Marxism, Psychiatry, and Capitalism: An Interview with Dr. Bruce M. Z. Cohen

By Brenan Daniels

This is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Dr. Bruce M. Z. Cohen, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland and author of "Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), where we discuss capitalism and psychiatry, and view psychiatry under a Marxist lens.

What made you want to apply a specifically Marxist view to psychiatry and psychology?​ Are you personally a Marxist and how did you come to be one?

That's a good question. I didn't expect to ever be writing such a book, but thanks to my students I realised that someone had to take responsibility for filling a current gap in the literature. I run a postgraduate course on the Sociology of Mental Health, in which my students complete project essays on topics of their own choosing. As it is a sociology course, they are obviously required to apply different theoretical approaches to their chosen issue. I always encourage the students to consider the wide range of theoretical approaches available to them including structural functionalism, labeling, social constructionism, Foucauldian, critical feminist and race theory, as well as Marxist scholarship. Regarding the later, my students complained that they couldn't find anything much out there. As a lecturer, I am always a little skeptical of such claims, but -hats off to my students!- they were correct on this occasion. With all the literature on mental health and illness currently in circulation, I found it astounding that there was no standard Marxist account available. Hence, the main reason for writing Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness.

To answer the second part of your question, yes I am a Marxist! Though I grew up in a very conservative -large as well as small 'c'- part of England in the 1980s, my parents were members of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain). (In fact, my mother became the first communist parish councilor in the area, kicking out a Tory in the process). So I was politically conscious and politically active from a young age thanks to my family, imbued with a strong sense of social justice, and particularly incensed by Thatcher's attacks on the trade unions and the working classes at the time (which most people in my area thought was just fantastic!). But I think being a sociologist has really made me a fully committed Marxist; whichever area you are studying or working in, be it religion, education, health, crime, the family, or whatever, it doesn't take long to uncover evidence that the needs of capital determine the priorities of these institutions- they reproduce inequalities, oppress the majority of the population, and produce surplus value for a privileged minority. Is this a kind of society that, in good conscience, I or any sociologist can accept or support? Of course not! That's why I'm a Marxist. Human beings can do better.

Please discuss the connection between psychiatry, psychology, education, and capitalism and how the former institutions have been influenced by the latter, historically speaking.

Following my point above, the mental health system (I use this as an umbrella term here to bring together psychiatry, psychology, and the various support professions and agencies working in the area of mental health including therapists, counselors, psychiatric nurses, and social workers) and the education system in their contemporary forms are both products of industrial capitalism. Briefly, compulsory schooling developed across western societies in the nineteenth century due to the needs of capital for higher skilled workers as well as to socially control working class youth (through, for example, socializing them into the norms and values of capitalism as the only "correct" way to think and understand the world). As I discuss in my book, the mental health system develops during the same period as another institution of social control: the asylums separate the able from the non-able bodied, it pathologises and confines problematic populations (primarily working class groups).

In neoliberal society, I argue that the connections between the mental health system and the education system (as well as many other areas of public and private life) have become much stronger and more explicit. For example, my socio-historical case study of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the book demonstrates that the origins of the diagnosis began with psychologists' concern for deviant working class youth who failed to "adapt" to the demands of compulsory schooling. A hundred years later, we can still see in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that the symptoms of ADHD have nothing to do with having a mental illness but rather denote the requirements for more productive and efficient students and workers (for instance, forgetting or losing homework, failing to complete assigned tasks, poor time-management, and so on). As the demands on young people to stay on at school and go further in education have increased, so we have seen an increase in mental health experts in this area, and thus the increasing medicalization of "at risk" (I would argue, non-conforming) children. The expansion in the use of diagnoses such as autism and "oppositional defiant disorder" by psychiatry can also be theorized as serving a similar purpose here.

In what way does capitalism utilize psychiatry and psychology to demonize and ridicule those who have politics that don't fit with the status quo? (This has been talked about somewhat before and I would be interested in hearing you expand upon it.)

I devote a chapter to this issue in my book, but to be honest I think a whole monograph is required on the subject. It's a fascinating (and, as you do the research, shocking) issue. I can follow many other scholars by reiterating that the mental health system is highly effective in neutralizing threats through pathologising political and social dissent. I think it's more effective than say the criminal justice system because the courts are usually questioning the legality of the person's actions alone, rather than the rationality or sanity on those actions. Imprisonment of a protester, for instance, does not fundamentally undermine his or her actions or beliefs in the same way as being labeled as mentally sick does.

There are many examples of this process in operation. In the late nineteenth century, the suffragette movement was a frequent target for the "hysteria" label. During the civil rights movement in the US, there was a significant increase in the labeling of young Black men with "schizophrenia" (psychiatrists sometimes referred to this as "the protest psychosis"). Similarly, young African-Caribbean protesters in the deprived inner cities of 1980s Britain were theorized by psychiatrists as prone to "cannabis psychosis." As I mention in the book, I think an increasingly popular diagnosis which the mental health system is utilizing to pathologize those involved in civil disobedience or political violence today is antisocial personality disorder (APD): post-9/11, you can see that psychiatry is taking a much greater interest in medicalising any behavior which breaks the legal or moral status quo within capitalist society, particularly acts which involve perceived or actual violence.

How is psychiatry not an actual science in some ways? May people assume it is just by virtue of its utilization of 'experts' and 'quantitative studies'?

This is really at the heart of the matter. To be considered as a valid branch of medicine, psychiatry has to reach the medical "gold standard," which is to observe and identify real pathology on the body. And, though they're tried repeatedly to do this, so far psychiatry has failed in this fundamental goal. Most recently, for example, the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) DSM committee (which was responsible for producing the DSM-5) came to the following conclusion: the causation of mental disease remains unknown (for example, there is no useful biological marker or genetic test that has been identified) and psychiatrists still cannot distinguish between mentally healthy and mentally sick people. And of course without accurate identification of disease, a medical discipline cannot claim proof of causation or evidence of successful treatment, and they certainly cannot predict future cases of that disease.

So, to answer your question, no psychiatry is not a valid medical science. However, I argue in the book that progressing knowledge on madness (if such a thing is even possible) was not the reason for the establishment of the psychiatric profession or the continuation and expansion of the mental health system today. Rather, it's a discipline that has supported capitalism, both in the pursuit of surplus value as well as being an institution of ideological control, responsible for reinforcing the norms and values of this society and punishing deviations from them.

In what ways does this massive increase in the labeling of people having psychological disorders affect us on a personal, familial, and community level? How does this increase the alienation from ourselves and our larger communities that has been going on for some time now?

The biggest issue is that it individualizes what are fundamentally social and political issues in this society. This obviously suits capitalism, it follows a neoliberal ideology that you need to work on yourself and look nowhere else for solutions to your problems. As I argue in the book, this is why the psychiatric discourse has been allowed to become all-encompassing (effectively "hegemonic") over the last few decades; it has become highly useful in de-politicizing the oppressive reality of our lives. The involvement of the mental health system here is only one factor in the bigger issue though, which is of course the way the neoliberal project has attempted to destroy the social and the collective.

What are the negative aspects of self-diagnosing and how does that reinforce the status quo?

As with Marx's famous comments on religion as the opium of the people, I think we can understand self-labeling and people desiring to have such a label as a way of coping with the alienating tendencies of capitalism. It's no solution to the fundamental issues they have, but it can be a means of survival and maybe a limited form of "emancipation" at times. For example, the parents of a child who is underperforming in school may desire a mental illness diagnosis so that they can claim extra funding for study assistance, or someone who doesn't enjoy socializing in large groups may seek a psychiatric diagnosis so that they can legitimately take antidepressants which dull their inhibitions.

There are a number of significant problems with self-labeling: most obviously, you cannot solve the social and political problems of capitalism with a mental illness label or by being subjected to talk therapy, drugs, or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It can obviously be dangerous to your health (for example, long-term users of antidepressants tend to die at a considerably younger age than non-users), and it can be stigmatizing. Further, it falsely legitimates the mental health system as a valid medical enterprise.

How do you see the working class overcoming this system?

Ultimately it's a case of abolishing the mental health system and all its supporting apparatus. As with the criminal justice system, this is not an institution that has ever functioned in the interests of the working classes. At the end of my book I suggest a few practical things that can be done immediately to challenge and weaken the power of the mental health experts, these include: campaigning to remove psychiatry's compulsory powers to confine and drug people against their will, withdrawing their prescription rights, and outlawing ECT. I also think it is crucial to form closer alliances between academics, left wing activists, community groups, and progressive psychiatric survivor organizations to build a strong abolitionist alliance against the psychiatric system.

Tell us about your upcoming book and where you and others argue that "the best form of treatment for mental disorder is no treatment at all, and the causation of mental illness itself has yet to be established." It would be great to hear about those last two parts in-depth.

Well, I've hopefully addressed those two specific issues previously in this interview - what passes for "treatment" at the hands of the mental health system is, ironically, very bad for your physical and emotional health. Perhaps that is unsurprising given that mental disorders are fabrications produced by psychiatry without real evidence for their existence.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health (due out later this year) is an edited collection of original contributions from colleagues in the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which systematically problematizes the practices, priorities, and knowledge base of the western system of mental health. Basically, I have constructed a comprehensive resource manual which offers a variety of ways in which to theorize the business of mental health as a social, economic, political, and cultural project. So, for instance, the book provides updates on critical theories of mental health such as labeling, social constructionism, antipsychiatry, Foucauldian, Marxist, critical feminist, race and queer theory, critical realism, critical cultural theory, and mad studies. But it also demonstrates the application of such theoretical ideas and scholarship to key topics such as medicalization and pharmaceuticalisation, the DSM, global psychiatry, critical histories of mental health, and talk therapy. I'm very pleased at how it has turned out.

Is there a way to bring back a form of alternative psychiatry or psychology at all?

