quickly to try to get them out of shelters. Only a third of these minors have any follow-up after placement with a sponsor, and even that limited support ends after a few months.

Hyper-exploitation Of Child Immigrant Labor

This is a crisis of poverty and immigration. Families and unaccompanied minors are fleeing desperate situations in Latin America to find only different conditions of desperation in the States. All families in the US right now are experiencing the pressures of our current economic crisis, from high inflation and the cost-of-living crisis, to the ending of the child tax credit and the rollback of the COVID social safety net leaving many without access to food stamps and Medicaid benefits. While many minors who haven’t migrated are being put in situations where they have to work, many more immigrant minors, with or without their family, are forced to take up work once they arrive in the States, sending money back to their families in their home country or just to afford to survive in America. US immigration policy – under Trump and continued under Biden – criminalizes border crossings. The threat of deportation still hangs over the heads of immigrants and their families. With this stress, many unaccompanied minors also have debts accrued from their border crossing due to fees owed to those who helped them cross the border and additional money owed to their sponsors once they have been relocated out of the government’s custody. 

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This has led many children to take up jobs in very dangerous industries like meat processing plants, commercial bakeries, and construction. These children – some as young as 13 – work upwards of 14-hour shifts doing jobs that are classified as too dangerous for anyone under 18. While these jobs are difficult for any worker, these children must balance their school course load and full-time employment with the additional stresses of worrying about their families back in Latin America and knowing they are already burdened with debts they must pay. Some of these children are forced to drop out of school, many of which drop out unnoticed due to the lack of HHS oversight into their care once placed with a sponsor, if their sponsor enrolled to begin with.

As inflation continues to rise, especially with increases in rents, children and their families are forced to find ways to make ends meet, regardless of whether these survival methods skirt that law. While it is illegal for children to be working in these jobs, the bosses use these desperate circumstances to exploit these minors who are just trying to survive. With the Great Resignation, many sections of the working class no longer accept poverty wages which leads companies to look for workers who will accept these conditions as a way to continue to keep wages low and produce higher profits. Many immigrant children fit this role perfectly due to their need to assist their families back home and pay down their debts to sponsors here in the States. 

This Is A Fight For The Labor Movement

While this crisis is one of true desperation by these children and their families, it highlights the overall weakening of the US and Latin American labor movements. Almost a century ago, child workers and their families fought for an end to child labor and guaranteed education for all minors. This fight was won through mass action, with child workers and their families going on strike and protesting the intense conditions they were being forced to labor under. The bosses are not interested in enforcing labor law, especially when it comes to the hyper-exploitation that comes with migrant labor. The US labor movement must organize to protect all workers and that means fighting back against these trends of increasing child labor. If an injury to one is an injury to all then workers must stand up for these children and demand that they have adequate resources, safe sponsorships, and the ability to go to school and learn, not work as if they were an adult. 

While it is positive that the government is taking some action due to public scrutiny from the media, it will not solve this crisis. A lack of government oversight and the continuation of brutal immigration policies that set up immigrant workers for hyper-exploitation has led us to this situation. It will take courageous strike action from these child workers and their families, joined by the masses of organized labor, to win back what had been won a century ago. These children’s desperation cannot be used by the bosses to continue to exploit them. Workers should fight for guaranteed education for all minors, resources for unaccompanied immigrant children like food stamps and stipends, and for a process within HHS that actually protects children, not simply pushes them through the system.

Inventing Reality: Past and Present

By Youhanna Haddad

Capitalist countries like to claim that they have the freest media. President Joe Biden frequently reiterates America’s supposed commitment to a free press. In a similar vein, the British Broadcasting Corporation has repeatedly lauded the United Kingdom’s ostensible “freedom to publish.”

These statements often feature alongside denunciations of the alleged unfreedom in other countries — particularly those adversarial to Western hegemony. Such criticism tends to take on a certain form. Westerners claim that these adversarial powers tightly curate their media, only allowing information that reinforces state agendas. A recent (retracted) article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, accused China of “parroting lies” via their “solidified grip on information.”

But China is far from the only target. Whether it’s nations in Latin America and the Middle East, or Russia, the Global North’s prominent media institutions frequently remind viewers that information coming out of these places should be heavily scrutinized, with particular caution advised toward state-sponsored media. 

Since the Cold War, the imperial core has honed this rhetoric, which not only espouses the superior integrity of its media institutions but also attributes that integrity to a supposed respect for free speech rights. This narrative sounds good. But it rings utterly hollow upon closer scrutiny. In reality, free speech does little to keep the interests of capital from dictating the “news” Western media reports. As Lenin described over a century ago, “[In] capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.”

In the United States, just six corporations own a whopping 90% of the news media. This centralization demonstrates that, despite what seems like an abundance of options, the media is controlled by a tiny capitalist minority. And this minority is united by an overriding monolithic interest: profit. That means the media is only really free to report what doesn’t threaten the bottom lines of its owners.

But that is far from the only source of bias. Oftentimes, Western media institutions act at the direct behest of their governments. While the full extent of such collusion is often hidden in classified documents, what little has trickled into the public view vindicates the belief that “free” Western media is a fantasy.

The history of collusion between Western governments and media megacorporations is both storied and unsettling. Consider the 1975 Church Committee, which was organized by the United States Senate to investigate potential abuses by the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The Church Committee formed after several major news stories broke implicating the Department of Defense and CIA in the surveillance of civilians and covert assassinations of foreign leaders. 

