A Working-Class Response to Trump's 2020 State of the Union Address

The wealthy have taken everything from us, and continue to find ways to take even more. It is never enough for them. And, year after year, their political puppets in both capitalist parties ensure that their rivers and avenues of unfathomable, flowing wealth never dry up or close down. When needed, they construct more. Always at our expense, and always through our collective (and manufactured) misery. The wealthy create or produce nothing of value, barely lift a finger in their daily routines, and get richer and richer directly through our labor, our exploitation, our indebtedness, and our mass dispossession of land and resources. 

Barack Obama was the empire fully clothed, hiding these horrors with impressive displays of eloquence and articulation. Donald Trump is the empire without clothes, naked and with all of its horror on full display. With or without clothes, the horrors exist. With or without clothes, these horrors have disastrous consequences for billions of people worldwide, which are viewed as nothing more than collateral damage sustained through coordinated resource extraction and [disaster] capitalism. For the majority, including most Americans, this reality has existed for centuries. 

This "response" was written an hour before last Tuesday's address because we knew that whatever words would come out of Trump’s mouth would be empty. They are inconsequential to us. They are nothing more than damage control, designed to instill false hopes through the vast wastelands of this country. Just as they were with Obama, both Bushs, Clinton, Reagan, and so on. No matter who stands and delivers this yearly address, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the bombs never stop falling. The working-class struggle also never ends, and has only become more and more difficult. 

We have had enough. 

Capitalism's predatory onslaught has run its course. America's bourgeois democracy is no longer a suitable cover for a nation that has committed systemic crimes against the global majority, including its own working-class citizens, and especially its indigenous people, its women, its immigrants, and its people of color. From constant war and never-ending exploitation to forced indebtedness and smothering repression, the people no longer believe in this charade. We know that governments in capitalist society are but "committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class."

The future does not belong to Presidents, Senators, bankers, executives, hedge-fund manipulators, speculators, investors, financiers, shareholders, cops, landlords, bosses, owners, prison guards, ICE agents, and border patrol agents. It belongs to warehouse workers, carpenters, laborers, bus drivers, teachers, forklift operators, baristas, janitors, restaurant workers, nurses, social workers, firefighters, farmers, prisoners, the unemployed, the homeless, the disenfranchised, and all who have been forced into a hopeless existence only so a small percentage of the population can accumulate more wealth than they know what to do with. 

The empire has been exposed. The "state" and the "union" are myths constructed to hide the class and racial divides that are deeply rooted in the country’s foundation. The American "middle class" was an historical anomaly that will never return, and is only kept alive as a carrot for politicians to dangle in front of us every election season. Capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy are approaching their demise. The fascist tide that has reared its ugly head under late-stage capitalism is already being snuffed out in the streets by courageous, working-class warriors. 

The people are rising, like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number. The future is ours. And your words, Mr. Trump, mean nothing to us.

All power to the people.

Socialist Feminism in the era of Trump and Weinstein

By Susan Ferguson

Originally published at New Socialist.

It wasn’t that long ago when news outlets were abuzz with the idea that feminism was dead, a relic of the past.

Young women who had reaped the benefits of the Second Wave – access to postsecondary education, non-traditional jobs, boardrooms, and more flexible household arrangements – saw, it was said, no need to fight for more equality, more freedom. It was a “post-feminist” world. (I put that word in scare quotes because, as I explain below, “post-feminism” actually means something else among critically inclined feminists).

Of course, those commentators were dead wrong. But if they could keep their heads in the sand back then, they certainly can’t today.

Just 14 months ago Americans – well 26 percent of eligible American voters anyway – elected a man who has yet to meet a woman he hasn’t ogled, insulted, demeaned or groped.

Then, in 2017, high-profile, powerful men fell like dominos because the women they work with (and generally work in positions of relative power over) have been emboldened to tell their stories of sexual harassment and assault.

And although it gets far less press, it is also the case in 2017 – as it was in the 1980s when the “post-feminist” era was first proclaimed – that millions of women living in the wealthiest nations of the world face poverty, violence and/or discrimination in their everyday lives.

So, the post-feminist era was always a myth.

Even the pundits no longer talk much about “post-feminism.” They’ve actually found a new feminist – Justin Trudeau. And, more appropriately, Time magazine has just named the #MeToo movement its “person of the year.”

Of course, some of us have known all along that there is nothing outmoded about the need for a feminist analysis and politics. We’ve been working throughout the last few decades, advocating in various ways to improve women’s lives.

It is those “various ways” that I want to look at here. For however much one set of feminist politics tends to dominate the public discussion, there’s a rich and diverse tradition from which we can draw our ideas and thinking.

I’m going to comment briefly on three faces of feminist politics that have emerged over these years, which I’m calling:

1. “Fearless girl” feminism

2. Allyship feminism

3. Anti-capitalist feminism from below

While there is plenty of overlap among these, we can trace their roots back to distinct theoretical and political premises – and in so doing, see how they support divergent notions of progress and freedom for women.

To signal where I’m going with this: while all three “faces” of feminism have generated substantive, material changes in women’s lives, it is the third approach – anti-capitalist feminism from below – that orients us to thinking about how to develop a transformative politics that grapples most directly with the systemic nature of oppression.

“Fearless girl” feminism

The title here refers to the bronzed statue of a small girl facing off against “Charging Bull,” the Wall St. icon installed two years after the 1987 market crash. The “fearless girl” statue (created by artist Kristen Visbel) was erected by State Street Global Advisors just as International Women’s Day was rolling around this year. It symbolizes a feminism that promotes women’s “empowerment” through economic independence and labour market opportunities.

State Street Global Advisors is an investment firm which manages $2.5 trillion in assets. It unveiled the statue as the launch of a campaign to add more women to corporate boards of directors. (Apparently, surveys have found deep resistance to the idea that women should comprise even 50 percent of a board, with 53 percent of directors surveyed responding that women should comprise no more the 40 percent of board membership.)

Why would State Street Global Advisors care? Well, it turns out, gender diversity has been shown “to improve company performance and increase shareholder value.”

This is, of course, the dominant face of feminism today. It is what Justin Trudeau trumpets when he fills half of his cabinet seats with women (you’ll remember his flippant but hard-to-argue-with reasoning, “Because it’s 2015”). Or, when he sits down with Ivanka Trump for a roundtable on so-called women business leaders. Or, again, when he insists that any free trade deal with China requires both parties sign on to gender equity provisions.  

And while many of us will roll our eyes at the superficiality of Trudeau’s feminism, few would argue, I suspect, that he shouldn’t take these positions.

In other words, it’s somewhat awkward, and complicated.

The so-called empowerment of women achieved by widening the corporate and political corridors to accommodate them is a result of decades of feminists trying to redress inequality through equal pay and pay equity legislation – legislation that has undoubtedly improved the lives of many, many women.

Yet, where has this gotten us? As the Trudeau/Trump collaboration attests, these feminist initiatives are easily coopted by a shallow exercise in corporate diversity management. And we see the broad societal impact of this uptake of “fearless girl” feminism in the widening gap between wealthy and average-income earning women.

Leslie McCall, a sociologist at Northwestern University, has tracked women’s wages in the US since the 1970s.

From: Leslie McCall, Men against Women: or the Top 20 percent against the Bottom 80, 7 June 2013, Council on Contemporary Families (https://contemporaryfamilies.org/top-20-percent-against-bottom-80/).  

When she started, women with college degrees earned less than men straight out of high school. But then, the effects of equal pay legislation (introduced in 1963 in the US) started to kick in.

Today, women still haven’t seriously dented the ranks of the 1 percent. They are, however, much more often found among top salary earners. Women’s earnings in the top 85th to 95th percentile (yearly incomes of about $150,000) have grown faster than men’s earnings in that category in every decade since the 1970s. For example, they’ve seen a 14 percent growth in the first decade of this century, compared to an 8.3 percent growth for those making average wages.

According to McCall, there have been “strong absolute gains for women in this elite group.”  

Meanwhile, median earnings of all full-time workers (men and women) didn’t change between 2001 and 2010. And the gap between high-earning women on the one hand, and middle- and low-earning women on the other, has been steadily growing.

So, while women who make about $150,000 a year are seeing their salaries continue to grow at robust rates, women (and men) who make about $37,000 or less a year have, for some time now, seen their incomes stall.

To be clear, then, we are talking about a very small proportion of women who have truly been “empowered” here:

• in 2013, according to a JPMorgan Chase researcher, only 3.25 percent of American women wage-earners took home more than $100,000 per year.

• That same year, according the US Social Security Administration, more than half of US wage-earners earned $30,000 or less. And you can bet that women, blacks, Latinos/Latinas, trans people, queers, and immigrants were over-represented in that group.

Yet, yet . . . I defend “fearless girl” feminism’s demand for pay equity and equal pay. One thing these figures don’t tell us – they can’t tell us in fact – is how much lower all women’s wages would have been had feminists not been fighting all along for economic parity and independence.

At the same time, it is awkward because while such policies have improved individual lives, they haven’t, and never could have, challenged the conditions which produce the tendency toward unequal pay in the first place – which is precisely why Justin Trudeau, Ivanna Trump, Hillary Clinton and Wall Street investment firms have no trouble with embracing and promoting them.

“Fearless girl” feminism is entirely consistent with the capitalist world order that Trudeau & Co. represent and defend. That is the same capitalist world order which can be pushed to accommodate some gender and racial equality, but cannot give up its life-blood: a vast and growing pool of low-waged, and no-waged, labour – and the racist, sexist and otherwise oppressive relations that ensure an ongoing supply of the same.

Allyship feminism

If we consider women’s experiences of violence and harassment over the same period that we looked at for changes in women’s wages (the 1970s to 2017), we find much less reliable statistical evidence. That’s because changes in women’s reporting levels fluctuate (recall how a couple high profile complaints at private sector companies led to the recent spike in reporting). It’s also because there have been shifts in how gendered violence is defined.

Still, we learn from a recent StatsCan report the following:

• Women’s reports to police of physical assault have fallen some, while reports of sexual assault are stable.

• The self-reported (on the General Social Survey) rate of violent victimization against women aged 15 years and over has remained relatively stable between 1999 and 2009.

Most significantly, we know that gendered violence and harassment continues at unacceptable levels today. A report by the Canadian Women’s Foundation tells us that:

• Half of all women in Canada have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16.

• Approximately every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner.

• There are upwards of 4,000 murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada.

• Young women (aged 18 to 24) are most likely to experience online harassment in its most severe forms, including stalking, sexual harassment and physical threats.

While there have certainly been missteps, and there is still much more that needs to be done, feminists have demanded and won resources for those vulnerable to gendered violence. They have also developed policies and practices that make meaningful differences in the lives of women, trans people and queers, allowing many to leave risky, abusive situations, to better negotiate legal systems, and to feel more secure at school, on the streets, and at work.

In recent years, much of that work has been informed by what I’m calling allyship feminism (though other forms of feminism certainly deserve credit too for progress on these fronts). By allyship feminism I mean to identify a politics that is grounded in a critique of intersecting systems of oppression. Similar to anti-capitalist feminism from below, this feminist perspective sees the powerful institutions and practices in our society – schools, courts, law, corporations, healthcare – as implicated in upholding racism, sexism and heterosexism, trans and queer phobia, ableism, settler colonialism, economic exploitation, and so on. [1]  

However, even though many feminist allies hold this radical, often even anti-capitalist, understanding of society, their political work usually stops short of challenging the systemic powers they critique.

The reason for this arguably has much to do with their commitment to the principle of allyship, and the ethos of “privilege” that informs it.

Allyship feminism begins with listening to those who are directly disempowered in this multiple and complex matrix of “interlocking” oppressions (to use Patricia Hill Collins’ term). Listening is integral to a process of building relationships of trust and accountability with those feminists seek to be in allyship with. Once that relationship is on solid ground, then feminist allies engage their financial, organizational or other forms of resources to help strategize ways and means to support and protect the disempowered.

This approach is counter-posed to mainstream feminism, which tends to treat the marginalized as victims or clients, who can be helped by integrating them into existing institutions and systems. By contrast, the goal of allyship feminism is not to “save” or “integrate” people, but to work with them, on terms defined by the marginalized, to “challenge larger oppressive power structures.”

It is also counter-posed to the (presumed masculinist) socialist left. Rather than “impose” their systemic critique on the oppressed, and prioritize political confrontation and social change over meeting the self-defined needs of marginalized communities (as certain – though, significantly, not all – left traditions can be rightly singled out for doing), allyship feminists stress that their own political goals are secondary to those they seek to be allies with.  

Alongside offering resources, feminist allies actively work to recalibrate interpersonal relationships between themselves and marginalized people. This means, in the first instance, identifying and taking responsibility for one’s complicity in the wider social dynamics of oppression – for one’s “privilege,” say, as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered student who is working with Indigenous women living in poverty.

“Checking one’s privilege” is not an optional or one-time feature of allyship feminism. According to the Anti-Oppression Network, allyship is “an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group.”

Self-consciousness, care and respect when working with vulnerable people is incredibly important. What’s more, there is no doubt that the work of feminist allies has made university campuses, workplaces, homes and streets safer for many women, queers, and trans people vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment. It has contributed to establishing and improving funding for community centres, safe spaces and educational materials about gendered violence. It has led to improved policies and procedures for those reporting sexual assault, and contributed a compelling defense of nongendered language to an often toxic public debate.

But, again, I find assessing allyship feminism to be a bit awkward and complicated. As with struggles for pay equity and equal pay legislation, this approach hasn’t been – and can’t ever be – enough. Allyship feminism comes up against the limits of its own premises.

First, the focus on using resources to support the goals of more marginalized people is laudable of course. But it can – and often does – work to bind feminist allies to the very power structures that perpetuate the inequality of resources that have made them “allies” and not members of the “more marginalized” communities in the first place.

Instead of confronting power, feminist allies tend to define their political work in terms of getting those in positions of authority onside with their agenda. They risk cultivating, that is, either a naïve trust in their bosses or political elites (who they believe they can influence), or a fear of alienating the support of their higher-ups by pushing for more radical demands.

Second, the politics of individual privilege risks diverting attention away from the broader forces sustaining the conditions of inequality and oppression. Feminist allies insist that “checking one’s privilege” is about taking responsibility for one’s own consciousness and behaviour, and not about confessing guilt for occupying a relatively advantageous social position.

But, as critics of this approach point out, the focus here is nonetheless on the individual. And not just any individual. Because it is their “self-changing” which becomes the centre of political work, say the critics, feminists from the dominant (usually white, academic) culture have (once again) made themselves the centre of anti-oppression politics – albeit not intentionally, nor in the same way as “second-wave” feminists did. Still, the irony is hard to miss.