Some scholars are positive about the development of a post-revolutionary "Marxist psychology" or similar. I don't think that's possible, and I worry about giving these professions any sort of way out. My analysis points to these professions as agents of social control; they have always been responsible for policing the population not for emancipating them. So my answer to that question is an emphatic "no!"

Bruce M.Z. Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His other books include Mental Health User Narratives: New Perspectives on Illness and Recovery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Being Cultural(Pearson, 2012).

Gun Control in Capitalist America

By @leftistcritic

With the beginning of the "Trump era," the calls for gun control have been partially (but not fully) muted. This article will go beyond the critical history of gun control and armed resistance by discussing my justification for rejecting gun control and, instead, an embrace of armed self-defense and armed resistance, terms which I will explore later in this post.

The Battle Between Gun Control, Gun Rights, and Armed Resistance

Gun control and armed resistance, with the latter used to defend against acts of oppression, have been often at odds. When the White European settlers came to the Western Hemisphere, indigenous peoples "offered heroic resistance" but they were ultimately suppressed because "Europeans possessed a huge superiority in weapons." [1] At the same time, armed resistance has been an effective form of self-defense. During the Reconstruction period, Black militias were formed to defend the Black population against racist Whites, sometimes even unifying with poor whites to achieve this goal. [2] Examples of such self-defense later on includes Robert F. Williams and his gun club, called the Black Armed Guard, as noted in a previous post, meaning that "becoming a threat to the capitalist order and defending the gains of the workers movement and democratic rights through force if necessary" is important. The long history of racial domination in the United States (1510-2017), with "systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World" beginning on January 22, 1510 , shows that the right and ability to own guns is an essential tool to "stand up to white terrorists and overt racist ideologues." [3] This has been flaunted by the fact that, as also noted in the previous post of this series, some of the first gun control laws were aimed at Blacks, which is why many view the debate over such control with caution, and the fact that the KKK was first a "gun-control organization," and that policies like "stop and frisk" were driven by gun control desires, feeding an "exploding prison population." [4] Such history allows gun rights supporters on the "Right" to claim that gun control has racist roots, even though some liberals say that this claim does not negate the possibility of adopting any gun regulations in the present. [5]

The history of guns and gun rights have become politicized. Some claim that the assertion that gun control is racist and that the civil rights movement succeeded because blacks "were willing to take up arms against their oppressors" came from libertarian and "obscure right-wing" websites. [6] Some of these people have also used the example of gun control laws enacted after the Civil War and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was "blocked by segregationists when he tried to get his concealed carry permit" to argue against current gun control efforts, criticizing "Obama or his gun-grabbing cohorts," saying that gun control is racially motivated. [7] This claim reportedly was tied with the claim that "slavery might not have lasted so long in America if black people had been granted the right to bear arms at the outset of their arrival in the new world." [8] To digress a bit here, not only is the claim that armed enslaved Blacks could have resisted their bondage with guns ahistorical (because why would the white overlords give enslaved Blacks guns at all? wouldn't that undermine their whole system of control?) but it implies that enslaved Blacks did not resist their chains of human bondage. Any analysis of history shows this to be completely false. Yet again, gun rights supporters will do anything they can to promote the use of guns. Saying that, the liberal arguments for gun control are at times so deluded as to be a joke.

Ladd Everitt, the former communications director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), a gun reform organization, is one of theses people. In his article on Waging Nonviolence, one of those progressive publications, he scoffs at the idea of gun control being racist, asking "if gun control laws had targeted blacks for disarmament, how would they have been able to successfully engage in armed resistance against White terrorists during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement?" [9] This ignorant argument doesn't even make sense, because it disregards the fact that enslaved Blacks gained guns during the Civil War and due to evasion of gun control laws, allowing them to engage in armed resistance. Apart from Everitt's silly argument, he then claims that calling gun control racist doesn't make sense because "for most of our 234 years, the entire U.S. legal system has been arrayed against blacks" and that history is "replete with examples of African-American communities being severely punished and repressed after they did take up arms against white terrorists." [10] Now, he is correct that the entire US legal system has been arrayed against Blacks and that some Black communities did suffer backlash from armed resistance, but he dismisses the obvious reality that such resistance allowed Blacks to survive through years upon years of bondage, discrimination, and bigotry.

As the years have gone by, the " political forms of the left-right axis " have begun to change. In 1976, cities like DC led the way in gun control, with the majority black city council banning "residents from owning or carrying handguns (excluding guards, police, and those with already registered handguns)." [11] By 1989, the NAACP voted to support gun control measures, and four years later, during "the peak of gun homicides among African-Americans," 74% supported gun control." [12] Still, a number of groups have historically engaged in armed self-defense, including the Deacons for Defense and Justice , the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Brown Berets (which has a modern version formedin 1993) the Young Lords, the Young Patriots , and the still-existing American Indian Movement. Currently there is the Fruit of Islam, Muslim Girls Training , the Red Guard Party (Maoists in Texas), Brothas Against Racist Cops , Redneck Revolt, Black Guns Matter, the John Brown Gun Club/ John Brown Militia , the Huey P. Newton Gun Club , and the Indigenous People's Liberation Front , among many others, showing that "marginalized communities and their supporters [can use]…firearms for self-defense and the defense of others against hate crimes, protection against the police, and as a means of challenging oppression from across the political spectrum." [13]

There have been a number of current developments when it comes to gun rights. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller , held that the Second Amendment "guarantees an individual's right to possess a gun" rejecting the existing D.C. law that someone could own a shotgun but could not use in self-defense apparently, but Antonin Scalia had a whole set of exceptions to this declaration of gun rights including allowing "laws banning guns in sensitive places…laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, [and] laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed." [14] This decision was also one of the first fortes into "gay rights activism for the Second Amendment rights of sexual minorities and of all other Americans." [15]

In 2010, the Supreme Court hit another nail in the coffin of gun control in the United States. In a 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago , the longstanding ban in Chicago of handguns was overturned, with the declaration that the Second Amendment applies to states. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, noted Black Americans who used guns throughout US history, noting that "Reconstruction-era efforts designed to grant equal citizenship to black Americans were equally as much about gun rights as they were about civil rights." [16] The amicus brief for the Pink Pistols group declared "Recognition Of An Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms Is Literally A Matter Of Life Or Death For Members Of The LGBT Community," which was cited by Justice Scalia , contending that gun rights are "especially important for women and members of other groups that may be especially vulnerable to violent crime." [17] Scalia further argued that even the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated guns rights because it was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 , which is not likely referring to the law itself, since it NEVER mentions the words "gun" or "arms," but rather to the fact that "advocates of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 cited the disarmament of freed blacks as a reason the law was necessary" as the arch-conservative National Review claims . While these claims may seem erroneous, a number of books seem to back up this assessment as a correct one. [18] There is no doubt that gun rights were on the minds of Radical Republicans in Congress since the State of Mississippi had enacted a law in November 1865, part of the " Black Code " in the state, saying

"…it shall be the duty of every civil and military officer to arrest any freedman, free negro, or mulatto found with any such arms or ammunition, and cause him or her to be committed for trial in default of bail…That if any white person shall sell, lend, or give to any freedman, free negro, or mulatto any fire-arms, dirk or bowie-knife, or ammunition, or any spirituous or intoxicating liquors, such person or persons so offending, upon conviction thereof in the county court of his or her county, shall be fined not exceeding fifty dollars, and may be imprisoned."

Furthermore, the Second Freedman's Bill the following month declared in Section 7 that

"…whenever in any State or district in which the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted by the rebellion, and wherein, in consequence of any State or local law, ordinance, police or other regulation, custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms, are refused or denied to negroes, mulattoes, freedmen, refugees, or any other persons, on account of race, color , or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, or wherein they or any of them are subjected to any other or different punishment, pains, or penalties, for the commission of any act or offence, than are prescribed for white persons committing like acts or offences, it shall be the duty of the President of the United States, through the Commissioner, to extend military protection and jurisdiction over all cases affecting such persons so discriminated against."

White racist attacks on Southern Blacks and efforts to take guns away from them by the KKK and other terrorist groups likely influenced the provision in the 1868 Mississippi Constitution saying "All persons shall have a right to keep and bear arms for their defense."

Back to the McDonald case, Clarence Thomas had a concurring opinion which was evidently different than Alito's . He noted how "blacks were disarmed by state legislatures and denied protection from white mobs" and after this, and the decision itself, articles appeared in numerous conservative publications saying that gun control was racist. [19]

Fast forward to 2013. That year, the Washington Post came out with an article about Black gun clubs in Maryland such as the Metro Gun Club, Big Foot Hunt Club, and elsewhere. The members of the club who were interviewed said that they loved "their guns and recalled growing up in black farming communities where every family had guns for hunting - and protection" noting that such love for guns "spanned generations in their families." [20] Members had a variety of opinions, with some believing that "guns should be in the hands of decent, honest people" but that assault rifles should be "restricted to military and law-enforcement personnel," some saying that guns could protect women from rapists, others saying there are new challenges being in favor of guns "in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December and talk of tighter gun control laws," and one long-time gun owner saying "I'm torn. I don't want guns to shoot people, but I don't want you to take away my guns either."

As the years past, more began to question peaceful protest and thought that violence could be the answer. One writer put it in 2014 that "weeks of peaceful protests and outright riots in Missouri have accomplished nothing" and said that people should act to "preserve their own life" from an out-of-control police state, and then posing the question "is it time to start resisting police with violence?" [21] This question is nothing new, as resistance to police has taken a more combative tone in the past, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, during the main thrust of the Black Power movement.