One of the most disturbing findings was the explicit confirmation of CIA involvement in domestic and foreign media. The Committee confirmed at least “50 CIA relationships with U.S. journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations.” Additionally, it demonstrated that the CIA had control of two European press services — one of which was subscribed to by “over 30 U.S. newspapers.” With a notable lack of remorse, a senior CIA official told the Committee that, “Whether or not this type of overseas activity should be allowed to continue is subject to differing views and judgments… [in my opinion] we would be fools to relinquish it because it serves a very useful purpose.”

CIA defector Colonel John Stockwell corroborated this practice of media corruption. On his assignment to the Angolan Civil War, he allegedly headed a CIA campaign to disseminate news stories that slandered the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola and their Cuban reinforcements. According to Stockwell, a full third of his CIA personnel in Angola were career propagandists. One startling falsehood they reported was a totally fabricated execution of 17 Cuban soldiers for the rapes of Angolan women. Framed as an act of feminist liberation, the imaginary victims supposedly executed the perpetrators by firing squad. This tale made its way to the front page of the Toronto Star — Canada’s largest daily newspaper — the Globe and Mail, and local papers in Winnipeg, Halifax, and Montreal. 

More recently, a 2019 bombshell in The Washington Post revealed that — even in this century — United States’ military campaigns are shrouded in lies to make them more palatable to the American public. Generals, senior federal officials, an Afghan War czar, and a Bush-era secretary of defense all confirm that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable while claiming that there was “no way” the United States could lose the war when interviewed. Federal officials faithfully chanted “steady progress” throughout the duration of the war despite knowing that their objectives were bound to fail via the means they were employing.

Today, the world's eyes are on Ukraine. Russian troops have been in the country for over nine months after Ukraine, against Russia’s repeated warnings, moved to join NATO. Since the invasion began, the United States has spent $68 billion to aid the Ukrainian government and military.  

While modern Russia is thoroughly capitalist, it's easy to see why NATO — the world’s preeminent imperialist alliance — views it as a threat. The country has the world's largest nuclear arsenal and its security interests are directly opposed to NATO’s objective of expanding eastward toward Russia’s borders. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not unexpected by any stretch of the imagination, Russian leaders have expressed for decades that their ability to defend their nation from invasion or global conflict would be severely compromised if NATO was permitted to expand toward its borders. 

Most infamously, declassified State Department documents confirm former Secretary of State James Baker promised Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward” in 1990. To the contrary, NATO has admitted 14 former Soviet or Soviet-aligned states since then.

From the billions in aid to Ukraine, it’s clear the United States is investing heavily in the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Much of that aid is designated for weapons that are not yet manufactured, suggesting the United States is ready to support the neoliberal Ukrainian government for years to come. This means that — just like in Vietnam and Afghanistan — the federal government is dedicated to a long-term conflict with little regard for any public resistance they may encounter. Ask yourself: When in its history has the United States heavily funded a fighting force that was trying to improve living standards for any group of working people?

Today, we face a nonstop barrage of pro-Ukrainian media. Major news outlets have been reporting optimistically on Ukraine’s war efforts, while Russian troops remain planted on Ukrainian soil since February. Western bourgeois media is clearly trying to make NATO’s investment in Ukraine seem worthwhile, as they have done to support the invasions of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

You don’t have to be a Putin apologist to understand that Western powers see Russia as a threat to their hegemony. Those with a deep respect for human life should hope to see an expedient and diplomatic end to the conflict, with no further expansion of NATO. Unlike the United States and her allies, we should not support the effort to include Ukraine in NATO at any cost. This position is nonsensical, and only remains publicly acceptable due to the tireless media campaigns of a supposedly “free press” in the Global North.

Youhanna Haddad is a North American Marxist of the Arab diaspora. Through his writing, he seeks to combat the Western liberal dogmas that uphold racial capitalism.

The Pseudo-Cyclical Time of Non-Events

Art by Mimmo Rotella (1960)

By Michael Templeton

A man walked into a local bank, right in the symbolic center of the city itself, and randomly opened fire on anyone he saw in the bank. He killed three people. This was one of numerous events just like it around the United States. Random shootings occur with such frequency that they pass with barely a notice. People react with a modicum of shock. Public officials make their pronouncements of sympathy and outrage. By now, there are internet memes mocking the obligatory “thoughts and prayers” offered by political leaders. Then there are symbolic calls for gun legislation. The defenders of the second amendment push back. All the same bullshit gets exchanged. It is a dull round that disappears from memory almost as soon as it happens.

Soon after this happened, everything went back to normal. The events of the day consisted of local crimes, a nod to the “important events of the nation,” and sports and weather. After devoting hours of airtime to the event, images of the event went to their websites where it stayed for months. Scroll through the day’s events and at the bottom of the page you find a replay of the horrible shooting. The event simultaneously disappears and remains suspended in perpetual image-time. The event of the horrible shooting faded quickly, but the images of the event remained suspended in cyber-time—remained suspended in a space that has no space and a time that is disconnected from the passing of real human time. The usual vapid feel-good stories of children who survive cancer and local churches doing great things for the community, etc. But the fact is, people forgot about the shooting. And yet, images of the shooting persisted on social media for weeks. The event was instantly superseded by the rush of other events, and the relative significance of events did not matter. Or rather, the significance of events was and is weighted according to criteria which may or may not have anything to do with the humane value of events or the impact events may have on everyday life. The event of the shooting simply got washed away in the flood of new events. However, the images persist online and on various other electronic media.

The time of events is fleeting. The time in which individuals can engage images of the event is different. There are two forms of time: the synchronic time of the image which remains constant, and diachronic time of everyday life which changes from day to day—even moment to moment. The synchronic time of the image is the time available for exchange; diachronic time belongs to individuals and has no exchange value. Yet, in both cases, the events are mediated by images. There is image-time in the present, and there is perpetual, or cyclical image-time. The immediacy of the event is unknowable except for a few people. Participation and consumption of images of the event unfolds in two different strata of time.