In some ways, privilege politics grows out of another second wave feminist idea, the idea that the personal is political. Understood as a claim that our most intimate relations are conditioned by wider power dynamics, that maxim is, I believe, indisputable. But insofar as allyship feminism focuses on personal privilege as a site of political activism, it suggests something else. It suggests that power is everywhere – an idea most associated with the French political philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984).

According to this perspective, there is no essential difference between the “power” wielded by individuals caught up in systems of oppression on the one hand, and the power generated and/or sustained by broader political and economic dynamics on the other. Or, if feminist allies do consider these types of power as distinct in some ways, privilege politics tends to obscure the relationship between them. As a result, key questions about systemic change tend to go unanswered: does, for example, challenging individual interpersonal practices and language lead to wider, more systemic, change? If so, exactly how?

The limits of allyship feminism are thus considerable. Yet, it is hardly surprising that many of the most critically minded feminists are drawn to this set of politics today. For those limits reflect the general weakness of the wider left. They reflect a left that has largely lost the capacity to pose an alternative to the broader structures of power that allyship feminism critiques.

My point is not that we need to, or should, abandon the type of work so many feminists with a radical critique of society do. While we should challenge some of their strategies, I think they advance important lessons for the wider left about working for social change within institutions, and about building relationships with disempowered communities.

The key task is to figure out how such work can be part of a broader challenge to the systemic reproduction of multiple oppressions. How can this work help build the societal capacity, confidence and solidarity required to move beyond where we find ourselves today?

Anti-capitalist feminism from below

Of the three faces of feminism, this is certainly the least familiar. That’s in part because, for the last 50 years, socialist feminists have gone from being a coherent presence on the left to working within organizations dominated by other sorts of politics. Unions and labour councils have absorbed many, but so have some activist groups mobilizing around healthcare, education, and poverty. And you’ll still find socialist feminists, like myself, lingering in small left groups like the New Socialists and, of course, in the academy.

By “coherent presence” I mean that anti-capitalist, from-below, principles contributed to and sometimes guided feminist political action in the 1970s and 1980s. Certainly, in Toronto, the struggles to establish childcare centres at the University of Toronto, to get maternity leave provisions in contract negotiations, to demand access to abortion, and to oppose police raids on bath houses are great examples of that.

In all cases, socialist feminists argued for and won arguments about the need to call out and confront those in power through large mobilizations. The idea was not to ask for spaces and services so much as it was to collectively claim them.

I don’t mean to romanticize this. To begin, these gains, like those of all feminisms, are fragile. As well, there were lots of unresolved issues, including a marked inability (and less commonly, a refusal) to seriously deal with the multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of oppression. That failing contributed to the dismantling of socialist feminist organizations and the faltering confidence that a broader vision of freedom from oppression was even possible.

In the last five years or so, though, we’ve seen a smouldering interest in the ideas of a renewed socialist feminism. By renewed, I mean a socialist feminism that doesn’t simply repeat the insights of an earlier era, but learns from its shortcomings, and attempts to move beyond these – namely, to deal seriously with the complexity of oppression.

This renewal, however, has had only a limited political expression. Many anti-capitalist feminists from below working in community and labour organizations today have renewed this face of feminism in practice, by building solidarity among feminists, anti-racists, queers, trans people and others. But they have not often articulated the principles guiding their work in any sort of coherent set of socialist feminist politics.

That task has been taken up largely by those of us in the academy and parts of the organized left. We are now debating and discussing the version of social reproduction feminism that was initially framed by Lise Vogel, in her book Marxism and the Oppression of Women. More on that in a second.

While one might argue that the numbers of US women who rejected Hillary Clinton and her fearless girl feminism, and flocked instead to the Bernie Sanders campaign are a sign that times are ripe for such a feminism, to date, in North America, the most significant political expression of anti-capitalist from below feminist politics came with the March 8, 2017, call for an International Women’s Strike.

The North American organizers of that strike took their inspiration from three mass mobilizations in 2016: the Polish women’s strike, which stopped legislation to ban abortions in that country; the Black Wednesday strike called by the #NiUnoMenos, (Not One Less) movement in Argentina to protest male violence; and the 300,000 Italian women and supporters who mobilized on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The organizers also understood that the sea of people donning pussy hats in the Women’s March this past January were not just upset that Trump was in the White House instead of Hillary Clinton. Their chants and placards drew attention to the devastation neoliberalism has wrought on the lives of women, trans people, Indigenous peoples, blacks, queers, immigrants and migrants.

Building upon all this, a group of US-based socialist feminists took up the call (issued first by the organizers of the Polish strike) for an International Women’s Strike. The call for a “strike” was deliberate. It was intended, according to one of its organizers, Cinzia Arruza, “to emphasize the work that women perform not only in the workplace but outside it, in the sphere of social reproduction”. That is, it highlighted the unpaid and/or low-waged work of cleaning, cooking and childminding (among other things) that produces the key thing capitalism needs in order to realize a profit, the worker.

Anti-capitalist feminism from below takes that insight as its starting point – an insight of social reproduction feminism that is articulated particularly well by Lise Vogel. Briefly, Vogel argues that capitalism absolutely requires workers, but bosses do not directly control their production (that is, the daily and generational renewal of labour power). That renewal is organized in patriarchal, heterosexist and racialized ways primarily in households, but also in hospitals and schools, for example, and through migration regimes.

Moreover, the relentless drive to exert a downward pressure on wages (and also on taxes) means that although capitalism needs workers, it also cannot help but undermine the capacity of those workers to reproduce themselves. And it is this unresolvable contradiction between the production of value and the production of life that haunts capitalism, making oppression a systemic feature of its very existence.

The 2017 International Women’s Strike – in recognition of the centrality of women’s work to capitalism – called on women to withdraw their labour not just from the workforce but from sites of unpaid social reproduction too. And women around the world responded. Activists in fifty countries participated.

While mostly symbolic as one-day protests tend to be, the strike as a strategy drives home the point that feminism can have an insurgent face that calls out the systemic nature of oppression.

And if we agree that it is capitalism that limits the possibility of meeting the very real survival needs of people, that puts profits before need not just in the workplace but in our communities and homes, then confronting that system also requires confronting the racism, sexism and all oppressions that work in concert with capitalism and against life.

This means working for greater economic equality between men and women, and to provide safe spaces and adequate resources for marginalized people. But we need to organize the demands for these things in ways that also build peoples’ capacities to draw attention to the ways in which oppression is embedded in the capitalist mandate to put profit over the meeting of human need.

And the only way we will ever be able to challenge that is by drawing more and more people into struggle – building the confidence and capacity of everyone with a stake in a more just society – to claim back not only our workplaces, but also our communities (our hospitals, schools, streets and households).

This doesn’t mean imposing ideas on marginalized groups. It does mean discussing and debating the nature of social power with them – and then strategizing to find ways to build the collective confidence to claim back the economic, political and cultural resources needed to produce a better world.

To my mind, this is the key distinction between working in solidarity with groups and seeking out allyship with them. Building solidarity certainly involves listening and respecting the self-determination of distinct groups. But it also involves moving beyond offering support and help, to articulating shared goals and strategies based on the knowledge that (i) all our lives are organized in and through a broader set of distinct, but nonetheless unified power relations; and (ii) that the capitalist system organizing those relations denies us collective control over the resources required to socially reproduce ourselves and our worlds in a way that meets our (material, cultural, spiritual, physical – in short, human) needs.

Solidarity, then, means standing with those who are willing to disrupt the usual flow of power from top to bottom. Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the Quebec Student Strike – these are all examples of recent efforts to reclaim social reproductive space and resources (our communities and schools) through movement building.

We can improve lives through influencing those in positions of authority to grant certain things – better services and education, higher wages and benefits. And we should continue to do that. But if we don’t link those struggles with others that also challenge more directly those who hold power over us, the patterns of inequality and oppression that keep far too many women, blacks, migrants, Indigenous and disabled people disempowered, and living in poverty and fear for the last fifty years, will still be evident over the next fifty.

In the era of Trump and Weinstein, we need the face of feminism to be insurgent and transformative.

Notes

[1] The feminist “post-feminism” that I referred to earlier (not to be confused with the media popularization of that term) takes its lead from intersectionality theory. Feminism is considered outmoded not because it is no longer needed or relevant, but because it is too narrow. That is, the implied privileging of gender relations is too narrow to adequately address the multiple, complex interaction of oppressions that more accurately describes people’s experiences.

Sue Ferguson is a member of the Toronto New Socialists, and writes on social reproduction feminism.

This article is based on a talk given on Dec. 8, 2017, sponsored by the Ottawa New Socialists and University of Ottawa PIRG.

Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.

Zimbabwe's Political, Social, and Economic Prospects: 2019 in Review

By Mafa Kwanisai Mafa

Political landscape

After the 2018 harmonized elections which gave the ZANU PF party the mandate to rule, President Emmerson Mnangagwa appealed to all political party Presidents who contested in the elections to come together in a national dialogue and find a way to stop the toxic political polarization which continues to divide the Zimbabwean nation. Another reason for the national dialogue was to provide a viable platform for contributing towards lasting solutions to the challenges that confront the country. All the 19 political parties accepted the President’s invitation to Political Actors Dialogue (POLAD) and the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) refused on the basis that they don’t recognize the Presidency of Emmerson Mnangagwa.

They claim that Mnangagwa is an outcome of a rigged election despite the fact that they were deemed free and fair by many international observers and also by the Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe. A southern Africa bloc, Southern Africa Development Commission (SADC) is in support of the POLAD platform created by the government of Zimbabwe and support a full inclusive dialogue. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki who brokered the Global Political Agreement (2008) before was in the country towards year end to bring all stakeholders to the table and consult. President Thabo Mbeki is pushing for talks to end economic crisis. Mbeki held marathon meetings with the protagonists in Harare as well as other political, civic society, and church leaders. The opposition MDC says it is committed to “real dialogue” to solve the political and economic morass in the country and will not be part of President’s Mnangagwa’s POLAD platform.

The opposition, in cahoots with their international allies through foreign embassies and civil society groups, are escalating their efforts to topple the government of Emmerson Mnangagwa. These organizations are fighting in the opposition corner by supporting and funding the MDC destabilization agenda. The same organizations have been urging USA and EU to maintain the illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, citing alleged human rights violations by the government and security services. The MDC opposition leadership has been on the whirlwind tour in western capitals asking for more sanctions to put pressure on the Zimbabwean government.

Economic Situation

Zimbabwe is in the throes of its economic decay in a decade characterized by acute shortages of cash, medicine, fuel and rolling power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. Inflation skyrocketed to 481.5% in November 2019, in the process eroding salaries and decimating pensions. Zimbabwe is also grappling with price increases which are changing every day. In the interim, salaries have remained depressed, with consumer spending severely curtailed. Zimbabwe economic morass constitutes one of the biggest threats to ZANU PF's continued hold on power. United Nations expert Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, noted that Zimbabwe is on the brink of starvation, a crisis that has been compounded by hyperinflation, poverty, natural disasters and economic sanctions. The ZANU PF Central Committee report of 2019 noted that the most latent security threat that has great consequences is the unstable economy, which is largely propelled by the parallel market (black market). Formal trading prices are determined by the parallel market exchange rate, which has been sharply rising on a daily basis. Prices of all commodities and services have followed suit to unsustainable levels.

The report admitted that most people are failing to make ends meet, so poverty levels are rising very much throughout the year. As a result anger is brewing among the citizens while there is loss of confidence on the direction the economy is taking. In January a steep hike in fuel prices led to violent demonstrations across the country which the army and police ruthlessly put down. The human rights groups estimated that about 17 people were shot down with live ammunition by the security forces during the three days protests.

Zimbabwe is suffering from massive power cuts which has brought a number of businesses to a standstill. The power utility in 2019 went on to increase tariffs by 320%. The increase in tariffs was meant to solve the power crisis in the country but failed dismally with some businesses bearing the brunt as they lost productive hours.

Economic Sanctions and the Regime change agenda

This is a sad chapter in Zimbabwe's recent history which marked the beginning of a well-organized, meticulously coordinated and generously funded campaign of economic sabotage and misinformation designed to mislead both the Zimbabwean population as well as the international community with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the elected government. Activists are being trained in foreign lands by intelligence forces on how to organize and apply strategies to undermine the government and its economic policies. This is meant to render the country ungovernable and incite the population to revolt and overthrow a legitimate government.

October 25, 2019 was declared a national holiday in Zimbabwe for people to march against western sanctions. Sanctions are causing more harm as they have affected people, companies, and schools. Zimbabwe has for the past two decades failed to access lines of credit from IMF and the World Bank. Some banks in the country are restricted from trading with international financial institutions. Under the USA Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, American companies are not allowed to deal with Zimbabwe entities on the sanctions list. Some companies associated with the state have had their money intercepted and blocked when they attempt to do business with international institutions. Companies are finding it difficult to move money into the country because banks can be fined for dealing with sanctioned countries.

In April 2019, the USA fined the Standard Chartered Bank US$18 million for dealing with a sanctioned country. Many companies have been forced to close shop or to scale down their operations. This has led to a loss of jobs. Many international investors are shying away from investing in the country.

In the past two decades, various opposition leaders from the MDC party have been consistently calling for and instating on the maintenance of the illegal economic sanctions with the aim of regime change. SADC set October 25, 2019, as the SADC day against Zimbabwe sanctions which marks the start of a sustained call for the unconditional lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe through various activities.

There is an organization based in Belgrade called Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) which is clandestinely training antigovernment activists with strong umbilical links to the Zimbabwean main opposition MDC. Its mission is to layout the groundwork for civil unrest. Srdja Popovic is the founder and executive director of this organization. He is based in Belgrade, Serbia and his job is to foment revolutions in countries such as Sudan, Swaziland (Eswathini), Venezuela, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Burma, Vietnam, Belarus, Syria, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Most of the activists which were arrested in Zimbabwe in the aftermath of the January 14 and 16, 2019 violent protests and charged with treason and subversion received their training in Czech Republic and the Maldives. Their training involves organizing mass protests, the use of small arms, and counter intelligence. Most of the organizations which are engaged in these nefarious and subversive activities to topple the government of Zimbabwe are also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an American private and nonprofit organization which focuses on “strengthening democratic institutions.”

CANVAS was founded in 2003 by Srdja Popovic and Ivan Marovic and ever since it has been training antigovernment activists in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Iran, Lebanon, Tibet, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Srdja Popovic was one of the key founders and organisers of the Serbian nonviolence revolution group called Otpor! Otpor! Campaign which toppled the Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic in October 2000. CANVAS has been successful in most countries mentioned in fomenting uprisings save for Swaziland, Belarus, and Zimbabwe, which are still enjoying some peace. Foreign organizations are coordinating workshops and trainings in the country, the region, and overseas to topple the Zimbabwe government.