In 2015, the tension between gun control and gun rights continued. That year, 60 percent of Black Americans believed firmly in gun control, while White Americans believed the opposite. However, the racist history of gun control is present for some in the Black community, with the right to bear arms seen as civil rights issue, support for gun control in this community decreasing in the last 20 years, and support for gun ownership by black Americans has grown, especially since the massacre at the Charleston Emanuel AME Church when gun control was pushed as a solution by President Obama. [22] Taking this into account, it worth remembering that "gun control and race…are inextricably linked." The idea of gun ownership as a form of civil rights may result in some balking from liberal gun control supporters. One point they can dispute is the idea that guns are used in self-defense. From first glance, it may seem that firearms are not used in self-defense, with gun rights supporters countering that "in most cases shots are never fired, because simply displaying a weapon can deter a criminal." [23] The idea of guns being used for self-defense is supported by many Americans, even if evidence may not be as clear, especially when it comes to armed civilians ending acts of mass killing, with date from places such as the Violence Policy Center. However, it is worth noting that even the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, cited by gun control advocates, says that "firearms are used far more often to intimidate than in self-defense." [24] While they say that this isn't a use of self-defense, this is actually the idea entirely. It is worth quoting this Center in full:

"We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense…We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns…We found that these young people were far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use a gun in self-defense, and most of the reported self-defense gun uses were hostile interactions between armed adolescents…Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss." [25]

You could say that this disproves the idea of armed self-defense, but actually I would say that in a sense, it actually proves the idea by saying that guns can frighten and intimidate. And isn't that part of self-defense?

In 2015, the Pink Pistols filed an amicus brief in the case of Fyock v. Sunnyvale . They argues against a ban on standard magazines for common defensive arms, such as popular handguns from Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Springfield or Glocks, making clear the idea of a "relationship between gay rights and gun rights." [26] That same year, there was a powerful argument against gun control. The writer said that the idea to do something after a tragedy is nothing new, but new gun laws have consequences for Black people. He argued that any new criminal laws should be "carefully considered" saying that gun laws, like many criminal laws have "contributed to sky-high rates of incarceration for minorities," citing the story of Marissa Alexander, and saying that "strict gun laws with harsh penalties aimed at punishing violent criminals can also ensnare law-abiding people who make mistakes." [27] He goes on to say that gun control, historically has "been directly or indirectly tied to race," citing bills such as the Gun Control Act in 1968 and the Mulford Act in 1967, noting that these laws, among others in the years to come , "opened the floodgate to further federalization of criminal laws and the "tough on crime" mindset that dominated late 20th century American politics." He ends by saying that while "every gun death is a tragedy," with loss of life being horrendous, gun laws, even if well-intentioned, disproportionately burden the black community, arguing that "as calls grow for more gun laws, let's not compound a tragedy by continuing the same mistakes of the past."

From 2015 to the present, Black Lives Matter fits into this equation. They didn't focus on gun control as a priority possibly because of the "racist history of gun control" and the fact that such gun laws are "are more likely to be used against African-Americans than whites." [28]

There have been a number of developments in the fight between gun rights and gun control. The NRA, which declared that women with guns can stop abusers and rapists, called for armed guards in schools after Sandy Hook), was mum when unarmed Blacks (incl. Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, and Tamir Rice) were killed, even when a black man with a concealed permit, Philando Castile, was killed. [29] They weren't the only game in town. In Dallas, Texas, a Black man named Mark Hughes was marching with an AR-15 rifle across his chest in a solidarity rally to protest the deaths of Castile and Sterling, shooting began and he was referred as the "suspect" in the shooting on Dallas police officers by Micah Xavier Johnson, leading Black gun owners to feel, rightly, that "they're discriminated against for exercising their constitutional right to bear arms." [30] Clearly, the NRA is "a bunch of old white guys, and honestly, I don't think they have the tools and minorities in the organization to address these types of issues" as Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works, put it, even as he said that they were "afraid to make the wrong statement," which just seems like a convenient excuse. [31]

In the Black community in the United States, there have been strong calls for Black gun ownership and establishment of a Black nation within the US. [32] As General Babu Omowale, national minister of defense for the New Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club argued, "we [Black Americans] are a defenseless people and surrounded by a hostile society here in America…Blacks and African people need to be armed, We look at our history in this country…Being surrounded by white supremacy like we are, we are in the most volatile position of any race in the world." [33] Such feelings means that as Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War, a book on Newton Knight, a white Mississippi farmer, soldier and Union sympathizer who united with Confederate deserters and escaped slaves to secede from the Confederacy, puts it, "we're at a critical juncture of history in terms of race relations, reminiscent of the post-Civil War era" with independence and separatism viewed as the only recourse. Christian Davenport, author of How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa , adds that "it is fairly easily for African-Americans to form a Black nation within the United States" including organizations like the Nation of Islam occupying "decent size areas in American cities." [34] Apart from this, other groups have been formed. In February 2015, Philip Smith started a group, the National African American Gun Association (NAAG), for "law-abiding, license-carrying gun owners who happen to be African-American" which had grown to over 11,000 members in all 50 states, a sign of more interest by Black Americans in gun ownership, especially from Black women. [35] This has also manifested itself on protests by armed members of the New Black Panther Party (with questionable beliefs) and the Huey P. Newton gun club against the anti-Muslim hate group named the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR), with the horrid group declaring that, in typical fashion, "we cannot stand by while all these different anti-American, Arab radical Islamists team up with Nation of Islam/Black Panthers and White anti-American anarchist groups, joining together in the goal of destroying our country and killing innocent people to gain dominance through fear! We will be going in full gear for self defense only. This is a full gear situation." [36]

Since Trump's election, there have been a rise in memberships in gun clubs and gun ownership because they are worried about their safety, especially threatened by white racists, bigots, and neo-Nazis emboldened by the Trumpster. This includes more members in the Liberal Gun Club, which will be described later, Black Guns Matter, and the NAAG among "non-traditional" people such as self-described liberals, non-binary folks, Black Americans, and Latino Americans. [37] This included people, like Yolanda Scott, who said "I'm not the type of person who is afraid of my own shadow. I'm going to protect myself, whatever that means."

In 2016, there were a number of other developments. After the shooting at the Orlando LGBTQ nightclub, Democrats in the US Senate pushed forward a "gun control" measure to demonize Muslims by pushing to exclude those in on "watchlist" that the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center maintains. [38] Bursting to the forefront was the Pink Pistols, a decentralized "LGBT self-defense" group founded in 2000, headed by a disabled woman in Philadelphia named Gwendolyn Patton, with 45 chapters nationwide and 1,500 to 25,000 members, declaring "armed queers don't get bashed." [39] The group also files court cases on their behalf. They describe themselves as people dedicated "to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community…We change the public perception of the sexual minorities, such that those who have in the past perceived them as safe targets" and sometimes work with the NRA on certain cases, but not always. [40] At the present, there is another gun group, called the Liberal Gun Club. This group aims to "provide a voice for gun-owning liberals and moderates in the national conversation on gun rights, gun legislation, firearms safety, and shooting sports." [41] They also describe themselves as an "education and outreach non-profit" Beyond this, they declare they provide a place for gun owners who do not agree with "right-wing rhetoric surrounding firearm ownership" a voice. [42] With a range of opinions, the long-time contributors and annual meeting attendees (not all members), who they call "elders," believe in stronger mental healthcare, addressing homeless and unemployment, along with poverty, enforcement of existing laws instead of new laws such as the Assault Weapons Ban, uniformity in permits for guns if they are the law of the land, licenses for carrying a concealed weapon. [43]

There are a number of aspects worth keeping in mind. For one, at the present, as Democrats push forward gun control measures, including a number of Black politicians, White politicians oppose the measures, along with the NRA, which wants gun use to be deregulated without a doubt, and "conservative entertainment complex." [44] Perhaps those who call for Communist Gun Clubs to "learn basic skills of using weapons and armed self-defense, could become a basis for future workers militias that will fight all forms of reactionaries," recognizing that the principle of self-defense is universal, that views of guns are racialized, and that "opposition movements [to bigots] cannot function without simultaneously building communities." [45] Once we realize that, we should not reject those in the heartland of the United States who may oppose fracking but also strongly believe in their right to have firearms, with " liberals " possibly a section of the citizenry which is "less well informed than it believes it is, more driven by emotion and prejudice than it realizes," leading it to harboring "dangerous biases," as shown in the recent presidential election. [46]

Where we Stand Now

With the beginning of Trump's presidency, a grueling four years (or horrifyingly eight) is ahead. While there are some who say that gun control laws are classist, some say that gun control efforts are not racist, others who demand the removal of all gun laws, there is no need to delve in such areas [47] There is no doubt that there are people in the United States who feel that guns make them safe, whether they are part of the largely White NRA or not. [48] As it stands now in the US, gun laws will contribute to the white supremacist order. [49] More specifically, such laws are related to the fact that class rule in all states and in the US at large, reply on "bodies of armed men," such as police, prisons, a standing army, and other "instruments of coercion" to maintain order, manifesting itself in the Klan disarming Blacks, the "stop and frisk" laws in New York City, and creating "ore reasons for police to suspect people of crimes," bringing with it more justifications for a militarized police force. [50] Already, over 7 million Americans are subject to a form of correctional control, with gun control efforts as a major factor, coupled with Supreme Court decisions that authorized exceptions to the Fourth Amendment since policing guns, with unequal and unfair enforcement, can said to be like policing drugs.