Shootings like this occur with regularity in the United States, and the fallout is precisely the same in just about every case. There is the event, the momentary media signification of the event—this includes the pollical stage-show, and then instant forgetting except for the images of the event which replay forever. Any and all knowledge of events is mediated by images. Symbolic participation happens via images. Immediacy is instantaneously overtaken and subsumed by mediation, and the force of events are instantaneously overtaken by the dislocated isolation of time that has no duration. Situating a mediated presence into the past of real events, individuals remove themselves from actual life. Mediation and consumption of the image become supplements to lived experience. Hashtags serve to insinuate words into online mediated participation and remove any and all substance. “#grief” takes the place of grief as a signifier for the complex set of lived emotions which constitute grief. Life becomes a system of empty signifiers in the no-time of mediated images of things which no longer exist.

Our modern experience of time is one in which everything takes place on an abstract plane of continuous play. The time of immediate events is immediately lost. Even those who lived the experience and horror of a random shooting are forgotten. The time of abstraction in the form of endless images remains eternal. The only thing which has meaning is the eternal time of the images of events. Like the abstract space of the highway, we live in the abstract time of the stream of images. We are no longer even contained by the images of a day; we now participate in an eternity of images in cyber-time where the images of the events can and do play on forever. Since few of us will ever experience the horror of a random shooting, but everyone needs to know that they are participants in such events. The masses are able to insinuate themselves into the spectaculum of the events via consumption of the images. We are now able to transform consumption into an interactive pseudo-experience with the use of hashtags on social media. The shooting in Cincinnati led to #cincinnatistrong. Sympathy and support are provided by proxy with the use of the hashtag. When others use or search the hashtag, those who used it will be recognized via their images as participants in the horrifying event. The event exists in image-time and individual participation in the event is created through the hashtag and places individual images into the image-time of the event. The hashtag guarantees that once we insert our own image-participation, it will become part of the grand flow of other image-participations.

At the same time, the insertion of signifiers into the stream of images guarantees eternal separation from actual events. I gain access to the stream of images which signify the event, and I am able to remove myself to a space of non-existence. I do not even need to be a real person in order to insinuate my participation in the stream of images which constitute my image-participation. “I” exist in the eternal time of separation and isolation. The mediation of the consumable of event forecloses any real contact between real people. Participation by proxy in the image-time of the event is paid for with complete isolation in the world of physical lived experience. Image-time is the time of the commodity. Images are commodities exchanged endlessly in the market of commodities. This is a time outside of time. It unfolds without regard for everyday life. Image-time takes place in the heaven of the commodity where exchange follows the cyclical time of eternity. Everything always comes back to where it was. Like the cyclical time of the pre-modern world in which time was nothing more than the endless cycles of nature and God, the time of commodities and the time of the image endlessly comes back to an eternal present tense so that each new day offers the same exchangeable image of the event.

This all comes to the schiz between human time, the time that is lived by bodies in the world, and pseudo-cyclical time, time-as-commodity. Lived time, the time of everyday life, has no value, has no meaning unless it is entered into the ledgers of exchange. The time of people’s lives is meaningless until it takes on the false form of objectification in spectacular form. Experience must be projected onto the screen of the spectacle in order to take on meaning and value. Time only has meaning and value to the extent that time has exchange value, to be precise. There is no time unless it can be exchangeable for either more time or something else of value. What I do is meaningless and insignificant-- remains unsignified-- except insofar as that time enters into the system of exchange as a commodity like all other commodities. Time measured by a clock which is calibrated against all other clocks, churning out regulated blocks of time each of which carries a specific value measured against other units of value, forever amen—this is the only time that is substantial. The great irony is that this “substantial” time is nothing but abstraction. The time of living bodies is material. It cannot be measured against any other standard other than itself. Time-as-commodity can be measured, quantified, and valued. It has no substance, but it is all that can be known. Time-as-commodity takes on the appearance of cyclical time because it is experienced as perpetually renewing itself with every new day the market finds value in the representations of time. It is pseudo-cyclical time to the extent that it “is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the time-as-commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential traits of time: homogeneous exchangeable units, and the suppression of any qualitative dimension” (Debord, 110). While the time of image-participation unfolds in the seemingly infinite duration of cyclical time, it is in fact discreetly measured units of time. The perception of a cyclical or eternal presence of the representation of events persists only as long as replaying these events constitutes marketable, consumable, and profitable units of time. We who experience this pseudo-cyclical time forfeit our lived experience in favor of participation in image-time, the time of the image which exists in pseudo-cyclical time. Isolation and separation become the fate of individuals as we hand over our experience to image-participation in pseudo-cyclical time. In the end, our failure to commit to time as commodity will de-value representations. At which point, representations of events and our vicarious position as participants will dissolve. We and the event will fade back into the anonymity of the unsignified, unknowable, and irrelevant ephemera.

As the time of lived experience fades into the illegible under the eternal time of time-as-commodity, the time marked by image-participation, lived experience becomes another commodity. Our real lived experience pales in comparison to the experience we gain by those experiences prescribed and offered by the spectacle. Waiting for experiences to be signified by the generators of images of experience, we simply find our external space of experience and insinuate ourselves into it. We become apparitions taking possession of the outward forms of experience, and lived experience is devalued and denatured:

The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is certainly the formation of that category of “experience”, in the limited sense that one has “experiences” (sexual, athletic, professional, artistic, sentimental, ludic, etc.). In the Bloom, everything results from this loss, or is synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as with the metropolis, men never experience concrete events, only conventions, rules, an entirely symbolic second nature, entirely constructed. It imposes there a radical schism between the insignificance of everyday life, called “private”, where nothing happens, and the transcendence of a history frozen in a sphere called “public”, to which no one has access. (Theory of the Bloom, 48)

Everyday life, private life—this is where nothing ever happens because “real” experience cannot be known or understood outside the performances constructed by the spectacle. Image time is constructed according to algorithms, SEO analysis, “hits” on social media accounts—these are the metrics of experience, and we are left behind in the day to day which takes place in a void. Time is an abstract formal eternity in the infinite space of the image-sphere.