Austerity and the International Monetary Fund

Zimbabwe launched its austerity measures under the Transitional Stabilization Programme (TSP) in October 2018 when it was presenting the 2019 national budget. The time frame of the programme is scheduled to run from October 2018 to December 2020. The purpose of the austerity measures are meant to implement cost cutting measures, and to reduce the public sector wage bill. In addition to that, austerity reforms are aimed at increasing tax revenues by introducing the unpopular 2 % Intermediated Monetary Transfer (IMT) tax, restructuring the civil service and the privatization of ailing state enterprises and parastatals. These reforms are meant to bring about fiscal balances in the public sector. These reforms are meant to reduce government spending, increase tax revenues or to achieve both. The International Monetary Fund is keeping an eye on these reforms through a Staff Monitored Programme which covers a period from May 2019 to March 2020. These measures are very unpopular with the masses as they have proved to be anti-developmental, self-defeating, and have an adverse effects on the toiling working class.

The civil service has been affected by the austerity measures in terms of salaries which are now pegged at less than US$30 a month. Persistent threats of strikes and demonstrations have crippled important sectors such as health, education and even provision of documents such as passports. These austerity reforms shrink economic growth and cripple public service delivery. From past experiences IMF is unlikely to offer any bailout to the Zimbabwe economy, which means the country will have to lift itself out of any economic slowdown caused by the austerity measures. Critics of austerity measures fear that the reforms are acting as a double edged knife that leads to economic recession, job cuts, and company closures whilst failing to tackle runaway government expenditure. Its most likely that history is going to repeat itself, cognizant of the 1990 Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) which left the economy worse off, further marginalizing the poor and vulnerable groups.

The impact of austerity measures are likely to widen the already high income inequality gap in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is worsening social suffering as the government cuts social spending by 62%. Low income households are the most affected through expenditure cuts on social protection programmes which are mend for the children, elderly and the disabled and beneficiaries of Basic Education Assistance Programme (BEAM) and health facilities. In the current budget the government prioritized Defense and Home Affairs. The impact of taxation policy on distribution and equality is so glaring. Big companies are being offered several investment incentives under the 2019 national budget, the citizens under distress of the additional 7c and 6.5c per litre of diesel, petrol and paraffin. Implications of the 2c on Intermediated Money Transfer above Zimbabwe $10 are similar. This shows the repressiveness of the Zimbabwe tax system, where the poor contribute more than the rich.

By experimenting with TPS the government is repeating the mistakes of 1990 under ESAP and it’s expecting different outcomes. The commercialization and privatization policy is being smuggled into the fiscal policy under the government mantra of “Zimbabwe is open for business.” The Transitional Stabilization Programme, just like the previous Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, is affecting the economic opportunities for the urban middle income and the working class while marginalizing the poor further, especially women and children. The combination of privatization with the proposed labour market reforms under the Special Economic Zones, further exposes labour to exploitation. The Public Private Partnerships model in public hospitals has led to segregation and deepening inequality between the haves and have nots.

The austerity measures have failed to stabilize the economic situation as the cost of living has increased to extreme levels. The ever increasing prices of basic commodities has become a breeding ground for more poverty and vulnerability amongst the masses. The persistent hard economic situation is reversing and derailing some of the progressive plans the government has put in place to attain the UN sustainable development goals. The Zimbabwean government is a signatory to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the 2020 Agenda and it is committed to ensure that no poverty or hunger exists by 2030. It looks like there is no reprieve for the masses as fuel prices are continuing to rise due to the weakness of the Zimbabwean dollar against the US dollar and other foreign currencies.

The Zimbabwe government must come up with socialist policies that ensure that all citizens afford to live a dignified lifestyle. The economic hardship are causing moral decadence and erosion of social norms and values. The urban areas are becoming dangerous as incidents of robberies and prostitution are on the increase as well as reports of drug abuse amongst the youths. By intruding the TPS government is trying to please the IMF because since 2016 the government has been implementing the IMF staff monitored programmes.

Social services

Upon attainment of independence in 1980, Zimbabwe experimented with Socialism as it pursued a free primary school education and primary health care policies. This contributed to the high literacy levels which the country boasts as the highest in Africa, but the withdrawal of government support as recommended by ESAP climaxed in the introduction of school fees and user fess even in government hospitals. This had serious repercussions on women and children, as this contributed to gender inequality as parents were forced to prioritize educating the boy child at the expense of a girl child. Child mortality heightened as expecting mothers could not afford the hospital fees. These reforms mainly target social services, and even now in Zimbabwe it is the social services that are bearing the brunt of the austerity measures. Under the TPS, the government has removed fuel and electricity subsidies and this has caused the skyrocketing of prices of basic commodities and services.

The removal of subsidies are greatly affecting the companies on production as many companies are closing shop because it’s now difficult to sustain operations using diesel and petrol power generation. Inflation is rising at an alarming speed and the living standards, life expectancy, and economic production are plummeting. These hardships are causing increase in inequality, disaffection and exclusion. Opposition to the ruling class is deepening each day. The government economic crisis is becoming more pronounced, with a mounting foreign debt, declining experts and urban strife due to increased food prices, unemployment, the rising cost of living and brain drain. Many educated Zimbabweans are leaving the country for the foreign countries where they are being subjected to xenophobic attacks and precarious labour and exploitation.

The government under the direction of TPS intends to privatize some parastatals. With the high levels of corruption in Zimbabwe it is likely that these companies will be sold to acolytes, fronts and elites. This could be reminiscent of what happened in Russia in the 1990s, a period that gave rise to the oligarchs who stripped Russia of its gas and oil resources leading to the emergency of overnight billionaires. The Russian ultra-rich, such as Chelsea Soccer Club owner Roman Abramovich, amassed wealth during the economic and social turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of the free market economy. Oligarchs are monopolistic by nature. These are the pitfalls of privatization.

Greece is a good example of a country which experimented with austerity measures. In 2010, Athens imploded after its Parliament voted and approved the draconic austerity measures which they thought would unlock 120 billon Euros of emergency loans for the debt stricken country to avoid insolvency. Up to this day Greece is feeling the negative effects of austerity measures nine years later. The Greece story is a good example of how negative and cruel the austerity measures could be. The experimenting with TSP will leave most of the Zimbabwean population in dire straits. The public expenditure cuts, linked with this year’s drought and the effects of Cyclone Idai, will leave many people destitute. Pro-poor and socialist policies are the only way that is going to redeem the toiling masses and bring social development. The government vision of an upper middle class by 2030 under its slogan Vision 2020 remains a pie in the sky, influenced by western imperialist privatization efforts. The reality for most Zimbabweans is an economy that is regressing at an unprecedented rate.

Drought and Climate Change

Zimbabwe is grappling with a nationwide drought that h” The government vision of an upper middle class by 2030 under its slogan Vision 2020 remains a pie in the sky as the economy is regressing at a faster, unprecedented rate.

Drought and Climate Change

Zimbabwe is grappling with a nationwide drought that has depleted dams, cutting output by hydro power generation at Kariba dam. The has caused harvests to fail as most crops are wilting and this has prompted the government to appeal for US$464 million in aid to stave off famine. These prolonged droughts, dry spells, and heat waves are a result of climate change. Most major cities in Zimbabwe are rationing water in an effort to stretch the water supplies. The world over more than 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress and the UN has warned that the problem is set to worsen with demand expected to grow as much as 30% by 2050. A combination of drought and economic meltdown are pushing Zimbabwe to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. In the rural areas, 5.5 million farmers are struggling to find food. In urban areas, the inflation rate of 480% is forcing the poor families to survive on just one meal a day. The crisis is being made worse by a formal unemployment rate of 90% and also by an indebted government that is struggling to provide basic services, perennial shortages of fuel and foreign currency, and regular 20-hours daily power cuts.

Zimbabwe is marching towards unprecedented food insecurity levels in its history, the 2018/19 was the driest season in 40 years and these are the signs of climate change. Approximately 8 million Zimbabweans are now dependent on food from the World Food Programme and other donor agencies from western countries. Water and electricity are in short supply and basic health services close to collapse. The rising inflation has made the imported food in the shops unaffordable to many.

Zimbabwe was also ravaged by Cyclone Idai which devastated the eastern parts of the country leaving 259 people dead and thousands displaced. The storm caused destructive winds and heavy precipitation causing riverine and flash floods, deaths, and destruction of property and infrastructure. According to official figures, 250,000 people were affected by the cyclone. The forecast was done two months before the cyclone struck but authorities were “caught off guard.”

Trade Unionism, Picketing and Demonstrations

As the nation is falling in a deeper economic abyss, trade unions have come under spotlight and clashes with the government and business over the working conditions are increasing. The Zimbabwean working class is dwindling with 10% employment rate. The working class in Zimbabwe is starving, failing to pay rent, and has no access to health care. The purpose of trade unions among other things are to negotiate for living wages and better working conditions, regulating relations between workers and the employer, taking collective action to enforce the terms of collective bargain, raising new demands on behalf of its members, and helping to settle grievances.

Trade unionism in Zimbabwe has been hijacked by politicians and no longer serves the interests of the working class. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) came into existence on 28 February 1981, after joining of six unions, namely African Trade Union Congress (ACTU), the National African Trade Union Congress (NACTU), Trade Union Congress of Zimbabwe (TUCZ), United Trade Unions of Zimbabwe (UTUZ), Zimbabwe Federation of Labour (ZFL) and the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress (ZTUC). These unions came together to form the now Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. The ZCTU is now being used by the western governments as a tool for the regime change agenda which saw it becoming a bedrock of the opposition party, the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) which was formed and launched in September 1999.

The birth of the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) on September 12, 1999 was the genesis of the ZCTU participation in politics. This unwarranted meddling in politics has left the working class poorer. Trade unionism in Zimbabwe has become a stepping stone for individuals to gain political power at the expense of the poor working class whom they claim to represent. The unions are failing to address the working class needs yet they must be the voice of the working class. Majority of the working class in Zimbabwe are being subjected to exploitation, unions must negotiate for higher living salaries, and jobs must be dignified and productive with adequate social protection. The unions have been captured by western government forces seeking to topple the government so that they can exploit the natural resources freely. Currently, Zimbabwe is reeling from the economic sanctions wrought by illegal economic sanctions imposed by USA and EU. The ZCTU must join calls and demand the lifting of the sanctions that are severely affecting its membership. The current crisis in Zimbabwe is exacerbated by the disputed 30 July 2018 elections, economic collapse, high prices and cash shortages, high unemployment, and public health crisis. The local authorities in major cities are failing to provide adequate clean water to residents and even basics such as regular garbage collections have been delayed.

Company closure and the slowing down of production in most sectors of the economy has led to a decline of trade union membership, and those that are still working are earning very low wages. Most workers are now in the informal sectors such as vending. Factory shells in the light and heavy industrial sites in major cities are deserted. Manufacturing and industrialization has stagnated and been replaced by importation of finished goods from neighboring countries.

Zimbabwe currency collapsed in 2009 which led to the adoption of the US dollar as legal tender but the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe lacked the foreign currency reserves to meet this obligation. Prices of basic commodities have risen dramatically and the purchasing power has been eroded. In January 2019, the country’s 305,000 civil servants gave notice to strike after they were paid in the local currency which is called the bond note instead of the US dollars. During that same period the government raised fuel prices by over 200%, which made Zimbabwe fuel to be the most expensive in the world. The following day, the ZCTU called a three-day general strike, which was supported by many civil society organizations. Many people joined this nationwide strike because of widespread anger over economic decay but there was massive looting and property destruction. This provoked a brutal crackdown by the security forces, and the government shut down the internet to prevent social media coordination of the demonstrators.

Between the period of 1996 and 1999, George Linke of the Danish Trade Union Council came to Zimbabwe with an agenda to transform the ZCTU into a political party. Part of his mission was to identify other groups in the country which were to join the proposed new political formation. This party was to spearhead the regime-change agenda. The transformation of the ZCTU as a political formation brought together employers, workers, students, and former white farmers. This new party was also formed as a response to a government resolution to designated 1,500 white-owned farms for expropriation and the increased emphasis on black empowerment and the draft constitution which would enable the government to acquire white-owned farms compulsorily without compensation. The ZCTU allowed itself to be transformed into a political party so that it can serve the interests of the former white farmers and western capital. Labour unions are being funded by the arms of the US government through conduits such as the National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, and National Democratic Institute, which have nothing to do with strengthening workers’ rights and everything to do with toppling governments.

In September 2019 the Zimbabwe health care system became shambolic, characterized by an acute shortage of drugs and an indefinite industrial action by doctors over salaries. The country’s public hospitals, already beset by a myriad of challenges, degenerated into death traps after doctors embarked on a strike that is still ongoing. In response, the government dismissed 448 doctors while it pursued disciplinary action against 1,000 others.

Also in August, Zimbabwe was hit by another wave of protests, which saw the security forces brutally squashing the demonstrations. The ZANU PF ruling party and the main opposition party MDC both feel the way forward and out of this economic crisis is to impose neoliberal austerity measures against the working class and the poor. The right-wing organizations that are currently pushing for social dialogue are fronts of the imperialist countries and are funded by them.

Demands

The Zimbabwe working class are demanding a living wage and pensions.

Workers are demanding that never again should they allow the workers’ struggle and trade unions to be hijacked by politicians.

Workers demand the immediate stoppage of harassment of street vendors who are trying to make a living to support their families.

Workers stand against the government mantra of “Zimbabwe Is Open for Business” as this is tantamount to selling the country to imperialist investors.

No to privatization of government companies, as this will benefit the elite connected to the government who will buy the company for a song.

The rich, which include huge mining companies, multinational corporations and foreign investors, must be taxed more to finance developmental interests of the poor

The only way forward is to smash the system of capitalism which breeds wars, poverty, and misery and replace it with Socialism. This can only be achieved by building an International Workers Socialist Revolutionary Party. This is the time as capitalism is in deep crisis globally.

Aluta Continua!

The author may be contacted at cdemafa@gmail.com

Ending the Epoch of Exploitation: Pantherism and Dialectical Materialism in the 21st Century

By Chairman Shaka Zulu

Lots of people aren’t familiar with the term “bourgeoisie” or for that matter with thinking in terms of the different classes—even though we live in a class-based society. Moreover, we live in an epoch of history that is based upon class exploitation and class dictatorship. In this “Epoch of Exploitation,” there have been different ages each with their own distinctive class structures based upon the relationship each class had to the mode and means of production.