While practical measures, such as increasing funding for mental health programs should occur, we have to turn to "mutual help and self-defense" to strengthen the solidarity between all of those never meant to survive under the unjust system of capitalism. [51] Additionally, a "reasonable gun control regime" is not possible in the US currently, with the need for racial justice ignored, even as some claim that "permissive gun laws [in the US] are a manifestation of racism," and claiming that gun control are anti-racist measures, which doesn't even make sense. [52] Some who are in favor of gun control have proposed all sorts of "technological fixes." This includes support of (1) "smart guns" that can only be fired by "authorized users" and connected to cell phones perhaps; (2)"gunfire detectors" or make a school a "fortress" with lockable doors and a computer terminal at a local police department allowing police to control the school; (3) using robots to detect those who "don't belong" in an effort and ultimately having "lethal robots" to kill suspected shooters. [53] In all, each of these ideas is horrible and should not even be considered as a "solution" as they would increase police power and reinforce the problems with the (in)justice system. Others are vehemently opposed to guns, like one person who was incensed with "gun ads" on TV, the rhetoric of the NRA, and romanticizing gun efforts. [54] One piece specifically, mocking those on the "Left" who "active oppose gun control," says that it doesn't make sense that people need "guns to wage an eventual revolution and liberate themselves from the shackles of the state and corporate America," saying that such "leftist dreams" would not occur because of a "toxic gun culture….with a lethal cocktail of supercharged masculinity, racism, and provincialism" and that "disarming the Right" would do more, even saying that "guns hardly keep away the police or help communities fight back against the cops" and implying that such laws are "against patriarchy and other forms of oppression." [55] While the piece may have some good points, it misses the bigger picture. Gun control laws are not the the "only ways to reduce gun violence and save lives" and such laws don't help protect marginalized communities, arguably disarming them at most, or weakening their protection at minimum. [56]

As the Trumpster continues to sit in office with his cronies and state violence increases across the country by police, immigration enforcers, and bigots, we should listen to Lorenzo Raymond . He said that in this "historical moment," hate crimes and racist terror is growing and the "Left" needs to recognize the right of "necessary self-defense against oppressive force." Raymond goes on to say that there is a growing "black gun movement" in the US based on past history, remembers that there has been a "virgorous Black gun culture" in the South when the Black freedom movement was working to overturn segregation, and that gun control for most of the establishment isn't about peace but has to do with "an orderly and centralized capitalist empire." He adds that while guns kill 33,000 a year, alcohol (80,000 a year) and prescription drugs (120,000 a year) kill more, with more lobbying by these interests than the NRA since as the New York Times put it once, guns are a small business in the US at large. He goes on to say that gun control won't bring us to a humane society, noting that Australia has such control and their society isn't humane, while saying that the "open-carry state of Vermont" has elected imperialist "progressive" Bernie Sanders, and citing the "autonomist Kurds of Northern Syria," who are not as radical as he portrays them but are actually serving the interests of imperialism in helping to split up the Syrian Arab Republic, as examples. Raymond has more. He says that "unilateral disarmament of the American Left" is new, with Eugene Debs calling for guns after the Ludlow Massacre to protect from Rockefeller's assassins (and goons), armed miners in Harlan Country in the 193os, and armed protection by urban labor unions. He ends by saying that armed resistance by the Right-wing is likely in the coming year, such as by right-wing militias and white terrorists, that there is a need to recognize the right to bear arms like conservatives, joining groups like the Liberal Gun Club and Phoenix John Brown Gun Club, since it is the only hope of making the country safer, defending from bigots and others by any means necessary, even as the "right-wing's fetishization of brute force" should be refuted most definitely.

While Raymond is right, he is only putting forward part of the puzzle. A month ago, in an article where I attempted to predict the likely agenda of Trump's administration, I declared at the following:

"…Considering that US society is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted, it is criminal and irresponsible to fight for gun control. Anyone who is a person of color, whether female, transgender, bisexual, homosexual, intersex, or is otherwise considered a "minority" in current society, should have the right to defend themselves with arms as necessary. That right is already claimed by white, straight men, so why can't others in society arm themselves to fight off bigots? You can't fight a revolution with flowers and sayings, but political power, as Mao Zedong put it, "grows out of the barrel of a gun." Gun control, if decided as necessary, should happen after a socialist revolution, not before it."

Now, in saying this, I am simply saying that any "minority" should have the right to self-defense by arms as necessary. Also, in saying that revolution can't be fought with "flowers and sayings" but that political power grows out of a gun barrel, I was trying to say that there should be a diversity of tactics. When I pointed out that gun control should happen after a socialist revolution, not before, I was arguing out that such self-defense cannot occur as effectively with gun control measures in place. Also, I was trying to say that the focus on gun control should be removed from the equation, with other approaches instead, which are more effective.

Guns have been seen as necessary by those advocating for socialist revolution. Karl Marx, in his 1850 Address to the Communist League, declared that

"…it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, guns, and ammunition must be carried out at once; we must prevent the revival of the old bourgeois militia, which has always been directed against the workers. Where the latter measure cannot be carried out, the workers must try to organize themselves into an independent guard, with their own chiefs and general staff…under no pretext must they give up their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must be forcibly resisted." [57]

Marx was not the only one to make such a declaration. Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the Great October Socialist Revolution , supported "special bodies of armed men" as part of a socialist revolution and believed that armed people can make communism a possibility. [58]

He even went as far as saying, in earlier years that workers should be immediately armed and said something that should make liberals tremble:

"…only an armed people can be a real stronghold of national freedom. And the sooner the proletariat succeeds in arming itself, and the longer it maintain its position of striker and revolutionary, the sooner the soldiers will at last begun to understand what they are doing, they will go over to the side of the people against the monsters, against the tyrants, against the murderers of defenceless workers and of their wives and children" [59]

There is no doubt that guns can be a tool to allow socialist revolution to succeed. Why should the "Left" focus on limiting such a tool? Sure, guns can be used for malevolent ends and have often been used in such a way as gun violence on the streets of cities across the US, in the slums and ghettos of the oppressed, demonstrates. However, they can also be used to allow socialist revolution to succeed in countries such as China (1949), Russia (1917), Cuba (1959), and the DPRK (1948-1950), among many more.

Finding the way forward requires looking at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. I am aware that the document in its entirety is classist and bourgeois in character. However, I think it is worth reprinting here:

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Apart from the fact that this Amendment reads like an unfinished sentence, one can still have an interpretation. I think it is fair to say that the amendment says that militia units in states should be well-regulated for the purposes of securing the State from "undesirables" (whoever the elites and society think they are) but also declares that "the people" which means the whole population of the US, over 324 million people, have the right to "keep and bear Arms," a right which shouldn't be infringed.

Now, while the Second Amendment is mainly said to be about gun rights, I would argue that is too narrow. The word "arm," which has been associated with weapons since its origin in Indo-European languages is defined by "any instrument used in fighting" or a "weapon," with a weapon defined as either an organ used for defense or an "instrument of any kind used to injure or kill, as in fighting or hunting" as noted by Webster's New World College Dictionary and numerous thesauruses. This means that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" applies to ALL weapons, not just guns. Hence, people, as noted by Akinyele Omowale Umoja in We Will Shoot Back, on pages 7 and 8, have the right to defend themselves with "fists, feet, stones, bricks, blades, and gasoline firebombs," along with guns of course.

Keeping this in mind, it worth defining a number of terms. Umoja, in We Will Shoot Back, on page 7, defines armed resistance was the "individual and collective use of force for protection, protest, or other goals of insurgent political action and in defense of human rights," while also including armed struggle, armed vigilance, guerilla warfare, spontaneous rebellion, retaliatory violence, and armed self-defense. He also defines armed defense, on the same page, as the "protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." Adding to this, Black's Law Dictionary (Third Pocket Edition), defines force (which they break down into eight types), on page 294, as "power, violence, or pressure directed against a person or thing," meaning that one does not have to kill or maim someone to apply force. These definitions are suitable for describing tactics used in the current political climate of the United States.

As we watch the Trump Administration from our TVs, computer screens, phones, or read it in the papers, we must recognize the need for resistance and act on such feelings. Still, we cannot be roped into the bourgeois milquetoast resistance by the Democratic Party and their lackeys and instead engage in solidarity, at minimum, with those under attack by the capitalist system within the US and across the world as a whole. It is not worth "waiting" for revolution. Rather, it is best to act in the present against the threats that face this planet and its people, even when one should do so without illusion, whatever form that takes offline or online.

This was originally published one the author's personal blog.

Notes

[1] LeftistCritic, " Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia ," Soviet History, Vol. 1, no. 1, p. 6.

[2] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016.

[3] Malik Miah, "African-American Self-Defense," Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[4] Ibid; Joe Catron, " Gun control and bigotry ," Worker's World, ; David Babat, " The discriminatory history of gun control ," Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017.

[5] David B. Kopel, "The Klan's Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South," Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, "Gun Control is "racist"?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017. The latter piece Ends up advocating for gun control.

[6] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). He goes on to talk about Nat Turner's rebellion, the Colfax Massacre, and numerous other instances to disprove the gun control is racist idea.

[7] Newsmax, "Top Firearms Group: Gun Control Has Roots in Racism," February 25, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[8] Bill Blum, "There's Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore," Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[9] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Logan Marie Glitterbomb , "Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control," Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only "Part 1." They also note the Sylvia Rivera Gun Club for Self-Defense as an example but this group could not be found despite internet searchings. It is possible the group exists but may be a small group with little publicity or its name has changed from the past.

[14] Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Gun Control," The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.

[15] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[16] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV).

[17] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[18] Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law , Vol. 1 (ed. Gregg Lee Carter, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 9; John Massaro, No Guarantee of a Gun: How and Why the Second Amendment Means Exactly What It Says (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009), 652; Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 93; Deborah Homsher, Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America: Politics of Firearms in America (Expanded Edition, New York: Routledge, 2015), 292; Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 19, 197; Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 45; Philip Wolny, Gun Rights: Interpreting the Constitution (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2015), 26.

[19] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.

[20] Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, "Black gun clubs and the right to bear arms," Washington Post, February 19, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[21] Rob Los Ricos, " The US police state is out of control - is armed self-defense a necessary option? ," rob's revolting, November 15, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Justin King, " When Should We Start Forcibly Resisting Police Tyranny? ," September 19, 2014, TheAntiMedia; accessed January 16, 2017.