Lived experience takes its meaning from an other scene, as it were. Something of an unconscious provide meaning for lived experience, but this unconscious is not within individual minds. It is now the projection of experience into the spectacular realm of image-time, or pseudo-cyclical time. The world of images is not subject to the passage of time. All images are simultaneous. All are old and new at the same time. Freud said that the unconscious has no time; it is always present, and every feature of the unconscious is always present. Our present world projects this into the heaven of images, and our own inner life and inner world withers from inanity. Everyday life is now the impoverished and banal content which exists to reveal the latent content of images. What is my life if I do not have followers on Instagram? And the Real of my life is of no consequence in comparison to the images which stand in for me. Everyday life is now an illusion.

Even as an event as horrifying as a mass shooting, a mass shooting at school, even—nothing can merit the status of a real event until it has been evacuated of its interior substance and rendered as a timeless event in the world of images, in the world that is the spectacle. My individual forgetting of the event, anyone’s individual forgetting of the event is perfectly acceptable because there is an external form of the internal memory in the form of image-time which remembers for us in the manner of a prayer wheel. We do not need to send thoughts and prayers, the heaven of images is perpetually sending thoughts and prayers for us.

The medieval Great Chain of Being sutured everyone to a specific place in the cosmos. At the center and circumference of everything, there was God. The orders of being descended from heaven to earth and the King occupied the place of God’s vice-regent in this fallen world which included the passage of time. At the level of the individual, nothing mattered because one’s place was ordained and guaranteed by this divine order. The passage of time was marked by the passage of the seasons and the days. What happened on one day was only distinguishable from what happened on another day to the extent that the events were either present or past. There was no causality to events because causality was in the hands of God. The cycles of time were performed in the holy offices of the Church and at local festivals which marked the passing of one season to the next. But all time would cycle back to the same thing. Time was cyclical. Knowledge of the passing of time was projected outward onto the heavens which directed the passing of time.

In the pseudo-cyclical time of the spectacle, time once again belongs elsewhere. The passing of time and the significance of time are marked by spectacular performances. The cycle is sustained in the manner of pre-modern cyclical time by spectacular performances which mark the passing of events. But pseudo-cyclical time, the time of images, lacks the guarantee of God and the Great Chain of Being. Its eternal status is sustained by the fact that it is eternally consumable. Every image is just as consumable as every other image and in precisely the same way. You can download Bach’s St. John Passion as easily as you can download a digital cum shot. So it is that the consumable images of the shooting at the bank take on the eternal cycle of cyclical time. All mass shootings take on this cyclical disguise, when in fact they are nothing more than consumable images generated for the sole purpose of being consumed. As we consume them, our sense that we are participating in the Great Chain of Modern Events allows us to extract ourselves from real events and remain in our isolated pockets of emptiness. Like the medieval serfs whose lives were immaterial non-events in pre-modern culture, we have taken an analogous position of insignificant peasants under the heaven of image-time.

As our individual relations to actual events are overtaken by our solitary relations to the images of events, so our relations to each other have kept pace. The singular events of our lives are made real to the extent that they are linked to the events in image-time. Everyone who posted a photograph, a quotation from a great thinker, a prayer, a remembrance, etc. who also linked these things with the hashtag #cincinnatistrong became participants in the series of images which mark the event of the shooting. Anyone who did not use the hashtag remained completely isolated. And yet, the linkages of the hashtag are only made manifest to the extent that they are linked in image-time. The isolation of individual participants remains, and the hollowness of the sentiments becomes more pronounced as these words and images are pulled into the swirl of spectacular time and the logic of the spectacle. The endlessly exchangeable status of images and image-participation is ultimately subject to the same logic as any other image or any other commodity. Professions of faith, sympathy, and commitment rise into the ether of the image. A prayer is an image of a prayer is an image and only an image: a thing of nothing. Any images which may have taken on a life beyond the image-time of the event took its value entirely from its status as an object of exchange. The use-value of the prayer, if there is such a thing, is rendered ephemeral at best in its becoming a form of exchange-value. Individuals, in the beginning and the end, remains isolated monads delinked from the validity and reality of events and each other. The purported bond of the hashtag serves only to distance and isolate. Individual monads participate in isolation together.

The net result of the loss of real experience is the fission between individuals which is an overall dissolution of community. In the grand suburban existence that is contemporary America, a new metropolitan existence has come to define life. As experience is given over to the formal display of experience in the heaven of pseudo-cyclical time, the inevitable isolation among individuals takes on the form of experience rather than experience. The modern metropolis is a form without substance and experience consists of the images of substance without form. “At which point the loss of experience and the loss of community are one and the same” (The Bloom, 52). We live the supplement of life in the image. The throbbing metropolis is the dystopic non-place of empty space and timeless time: “In the metropolis, man purely undertakes the trial of his negative condition. Finitude, solitude and display, which are the three fundamental coordinates of that condition, weave the decor of the existence of each within the grand village. Not the fixed decor, but the moving decor, the combinational decor of the grand village, for which everybody endures the icy stench of their non-places” (The Bloom, 50). Image-time, pseudo-cyclical time, the non-space of the interstate—all of this serves the sprawling non-place of the modern metropolis where nothing is, where isolation offset by meaningless display define the emptiness of everyday life.