These can basically be defined as: Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. In each of these periods, there was an exploiting ruling class, an exploited laboring class, and a middle class. Under slavery, there were Freemen as well as Slaves and Slave Owners. These might even be slave traders or hired men of the slave owners.

Under Feudalism, the lower class were the Serfs or poor peasants, and the ruling class were the landed nobility, the Lords, and Ladies. The middle class were the Burgers or Bourgeoisie, who lived in independent towns or burgs, which were centers of trade and manufacturing. These “freemen,” who governed their towns more or less democratically, waged a struggle with the Lords to maintain their independence and this culminated in a wave of Liberal Bourgeois Democratic Revolutions that overthrew Feudalism and replaced kingdoms with republics.

The bourgeoisie became the new ruling class and the petty bourgeoisie (little capitalists) became the new middle class, and a new class--the Proletariat—the urban wage workers and the poor peasants were the lower class. As the Industrial Revolution took off, the bourgeoisie got richer and the petty bourgeoisie more numerous, while the proletariat were formed into industrial armies to serve in the struggle with Nature to extract raw materials like coal and iron ore and transform them into steel and goods of all type.

In this Bourgeois Era, the bourgeoisie reconstructed society in their own image and interest. Under this Bourgeois Class Dictatorship, the state exists to maintain the inequality of the class relations and protect the property and interests of the ownership classes. Bourgeois Democracy is basically a charade to mask over the reality of class dictatorship. The masses may get to vote, but the ruling class calls the tune. Money talks and the government obeys.

The charade is for the benefit of the Petty Bourgeoisie who are the voters and hopers that the government can be made to serve their class interests. The dream that they will one day climb into the upper class and share in the privilege and opulence motivates them to subordinate their own class interests to those of the bourgeoisie. A greater challenge to the bourgeois class dictatorship is getting the working class to adopt its world view and politics that clearly do not serve their interests.

This is where the middle class are of use, and where some proletarians find their niche and a point of entry into the petty bourgeoisie as promoters of bourgeois ideology and politics. I’m talking about all manner of jobs and positions from union boss to preacher and news commentator to teacher. These hacks and hucksters sell us the illusion that this is the best of all possible systems and all is right with the world so long as we do as we are told.

They serve the ruling class by playing the game of “divide and rule” and throwing water on any sparks of resistance. They feed the masses disinformation and “fake news” and feed people’s idealism and false hopes to prevent them from identifying and thinking about their true class interests.

The job of our Party is to help the masses cut through this BS and to arm the people with an understanding of revolutionary science on which our political-ideological line is based. We call this Pantherism, and it is based on application of revolutionary science—dialectical materialism—to the concrete conditions we face in the 21st Century.

We make no bones about it, we are revolutionary socialists determined to bring the Epoch of Exploitation to and end and empower the common people. In other words to advance the evolution of human society to Communism.

DARE TO STRUGGLE DARE TO WIN… ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Shaka Zulu is chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's prison chapter.

The Importance of Political Education and Class Analysis in the Struggle for Black Liberation

By Erica Caines

This piece was originally published at Hood Communist.

What does organizing look like when Black radicals are being pushed out of spaces for ‘progressiveness’ that makes uncontested room for the centrist, right-wing and fascist narratives driving most platforms?  When examining the conflicts between those fighting oppression under capitalism and the capitalist state’s ruling class alongside those who subscribe to “success” and riches obtained at the expense of the oppressed, few things strike me as obvious disconnects and contradictions.

I am often asked about my relationship with the analytical science of Marxism-Leninism as it pertains to my studies, teachings, and praxis because it’s somehow shocking that a Black woman would align herself with a political ideology that’s been presented as predominantly white and male. I once used these moments as opportunities to flex my knowledge on the historical relationship between socialism/ communism and Black people (particularly Black women) as if I were a fact sheet. While it is important to highlight how many of those we’ve come to know as simply “civil rights activists” were politically and ideologically aligned with socialism/communism, what does that mean? Furthermore, why is that important? 

“Knowledge is power” is a familiar mantra. The Marxist Theory of Knowledge describes knowledge, or the idea of it, as socially constructed. Karl Marx details “power” (economic, intellectual and political) as something that stems from the ownership of the means of production. Simply put, a lot of what we *know* is predicated on the interests of the ruling class. It is in this country’s best interest to keep us ignorant. 

One way we combat ignorance is through active study and dialogue. One of the more frustrating things is the way reading is discussed as a pastime of the elite. That, in itself, highlights how comfortably ahistorical we’ve all become. We discuss accessibility and ability to study —-and by extension, obtain knowledge—- in bad faith. We fail to admit to our own intellectual laziness. It also highlights a misunderstanding of how knowledge and education should be used. 

Marx’s Dialectics of Theory and Practice assumes that none of us are “all-knowing”, but the practice of becoming politically educated, both understanding theories and using them in praxis to better conditions, ultimately improve and transform our conditions. One of the more famous examples of having done this can be found by studying members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

The BPP implemented collective actions that not only included providing much-needed resources but, more importantly, a political education. They believed in active study and debate and with that belief, went on to educate others enough to advocate for themselves. 

When communities advocate for themselves through breakfast programs, liberation schools and providing healthcare (the more prominent examples of the BPP’s work), ‘the group’ is prioritized over the individual. These small actions that result in transforming realities (material conditions) are what the practice and principle of collectivism are rooted in.

This differs from individualism, which is dependent solely on the best interest of the individual. Black people, in mass, seem to be engulfed in a state of individualism. Many have actively disconnected from our history of collectivism (and other tenets of socialism/ communism). This is made obvious with ‘celebrity culture’, the fixation on Black Capitalism as liberation and blatant misrepresentations of our “ancestors wildest dreams”. 

The lack of implementing class analysis (recognizing the significance of class) to understand our material conditions are major factors of the collective distortion of our material realities. I am not speaking on the problematic and dangerous ways white leftists ignore “whiteness” as a class issue to generically state “race and class” and ignore their innate racial prejudices. I am speaking on how our confrontations with racism, as Black people, have disallowed us to interrogate the Black people that exist within different class statuses. 

We live in a white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy so Black people are, undoubtedly, confronted with how oppressions manifest, particularly racism. Unfortunately, we do not leave room to have any introspection on how oppressions manifest through class. All Black people may experience racism, but not all Black people experience poverty. When overwhelming many experience poverty, combatting racism, solely, causes us to turn a blind eye to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.That “blind eye” results in a failure to [not want to] understand or implement a class analysis.

The purpose of class analysis is to clarify the agendas between classes. When we discuss the class structure of capitalism in Marxist theory, the capitalist stage of production consists of two main classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalists who own the means of production) and the proletariat ( the working class who must sell their own labor power). If we are applying class analysis to our material conditions we are acknowledging how these class groups work and function within our realities. When applying it to our communities it is evident that the [almost non-existent] middle class would much rather align with the bourgeoisie (the rich) than the working class. This presents huge contradictions. Not just in organizing, but the way that we view liberation. 

In order for the bourgeois class to thrive, there must be an oppressed working class to exploit. If there are Black people who would much rather align with the rich, what does that mean for the Black people under the thumb of economic oppression? How does that manifest when we are talking about Black political power? 

Capitalist state ruling classes resist change. They disguise their arbitrary privileges and power behind lies, dogma, half-truths, and fallacies. This is most evident through the use of celebrity-driven and identity reductionist activism that uses “socialist” rhetoric to push neoliberal agendas that don’t seek to transform realities but make them easier to digest and not disrupt the status quo. 

In a society plagued by communities of individualists, how can we approach collectivism in substantial ways? We must have a principled commitment to political education, cooperation, and concern for the welfare of each other. 

Workers Unite. 

How Many Types of "Good" Capitalism Are There?

By Shawgi Tell

It is no secret that capitalism has been in trouble for some time. This outmoded economic system constantly increases tragedies and inequalities of all kinds and cannot extricate itself from the perpetual crisis it finds itself in. It is thus no surprise that in the recent period many writers have produced books and articles that discuss alternatives to capitalism.

It is also unsurprising that, in an attempt to prettify, legitimize, and extend the life of this transient economic system, many capital-centered thinkers have put forward various types of “good” capitalisms to disinform the polity. These include:

1. accountable capitalism

2. managed capitalism

3. ethical capitalism

4. progressive capitalism

5. conscious capitalism

6. friendly capitalism

7. people’s capitalism

8. regulated capitalism

9. stable capitalism

10. fair Capitalism

11. sustainable capitalism

12. inclusive capitalism

In reality, these are oxymorons, irrational conceptions, false dichotomies, and apologies for the status quo. They are an attempt to portray capitalism as something other than capitalism - as something desirable and worth preserving. Such descriptors reveal an aversion to theory.

While capitalism has evolved and changed over time, it has always been about major owners of capital exploiting labor-power to maximize profit as fast as possible for themselves, resulting in economic and political power becoming more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. This is what is at the base of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalists cannot accumulate capital without exploiting labor-power, which is the only source of new value. Redistributing profits is not possible without new value produced in the productive sector, simply because what is not produced cannot be distributed.

While capitalists constantly invent new ways to counter the law of the falling rate of profit, there are no new economic models of capitalism per se. The laws of value, accumulation, and profitability all stand; they have not disappeared. Greater monopolization of economic sectors, more “financialization,” casino capitalism, disaster capitalism, and the rise of the so-called “rentier” economy are not new forms of capitalism as such, but direct products of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between social production and private ownership. “Financialization,” irrational stock market speculations, printing phantom money, and toxic and exotic financial instruments that bear no relationship to the productive sector of the economy are natural expressions of capitalism at a particular stage of economic development, not aberrations or anomalies.

The aforementioned oxymorons and false dichotomies are largely ideological devices which strive to hide the fact that capitalism as a system is exhausted and cannot be “reset,” “renewed,” or “improved.” 

As the end draws nearer for capitalism, irrationalism, disinformation, parasitism, violence, and all manner of treachery will intensify. In futile attempts to save capitalism, bizarre ideas and arguments will increase. Twisted logic and absurd statements is all the ruling elite can offer in the final and highest stage of capitalism. The rich are compelled by inexorable circumstances to continue escalating disinformation about capitalism so as to convince people that there is no alternative to this outdated system that cannot provide for the needs of the people. Indeed, major owners of capital and their political and media representatives work hard every day to persuade everyone that, while capitalism is rotten in many ways, it is still “the best” history has to offer humanity. They want everyone to believe that capitalism is the only future for humanity. This is why it is easier for capitalists to imagine the end of the world than it is for them to imagine the end of capitalism. A good example of this retrogressive tendency is the work of  Branko Milanovic, a leading “expert” on inequality. Milanovic was a former chief economist at the World Bank. He recognizes that capitalism has serious problems but believes that the task at hand is to “improve” capitalism and make it “sustainable.” Milanovic has no interest in an alternative to capitalism and believes one does not exist.

To be sure, global, national, and local private interests are not going to cede power voluntarily and support an alternative to capitalism. They are not going to suddenly become enlightened and embrace democracy and affirm the rights of all, including the right of the working class and people to reorient the economy to serve society and the people. This is not how things work in class-divided societies filled with many forms of violence, chaos, and vicious rivalries. The rich are concerned only with their narrow egocentric financial interests, no matter the cost to society and the environment. They are opposed to a pro-social agenda that fosters social consciousness, unleashes the human factor, modernizes the human personality, and humanizes the natural and social environment.

In this dangerous context that keeps deteriorating, the working class and people need to become more vigilant, organized, and pro-active in order to fend off present and future attacks on their rights. The working class and people must use well-established methods, as well as new and creative ways to deprive the rich of the power to deprive everyone else of their rights. 

A society made up of an empowered polity directing the economy and all the affairs of society is urgently needed, a historical necessity. Decision-making power must not rest with the financial oligarchy if society is to move forward and human rights are to be affirmed. Major owners of capital are unfit to rule and care only about their own narrow economic interests.

The working class and people are not interested in this or that type of capitalism. It is not about “bad” capitalism versus “good” capitalism. The working class and people are the negation of this anachronistic economic system. 

People want and need an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to perpetual crisis and instability. At home and abroad, capitalism is certainly working for some people, but not the majority. The need for change that favors the people will intensify as a massive amount of social wealth and power becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a tiny ruling elite. History is demanding new pro-social, human-centered relations free of exploitation and injustice. 

Shawgi Tell, Ph.D., is author of the book, Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu 

The Meditation Ethic and the Spirit of "Inclusive Capitalism"

By James Richard Marra

In the United States, capitalism is becoming "mindful." Meditating corporate CEOs, capitalist think tanks, research institutions, and government ally to champion a burgeoning “mindfulness” industry and a new social conception of what it means to live and work under finance-monopoly capitalism (FMC). Increasingly, large domestic and globalized businesses, mainly in the finance, technology, and electronics (FTE) sector of the “Knowledge Economy” (KE) are introducing employer-sponsored employee meditation programs (EMPs). These programs work in synergy with putatively healthful and productive work environments, and within the wider social context of an emerging “socially conscious” capitalist regime.[1]

The business plans of individual enterprises as well of the EMP industry extend beyond the microeconomic to the entire FTE sector and the FMC society as a whole. The institutional network within the capitalist social “superstructure” supports these efforts, and thereby the profitability of businesses, markets, and the mindfulness industry. For example, innovative technology developed within universities fosters start-ups that establish deep penetration into related markets. Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman indicate that

This trend repeats itself on a global scale, as the founding of new firms occurs in a limited number of regions with access to leading research institutions, venture capital, and an abundant pool of educated labor (Owen-Smith et al. 2002).[2]

Combined, these institutions help businesses most profitably implement EMPs. They also help identify specific and favored sets of cognitive skills that can be used as metrics for recruiting, maintaining, and advancing the most valuable group of workers. These laborers represent the “hard core” of FTE labor power, whose technical prowess commands capitalist interest.

Yet, these workers endure increasingly afflictive work environments created by the modes of production FTE businesses. These businesses need to respond to competition resulting from the rapid introduction of new products, and technological innovation; so work is “fast paced.” Profitability demands feed heavy productivity goals, translating into workers working harder, and over longer periods. They do so while accepting increasing responsibilities driven by workforce consolidations and reductions, and “flexible” working hours. Peter S. Goodman, Executive Business and Global News Editor at The Huffington Post, points out that flexible work hours create an environment where, "No one counts how many hours people sit at their desks." At Google, some workers endure 80-hour workweeks.[3] At Amazon, “They overwork you and you’re like a number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60 hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was falling asleep behind the wheel.”[4]

Productive work within the FTE is intense, its volume considerable, involving complex technical tasks and management processes. Research correlates persistent physical, psychological, and social problems among workers laboring within such debilitating workplace environments. These conditions create psychological and behavioral dispositions that negatively affect productivity. Workers exhibit a lack of empathy, impatience, emotional control, and task engagement, as well as a commitment to business goals and loyalty to the employer. Low worker morale can lead to behaviors that weaken collaboration, communication, leadership, creativity, accountability, and judgment. They can also increase absenteeism, employee turnover, while corrupting business and ethical judgments. The federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “productivity losses related to personal and family health problems cost U.S. employers $1,685 per employee per year, or $225.8 billion annually.”