[22] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[23] The Week Staff, "The truth about guns and self-defense," November 1, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[24] Michael McLaughlin, "Using Guns In Self-Defense Is Rare, Study Finds," Huffington Post, June 17, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[25] Harvard Injury Control Research Center, " Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[26] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[27] Jonathan Banks, "Gun Control Will Not Save America from Racism,"Vice, June 22, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017. I know its horrid Vice, but so what.

[28] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[29] Claire Landsbaum, "NRA Ad Claims 'Real Women's Empowerment' Is Owning a Gun," New York Magazine, July 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Max Plenke, "When Black Men Are Shot and Killed, the NRA Is Silent," Mic, July 7, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[30] Tessa Stuart, "Black Gun Owners Speak Out About Facing a Racist Double Standard," Rolling Stone, July 14, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, "Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias," Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[31] Hannah Allam, "For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue," McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, "Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias," Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[32] David Love, "Is it Time for Black People to Reconsider a Black Nation Within a Nation and Armed Self-Defense?," Atlanta Black Star, July 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Hannah Allam, "For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue," McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[36] RT (Russia Today), "New Black Panthers in armed showdown with anti-Muslim militia in Texas," April 6, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[37] Charmaine Lomabao, "Liberal Gun Club Experiences Increasing Membership Since Trump Victory," Newsline, December 27, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Shantella Y. Sherman, "Black Gun Purchases Reportedly Skyrocket Since Trump Election," Afro, January 4, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; The Grio, "Gun sales to blacks, minorities surge after Trump win," Aol News, November 28, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; , "Firearm sales rise among minorities," WBCD (NBC Affiliate), December 28, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Ben Popken, "Trump's Victory Has Fearful Minorities Buying Up Guns," NBC News, November 27, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Teryn Payne, "Gun Sales Among Blacks See Increase," Ebony magazine, November 29, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017. Reprinted from Jet magazine; Brian Wheeler, "Why US liberals are now buying guns too," BBC News, December 20, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Joe Schoenmann, "Fearing Trump Supporters, Now Liberals Are Buying Guns," KNPR, January 10, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Teresa Walsh, "Now it's the liberals who are arming up," McClatchy DC, December 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Brandon Ellington Patterson, "African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness," Mother Jones, July 12, 2016; Brandon Ellington Patterson, "African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness," Mother Jones, July 12, 2016.

[38] Minnie Bruce Pratt, " Gun control or self-defense? ," Worker's World, Joe Catron, " Gun control and bigotry ," Worker's World,

[39] John Burnett, "LGBT Self-Defense Site 'Pink Pistols' Gains Followers After Orlando Massacre," NPR, June 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Julia Ioffe, "The Group that Wants to Arm Gay America," Politico, June 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[40] Pink Pistols, " About the Pink Pistols ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[41] The Liberal Gun Club, " Who We Are," accessed January 16, 2017.

[42] The Liberal Gun Club, " What We Do," accessed January 16, 2017.

[43] The Liberal Gun Club, " Talking Points Regarding Regulation ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[44] Adam Winkler, "Is Gun Control Racist?," The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Niger Innis, "The Long, Racist History of Gun Control," The Blaze, May 2, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Edward Wyckoff Williams, "Fear of a Black Gun Owner," The Root, January 23, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[45] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Nicholas Johnson, "Negroes and the Gun: The early NAACP championed armed self-defense," Washington Post, January 30, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, "African-American Self-Defense," Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Alexander Reid Ross, " "Death to the Klan" and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US ," It's Going Down, July 26, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[46] Barbara Nimiri Aziz, " Profile of a Progressive Gun Enthusiast ," CounterPunch, Accessed January 16, 2017.

[47] David Babat, " The discriminatory history of gun control ," Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Gun Control," The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.

[48] Ehab Zahriyeh, "For some blacks, gun control raises echoes of segregated past," Al Jazeera America, September 1, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, "There's Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore," Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Stephen A. Nuňo, "Gun control is people control, with racist implications," NBC Latino, July 24, 2012; accessed January 16, 2017.

[49] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016.

[50] Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Minnie Bruce Pratt, " Gun control or self-defense? ," Worker's World,

[51] Ibid.

[52] Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Gary Gutting, "Guns and Racism," The New York Times, December 28, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[53] William Brennan, "Bulletproofing," The Atlantic, January/February 2017.

[54] Bruce Mastron, " My Latest Reason to Boycott the NFL: Guns ," CounterPunch, January 16, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Ken Levy, " If You Don't Support Gun Control, Then You Don't Support the Police ," CounterPunch, July 16, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[55] Andrew Culp and Darwin BondGraham, " Left Gun Nuts ," CounterPunch, May 29, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017.

[56] Logan Marie Glitterbomb , "Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control," Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only "Part 1."

[57] Karl Marx, "Address to the Communist League," The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 67.

[58] V.I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution" (1918), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 572, 591.

[59] V.I. Lenin, "The revolution in 1905: The beginning of the revolution in 1905" (January 25, 1905), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 508-509.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed Against Trump: Communist Education in the Emerging Mass Movement

By Derek R. Ford

Education is a central component of revolutionary activity, especially during non-revolutionary times, and especially for cadre in a Leninist Party. In fact, Lenin's seminal work on organization and leadership, What is to be Done? touches on many educational issues, including consciousness and theory.

As a polemic against economism - which held that the working class develops its own revolutionary consciousness spontaneously as a result of daily struggles with the bosses - Lenin argued that spontaneity was only consciousness "in an embryonic form," and that something more was needed. Spontaneity is necessary but is ultimately limited to "what is 'at the present time'" (p. 67). In other words, spontaneity by itself isn't able to look beyond isolated daily struggles and forward to a new society. Lenin called the spontaneously generated mindset "trade union consciousness."

This analysis is what led Lenin to state that "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary practice" (p. 69). By this he meant that, without a theory capable of connecting individual struggles and issues to the totality of the social and economic system, struggles would be limited to reforms within the existing system. Revolutionary theory is developed not by intellectuals holed up in university classrooms, but through the communist party, which is composed of workers who become "socialist theoreticians" (p. 82f1). In the party, he wrote, "all distinctions as between workers and intellectuals… must be obliterated" (p. 137).

Lenin believed that workers were capable of more than trade union consciousness. He actually derided those who insisted on appealing to the "average worker:" "You gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the 'average worker,' as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing labor politics and labor organization" (p. 153). He wrote that organizers had actually held workers "back by our silly speeches about what 'can be understood' by the masses of the workers" (p. 156).

Pedagogy of the oppressed

The question of pedagogy comes into the picture here. Pedagogy names the process by which we enter into educational engagements with others. It's a question that communists in the U.S. have to take seriously, especially at this moment, when a new truly mass movement is brewing. Of course, it is important not to dismiss those who are either new to the struggle or who are limited by liberalism or "trade union consciousness," but we need to think beyond our attitude and toward our pedagogy.

Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be helpful in this regard. Freire was a revolutionary Brazilian educator who was jailed and exiled from his homeland in 1964 for his activities as a teacher. Like any good revolutionary book, it is a reflection of actual experience. In Freire's case, the book is a reflection of his work in literacy campaigns, where he taught poor peasants how to read and write and how to, as he put it, "name the world."

Pedagogy of the Oppressed has been targeted by the right wing in the U.S. (it is currently banned from public schools in Arizona). It addresses the educational components of revolutionary movements and, as such, it is littered with references to Marx, Lenin, Guevara, and others. In fact, Freire uses Castro and the Cuban revolution as an example of the pedagogy he advocates.

Specifically, the book is concerned with how the revolutionary leadership pushes the struggle forward, or how it teaches the mass movement. Interestingly, the book is mostly referenced in academia, and its tight connections to revolutionary leadership are rarely, if ever, mentioned.

The problem: Banking pedagogy

The pedagogy of the oppressed has two stages. During the first stage, "the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through praxis commit themselves to its transformation." During the second stage, which is after the world of oppression has been transformed, "this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation" (p. 54).

The first stage of Freire's pedagogy addresses how the oppressed view and relate to the world. It begins by acknowledging that the oppressed possess both an oppressed consciousness and an oppressor consciousness. The oppressor consciousness is the enemy that needs to be liquidated:

The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time-everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal. (58)

This is what capitalism does: it takes everything and makes it into private property, including our ability to labor. This has a profound impact on the world, even instilling the oppressor consciousness in the oppressed. Thus, we have to distinguish an oppressor consciousness from the oppressed person, and we have to transform that consciousness.

The way that we engage in that transformation is absolutely crucial, and this is where the question of pedagogy comes into play. The traditional form of pedagogy Freire calls "banking pedagogy." In banking pedagogy, the teacher is the one who possesses knowledge and the students are empty containers in which the teacher must deposit knowledge. The more the teacher fills the receptacle, the better teacher she is. The content remains abstract to the student, disconnected from the world, and external to the student's life.

Banking pedagogy-which is what most of us in the U.S. have experienced in public schools-assumes that the oppressed are ignorant and naïve. Further, it treats the oppressed as objects in the same way that capitalism does.

Importantly, banking pedagogy can happen regardless of the political nature of the content. Even communists and other revolutionaries can engage in banking pedagogy and objectify the people. This is what happens when alleged revolutionary groups talk down to the people, telling them they must read their newspapers for the correct analysis, deriding them when they don't chant their slogans or follow their directions. This is an elite form of education wherein some enlightened individuals or sects feel that they, and only they, are equipped to "name the world." Freire calls this "manipulation" and "cultural invasion," and it can happen regardless of our attitude and our politics.

Thus, it is not enough that we be friendly to newcomers and that we welcome them to the struggle. We have to can engage them in an authentic educational relationship.

The solution: Dialogic pedagogy

The correct educational method for revolutionaries is dialogue, which means something very specific. To truly engage in dialogue means becoming partners with the people. In this situation, "the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow" (80).

The task of revolutionaries is to engage with our class and our people in true, authentic dialogue, reflection, and action. If we have dialogue and reflection without action, then we are little more than armchair revolutionaries. On the other hand, if we have only action without dialogue and reflection, we have mere activism.