With this isolation and emptiness comes the outward display of false commitment and performances of substance. The more lived life becomes devoid of anything which could be construed as intrinsically meaningful, the more the performance of values and commitments becomes important. It is only the mass of isolated individuals living in self-imposed exile of unwilling anonymity which partakes of the empty image-participation which serves only to further their isolation. The image takes over for life as it is actually lived, and everyday life is devalued and rendered meaningless:

Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation. The tendency toward the specialization of the images-of-the-world finds its highest expression in the world of the autonomous image, where deceit deceives itself. (Debord, 12)

Images become the lie which stands in for real lived life, and the even the lie begins to believe itself. The reality of everyday life is supplanted by the image lodged in pseudo-cyclical time. In this way, the metropolis, or the suburban world in the United States, becomes the empty space of unreality where no meaningful connection can be established between individuals because the grid on which meaning and understanding can be established has been projected from the ground of life onto the non-life of the spectacle. Space and time no longer exist in the world of living individuals. Space and time are in the domain of images and commodity exchange. A projection of interior life which is in fact a performance of a pre-scripted form of life effectively negates interior life. The hashtags which constitute image-participation in the spectacular event of a mass shooting are the forms of belief which stand for an overall lack of belief. This is to say that individuals do not and cannot sustain real belief in anything like sympathy, grief, or even faith since these things have been evacuated of their content and replaced with images of sympathy, grief, and faith. Real people in the world cannot sustain these things in everyday life because everyday life has no content. Content is projected out into the formless spectacle, and the forms of life left to individuals have become devoid of content. It is under the dominance of image-time and the non-space created by the interstate that we arrive at our current state of contemporary life in the suburban metropolis where the logic of the Bloom takes shape:

The Bloom cannot take part in the world in an internal way.  It never enters there except in the exception of itself.  That is why it presents such a singular tendancy towards distraction, deja-vu, cliche, and above all, an atrophie of the memory which confines it inside an eternal present.  And that is why it is so exclusively sensitive to music, which alone can offer it abstract sensations -- it would here be necessary to evoke velocity and “friction coefficient”, which are also bloomesque pleasures, but this time it is abstraction itself which appears to them as sensation. (The Theory of the Bloom, 54)

It is only a people devoid of faith who feel the need to declare their faith with grotesque gestures and monuments. Thoughts and prayers for the victims of random shootings come from a population whose thoughts come in prescribed images and for whom prayers are histrionic performances of a total lack of faith. There are no more compelling atheists than those who do tricks in the service of faith. Creation theme parks, grotesque statues of Jesus Christ, religion.com, and professional Christians abound in this metropolis of emptiness. In this suburban metropolis devoid of substance where all that remains is the form of life, a diabolical inversion of belief takes the place of belief. Even as the heartfelt declarations of horror and sympathy poured out for the victims of the mass shooting, the individuals who authored these sentiments betray the fact that they no longer have access to the very conditions on which such sentiments can be formed. Isolation and contempt for everyone else are the only real attributes of the suburban metropolis.

He who cannot do anything but play with life needs the gesture, so that his life may become more real than a game adjustable in all directions.  In the world of merchandise, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all things blend together and transform into one another, where everything is only ambiguity, transition, ephemerality and blending, only the gesture settles once and for all.  In the flash of its necessary brutality it cuts out the “after” that is insoluble in its “before”, which the ONE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.

References

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone           Books,1995.

The Invisible Committee. Theory of the Bloom. Tr. Robert Hurley. Creative Commons. 2012.

Null Space and Null Existence Under the Spectacle

By Mike Templeton

Exit any stretch of interstate and you will immediately be confronted with the mass of business which defines contemporary American existence. From the multi-lane interchange that draws you off the interstate highway to the seemingly endless retail and restaurant chains, life is one continuous stretch of consumer destinations. Gas stations are full-service outlets selling roller food, beer and wine, lottery tickets, trinkets, ball caps, etc. The gas pumps now have video screens so you can watch sports update videos and some kind of corporate version of the news while you pump gas. From this point onward it is nothing but consumption. Consumer existence is human existence.

The full-service gas stations are generally the first places you encounter upon exiting the highway. BP, Speedway, Pilot—it really does not matter which specific brand you choose they all offer the same things. There are hotdog rollers with taquitos and three or four forms of processed meat tubes. Gourmet coffee and “cappuccino” machines that pour frothy French Vanilla and Caramel flavored hot drinks loaded with high-fructose corn syrup are available at stations with glossy images of crafted Starbuck’s-style drinks. There are generally two walls of coolers stocked with every known soft drink. They have a section for a dozen or so brands of beer ranging from the common American corporate brands to the so-called craft brews (all of which are owned and brewed by the corporate American brands). Row upon row of food-substances the origins of which are unknown and unknowable. Then you move to the microwavable food stations. Many of these service stations have now partnered with fast food chains so some sort of drive-through fare is also available. The entire panoply of consumer choice and consumer life are contained under these multi-purpose service stations designed to make your stop from the interstate as seamless and convenient as possible. Of course, the most important commodity on offer is gasoline: the blood that is the life of contemporary life.

Surrounding these service stations, stretching for miles in any direction, are fast food and restaurant chains of all types and varieties. The obvious McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, etc. are punctuated by the more elaborate fare found in Outback, Cracker Barrell, and Chilie’s. Food of every known kind can be obtained either in drive through or take out, or in the form of an actual dine-in experience with wait staff. Along with food, these thoroughfares will feature Target, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. Each of these big-box retail stores will anchor an entire strip of other retail stores such as Staples and Home Goods. Within these plazas there are also stores with shorter lives: Chinese and Indian take-out, used video game stores, Hallmark stores, Christian bookstores, etc. None of these last long, and each is replaced with something equally transient. Not only is the merchandise consumable and disposable, so are the retail outlets which provide the merchandise.