Consider as an example of this systemic workplace toxicity, the wage system under which many millennials work. FTE workers receive wages and benefits, Marx's "variable capital" payments. Because EMPs are an investment in employee skills and wellness, and not in the means of production, business owners pay for EMPs, applying capital, and accounting it to some benefit (like “wellness”) or wage category (like a bonus). The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes wage structure rules. The US Labor Department Most considers most FTE workers as “exempt” from overtime wages. These include executive management, administrators, professional, and computer roles.

The FLSA salary protocol provides businesses with a profitable mechanism by which owners can allow workers to meditate during the working day, without incurring a potential business risk involving overtime payments. Workers can meditate at work all they wish, as long as they meet production requirements, and manifest corresponding workforce performance dispositions. With exempt compensation, the functional significance of the length of the working day as a determinant of productivity is lost. The concept of the “working day” is replaced by the “contract period,” and removed from the capitalist lexicon of exempt labor. 

The result is that the range of practicable solutions to the debilitating effects of expanding working days is constrained. For example, the range of potential improvements to the workplace environment identified by Mattke, Schnyer, and Van Busum include only those that require a modification of employee behavior, and not other aspects of the mode of production, such as the length of the working day. Nowhere in the paper do the authors mention such concepts as "the working day," "exempt," "salaried," or "hourly." They employ the word "capital" exclusively with reference to human capital management: "Our senior management is committed to health promotion as an important investment in human capital.”[5] When identifying changes to the working environment, the study offers strategies that "range from changes to the working environment, such as providing healthy food options in the cafeteria, to comprehensive interventions that support employees in adopting and sustaining healthy lifestyles."[6] 

Nevertheless, businesses remain sensitive to the negative production implications of worker debilitation. They are also aware of the human capital value of offering a mindfulness program as part of their wellness and self-fulfillment benefits. Thus, employers address a potential production problem, while also providing value added to the employee. The millennial workforce appreciates of value of mental focus to work success, a recognition gained from their educational experience. These meditating workers generally testify that they feel a greater sense of “empowerment,” by acquiring mental tools to help relieve anxiety, stress, and disinterestedness. 

Denise Parris is recognizes the need to align millennial socialization with the current mode of production. Her work ethic recognizes that “helping others is not self-sacrifice but self-fulfillment,”[7] and seeks to impress upon business owners an appreciation of the productive value of servant leadership, and motivate them to implement EMPs. In this way, industry experts advise businesses on how to leverage the socialization of a favored class of workers to design and promote their EMPs, which promise expanded productivity.[8] 

The metaphysics, theory, science, ethos, promises, and expectations surrounding EMPs have their critics. William Little, writing for The Guardian, criticizes selective causality and evidentiary cherry picking within EMP marketing. He suggests, echoing Marx and Engels, that workplace meditation may represent an “opiate” that desensitizes the worker from the symptoms of the toxic workplace.[9] 

Some scientific studies regarding EMPs suggest prudence regarding claims of positive affects of workplace meditation. As M. Goyal, S. Singh, and E.M.S. Sibinga conclude from a study of 41 meditation programs that “the mantra meditation programs do not appear to improve any of the psychological stress and well-being outcomes we examined, but the strength of this evidence varies from low to insufficient.[10] Behavioral scientists Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, writing for the The New York Times, illuminate a puzzling contradiction: 

“A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.”[11]

Critics point to the preliminary and inconclusive evidence that some workplace meditation advocates claim corroborates the effectiveness of mindfulness in achieving favored cognitive skills.[12] 

Kim reports that, “Mindfulness training can also run counter to a corporation’s goals. An article published by the journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2015 suggests that because mindfulness encourages employees to act in line with their values and interests, it may elicit behaviors that are not in the best interests of organizational performance.”[13] A 2017 report from the National Center for Complementary Health and Integrative Health suggests that the fine-tuning of meditative practices accomplished within EMPs may contribute little to their success. Researchers analyzing the prevalence and patterns of use of three meditation types concluded that the "use of meditation may be more about the type of person practicing than about the specific type of meditation practiced...."[14]

Some studies indicate that meditation might not be as effective as previously expected. While some FTE workers enjoy their work and workplaces, many who are offered EMPs view their work as nothing more self-actualizing than a paycheck. These workers experience little, if any, enjoyment or self-fulfillment in their productivity. Since the technology they employ in production is the business owner's private property, workers experience a lack of control over their work, and view their labor as simply a meaningless job. The resulting weakening of labor power contributes to an existential "torment" among workers; what Marx calls “alienation.” 

The potential that workers might shift from applying their meditation to practical wellness and cognitive skills enhancement to deeper philosophical insight is reflected in an analysis by Robert Wright, author of the book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.[15]

Nonetheless, the average mindfulness meditator is closer to the ancient contemplative tradition, and to transformative insights, than you might think. Though things like stress reduction or grappling with melancholy or remorse or self-loathing may seem “therapeutic,” they are organically connected to the very roots of Buddhist philosophy. What starts out as a meditation practice with modest aims can easily, and very naturally, go deeper. There is a kind of slippery slope from stress reduction to profound spiritual exploration and radical philosophical reorientation, and many people, even in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, are further down that slope than they realize.[16]

If Robert Wright is correct, then Raytheon is at risk of creating worker disillusionment if their meditation brings them to moral realizations that are at odds with corporate profit.[17]

As we have seen, there are implications within the capitalist global superstructure as well. Writing for The Guardian, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, an international security journalist and academic, suggest an artful side to the altruistic pronouncements of the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism (CIC). Reporting on the Henry Jackson Society's 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, which inspired the EPIC report, Ahmed summarizes the purpose of the event.

While the self-reflective recognition by global capitalism's leaders that business-as-usual cannot continue is welcome, sadly the event represented less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.[18]

EMPs may carry significant inductive business risks. If EMPs fail to deliver, the wasted capital investment in training results from a misunderstanding of the available evidence and the causality of workplace meditation. Business owners multiply this risk when they take biased explanations of workplace toxicity seriously (like that of Mattke, Schnyer, and Van Busum). However, even where EMPs fail, businesses can still ameliorate inductive business risk. This is because EMPs can still function to identify, hire, and retain (through the use of a wellness performance metrics) those workers who possess valued natural cognitive abilities; and thus bolster a company's the inclusive branding that can increase its market share.

Rebecca Stoner appreciates an impact upon worker socialization. Stoner reviews Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism by John Patrick Leary,[19] a book critical of the capitalist semantic project, and offers a Marxist interpretation of Leary's account. Capitalist keywords (including some of those cited in this study) represent “a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that...promulgate values friendly to corporations...over those friendly to human beings....When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we’re seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we’re implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence.[20] [My italics] 

This threat is proudly announced within the reconstructed semantic of inclusive capitalism.

...[T]here’s the “moral vocabulary of late capitalism,” which often uses words with older, religious meanings; Leary cites a nineteenth-century poem that refers to Jesus as a “thought leader.” These moral values, Leary says, are generally taken to be indistinguishable from economic ones. “Passion,” for example, is prized for its value to your boss: if you love what you do, you’ll work harder and demand less compensation.[21]

Replacing “Jesus” the Song of God with Jesus the thought “leader” defines away (or “rationalizes”) much of the hard-core metaphysical and ethical orientations that underpin traditional meditation practice. This provides businesses with a new ethical use value aligned with a millennial socialization that is at least disillusioned with traditional religion. Businesses then offer this use value, an ethical ethos, to workers, directing it towards cajoling workers, and then controlling their ethical and productive dispositions in a way that keeps them working at maximum capacity. 

I use the word “rationalize” in order to highlight Weber’s analysis of the process of rationalization that he claims removed the Protestant ethic from the economic and social aspects of an emerging capitalism. Work conceived as a spiritual calling evolves into labor as a function of profit.

At present under our individualistic political, legal, and economic institutions, with the forms of organization and general structure which are particular to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, purely as a result of adaptation. The capitalistic system so needs this devotion to the calling of making money, it is an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to that system, so intimately bound up with the conditions of survival in the economic struggle for existence, that there can to-day no longer be any question of a necessary connection of that acquisitive manner of life with any single Weltanschauung. In fact, it no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the attempts of religion to influence economic life...to be as much an unjustified interference as its regulation by the State. In such circumstances men’s commercial and social interests do tend to determine their opinions and attitudes.[22]

Similarly, EMPs significantly circumscribe the meditation training offered to workers in ways that not only maximize their effect within an encompassing system of capitalist production, but also appeal to a secular millennial worldview. EMP meditation practice does not center on expanding the spirituality of workers in order avoid business risks associated with realizations emerging from deeper insight meditation. Rather, it aims to calm and focus the mind, a goal that aligns with the millennial wellness and self-fulfillment ethos. It also reflects the millennial appreciation of the value of mental focus to work success, a recognition gained from their educational experience. Meditating workers generally testify that they feel a greater sense of “empowerment,” by acquiring mental tools to help relieve anxiety, stress, and disinterestedness. For many workers, EMPs provide appreciated healthful use values.

It is not surprising that the EMP industry deconstructs the traditional ethical, religious, and semantic orientation of meditation, re-conceptualizing it as a productive and self-actualizing mindfulness ethos. By doing do, capitalism can gradually transform (through social engineering and scientific management technology, for example) the external social semantic of its preferred workforce into one whose ethical hard core is aligned with inclusive capitalism. Thus, capitalism appropriates the externality represented by the consciousnesses of workers, including their natural cognitive abilities and dispositions and language, for the purposes of increasing labor power, and to rebrand itself as inclusive, and therefore potentially profitable. Together, these synergies represent the systemic tendency of capitalism to expand into new resource and market externalities, unexploited or underexploited. EMPs intend to assist productive and organizational requirements by exploiting one such externality: the cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions of skilled workers. By doing so, EMPs promulgate a reconstructed and inclusive mindfulness ethos for workers that businesses employ internally to maintain its productive system, and expand their sales. 

The synergizing of productive capabilities along with branding and marketing efforts manifests an interpenetration of production and sales that typifies FMC.[23] Thus, the mindfulness industry exploits both the millennial worker desire for self-actualization (“success”) and the need of capitalism to accumulate to aligning a program of worker socialization with new technical modes of production, while simultaneously advancing business-marketing efforts.

This ethos is institutionalized in the operational semantics and metrics developed by the CIC, a marketing metrics that measures and advertises “intangible” capital. For example, significant intangible capital consists in a highly motivated workforce keen on developing individualized worker professional development plans. Since employers value self-motivation directed toward the advancement of productive skills, EMPs, beyond the directly productive, help businesses identify and retain workers with that favored workplace behavioral disposition. They do this by helping human capital management develop performance metrics for individual workers that are used to identify this favored workplace behavior, and provide a basis for appropriate compensation and potential advancement.

As FTE businesses realize the potential risks engendered within a toxic workplace, the mindfulness industry predictably blossoms. Meditation rooms, beautifully landscaped outdoor walking paths, and yoga training become as common as data models, spreadsheets, and project plans. If metrics indicate that meditation is “successful” in the sense explained by the CIC, companies can communicate their capacity for profitability to customers and investors with reference to specialized “human value levers” (like “Occupational health and wellbeing” - including meditation).

More evidence is required to verify the “successes” of EMPs. Certainly, people of good conscience wish others well, and hope that meditation practice will continue to have a positive impact on people’s lives. Even if EMPs do not deliver spiritually or behaviorally, businesses can engineer their programs to work synergistically with human capital management to enhance productivity. Businesses do this through worker acquisition and retention efforts that appeal to valued workers through offering EMPs. They also promote sales and investment by using value levers as advised by the inclusive business consortiums. Through the application of ergonomics, operational innovation, and advanced scientific management technology, capitalists can accomplish this without altering their empowering class apparatus of capitalism, and potentially maintain maximized accumulation.

To its credit, capital remains resilient and adaptive in its rebranding efforts, and for good business reasons. Nevertheless, as Ahmed reminds us, consortiums like the CIC might remain an “event” representing “less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.”

Notes

[1] The terms “socially conscious” and “inclusive” are used synonymously within the theory, practice, and marketing of the new capitalist social consciousness. This study will use “inclusive,” as used by supporters participating in the “Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism,” which is examined below.

[2] Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman, “The Knowledge Economy,” Annual Review of

Sociology 30 (2004): 17.

[3] Peter S. Goodman, "Why Companies Are Turning To Meditation And Yoga To Boost The Bottom Line," Huffpost, April 1, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/mindfulness-capitalism_n_3572952.html. (accessed February 11, 2019).

[4] Michael Sainato, “’We are not Robots’: Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize,” The Guardian, January 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/01/amazon-fulfillment-center-warehouse-employees-union-new-york-minnesota. (accessed April 27, 2019).

[5] Soeren Mattke, Christopher Schnyer, and Kristin R. Van Busum 30.

[6] Ibid., 3.

[7] "Denise Parrish," Price College of Business, http://www.ou.edu/price/entecdev/people/denise-parris. (accessed April 17, 2019).

[8] In this latter regard, Peter Temin’s hypothesis regarding the rise of a global “Dual Economy” as a manifestation of the emergence of the FTE sector provides a rich source of theoretical and empirical considerations regarding evolving and emerging sub-class distinctions within the working class.

[9] William Little, “Mindfulness courses at work? This should have us all in a rage,” The Guardian, Jan 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/

mindfulness-work-employers-meditation. (accessed February 25, 2019). Powell and Snellman: “Are these new practices intended to remake the organization of work to produce shared gains, or to increase productivity by increasing work output while the associated gains are skimmed off by those at the top of the (flatter) hierarchy?” (op. cit. 210)

[10] M. Goyal, S. Singh, and E.M.S. Sibinga, "Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-Being," Comparative Effectiveness Reviews, 124, January 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK180104/#discussion.s9. (accessed April 7, 2019).

[11] Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, “Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate,” The New York Times, June 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/

2018/06/14/opinion/sunday/meditation-productivity-work-mindfulness.html. (accessed November 3, 2018).