Revolutionary organizers, therefore, are defined not just by the revolutionary ideals they hold or actions they take, but by their humility, patience, and willingness to engage with all exploited and oppressed people. It is not possible for us to "implant" the conviction to fight and struggle in others. That must be the result of their own " conscientização," or coming-to-critical-consciousness.

This is a delicate and contingent process that can't be scripted in advance. Still, there are a few general components to it.

First, we have to truly get to know our people, their problems and their aspirations. This means that we have to actually learn from people, acknowledging that, even if this is their first demonstration, or even if they voted for a democrat in the last election, they might actually have something to teach us. The more experiences we learn from the people the richer our theories are and the more connection they can have to the daily realities of workers and oppressed people today. Our class is bursting with creative and intellectual powers that capitalist society doesn't allow us to express or develop. The revolutionary party is stronger the more it cultivates these powers.

Second, we have to provide opportunities for others to understand their problems in a deeper and wider context, and to push their aspirations forward. Freire gives a concrete example of this:

…if at a given historical moment the basic aspiration of the people goes no further than a demand for salary increases, the leaders can commit one of two errors. They can limit their action to stimulating this one demand or they can overrule this popular aspiration and substitute something more far-reaching-but something which has not yet come to the forefront of the people's attention… The solution lies in synthesis: the leaders must on the one hand identify with the people's demand for higher salaries, while on the other they must pose the meaning of that very demand as a problem. By doing this, the leaders pose as a problem a real, concrete, historical situation of which the salary demand is one dimension. It will thereby become clear that salary demands alone cannot comprise a definitive solution. (183)

Through this process, both the people and the revolutionary leadership act together and collectively name the world. Genuine knowledge is produced and authentic action is taken, and real conviction for the struggle is strengthened.

Slogans and newspapers are crucial tools in the revolutionary struggle, but not because they instill the truth in the people. Rather, they are tools that-in addition to crystallizing demands and analysis-initiate a dialogue with others. We engage in this dialogue and action with hope and conviction, because ruling powers are overthrown, and because the masses do make history.

Originally published at Liberation School .

References

- Paulo Freire. (1970/2011). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.
- V.I. Lenin. (1902/1987). What is to be done? In H.M. Christman (Ed.), Essential works of Lenin. New York: Dover Publications.

Lies and Legacy: A Conversation on Fidel Castro

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Patxi Ariet, the son of Cuban immigrants to the US who supported Fidel Castro, about Castro, Cuba, the US media coverage of Cuba/Castro, and Cuba's future.

What are your thoughts on Castro's death and the media's reaction?

The death of Fidel Castro marks the end of an era in the history of Cuba. To me it marks the end of the 20th century and the Cold War era and moves Cuba into the 21st century and makes room for the youth of Cuba to continue the revolution in the spirit of Fidel Castro. As to the media coverage, I feel that it was highly choreographed as to what was said. At first Fidel was referred to as the "Leader of the Cuban people," when the news first broke about his death. As the day went on, however, he went from leader to Dictator.

We saw the political line of the American government come out through all media sources in the United States. Whether this was print or broadcast, the line was the same. There was also very little attention to given to Cubans in the island. The emphasis was on the Cuban exiles and their story out of Miami. Showing people living in Key Biscayne, which is one of the most exclusive and wealthiest parts of Miami, to get their take on the death of Fidel and of course to through some punches at his legacy. This was to be expected though, every emperor rejoices in the death of their enemy.

Tell us about your life and growing up as a Cuban whose parents supported the revolution? Why did your parents support the revolution?

To say the least, I did not fit in with the other children that came from staunch Anti-Castro, Republican homes. I would listen to the stories they have heard from their parents and I would tell mine. My family supported the revolution because they remembered and were not blind to the abuses of the Batista government. They saw the need for a total change in Cuba and its relationship with the United States. I would hear about how Havana was controlled by the Mafia and American corporate interests. They would tell me the stories about the "Saca Uñas," the Nail Pullers.

These were special secret police that would kidnap, interrogate, imprison, even kill Anti-Batista Cubans, or just those that did not do what the secret police told them to do. My own great grandfather who was Captain of the Police force in Havana was forced to resign his post when he refused to assassinate people for the government. These were stories that many Cubans in Miami would never talk about or allow their children to hear. Along with the corruption my family remembered the poverty and injustice outside of Havana.

How people could just be thrown off their land by the whim of the foreign land lords. My own grandfather used to deliver medicine for free and provide medical care for free in these areas because they did not have any money for food much less healthcare. This is why the revolution was necessary in their eyes.

How have people received your support for Castro? Have you been shunned by members of the Cuban community?

Depends on who I am talking to. An American will sit with me and discuss the Cuban missile crisis and Bay of Pigs, of course from the American perspective. These conversations usually end with, "Huh, I didn't know that", from the person I'm speaking to. As far as the Cuban community, the reaction is a bit different. I never try to disrespect or put down the experiences of those Cubans that I'm speaking to that lived through the early days of the revolution. I know that any revolution is a difficult thing to live through, change is always a painful process and I try to sympathize with what they went through. For the most part I am either kicked out of where I am by the Anti-Castro supporter, or I am drawn into a long conversation about the horrors of Fidel and then kicked out.

There is a type of shunning that comes with being a Pro-Castro Cuban in Miami. People automatically know your name, recognize your face. Create elaborate stories about you, about how you are a spy for the Cuban government, how you must have killed 100 political dissidents to get to where you are. This is the basis of the Anti-Castro propaganda, lies and exaggerations. I remember once I was at a schoolmate's house doing a project for school.

My parents struggled to send me to La Salle high school in Miami, one of the two obligatory schools Cuban exile children chose from to attend. I was doing a project at the house of a class mate whose mother was Anti-Castro, gun-ho republican. She was speaking to me about President George W. Bush's policy towards Cuba. She went on and on, when she finished all I said was, "The embargo is the reason for the shape Cuba is in, but Fidel and the revolution has still managed to help the people of Cuba." I was immediately told to leave. This is normal and you learn to keep your mouth shut in certain areas. I am much more well-received in American areas

There are some who would argue mistakes were made by Castro, Talk about those mistakes, but also how the media seems to ignore anything positive Castro has done.

Every government makes mistakes. To err is human. Unfortunately, when the leader of a country makes mistakes, some people suffer from it and it becomes the focal point of propaganda. In my humble opinion I feel Fidel could have done more in the way of "Socializing" industry and not just Nationalizing them. Industry should have been for the benefit of every Cuban and controlled by the workers of those industries. I see this as a major flaw to an exact Socialist state. This mistake, however, I do not even hold to much against Castro. I was never in his position and I trust he did what he thought was best to maintain the revolution in Cuba and make sure it was in the best interest of the Cuban people in the long run. I also know that there is scarcity due to the embargo so this could also be a reason to nationalize all industry, to make sure that enough is produced and distributed among the people.

However, the media looks at these "flaws" as evidence of an Evil dictator that refuses to adequately feed his people. Of course, they don't mention the free healthcare and education systems across the islands, nor how Cuba send doctors all over the world to help those in need that cannot afford medical care. They don't mention how every Cuban has a job, can read and write, has housing.

You never hear about the low infant mortality rate that is even lower than in the US. You don't hear the fact that no one starves to death on the Island. There is scarcity, yes, but everyone eats and no one is starving to death. The western media ignores these facts and make Cuba look like a prison.

They distort why some people are in jail, they distort the numbers of people in jail, yet fail to mention that the US has the highest prison population in the world! How the prison system in the US is used as a modern day slave system to contract inmates, mostly of color, out to companies to do jobs for little or no pay. This is never brought up, yet the few small incidences in Cuba are blown out of proportion to be used as propaganda. It is disgusting.

What would you say is the impact Castro has had over the years and the impact he is still having?

Over the years Castro has impacted millions of lives. To begin with, in Cuba has impacted every single Cuban those who love him and those who hate him see this man as the one that changed their lives. Around the world he has impacted many, many others over the years. From his stance against the Belgians in the Congo during their fight for independence. Him sending troops to Angola to defeat the apartheid soldiers sent in from South Africa, which were supported by the US.

To the peoples of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador who looked to Fidel Castro as well as Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos as an inspiration to overthrow those in their countries that wanted to use them as slaved to continue making money and who have repeatedly sold them out to the United States so they can further their own economic interests. Even after his death he is impacting and will continue to impact millions of people daily.

He has become the symbol of revolution, the symbol of fighting for what you believe in and fighting for the right of your country and your people to be free. He stood up to the biggest empire this world has ever known and lived to be an old man. That is inspiring. His actions will never be forgotten and it is because of his action that his words and his legacy will be immortal. History has truly absolved him.

If possible, have you been in contact with anyone in Cuba who can speak to how the Cuban people are feeling?

I have a few friends of mine that are from Cuba and travel to Cuba quite frequently. None, unfortunately, that have visited the island after the death of Fidel. I can speak to how he was spoken about while he was alive. I have heard some say he was like a grandfather. Others who criticized him for not giving in to the Americans so they can have more things. Overall though the people of Cuba do not regret the revolution nor do they wish for the state to be overthrown.

As any patriotic citizen of their country, they feel that Cuba can be better, and it is exactly that feeling that Fidel Castro inspired in people and that is why Cuba will be better. Notice that those that have criticized Fidel were not harassed, nor put into prison. They criticized him openly and without fear of the state.

What do you think the future hold for Cuba, especially with regards to its relations with the US?

I think Cuba will continue to grow and move towards Socialism. With the next generation preparing to take the helm of the country I am excited to see what happens. When it comes to relations with the US. I am afraid that under President Donald Trump, the doors of diplomacy will be closed once again and the Cold War with Cuba will continue. I do not see Cuba giving in to the demands of a demagogue like Trump. I feel optimistic, however, that this will not limit Cuba's interaction with the international community and that Cuba will continue to grow economically in the world despite the attempts of Mr. Trump to strangle it.