Nearly any exit off an American interstate will look like what I describe above. Each will be identical. The only changes will be local versions of the same thing—White Castle in the north turns into Krystal in the south. The local fare will reflect the regional identities to the extent that regional identities are easily identifiable across all regions. This is to say that a restaurant in Tennessee will offer something unique to the state of Tennessee only insofar as anyone from outside the region would be able to understand the image. “Hillbilly” will be packaged and marketed so that people from Maine, Minnesota, and California are not in any way mystified by the image of Tennessee. All big-box retail stores are the same in every state and region. Stand in a Target in Ohio and you are standing in the same Target as the one in Nevada. You are effectively in the same place since the place itself is as interchangeable and exchangeable as everything in the store.

Beyond the retail strip and restaurant chains, housing developments stretch off into the distances. Farmland may well still exist, but the developments of new housing will invariably stretch along or through the rural landscape. Each subdivision differs only in the most superficial ways. These are houses which are built in precisely the same way as all mass-produced commodities. Within each subdivision, all individual structures will be virtually identical, differing only in superficial details. These housing developments are arranged so as to create the illusion of a neighborhood. Streets arranged in rows or semi-circles all of which join a central street which is connected to the main artery of retail and commercial sprawl. The neighborhoods are generally named after local features such as trees and geological forms none of which can be seen since all of these things were removed to make way for the retail, restaurant, and housing complexes and sprawls which now occupy the terrain.

Some areas off the interstates are devoted primarily to commercial development. These consist mostly of information processing industries, transportation of goods and services, and corporate headquarters for companies which may still be in the business of manufacturing goods, but the actual manufacturing takes place miles away, often in different countries altogether. Shipping companies occupy large areas in order to facilitate the transfer and movement of consumer goods. Office parks occupy massive geographical areas with enormous parking lots. Surrounding all of the commercial plots are carefully landscaped grounds complete with circulating lakes and manicured greenspaces. The natural environment which once defined these areas, the rural landscapes and natural terrain were completely cleared and replaced by these artificial landscapes which give rise to an industry of landscaping and lawncare all to itself.

The images described above have overtaken the American landscape. Various regions of the country will differ according to the climate, but the basic layout of consumer life, commercial development, and suburban development will remain constant. There is no place that is significantly different than any other place. Place itself is interchangeable and exchangeable so that individual places no longer exist except insofar as places have been commodified and branded. Neighborhoods exist because land developers have named them as neighborhoods. Regional identities exist to the extent that they are marketable brands of regional identities. Individual places are unrecognizable, and the space between individual places exists only to be overcome with the greatest speed and convenience. Even the fundamental identity of the rural world and rural culture has been effaced by the encroachment of consumer life and suburban development. The only remnant of rural life is the brand of rural life found in Cracker Barrell where one can buy “farm-style” breakfast plates stuffed with every example of breakfast food imaginable. These feed people who sit in cars and work in offices and only walk as far as the front doors of their newly constructed pre-fab homes to their cars.

Although all of this development takes place within the domain of civic authority, the actual force of authority are the capitalist ventures which own the land and the points of consumption. This is to say that all actual power and authority remains squarely within the realm of capitalist ownership. Civil law and the concept of a civic arena are subordinate to the private ventures which fuel these forms of consumer developments and the consumer culture which drives the private ventures. It is a reciprocal system to the extent that individual demand drives corporate development and corporate development creates the space and conditions for consumer demand. This is a purely spectacular world, one which is driven by forms of authority which far exceed the civic domain. The cultural conditions of contemporary American terrain are defined by the capitalist drives which fuel consumer culture, and this finds its most extreme expression in landscape I have described above. As Debord explains:

At the core of these conditions we naturally find an authoritarian decision-making process that abstractly develops any environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere just as soon as industrialization begins. (The Society of the Spectacle, 122-123)

American geography has become an environment of abstraction. The Real—any idea of the Real—which may have once existed has been plowed under and replaced by abstract forms of geography designed entirely to facilitate a culture of pure consumption, a culture which produces nothing but consumption and waste. The lives of individuals who live in these regions are defined in terms of consumption and waste. All commodities lose value the moment they are purchased and must endlessly be renewed with new versions of the same thing. This is culture abstracted from material life and rendered entirely in the form of consumption.

Consumer capital is all there is, and virtually all of life is subsumed by consumer capital. Basic needs are provided through a diffuse network of supply which is so far removed from the sources of food, fuel, electricity, and water that all of these things appear to simply appear ex nihilo. The massive waste generated by this world is also removed and landfilled in regions largely cut-off from the lives and businesses which generate the waste. Once dumped, it no longer exists. The super-highway interstate system makes all of this possible. A vast system of interstates connects the entire country via a network of space which provides nothing but the means to move past it. The space of the interstate system is nothing but space to be overcome. The sole reason for its being is to pass it behind. The interstate system and the worlds which develop along their length and breadth are heterotopias, abstract spaces on which abstract lives are lived in relation to a world which grows ever more abstract. What is the highway but a space of abstraction in which “(t)he undifferentiated daily flow is punctuated only by the statistical, foreseen, and foreseeable series of accidents, about which THEY keep us all the better informed as we never see them with our own eyes—accidents which are never experienced as events, as deaths, but as a passing disruption whose every trace is erased within the hour” (This is Not a Program, 152). As the highway effaces all difference through its endless uniformity and totalizing program of mathematical planning and control, everything else becomes undifferentiated to the point that what marks one “thing” apart from another is lost. Accidents and real deaths are experienced only as transitory moments in which the ceaseless flow becomes momentarily interrupted. And as all space becomes continuous in a seamless flow of undifferentiated space, space itself is lost. Designed to facilitate the movement over distances, “the pure space of the highway captures the abstraction of all place more than all distance” (152). This “all place” is also the multiple “places” in which everyday life is now lived in the abstraction of space. Suburban sprawl is pure abstraction laid out in accordance with the abstraction of the highway.