[12] Pandit Dasa and David Brendel, “Does Mindfulness Training Have Business Benefits?”

[13] Hannah H, Kim, “Issue: The Meditation Industry” (January 29, 2018), Sage businessresearcher, 6.

[14] National Center for Complementary Health and Integrative Health, Meditators and Nonmeditators Differ on Demographic Factors, Health Behaviors, Health Status, and Health Care Access, New Analysis Shows.

[15] Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).

[16] Robert Wright, "Is Mindfulness Meditation A Capitalist Tool Or A Path To Enlightenment? Yes," Wired, August 12, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/08/the-science-and-philosophy-of-mindfulness-meditation/. (accessed May 8, 2019).

[17] "...the bulk of this war’s civilian casualties have come from the Saudi-led coalition’s technological superiority and exclusive domination of the air. In the process, coalition airstrikes have left a trail of material evidence in their wake, including the remains of many Raytheon-manufactured systems.” Jefferson Morley, "Raytheon’s profits boom alongside civilian deaths in Yemen," Salon, June 27, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/06/27/raytheons-profits-boom-alongside-civilian-deaths-in-yemen_partner/. (accessed February 28, 2019).

[18] Nafeez Ahmed, op. cit.

[19] John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019)

[20] Rebecca Stoner, "The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous," MR online, December 21, 2018, https://mronline.org/2018/12/21/the-language-of-capitalism-isnt-just-annoying-its-dangerous/. (accessed December 26, 2018).

[21] Stoner, op. cit.

[22] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992): 72.

[23] For this and other features of FMC, see John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,” Monthly Review, 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1 - 16.

Historical Shifts in the Ideology of Work: From Artisanship to Prison Labor and Back

By Valerie Reynoso

The ideology of work has shifted through time by material changes imposed by capitalism-imperialism, an ongoing process that forms the condition of the working class and the social order that indoctrinates them. James R. Farr, Catherine W. Bishir, Karl Marx, John Ruskin, William Morris and Erin O'Connor are authors who have explored the relationships between work, history, and people. The historical shifts in the ideology of work are rooted in class struggle, in the synthesis of the thesis and antithesis of the proletariat (working class) and the bourgeoisie (capitalists), reminiscent of the former synthesis between the serf and feudal lord. Work becomes a practice of resistance when the proletariat realizes its socioeconomic value and moves toward seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie. But before this can happen, workers must experience an ideological awakening of sorts - something that creates the realization that our constant struggle to survive under a system of wage labor is not only unnatural, but is an artificial arrangement made by a very small percentage of people who seek to make a perpetual fortune from our exploitation. In doing so, we must also recognize the various and ever-shifting forms of labor that we are systematically coerced into. Breaking from this coercion is the key to our liberation.

Lessons in Assimilation

The key concepts from Bashir's Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina are slavery, race, class, gender, and segregation. These concepts are engaged with the empirical experience at hand of Black artisans given that their professions were informed by their race and socioeconomic status, or was part of their oppression if they were enslaved. In the Bishir text, details are given on a free Black plasterer and brickmason named Donum Montford who was forty years old in the year 1810, a master craftsman with apprentices for children and a slaveowner who also owned real estate and was qualified to vote. Montford had lost a diamond tool with a monogrammed handle that was used to score precise lines to cut and install windowpanes as part of his trade[1]. Ownership of craft tools was central to artisan identity and following 1776, it was common for urban white craftsmen to brandish their craft tools as a symbol of their elevated socioeconomic status and to display patriotism. New Bern, the town where Montford lived, was considered to be a hub of opportunities for Black artisans and racial integration between white and Black artisans in the workplace.

In this given context, craftsmanship was being implemented to the benefit of the white supremacist social order through which upwards social mobility necessitates the subordination of the lower classes. Montford is emblematic of a Black free man who had become assimilated into the bourgeois class. He became essentially an enemy to his own people via aligning with the white bourgeoisie through usage of artisanship, ownership of private property such as real estate, and becoming a slave master himself, despite having been enslaved for approximately half of his life. The importance of craft tools to socioeconomic status of craftsmen informs Montford's bourgeois assimilation, seeing that he had a diamond-head tool monogrammed with his name, a practice that has been prized and rooted in colonialism from the US partition from Britain, despite the figures of the US revolution having been colonizers and enslavers as well. This also plays into respectability politics, since in order to fully fit Anglo-Saxon constructs of masculinity as a formerly enslaved and Black man, having a prized craft tool would make Montford seem more respectable and "manly" in the eyes of white craftsmen.

Montford's elevated socioeconomic status as a Black free man is also an instance of bootstrap theory. Bootstrap theory posits that if one simply works harder, they can achieve their goals, and an inability to achieve this goal is a product of individual failure rather than systemic oppression. This rhetoric is idealist and anti-materialist, as it implies that changing one's attitude in itself will elevate one's socioeconomic status when this is not the case under capitalism-imperialism due to racism, classism and other discriminations that make it nearly impossible to shift the status quo unless one is already categorized as a first-class citizen. Montford being a wealthier, free Black man who was also a slaveowner was the standard held for African-American craftsmen and enslaved persons during that time period; that poor and enslaved people can simply work their way out of slavery and excel to the point where they, too, can become an oppressor who maintains the capitalist-imperialist social order through their capitalist conception of work.

Bootstrap theory and justification of capitalism-imperialism is also found in the section titled "Artisan Trades in Wartime" of the Bishir reading. Bishir details that the liberated city of New Bern had provided Black artisans with profitable employment opportunities in catering to soldiers and refugees during wartime with limited competition from whites. Cooks, gardeners, butchers, drivers, housekeepers and barbers also experienced an augment in their earnings during the war. Skilled workers took advantage of every new opportunity to advance their business and increase their wealth [2]. This example Bishir provides demonstrates that the income of the Black working class was reliant on industries that imperialist wars spearheaded by the U.S. necessitated. Similar to Montford, this instance is also emblematic of bootstrap theory given that Black people were inciting themselves to accumulate more wealth by working more, which is not always realistically the case as poor people usually work without any significant increase on the socioeconomic ladder due to capitalism-imperialism.

Understanding the Layers of Proletarian Exploitation

Capitalism-imperialism produces hierarchies reliant on exploitation and submission, which disproportionately affects proletarian women and children. Moreover, Marx and Engels believed that women and children were being used as tools for more capital for the bourgeoisie. In Engels' The Origin on the Family, Private Property, and the State, he argued that the subordination of women is a product of social relations, as opposed to biological disposition, and that efforts made by men to achieve demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties had become institutionalized in the nuclear family. Engels stated that the shift from feudalism to private ownership of land had a great impact on the status of women, given that women who do not own land, nor means of production, are enslaved and obligated to work for landowners in a system founded on private ownership [3]. Capitalism has separated private and public spheres and has provided disproportionate access of waged labor to men. The gender oppression of women is directly related to class oppression given that the institutional relationship between men and women is comparable to that of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the former profits off of and benefits from the systemic oppression of the latter under capitalism and patriarchy.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx argued that the societal position of women could be used to indicate the development of society as a whole. He stated that new social relations based on individuals seeing each other as valuable in themselves, as opposed to only worth what one individual can provide to another, would have to be formed in order for society to transcend from its capitalist form [4]. Women, especially nonwhite women, would be particularly important in this regard given that they are a marginalized group in virtually all societies. In Marx's Capital, women and children are rendered valuable under capitalism since they can be pressured and obliged to work for less - which then results in more capital gain for the upper class [5].

The condition and perception of the feminized and racialized proletariat is also informed by the science of dialectical materialism throughout history. The Marxist concepts of dialectical materialism and historical materialism may accurately describe the situation of colonized people through analyzing previous historic events that led to the present, even in a so-called post-colonial world. Dialectical materialism refers to the objective reality independent from the mind and spirit; it describes the tangible consequences of class struggle and life under a capitalist system. Historical materialism refers to the idea that all forms of social thought and institutions are a reflection of economic relations modified by class struggle. Karl Marx incorporates these ideas into his text Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this text, Marx analyzed the development of the 1848 revolution in France through usage of historical materialism. He had written this book with the purpose of explaining how the 1848 revolution in France led to a coup headed by Louis Bonaparte in 1851.

In Brumaire, Marx states that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" [6]. Today, globalization necessitates the constant expansion of markets in search of infinite profit extracted from the finite resources of the planet and its populations. Due to this, the bourgeoisie must settle everywhere and expand its empires in the name of capitalism-imperialism, and perpetually exploit low-cost labor from the underclass and the Global South in order to do so.

Historical materialism also insinuates that history is a movement of ideas and the unfolding of the relations of production. History is the expansion of the natural, which cannot exist outside of external modifications of it in order to turn it into capital. The material is always embedded in the relations of production and all relations of society are modified by class struggle. As stated by Marx in Brumaire, "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce" [7]. History is a spirit that unfolds as a phenomenon, the continuous synthesis and antithesis of ideas that accumulate through time.

Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts illustrate how the worker under capitalism suffers alienated labor and exploitation from the bourgeoisie. In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx specifies that the worker under capitalism suffers from three types of alienated labor: alienation from the product, where work is experienced as torment; alienation from our own humanity as we produce blindly, not in accordance with ourr truly human powers; and alienation from other people, where relation of exchange replaces satisfaction of mutual need. Marx showed how the economics of the bourgeoisie are derived from the presence of alienation and that people reinforce their own structures of oppression. Therefore, we must have an urge to move beyond said condition and take control of our destiny in order to eradicate the bourgeoisie from power [8]; this is the moment when work is realized as a practice of resistance.

Domination attains submission from its subjects not only through oppression, but it also requires a resistance, a reaction, signifying that the domination is undesired and exploitative in the eyes of the marginalized. Classism is organized by violence under capitalism, which James R. Farr details in his book Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914. In this text, he explains that "Violence and conflict often functioned as means to make inclusion and exclusion in these groups clear" [9]. Farr emphasizes that violence is used to keep the workers in submission and deter them from disobedience. The motif of worker mistreatment is emblematic of how workers, especially workers of oppressed backgrounds, are rendered mediums for ongoing exploitation; hence, dehumanized under a capitalist-imperialist system that does not value our lives. This deterrence enforces proletarian support for the capitalist social order that oppresses us and prevents us from transforming our work into a form of resistance.

This relates to the points made by William Morris and John Ruskin in the Preface to The Nature of Gothic, where Morris states "For the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it" [10]. The pleasure of the proletariat in their labor is desensitized under capitalism, which turns labor into an experience of torment, as Marx claimed, driven by the sole purpose of producing more capital for the bourgeoisie to extract. As stated by Erin O'Connor in her yet to be published "Breathing Work: Time, Space and The Vessel in Glassblowing," "The way we understand "body" is via the objective perspective of the sciences…If accepted as the first and most important site of the "education" of the individual, the body became much more than a sum of its natural functions; it was a set of relations - habits, gestures, expressions, etc. - a system of meaning, sculpted by society" [11]. As the body of a worker goes beyond its biological component, it is informed by social constructs that are artificially implemented by capitalist society. The labor alienation of the worker reduces us to a vessel through which the upper class obtains its profit. Despite this, as Marx said, the proletariat can move beyond capitalist exploitation and seize the means of production, which necessitates an expansion of awareness that goes beyond individualism and the single existence of a worker.

Modern Prison Labor

An example of labor and craft movement that directly ties to the readings by Marx and Farr is contemporary studio craft in US prisons. Prison labor is argued to be a form of modern slavery due to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery with the exception of usage as a punishment for a crime. This loophole has been implemented within the US prison industrial complex, particularly in regards to furniture artistry. Two popular arguments made about prison labor is that it is a way for incarcerated people to learn valuable skills to enable them to contribute to society once released, or that it is a means to exploit incarcerated people. Some prisoners in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas are not paid at all for their labor in government-managed facilities. In addition to this, the national average for the lowest wage incarcerated people receive for prison labor is 14 cents per hour [12].

Prison labor and craft is an important factor in the US economy, yet incarcerated people are typically paid either minimum wage or well below it. Prison labor has no real substance in granting incarcerated people useful skills but is only another force of opposition. Many of the incarcerated people have claimed that the work has no value for them besides the possibility of a shorter sentence. Even to those prisoners who are actually learning useful skills, the reintegration process can be intimidating. Some states uphold policies that bar ex-convicts from obtaining licenses for skills they learned in prison. For instance, there was a New York State prisoner who applied for a barber's license but was denied because "owing to state law, La Cloche could only practice his trade … if he remained behind bars" [13]. The skills La Cloche learned had been confined by a policy that is practiced by several US states, which renders skills gained from prison labor useless outside of prison. This undermines the presumption that prison labor is valuable to the incarcerated. On the other hand, prison labor is indeed valuable to capitalist institutions, seeing that "Virginia Code § 53.1-47… stipulates that all 'departments, institutions, and agencies of the Commonwealth' supported by the state treasury must purchase 'articles and services produced or manufactured by persons confined in state correctional facilities'" [14]. Prison labor can only do this because it exploits its incarcerated people. In addition to this, incarcerated people make a low wage in the Commonwealth of Virginia by earning $0.55 to $0.80 an hour [15].

Farr argues that work was often tied to moral systems of authority. Likewise, it has also been argued that prison labor and craft often gain psychological authority over incarcerated people - as Marx also contests, when he details that labor alienation of the worker reduces them to a vessel for the bourgeoisie to exploit. Farr believes that while labor relations differ depending on the type of workplace, control of the labor market emerged as the most issue dividing masters and journeymen [16]. Similarly, prisons tend to deduct costs of living from wages so that many of their incarcerated people earn cents per hour.

The impact of prison labor and craft on social change is that conviction results in social death for formerly incarcerated people: "To be sentenced to prison is to be sentenced to social death. Social death is a permanent condition. While many people integrate themselves back into the society after imprisonment, they often testify that they permanently bear a social mark, a stigma" [17]. This ensures a life filled with detriment for incarcerated people, especially those who are non-white. In August 2018, incarcerated people across the US initiated strikes to protest poor conditions and exploitative labor practices that many of them considered to be "modern slavery". According to the NAACP, over 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the US, which is an increase of 340% compared to 1980 [18]. With the rise of incarceration, prison violence, sexual violence and other issues have also increased. Protesters addressed these issues in their demands. Additionally, incarcerated labor is used to manufacture furniture and other assets with an hourly wage of between 33 cents and $1.41, provided by the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) [19].