Total Crisis in Egypt: A Marxist Analysis

By Hamid Alizadeh

Sisi came to power in Egypt after millions of people took to the streets to protest over declining living standards and the rising instability and increasingly authoritarian nature of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohamed Morsi. He came to power promising political stability and the raising of living standards. But far from solving anything, Egypt under Sisi has entered its deepest crisis in decades.

Scratches on the Surface

Sisi's facade as the strong and intelligent military commander has been shattered time and time again as he has hopelessly failed to tackle even the most simple of problems. His violent crackdowns on protests to quash the revolutionary mood has only managed to embitter the masses even more. The random torture, arrest and disappearance of thousands of young people on the pretext of fighting the Muslim Brotherhood has in fact partially served to give a new lease of life to the Islamist organisation.

In the Sinai Peninsula a few hundred Islamists connected to ISIS and with next to no popular support, have been spreading terror and killing scores of civilians and armed personnel. The mighty Egyptian army has pathetically failed to do anything about it. In fact the army is killing more civilians than terrorists with its indiscriminate bombing. This is a completely counterproductive tactic which has only lead to more anger towards the army.

Together, with the rise of ISIS and Islamic fundamentalist groups in Libya, this insurgency is becoming a seriously destabilising factor in Egypt. The illusion that a powerful army could guarantee the safety of the people and act as a stabilising force has been totally undermined and it is clear that the generals are now worried about the morale within the army itself.

Two Left Feet

With regards to foreign policy Sisi has not been any more lucky. The relationship with its long-time US ally had been weakened due to Barack Obama's heavy criticism over Sisi coming to power. However, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states filled in the vacuum left by the US by stepping in with $31 billion worth of aid in the past 3 years. This was the key to initially stabilising the Sisi regime. When it came to paying back the Saudis, however, Sisi could not offer much. First he had to hastily draw back from early promises of support for the kingdom over their war in Yemen. Besides regarding the Houthis as a good buffer against Al-Qaeda and other Islamic Fundamentalist organisations, the Egyptian ruling elite knew that the unwinnable conflict in Yemen - where Egypt has already lost one costly war in modern times - would only lead to further instability. The Egyptian masses have no appetite to send their children to fight and die on behalf of the hated Saudi monarchy.

Then, in April, during a visit by Saudi King Salman, Sisi made the surprise announcement of handing over the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia. This humiliating act of submission to the Al-Saud family caused huge uproar throughout Egypt. Small protests mushroomed all over the country leading to hundreds of arrests and a war of words began between Egyptian and Saudi journalists and TV presenters. In the end, sensing rising tensions, the ruling class had to retreat and a court reversed the decision. Needless to say King Salman was not pleased. The authority of the regime suffered a blow by this affair which also revealed serious fissures within the ruling class.

The Saudi-Egyptian crisis has since then further escalated. The final straw came over the summer as Egypt began a process of rapprochement with Russia . Seeing the relative decline in the role of the US in the region and the rise of Russia, the Sisi regime wants to use the renewed US-Russian conflict to its advantage by using Russia as a means of getting more concessions from the US. Hence the Egyptian navy held its first naval exercise ever with the Russian navy in September followed by other exercises in October. The Egyptian regime has also made several arms purchases from Russia as well as having discussed a possible joint strategy in Libya. All of this was topped by Egypt voting with Russia and against the Saudi/French proposals in the October UN security council meeting which discussed the situation in Aleppo, Syria.

As explained above, the war in Syria and the rise of ISIS and Islamic fundamentalist groups pose a concrete threat to stability in Egypt and the generals are eager to end the crisis as soon as possible. This puts them at odds with a Saudi regime which backs several Islamist proxies in Syria, one of which is ISIS itself. For the Saudis, defeat in Syria poses a serious threat to the future of the kingdom itself. The Saudis demand full loyalty as a minimum return for their financial aid but for Sisi the requests of the al-Saud's could have explosive domestic consequences. The Egyptian "betrayal" at the UN led Saudi Arabia, suddenly and without giving an official reason, to stop the vital supply of refined oil - a part of a $23 billion aid package - to Egypt in October.

A Perfect Storm

The economic shockwave coming from the sudden Saudi aid cut will have a devastating effect on the crisis-ridden Egyptian economy. This in turn will significantly deepen the general crisis of the regime. The decline in the world economy along with Egypt's political instability has driven its economy into a black hole. It was only kept floating just above the surface by the billions of Gulf dollars pouring in each year.

In 2015, investments were half ($14.5 billion) of their 2008 level ($28.5 billion). Foreign investments have collapsed from $13.5 billion to $6.5 billion in the same period. Due to the crisis, it is estimated that the state will be about $15 billion short of funds each year in the coming years. During the 2011-15 period, Egypt has seen an average yearly budget deficit of nearly 12 percent of GDP. In 2015 the public debt reached over 88 percent of GDP, and is projected to reach 94 percent this year.

The government has tried to establish many spectacular projects to find a way out of the crisis. An $8.2 billion dollar expansion of the Suez canal was supposed to double annual revenue from the canal to $13.2 billion a year, but in the context of declining world trade this is impossible. After blocking public canal revenue reports for a period, the August and September reports showed a 10% decrease (!) in canal revenue. Hence the bill for the expansion will be added to the debt of the near bankrupt state. This failure doesn't hold the government back from starting the pharaonic project of building a new Capital city outside of Cairo, the first phase of which will cost over $45 billion. Rest assured the workers and the poor of Cairo will not be the main beneficiaries of the new developments.

Declining Living Standards

The situation of the masses is deteriorating very fast. Official inflation has been floating at 15 percent this year, but will rise higher after the recent devaluation of the currency. Official unemployment levels remains around 13 percent, up from 11 percent in 2011, however just like then the real figure now is certainly higher. Just to remain at these levels, the economy must grow by 5-6 percent per year, yet since the 2011 revolution yearly growth has been just 2 percent, with the exception of 4 percent growth in 2015. Official poverty rates have also been steadily rising up to 27.8 percent in 2015 - the highest rate in 15 years and 2.5 percent higher than in 2010/2011. This year poverty is expected to grow at a far higher rate.

A new IMF "aid" package - with many strings attached - worth more than $12 billion is only worsening the conditions. The IMF is pushing for massive liberalisation and the cutting of the few benefits the Egyptian masses had. In August, electricity prices were raised by 20-40% under a five-year programme that will see power subsidies gradually eliminated. Petrol subsidies are next on the line.

A civil service "reform" will also attack the conditions of the six million people employed by the state and the 20 million who are dependent on public service employment as a source of income. Sisi was the man of the state apparatus with its armed forces of men and the army of bureaucrats, representing all those who felt robbed of their power by the revolution and who felt threatened by a Muslim Brotherhood government which wanted to take its own part of this gigantic network of patronage. It is amongst these layers that Sisi's strongest support is found and a consistent pressure to reduce its size and impose austerity will leave a serious mark on the regime. The debate about these "reforms" in parliament has revealed serious divisions within the regime. While a layer is pushing for liberalisation and attacks on living standards, another layer understands that these attacks could lead to a severe backlash. Yet within the confines of Egyptian capitalism, there is no other solution.

Already the regime has tried to sustain stability by spending vast foreign currency reserves to keep the Egyptian pound artificially high in relation to the dollar. In the context of a decline in the real economy the costs needed to keep the pound up have become even bigger, leading to an acute foreign currency crisis. By the end of October sugar started running out. While the authorities blamed mismanagement, it is clear that the sugar crisis was linked to the low dollar reserves. Sugar prices rose 100 percent. The fear of a spreading crisis led to rising prices on staple commodities while many less crucial products disappeared altogether from the shelves. This was clearly unsustainable. Pushed by the IMF the government had to let the currency float freely on the markets on 3rd November. This immediately resulted in a 50 percent devaluation of the Egyptian pound. Within hours fuel prices shot up 50 percent and other prices are expected to rise.

Anger and Desperation

A mood of anger and dissent is now present amongst the masses. In October a 30-year-old taxi driver named Ashraf Mohammed Shaheen, furious at the government and rising prices, set himself on fire in front of an army office in Alexandria. The news spread quickly on social media with hashtags (In Arabic) of #Bouazizi_Egypt, referring to the street vendor whose suicide sparked the Tunisian revolution.

A video of a Tuk Tuk driver spread like wildfire and became the topic of discussions throughout the country. In the video (Which is well worth watching in full below!) the angry driver sums up the situation very sharply:

"How [can] a state that has a parliament, security and military institutions, ministries of interior and foreign affairs, and 20 [other] ministries end up like this? You watch Egypt on television and it's like Vienna; you go out on the street and it's like Somalia. Before the presidential elections, we had enough sugar and we would export rice. What happened? The top echelon spent 25 million pounds to celebrate, while the poor cannot find a kilogram of rice (…) The government keeps saying that Egypt is witnessing a renaissance, and it collects money for valueless national projects while our education is deteriorating like never before,"

When the journalist asks him where he graduated he replies "I'm a graduate of a Tuk Tuk."

He then goes on:

"How come such large national projects are constructed while we have starving, uneducated human beings whose health is deteriorating. There are three ways for the country to develop, and they are education, health and agriculture. Is this Egypt which gave Britain loans in the past, was the second country in the world to construct railways and whose cash reserves were the biggest in the world? How could we end up like this? Chad, Sudan and Saudi Arabia were part of Egypt, and now a bunch of Gulf countries make fun of us? Those dealers have tricked people under slogans of patriotism, freedom and social justice. Their promises are as far as they could get from democracy and justice. Enough is enough."