The places which emerge at every exit and on-ramp off and onto the highway are completely interchangeable and exchangeable places. They are nothing but forms of abstract space. The housing developments are abstractions based on a flimsy reference to what once occupied actual places. Where there were farms, expanses of woodland, and even small towns, there are now abstractions of those places that bear metonymical links with what once marked those places as real. The woodland that was clear-cut and plowed under is replaced with a pre-fab development of completely indistinguishable housing units arranged in some geometric pattern and then named after a species of tree which once grew in the woodland. It may be named after a native American tribe wiped out centuries ago, and now the local school system takes its name. The lost Lakota Indians become Lakota High School and the people who live in this abstract no-place can find a point of identification with the linguistic representation of an idea no one knows anything about and suture that linguistic representation to a life which unfolds amid absolutely nothing but things to be consumed. Words and individual identities are evacuated of all meaning and re-filled with exchangeable meanings that can be traded along the interstate corridor of abstraction. Consumption is life, and life takes place in the abstract space of pure nullity.

All of life is “presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirements of consumption” (Debord, 123). What of the culture of this world? What emerges within this landscape of nullity is a new form of peasantry, one which is conditioned entirely by the logic of consumer society. Unlike the old peasantry in which natural ignorance was a function of an isolated world, the new peasantry is conditioned to their ignorance by a cultural logic which denies anything exterior to consumer culture. In this landscape of consumerism,

Natural ignorance has given way to the organized spectacle of error. The “new towns” [subdivisions] of technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded: their motto might well be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen—and nothing ever has.” (124)

An organized spectacle of error is the inevitable result of a population who derive all knowledge of the world from the spectacle of the image and the mediation of the commodity. Nothing can be known except insofar as it is represented in a consumable form that is exchangeable with any other commodity. Therefore, knowledge itself is a commodity, and if it is not commodified knowledge, it is not knowledge. The break with historical time comes about, at least in part, from the ex nihilo fashion in which these communities spring up around consumer culture and consumer culture springs up around these communities. The process is one of expressive causality. One aspect of consumer life does not precede the other. The entire landscape and culture of the American landscape now simply appears on the horizon complete with everything I described above and much more. Any history of the regions which may have preceded the creation of the consumer landscape is denuded with the very land on which the spaces are built. Since this historical narrative is completely negated, any narrative of the existence of these regions is created from within the same cultural logic by which they come into being. Nothing ever happened here because everything happens exactly the same way every minute of every day. Nothing will ever happen here because everything that could happens is a reproduction of everything else that has ever happened. The term peasantry is perfect since what we see in the people whose lives are defined by these regions and the forms of culture which define these regions consists of a population which lives in total ignorance of what is beyond the society of the spectacle.

We are left with a geography of homogeneity and a population which mistakes this homogenous nullification of life for life itself. There are no spaces to be; only spaces to have…

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He is also the lead guitar player for the IdleAires, a communications service and information dissemination apparatus operating as a Rock n' Roll trio. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio with my wife who is an artist.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone           Books,1995.

The Invisible Committee. This is Not a Program. Tr. Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge:

Semiotext(e). 2011.

Confronting Columbus: Revisionism Versus Reality

By Colin Jenkins

Regarding the painstaking process of historiography, someone of relative importance once remarked, "History is written by the victors." A statement which echoes Plato's dictum that, "those who tell the stories also hold the power," its modern source is unclear. Still, many do not hesitate to attach these words to Winston Churchill, Britain's renowned Prime Minister during the Second World War. Considering Churchill's own history - born into an aristocratic family; his grandfather the 7th Duke of Marlborough; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, a wealthy British statesman; his mother, Jennie Jerome, an "American socialite," herself the daughter of a financier, speculator, and mass landowner - and the fact that he made an early living overseeing the mass killing of indigenous Africans and Indians located everywhere from Bombay to Sudan to South Africa, such a statement would hardly come as a surprise. If "victory" is defined in terms of deploying one's immense privilege - whether socioeconomic, "racial," or national - to enslave, oppress, and murder others who lack such privilege in order to maintain that very system for oneself and generations to come, then Winston Churchill was certainly one of history's "victors."

The act of whitewashing history - whether literally through the domination of Eurocentric perspectives, or figuratively through blatant omission and revisionism - is certainly common practice. It is the "victors" main tool in shaping history. Historical revisionism has been defined as "a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present;" "a collective task in a nation's cultural development, the full significance of which is emerging only now: to redefine a nation's status in a changing world;" or the act "of 'truth-seekers' finding different truths to fit the needed political, social, or ideological context." In the United States of America, such revisionism becomes immediately apparent when one steps into a public school classroom - where histories of indigenous genocide and human enslavement are, at best, minimized; and, at worst, utilized to stroke a false sense of superiority and exceptionalism; and where the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity are magically transformed from conquerors to "explorers," from murderers to "adventurers," and from slave masters to "patriots" and "founding fathers," all in the stroke of a pen or the voice of a lecture.