Private prisons are a billion-dollar industry, which exploit prisoners who are predominantly non-white for profit. These prisons are run by private companies and have been on the rise since the mid-1980s, especially following the crack epidemic during the Reagan administration. Over half of US states as of 2017 depend on for-profit prisons in which approximately 90,000 inmates are held each year [20]. Incarcerated people are paid slave wages: "Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other" [21]. Labor alienation and modern prison slavery, the productivity of the incarcerated craftsmen, is solely based on accumulating capital for the bourgeoisie.

Artisanship as Subversiveness

Despite the modern prison scenario, craft and other forms of artisanship can represent radical forms of labor and engines of social movement because, historically, they have been initiated in direct resistance to the status quo imposed by capitalist society. An instance of this is the usage of guilds in Medieval Europe. Guilds formed a central component in a theoretical system that arose in the late Middle Ages which historians label corporatism. Corporatist theory of the 14th Century intertwined with the demographic and economic forces to solidify a political and juridical system that would function until the 19th Century. Corporatism was informed significantly by confraternity associations, which was also the means through which craft guilds were established. The confraternities included work activity as their association developed despite the social security, morals, political identity and sense of place being the most paramount aspects provided to its members [22].

Jurists from the 12th and 13th Centuries alluded guilds to the collegium of the late Roman Law and enabled constituted authority to form and regulate this. As a result, the jurists had imposed a Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority onto the guild organization. Despite this, guildsmen continued to adhere to their theoretical legacy of autonomy stemming from the Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association and self-governance. Although medieval guilds continued to serve their main purpose as mutual aid societies, their connotation to governance and regulation of economic aspects also grew [23]. Johannes Althusius of Emden, author of the "Systematic Analysis of Politics" which was first published in 1603, was a German Calvinist who incorporated economic exchange into the moral foundation of guild values. He elaborated that exchange is rooted in mutual need and thus, reciprocity is vital to exchange [24]. Following France and Prussia, Germany was most associated with corporatism with its "hometowns" populated by less than 10,000 citizens [25].

Leather shoe cups are usually associated with craft guilds in which members would pass the cup in a circle to drink in allegiance to the guild. Jobs such as shoemaking were associated with men, hence the usage of shoe cups as a symbol of allegiance to the guild is akin to a reinforcement of a rite of passage into this representation of proletarian German brotherhood. This also interrogates authority in light of the Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority onto the guild organization, which the guildsmen, and particularly the German ones, would reject by continuing to adhere to their Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association and self-governance.

German guilds that used leather cups also represented self-authority, self-determination, and autonomy in the face of growing Roman influence and the incorporation of guilds into societal hierarchies and classism. The act of sharing the drink is representative of the main function of guilds as a structure that upholds mutual aid. It was marked by Calvinist influence inspired by the teachings of Emden, since the exchange of the leather shoe cup among the guildsmen is emblematic of reciprocity.

In the Middle Ages, European societies were marked by the idea that life was a struggle over classification, over accession to or preservation of a hierarchical status, especially given the growing influence of Roman and Calvinist thought on their societies. The hierarchical status of artists and craftsmen was represented by their position through a guild, which represented their securing of communal living as well as formed their social identity in relation to their place in the social order [26]. The leather cup represented the guildsmen's collective identity as craftsmen and celebration of their role despite their pending degradation in Medieval society, where they were eventually doomed by the classist hierarchy.

Ultimately, the historical shifts and evolution of work is informed by class struggle and the historical-materialist process. Work becomes a practice of resistance in the moment when the proletariat realizes they are alienated from their labor and begin to go against the capitalist social order. Craft and artisanship, especially those that operate on the fringes or in the so-called underground market, are radical forms of labor and initiate social change because they reject the parameters of systemic exploitation set up by the capitalist system. Such work can serve as both a catalyst and a supplemental force of class consciousness.

Notes

[1] Catherine W. Bishir, Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 . University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Friedrich Engels, The Origin on the Family, Private Property, and the State ( Hottingen-Zurich: 1884).

[4] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[5] Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Verlag Von Otto Meisner, 1867).

[6] Karl Marx, "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Die Revolution, No. 1 (1852).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[9] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[10] William Morris, "Preface to The Nature of the Gothic by John Ruskin" (1892).

[11] Erin O'Connor, "Breathing Work: Time, Space and The Vessel in Glassblowing" (2017), pp. 5.

[12] Daniel Moritz-Rabson, "Prison Slavery: Inmates are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government," Newsweek, August 28, 2018.

[13] David R. Jones, "Ex-Prisoners and Jobs," GothamGazette, May 24, 2006.

[14] Katherine Smith, "Smith: Sleeping on Exploitative Prison Labor," The Cavalier Daily, April 19th, 2018.

[15] Ibid.

[16] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[17] Joshua M. Price, "Prison and Social Death," Critical Issues in Crime and Society. Rutgers University Press (2015).

[18] Emily Moon, "Modern Slavery: The Labor History Behind the New Nationwide Prison Strike," Pacific Standard, August 22 nd, 2018.

[19] Daniel Moritz-Rabson, "Prison Slavery: Inmates are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government," Newsweek, August 28, 2018.

[20] Valerie Reynoso, "The Politics of Mass Incarceration," Counterpunch, October 12, 2017.

[21] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[22] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 20.

[23] Ibid. pp. 20.

[24] Ibid, pp. 24.

[25] Ibid. pp. 31.

[26] Ibid. pp. 22.

When and Why Did Unions Start Signing Contracts?

By Robin J. Cartwright

In 1911 Bill Haywood complained that

the A. F. of L. couldn't have a general strike if they wanted to. … They have 271,000 different agreements that expire 27,000 different minutes of the year. They will either have to break all of those sacred contracts or there is no such thing as a general strike in that so-called 'labor organization.'

Today labor relations professionals take it for granted that unions seek to sign contracts with employers, but in Haywood's day this was a relatively new and controversial practice, one that started when he was a teenager. Contracts were originally invented by labor unions that believed they needed to give national leaders authority to restrain strikes and militancy, which could bankrupt the union or subject it to state violence. As labor unrest increased, employers looked for new methods to control their workforce and undermine strikes, eventually choosing to work with and co-opt moderate labor leaders and use their authority over union members to discipline the workforce. Over several decades, employers and union leaders experimented with a series of contracts, gradually developing a workplace contractualism that served both groups.

Labor relations before contracts

Prior to the rise of contracts, unions practiced a variety of other methods to interact with management. During the Lowell textile strikes of 1834 and 1836, among the first factory strikes in the United States, the workers made no attempt to get management to sign a collective bargaining agreement. The strikes were waged in response to a wage cut in 1834 and an increase in the price of room and board in company boardinghouses in 1836. In 1834, the workers, nearly all of whom were young women, organized mass meetings and signed petitions against the cuts, pledging to refuse to work if they were not rescinded, and imposing penalties on any worker who broke her pledge. Although the 1834 strike was defeated, the 1836 strike was better organized and succeeded in reversing the price increase - without signing a contract and with little in the way of labor-management meetings and negotiation.

Nineteenth-century craft unions , with a mostly male membership, often attempted to unilaterally impose their preferred wages and working conditions on employers without signing a written agreement, or even negotiating. Typically, union members would meet and vote on what they called "legislation" (i.e. union work rules). This legislation set wages, working hours, break times, days off, terms of apprenticeship, and specifics of how work was to be done (such as the size of work crews, how many machines could be run at once, and how many products would be produced per hour). Union members were obliged to refuse any order which conflicted with this legislation, and refuse to work at any company that did not abide by it. These craft unions organized skilled occupations that required extensive training - making it difficult for management to replace any worker. If a sufficient portion of the limited pool of skilled workers refused to work for any employer that did not abide by union legislation, they could compel employers to abide by the union's terms. For this strategy to work, the union had to ensure that the number of workers who were trained in their craft remained limited, and many craft unions attempted to do this by restricting the number of new apprentices taken on, and by keeping women, people of color, immigrants, and/or the Irish out of their trade.

Another common practice among nineteenth-century workers was to issue a "bill of prices" or "wage scale" - a written list of occupations in the workplace and the pay rate the union demanded for each one - and go on strike. In some cases, workers were able to compel management, via this direct action, to sign these bills of prices. In other cases, management met with a committee of strike leaders and negotiated a compromise bill. Perhaps the most common result, when management did not defeat the strike outright, was to raise pay rates - but not raise them as high as the union wanted - without signing anything. For example, during the New England shoe worker strike of 1860 , a few employers agreed to a bill of prices with the union, but most raised pay by a moderate amount without formally signing an agreement. The strike gradually petered out as management gave workers much of what they wanted; in some cases, the union unilaterally called off the strike after management made sufficient concessions.

If you equate any written agreement between labor unions and management with a union contract (an overly broad conception of contracts), then these bills of prices would be the first union contracts. However, they differed from modern union contracts in that they did not have expiration dates and normally only set the pay rate. None of the other normal components of modern union contracts - management rights clauses, grievance/arbitration procedures, no strike pledges, language on hours and working conditions, dues checkoff, etc. - were present.

In the latter part of the Civil War and after, American workers began organizing trade unions on an unprecedented scale. Prior to the Civil War, labor unions had primarily been local or regional bodies with little in the way of a national or international structure to coordinate local activity. Unionists now established labor organizations that spanned coast to coast, with national conventions, elected national leaders, and a nationwide strike fund for each trade. They formed the National Labor Union as an umbrella federation (and, after a split, the Colored National Labor Union).

Samuel Gompers, who would later become President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and an advocate of contracts, first joined a union as a young man during this time period. In his memoirs he wrote:

There was a vast difference between those early unions and the unions of today. Then there was no law or order. A union was a more or less definite group of people employed in the same trade who might help each other out in special difficulties with the employer. There was no sustained effort to secure fair wages through collective bargaining. The employer fixed wages until he shoved them down to a point where human endurance revolted. Often the revolt started by an individual whose personal grievance was sore, who rose and declared: "I am going on strike. All who remain at work are scabs." Usually the workers went out with him.

Thus, even after the Civil War and the rise of a truly national labor movement, contracts between employers and labor unions were still unheard of.

The Knights of Labor and the attempt to abolish strikes

Most national trade unions collapsed in the 1870s in part due to a severe depression. High unemployment made it easy for employers to replace union members, and insured a large supply of scabs in the event of a strike. Trade union after trade union went bankrupt funding failed strikes.

When the labor movement revived at the end of the 1870s, the new unions, both the Order of the Knights of Labor (KoL) and the new trade unions that would later found the AFL, were determined to avoid what they thought were the mistakes of previous trade unions. They required all locals seek permission from the national leadership before launching any strike. Any strike not authorized by national leaders would not receive any support from the national organization.

For example, the KoL's regulations stated,

Strikes … are, as a rule, productive of more injury than benefit to working people, consequently all attempts to foment strikes will be discouraged. … No strike undertaken without the sanction and orders of G.A. officers … shall be supported from the Strike Fund.

The KoL's Grand Master Workman (president) Terence Powderly explained ,

Strikes are a failure. Ask any old veteran in the labor movement and he say will the same. … An association well organized need never strike. It is only half organized unions that do so.

In response to the idea that the Order "protect and foster strikes" he satirically proposed that the union also "purchase a rifle and bayonet; also one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition for each member" and acquire "the latest improved style of Gatling gun." He elaborated that men in office had "enacted laws which make it impossible for you to strike without the troops [being] called out" and that consequently encouraging strikes would bring severe repression upon the Order. Powderly further argued :

There are times when, under certain indignities and tyrannies, a refusal to strike amounts to downright cowardice; but these circumstances seldom arise. The average strike is brought about by the inflammatory speeches of some firebrand. … A strike seldom fails of one result, that is, to create confusion and distrust, and finally break the Union up. Whether the strike was successful, or not, it generally breaks up the branch engaged in it. One reason is, men expect that, as soon as they strike, they ought to walk up to the treasurer and draw five dollars a week, even though they have not paid in five cents.

Like the trade unions, the Knights felt that national union leadership needed to have a degree of authority over the membership to ensure members did not engage in strikes that would deplete their funds and/or provoke severe state repression. However, the Knights had a more ambitious approach to strikes than the trade unions - they wanted to abolish them. In the long run, the Knights intended to abolish strikes by abolishing capitalism, thereby making them unnecessary. In the medium term, they wanted the state to pass laws providing for the compulsory arbitration of all labor disputes. That objective was never achieved in the United States, although laws for voluntary arbitration were passed, and the Knights of Labor in New Zealand did get parliament to pass compulsory arbitration legislation during the 1890s (which the New Zealand IWW would later campaign against).

In the short-term, the Knights arranged for private arbitration with employers, instead of resorting to strikes, whenever possible, reserving direct action as a last resort. This private arbitration took several forms. KoL leaders were empowered to arbitrate disputes between their members and employers; they could order their members to accept a settlement they did not agree with. If the employer agreed, disputes could be submitted to a neutral third-party for arbitration.

In areas where the Knights of Labor were strongest they sometimes signed a written list of "rules and regulations" with an employers' association, laying out a process to use arbitration to resolve all conflicts. Usually one or two pages long, the rules forbade all strikes and lockouts and established a joint board of arbitration to resolve all disputes. These boards were composed of an equal number of representatives from the union and the employers' association, and had the authority to settle any dispute between workers and their employer in the factories covered by the agreement. In the event of a tie vote, each side was to select a disinterested person, those two would select a third person, and then the three of them would decide the matter at hand. Typically, they also provided for grievance committees and established a closed shop (or, as a compromise, permitted members to refuse to work with non-union co-workers).

These rules and regulations signed by the Knights of Labor have a great deal in common with twentieth-century union contracts, but there are some important differences. Perhaps most importantly, they had no expiration date - they were intended to last forever, to permanently end strikes and lockouts. They were much briefer and left most things specified in modern union contracts (including pay rates and working conditions) up to arbitration. There was no seniority and no dues checkoff. The Knights also had difficultly compelling their own members to abide by these terms. In 1886, in response to the failure of the Knights to suppress a wildcat shoe worker strike in Philadelphia , local shoe manufacturers locked out all of their employees for several weeks and then decided to arbitrate with a company union, on an open shop basis, rather than with the Knights - destroying the shoe workers' union in the city.

Initially, the Knights of Labor were larger than the trade unions and they grew rapidly until 1886, becoming larger than any previous labor union in North America. From 1886-1890, employers founded a series of employer associations that led a counter-offensive against the Knights which managed to destroy the union with a series of lockouts, aided by state violence and the backlash against organized labor after the Haymarket affair . The newly founded, and more conservative, American Federation of Labor then took the Knights' place as the largest labor union in the country. The reluctance of the Order's national leadership to authorize strikes did not save the union from being targeted and destroyed by employers.