The act of historical revisionism has deep-seated cultural effects. Essentially, it creates two worlds:

1. The first based in quasi-fiction, informed on selective data and historical accounts from either the actual "victors" or the direct beneficiaries of the perceived "victory;" and one that enjoys unquestioned dominance through manipulation and a process of layered assimilation where commonly accepted "knowledge" is constantly reproduced through academia and seamlessly delivered to its intended audience.

2. The second based in reality, informed on factual data and historical accounts from not only the "victors," but also from the supposed "losers;" and one that faces almost certain or near-extinction through numerous acts of manipulation and/or omission which are carried out over a number of years, decades, or even centuries.

Historiography is the proving ground for this ongoing struggle between revisionism and reality. The ruling classes deploy their army of "traditional intellectuals," born and bred of privilege and churned through the most prestigious schools and universities, to protect the dominant ideology through a sophisticated presentation of revisionism. The working classes, struggling to maintain actualities, look upon their own ranks to create a semblance of reality as the torchbearers of truth. Hanging in the balance is the direction of society: towards continued polarization, inequities, and dehumanization; or towards a sense of being - something that cannot be realized without truth.

Revisionism gives us Columbus Day; a federal holiday "in commemoration of Christopher Columbus's historic 1492 voyage," for which, in 1934, the U.S. Congress "duly requested the President proclaim the second Monday of October of each year as such"

Reality gives us Indigenous People's Day; "a holiday celebrated in various localities in the United States, begun as a counter-celebration to Columbus Day, with the "purpose of promoting Native American culture and commemorating the history of Native American peoples."

Revisionism gives us the following announcement from the White House: "When the explorers laid anchor in the Bahamas, they met indigenous peoples who had inhabited the Western hemisphere for millennia. As we reflect on the tragic burdens tribal communities bore in the years that followed, let us commemorate the many contributions they have made to the American experience, and let us continue to strengthen the ties that bind us today."

Reality gives us the words of Columbus himself: "(The natives) are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone."

Revisionism gives us the words of Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Institute: (Western civilization) brought "reason, science,self-reliance,individualism, ambition, and productive achievement" to a people who were based in "primitivism, mysticism, and collectivism," and to a land that was "sparsely inhabited, unused, and underdeveloped."

Reality gives us yet another dispatch from Columbus: "I promise this, that if I am supported by our most invincible sovereigns with a little of their help, as much gold can be supplied as they will need, indeed as much of spices, of cotton, of mastic gum, also as much of aloes wood, and as many slaves for the navy as their Majesties will wish to demand."

Revisionism gives us this official statement from the U.S. government: "In the centuries since that fateful October day in 1492, countless pioneering Americans have summoned the same spirit of discovery that drove Christopher Columbus when he cast off from Palos, Spain, to pursue the unknown. Engineers and entrepreneurs, sailors and scientists, explorers of the physical world and chroniclers of the human spirit -- all have worked to broaden our understanding of the time and space we live in and who we are as a people."

Reality gives us Columbus' words: "They (the Arawak Indians) brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

Revisionism gives us this:

Reality gives us this:

The "whitewashing" of history has an intended purpose -to control information and knowledge, to keep the "huddled masses" ignorant, and to maintain the status quo. The Churchills of the world and their keepers would have it no other way. For if history were reality-based, the immense wealth and power they have enjoyed and continue to enjoy - of which has been accumulated through the stolen resources of indigenous peoples, and multiplied on the backs of the enslaved, the imprisoned, the working classes and the peasantry - would cease to exist. If history were reality-based, the hierarchical systems that keep this illegitimate wealth and power intact, and the government watchdogs that protect these systems, would cease to exist.

On this day, reality begins with recognizing the real consequences of Christopher Columbus' "expeditions," which continued far beyond the hallowed year of 1492. "In 1493, Columbus returned with an invasion force of seventeen ships, appointed at his own request by the Spanish Crown to install himself as 'viceroy and governor of [the Caribbean islands] and the mainland' of America, a position he held until 1500," explains Ward Churchill. "Setting up shop on the large island he called Espa-ola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), he promptly instituted policies of slavery (encomiendo) and systematic extermination against the native Taino population." In all, "Columbus' programs reduced Taino numbers from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million in 1496. Perhaps 100,000 were left by the time of his departure" some seven years later.

As working class women and men, we have an intimate connection with indigenous peoples who were "so free with their possessions" that "they would offer to share with anyone," just as we do with our neighbors. We have a bond with those whose only wish was to be left alone, to live and carry on as they please, to progress their livelihoods, and to care for their families, loved ones and neighbors, just as we do. The conditioned need to possess "worldly goods" at the expense of enslaving and murdering other human beings does not exist for our benefit, and should not be celebrated. Reality does and should mean something.

Reject revisionism. Embrace reality. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

References

James McPherson, Revisionist Historians. Perspectives, 2003. American Historical Association.

Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (1927), MIT Press, pp. xxii-xxvii.

Matthew d'Ancona, History men battle over Britain's future. The Times, May 9, 1994.

Presidential Proclamation, Columbus Day 2012. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/10/05/presidential-proclamation-columbus-day-2012 . Accessed on 10/13/13.

"Winston Churchill" . Historylearningsite.co.uk. 30 March 2007. Accessed 10/13/13.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

http://www.amstudy.hku.hk/columbusletter.html . Accessed 10/13/13.

F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe (2005), Weiser, pg. 310.

Medieval Sourcebook: Christopher Columbus: Extracts from Journal, Fordham University archives. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/columbus1.asp. Accessed 10/13/13.

History Not Taught is History Forgot: Columbus' Legacy of Genocide. An excerpt from Ward Churchill's book, Indians Are Us (Common Courage Press, 1994) http://www.mit.edu/~thistle/v9/9.11/1columbus.html. Accessed on 10/13/13.