The early twentieth century: progressive employers embrace contracts

Unlike the Knights, the AFL did not harbor grandiose plans of abolishing strikes or ending capitalism. They viewed strikes as labor's most powerful weapon, but one that should be used sparingly. The AFL compared going on strike to going to war - it was a powerful act, but one that was risky and dangerous, and which should only be undertaken when attacked or in extreme circumstances. They were willing to sign a peace treaty, but unlike the Knights were not willing to give up the right to strike permanently. So their agreements with employers only lasted for a fixed amount of time, after which they were free to strike again. Initially these agreements were called "trade agreements" but by the twentieth century the terms "contract" or "time contract" were used as synonyms. It was these AFL trade agreements that the early IWW denounced when it rejected contracts .

When the AFL began to grow steadily in the late 1890s and early 1900s, it found a section of the employing class (mainly the wealthier section) was now open to compromising with unions - something they were largely unwilling to do with previous labor organizations. This shift occurred for several reasons. Some larger employers believed they could use unions to undercut their smaller competitors . The general trend over the preceding forty years had been for labor unrest to increase, and the growing cost of suppressing it led some employers to start searching for a more cost-effective means of retaining control over their workforce. In addition, some employers were concerned that the suppression of organized labor encouraged the growth of socialist, anarchist, and other radical movements. They worried that the growth of radicalism, combined with the tendency for labor unrest to increase over time, could, in the long-run, result in revolution if left unchecked.

In 1900 these progressive employers, with the participation of AFL leaders, founded the National Civic Federation to advocate for reforms meant to stabilize capitalism. The NCF lobbied for progressive legislation, mediated between employers and unions in labor disputes, and encouraged employers to sign contracts with trade unions. The year it was founded it passed a resolution declaring "trade agreements between employers and workmen where established for a definite term of years have so fully demonstrated their value in maintaining industrial peace that they should be generally adopted." They told their fellow employers that "the practical operations of the trade agreement systems disprove the criticism that they mean a surrender to unjust or uneconomic demands of labor." An article in their newspaper , seeking to persuade their fellow capitalists to sign contracts, argued:

One of the permanent advantages of the trade agreement system is the influence which organized employers have in improving the organization of the workers. As long as employers are hostile, or as long as an association of employers exists solely to fight the lion, the latter is forced to put forward its fighting men. But when employers organize for conference and agreement, and are able to remove the long standing suspicions of the workmen, a change comes in union leadership. The officers become negotiators and bargainers-business men, like their employers.

The reformist wing of the employing class consciously set out to corrupt and co-opt union leaders by signing contracts with labor unions.

The NCF contended that unions would generally abide by the terms of their contracts and that union leaders could be relied upon to suppress strikes by their own members. Their newspaper argued that:

An agreement between an organization of employers and an organization of workmen is backed by the machinery and the power to enforce observance. In the thirteen years of the Iron Molders' and Stove Founders' agreements there has not been a contract violation nor a strike or lockout, except occasionally in a single shop, soon settled by the national officers of the two organizations. … These officers, as in all labor unions, have power to fine and expel members and to revoke the charters of local bodies that interfere with the enforcement of trade contracts.

The longshoremen's organization in their contracts with the dock managers on the Great Lakes have occasionally been called upon to discipline their members for violations, and in the case of the Buffalo strike in 1900 the International President, after revoking the charter of the local union and supplying the places of a majority of the strikers with union men from other locals, filled the remaining places with non-union men. Mr. Samuel Mather, of the Dock Managers' Association, … says regarding their agreements with the Longshoremen's Union, "I am very happy to be able to testify that since that continuous arrangement was inaugurated, about three years ago, our business has been conducted with great advantage compared with what prevailed before. … If any occasion of dispute arises, it has not caused the work to terminate"

By signing contracts with labor unions, employers could convert them from organizations that incited strikes into organizations that broke strikes. In the eyes of the NCF, this was a more effective and cost-effective means of controlling their workforce than their previous reliance on violence and repression.

The NCF also praised a contract signed by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which established a cartel in bituminous coal mining . As settlement of a nation-wide strike in 1897, the union and coal operators signed a national contract, and a series of district contracts, that not only covered wages, hours, etc., but also specified the minimum price coal could be sold at and the amount each operator was to sell. Prior to this contract competing firms often undercut each other by increasing the amount of coal they sold, flooding the market and causing the price to plummet. This contract allowed them to sell less coal at a higher price, increasing their profits. The UMWA acted as the cartel's enforcer by striking any firm that would not sign the contract and abide by its price fixing. The UMWA also insured that a portion of the operators' increased profits went to its members in the form of higher wages. This early contract is one of the more flagrant cases of larger employers using union contracts to undermine their smaller rivals and deter competition. Higher wages undercut smaller firms because their lower profit margins made it more difficult to afford them. Higher wages also buttressed the cartel's position by acting as a barrier to entry, discouraging the founding of new companies in the industry and protecting operators from increased competition.

A more important contract from this time period was the Protocols of Peace , negotiated between the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (a predecessor to UNITE-HERE) and the Cloak, Suit, and Skirt Protective Association (an employers' association), as settlement of the cloak makers' "great revolt" (strike) of 1910 in New York City. The Protocols established a modern system of grievance machinery to settle disputes and enforce the contract. Its grievance procedures were foreshadowed by the Knights of Labor's arbitration system, but the Protocols was more elaborate, with added layers of bureaucracy, and focused more on enforcement of the contract's terms. Earlier trade agreements, too, had provisions for labor-management meetings to resolve disputes but did not have a true grievance system with numerous steps and arbitration involving outsiders. The Protocols not only allowed union members to file against their employers, but permitted employers to file grievances against the union, usually for wildcat strikes. In order to suppress wildcat strikes and uphold its part of the bargain, the ILGWU put locals into receivership when they defied the no-strike pledge, and recruited unionized scabs to undermine wildcat strikes.

The ILGWU succeeded in signing similar Protocol-like contracts with employer associations in other parts of their industry and in other cities, and it influenced the content of other unions' contracts. Larger employers signed not only to deter strikes and regain control over their workforce, but in hopes of undercutting their smaller competitors (who had smaller profit margins and would have greater difficulty paying union wages). In some cases they secretly agreed to sign a Protocols-like contract with the ILGWU before a strike even began, provided the union was able to compel smaller companies to join the employers' association and sign the same agreement.

After the First World War and the Red Scare, employers largely abandoned their interest in signing contracts with the ILGWU or other unions and attempted to go union-free. Some returned to the use of violence and repression to suppress labor unrest (others had never abandoned violence and repression). Some experimented with what historians call "welfare capitalism" - giving workers relatively generous benefits to reduce turnover and prevent unionization. Some established "employee representation programs" (company unions).

1940s-1970s: Heyday of the union contract

After the great depression began, labor unrest and left-wing radicalism revived, prompting employers and the state to institute many of the reforms they had first experimented with in the early twentieth century. In response to the strike wave of 1934, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, in an effort to protect commerce and prevent future strikes by encouraging employers to sign contracts with labor unions. The author of the act, Senator Robert F. Wagner, had been a member of the New York State legislature when the Protocols of Peace was signed, which he supported. The architect of the Protocols of Peace, Louis Brandeis, was appointed to the Supreme Court several years after mediating between the ILGWU and CSSPA during the cloak makers' great revolt, leaving his position on the board of arbitration (the final step in the Protocols' grievance process). He was still on the Supreme Court in 1937, where he voted in favor of the constitutionality of the NLRA.

Force of law alone was never sufficient to compel most employers to abide by the NLRA or sign contracts with business unions. A version of the rights in the NLRA were originally included in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, but they were ignored by employers and the law was later struck down as unconstitutional. When the NLRA was passed in 1935 it established a government agency to enforce those rights, but because there were no punitive damages for violating it most employers simply did not obey the law. It was the wave of sit-down strikes at the start of 1937 that convinced many employers of the need to sign contracts, or at least keep their anti-union activity legal. Most famously, the notoriously anti-union U.S. Steel (which controlled the majority of steel production in the U.S.) chose to sign a contract with the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee to prevent a sit-down strike at its plants and regain control over its workforce. Most unionists expected that unionizing U.S. Steel would require an enormous battle, but they signed a contract without a fight.

A minority of employers continued to violently oppose unionization even after the sit-down strikes. Perhaps the best known was Republic Steel, which committed the Memorial Day Massacre along with the Chicago police. These employers were finally brought into line during the Second World War. In exchange for a no-strike pledge, the federal government denied any contract for war supplies to any company that violated the NLRA, giving the law some teeth and bringing an end to corporate America's long tradition of murdering union organizers.

Although the NLRA did a great deal to institutionalize workplace contractualism, dues checkoff did not become a near-universal part of union contracts until the Second World War . During the war, union dissidents would sometimes withhold dues as a way of pressuring union leaders, which could encourage them to violate the no-strike pledge. Union leaders and the state insisted that employers directly deduct dues from employees' pay to remove this source of rank-and-file leverage. There were unions as early as the late nineteenth century that had dues checkoff, but it was not until the war that nearly all union contracts had it.

For the next thirty years, it was a social norm for employers to abide by the NLRA. Although most employers remained non-union, they largely kept their union-busting activities legal until the 1970s . To control their workforce, employers treated their employees relatively well (this was the low point of income inequality) and, when that failed, signed contracts with unions, relying on union leaders to keep workers in line. Flagrantly violating the NLRA was stigmatized.

Beginning in the late 1970s, employers began looking for alternative means of disciplining their workforce, which they eventually found in the form of higher unemployment and permanent replacement scabs. In the 1980s, they used these tools to destroy the labor movement and de-unionize much of the workforce, inaugurating the current era of low union density and low strike rates. They have spent much of the past thirty years gradually dismantling the remains of contract-based unionism.

Workplace contractualism and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

Workplace contractualism developed in fits and starts, with different components added in at different times. What we think of as a standard union contract was really only commonplace for roughly forty years (1940-1980). The previous period of experimentation with different forms of contracts (1880-1940) lasted longer. The later period (1980-present), of tiny, weak unions and very few strikes, has now lasted almost as long as the heyday of the union contract. The exact point when the labor movement started signing contracts depends on how you define contracts. There is no hard and fast point at which the movement passed from non-contracts to contracts, and even agreements that clearly count as contracts took on different forms at different times. One way to approach the issue is to look at how the early IWW viewed contracts, and then find the point in history in which an agreement matching that conception was first signed.

Historians generally write that the early IWW refused to sign contracts, and the IWW of that time repeatedly issued pamphlets and public proclamations denouncing contracts. A 1913 pamphlet written by IWW General Executive Board member Joseph Ettor and published by the IWW stated:

Industrial Unionists disdain to lower the history and ideals of the working class by entering into contracts or agreements with employers … Contracts and agreements tend to foist a false feeling of security on the worker.

In the pamphlet The IWW - its History, Structure, and Methods , Vincent St. John (the second General Secretary-Treasurer) wrote, "No part of the organization is allowed to enter into time contracts with the employers." In her old age, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalled that the IWW

did not believe in making any contracts. They believed that as long as you were organized, you could hold the office to what it said it was going to do. But a contract, a piece of paper held you and so they didn't make any contracts.

Bill Haywood told Congress

We say that no union has a right to enter into an agreement with the employers because they are members of the working class; and finally we say that the working class has no right to enter into an agreement because it is the inherent mission of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish itself in its place.

However, despite this rhetoric, the early IWW actually did make agreements with employers. On Philadelphia's waterfront , the IWW made several verbal agreements with employers to terminate large strikes in exchange for a number of concessions, including a closed shop and partial control over hiring and firing. In the 1912 Lawrence textile strike it drew up a "list of grievances" similar to the "bill of prices" used by unionists in the mid-nineteenth century, negotiated with management, and agreed to call off the strike after management granted most of their demands. If we look at the early IWW's constitution, we find it didn't explicitly ban contracts by name. What it said was:

Any agreement entered into between the members of any Union, or organization, and their employers, as a final settlement of any difficulty or trouble which may occur between them, shall not be considered valid or binding until the same shall have the approval of the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World.

No Union of the General Organization, Industrial Department, or Industrial Union of the I. W. W. shall enter into any contract with an individual or corporation of employers binding the members to any of the following conditions:

(a) Any agreement wherein any specified length of time is mentioned for the continuance of the said agreement.

(b) Any agreement wherein the membership is bound to give notice before making demands affecting hours, wages or shop conditions.

(c) Any agreement wherein it is specified that the members shall work only for employers who belong to an association of the employers.

(d) Any agreement that proposes to regulate the selling price of the product they are employed in making.

(e) No Industrial Union or any part of the Industrial Workers of the World shall enter into any agreement with any Labor Organization.

This section was removed in the late 1930s, except for the requirement for GEB approval, which was not removed until the 1940s. Histories of the IWW generally label this removal as the IWW signing contracts for the first time. It appears that by "contract" Bill Haywood and others who claimed that the IWW did not sign contracts meant an agreement that violated any of these five conditions, not any agreement in the broadest sense of that term.

The Knights of Labor's arbitration agreements would have been contracts in this sense because they violated part (b) by permanently forbidding strikes, although they did not violate part (a). The AFL's trade agreements violated both (a) and (b), and in some cases other clauses. The UMWA's contracts establishing a coal cartel additionally violated part (d); those contracts may be why early Wobblies included part (d). If merely getting things in writing counts as a union contract, the earlier "bill of prices" used by some unions before the Civil War would count as the first contracts. However, they were not contracts in the sense that the IWW opposed because they did not violate any of these stipulations, and because the early IWW itself issued similar documents. Therefore the first contracts, in the sense of contracts that the early IWW opposed, were invented by the Knights of Labor in order to abolish strikes.

Over the course of the twentieth-century, employers and/or the state in most countries eventually adopted measures designed to co-opt and control labor unions, abandoning older, more violent strategies designed to suppress unions. They used co-opted unions to maintain control over their workforce, and sought to marginalize radical unions that refused to cooperate in this process. In some countries this took the form of works councils or state subsidies for labor unions, but in the United States it took the form of workplace contractualism, because that was the form moderate labor unions invented and preferred. The process of co-opting unions was not entirely one-sided; employers had to make significant concessions to moderate union leaders to get them to cooperate and those concessions affected the structure of labor relations. Since the rise of neoliberalism forty years ago, employers have abandoned this strategy in most of the world, adopting alternative methods to discipline their workforce. The paucity of labor unrest has made working with moderate labor unions no longer an attractive option for most of the employing class. The origins of union contracts in restraining strikes, and the extensive history of employers using contracts to control workers, should make those of us who would like to revive labor unrest cautious about reviving contracts - or oppose it altogether.

This essay was originally published at Organizing Work , a media platform associated with the Industrial Workers of the World.