The video was quickly removed from the webpages of Al Hayat and the media outlet even started clamping down on independently uploaded Youtube videos of the interview. In the mass media a barrage of accusations ensued against the Tuk Tuk driver, linking him with the Muslim Brotherhood. But this only enraged people even more with thousands of people coming to the man's defence. One woman uploaded a strong defiant video (See below) saying: "Oh president of the Arab Republic of Egypt, you are scared of us that much? (...) because the guy came out and said 'I want to eat and I want to drink?!'".

Another poor man from the rural Upper Egypt posted a video saying:

"This president is an employee like any other…we are tired…we have lost our breath…you want to leave peacefully leave, if not we will force you. (...) We will go on 11/11 ready to die (...) Our revolution demanded justice, freedom and bread and we've got none of it."

After years of almost uninterrupted mobilisations and struggles, the revolutionary movement has ebbed and flowed in the past two years. Tired of the lack of change and disoriented by the rise of the Sisi regime, a certain tiredness crept in. Yet the pressures mounting on the living standards are pushing the masses back onto the arena of struggle once more. In the city of Port Said thousands of people took to the streets (See video below) on 18 October to protest against the rise of rent, shouting slogans such as "house us or kill us" and "we want our rights".

The Ruling Class is Afraid

A whistleblower within the intelligence agency spoke to Middle East Eye about a serious concern amongst the ruling class of an explosive situation developing. The website writes:

"A high-ranking person within al-Mukhabarat al-Amma (General Intelligence Directorate), the country's top security service, told Middle East Eye that reports sent to the presidency late last month highlighted a sharp decrease in both the popularity of the leadership and public support for the state.

(...)

" 'An upheaval is feared in places where there is no awareness of the economic efforts the country is making and where basic services are zero,' he said. He added that dissent, in the form of small angry gatherings, could also suddenly emerge if services promised by the government abruptly ceased.

" 'Look, for example, what happened in Port Said last month or at baby formula distribution branches [in August],' he said."

"In October, thousands of Port Said residents took to the streets, condemning a sudden rise in housing costs. The previous month, dozens of families gathered in front of state-owned pharmaceutical companies to protest against a shortage of subsidised baby formula. The official suggested that these protesters were driven not by political motives but by the sudden end to benefits they had enjoyed."

As is often the case, the bourgeoisie, due to their overview on society come to similar conclusions to the Marxists - albeit from a different class angle. An explosive situation is developing amongst the masses which could burst out into a new stage of open struggle against the regime. Sisi came to power by posing as the defender of the revolution. He promised to solve the economic crisis, to bring stability and to represent the masses. But at each turn he has failed miserably. Far from that, he is now leading the most violent onslaught against living standards in modern Egyptian history. At the root of his problems is the crisis of capitalism which is in turn exacerbated by the parasitic nature of the Egyptian ruling class. With the decline of the economy any attempt to keep living standards afloat will lead to higher debt and a bigger backlash in the future. The IMF package promotes a "cold turkey" cure of getting rid of the debt by slashing subsidies and public employment. But this will only hit demand, thereby dragging the market further down and any end to the vicious debt circle further away.

The ruling class is not blind to the consequences of this. The mood of anger and desperation in the population has seriously alarmed the authorities. The Sisi regime is a counter-revolutionary regime, yet due to its weakness it could have only come to power by pretending to represent the revolutionary masses. The tiredness and relative demoralisation amongst the masses gave Sisi a bit more room to manoeuvre. Yet he has never been able to inflict a decisive defeat on the revolutionary masses. In fact Sisi's first government administration, led by Hazem Al-Beblawi, collapsed under the pressure of a strike wave involving hundreds of thousands of workers. The ruling clique are very keen to crush any mass movements which disrupt the political and economic equilibrium. Yet they have not been strong enough to take such a decisive step. In fact the base of the regime itself has been wavering.

Capitalist Egypt is in a deep crisis. The ruling class is staggering from one disaster to another. It has lost much authority, even amongst its own traditional supporters. Pushed by the attacks on their living standards the masses are being forced to take to the path of struggle again. Yet the main problem remains the lack of a revolutionary leadership to galvanise the movement and lead it to its logical conclusion: the overthrow of the capitalist system.

This was originally published at In Defence of Marxism.

Is Communism Dead, and Can Spirituality Revive It?

By Paul Tritschler

"Every cultural transformation in history has reached into the most intimate sphere of human motivation."

The devil's finest trick is to persuade you he doesn't exist. This oft-quoted phrase from Baudelaire's short story, The Generous Gambler, could well apply to the antagonistic relationship between capitalism and communism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalism assumed a position of unparalleled power, and its ideology became entrenched as common sense. No viable alternative exists. It might need to be tweaked here and there, but capitalism is now the only deal on the table.

Politicians of all stripes battle it out over problems that have capitalism as their source-financial failures, social inequalities, global warming, and military conflicts-but they seek solutions exclusively within the same system. Even many protest campaigns around these problems implicitly believe that capitalism-a system that reproduces itself through exploitation-can be civilised.

By contrast, in his 1846 treatise on The German Ideology, Karl Marx saw communism as a state of mind-more accurately, a revolution of the mind: a movement which searches for emancipation and truth. By testing the boundaries of reality and questioning common sense, communism becomes "the real movement that abolishes the present state of things."

For Marx, the revolutionary potential of communism resides in its revelatory status: not a blueprint for utopia but a way to explain capitalism's irresolvable conflicts and flawed moral position-a means of exposing Baudelaire's devil. It seeks to redefine the meaning of wealth, and to render the principle of caring as a global imperative in place of competition. In this sense, communism is capitalism's greatest enemy, but it's clear that this enemy must be approached with different tactics in a post-communist world. This is where spirituality comes in.

Rudolf Bahro , the German Left-Green philosopher, is perhaps the most interesting exponent of these new tactics. The motivation behind his attempted 'spiritualisation' of politics had its source in prison. Bahro's dissenting views, expressed in his book The Alternative in Eastern Europe, brought him an eight year prison sentence in East Germany, and the bible was the only book that happened to be available to him in his cell-a cynical move, perhaps, on the part of the Stasi.

He studied it whilst on hunger strike, and although he was never wholly converted to Christianity he saw its place in the world and embraced many of its qualities. His writings reveal an acute sensitivity to personal suffering and the recognition that human needs are spiritual as well as physical and social. True to its origins, therefore, communism for Bahro was above all a revolution of the mind-an awakening.

Bahro was freed and deported after serving a little over a year, thanks to a campaign in the West that had the support of such literary luminaries as Heinrich Boll, Gunter Grass, Graham Greene and Arthur Miller, as well as many New Left academics, including E.P. Thompson and Ralph Miliband. The Bahro who entered prison, however, was not the Bahro who was released; this new version of himself set out to save the world.

For Bahro, a peaceful eco-communist alternative to capitalism is both possible and essential, but the belief that capitalism offers a life that is desirable must first be overturned if this alternative is to flourish. Through a variety of psychological strategies subsumed under the rubric of 'retail therapy', capitalism promotes pseudo-individualistic lifestyles, drives the desires of the self-absorbed, and promises fulfillment from the menu of all-you-can-eat. Retail therapy locates meaning in life through clothes, cars, homes, holidays and furniture. As the name implies, it even offers a way of self repair.

Consumerism resembles a cult that uses paradoxical statements to transcend rational thought: 'we must spend our wages and leisure hours in pursuit of unnecessary things.' Were this meaningless cycle to stop, capitalism would evaporate, and in the process we might even find our true selves. As Bahro puts it, "Today we consume around ten times as much energy for a worker to be able to sit in front of the TV in the evening with his bottle of beer as was needed in the eighteenth century for Schiller to create his life work."

But the working class will not be the bearer of an alternative society, he concludes. In fact the traditional labour movement's response to the problems of industrial society narrows the space for building those alternatives. Employers and trade unions are traditional power blocs which together institutionalise and manage conflict, thereby stabilising the system. It is not just the bourgeois class but the industrial system itself which threatens our survival. Seen from this angle, class struggle is not the solution.

Instead, Bahro's vision is that of a post-industrial spirituality which represents values that are at variance with hedonistic tendencies, consumerism, and contemporary levels of acquisitiveness. He saw this transition as a peaceful process characterised by dissolution: we don't go in and disband something, he argued, we allow it to disintegrate by withdrawing our energy from the system. That's not to say that this is a wholly passive process: any strategy for non-violent social change that is interwoven with the transformation of consciousness still requires a nudge.

Bahro wanted to reclaim the language of transformative consciousness for an eco-socialist movement, and sought ways to summon the power of whole populations in pursuit of common goals. His focus was on a revolution of the mind-a radical renewal in keeping with Marx's German Ideology-but there is also evidence of a parallel to St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, with its emphasis on transfiguration and metanoia : a 'way of seeing' completely at odds with the political philosophy of possessive individualism and capitalist exploitation. In this revolutionary process he saw the potential for overcoming common obstacles to socialism such as the tendency towards competitiveness, selfishness, greed and fear.

Every major cultural transformation in history has reached into the most intimate sphere of human motivation, and Bahro therefore wanted movements for human development and self-realisation to combine within a political-psychological context. Moreover, he wanted to explore the possibilities for a spiritual awakening that are linked to such a movement. He saw the necessity to bring together all the amorphous groups that are concerned with emancipation and the rescue of civilisation into one coherent form-a mass social movement of cultural transformation. Crucially, this would consist of unity between the Greens and the socialists: the socialists need the Greens because survival is a precondition for them to attain their goals; and the Greens need the socialists because survival can only be ensured by dissolving the basis of monopoly competition.

Similarly, Bahro argued, Christians need socialists, because capitalism is the furthest epoch from God. The moral stand that more and more Christians are adopting on animal rights, ecological issues, the capitalist plundering of impoverished countries and the oppression of the working class is ineffective without political action. But socialists also need Christians, for some degree of religious transcendence is necessarily bound up with subjective values-something which is frequently lost in the struggle to meet the needs of the oppressed.

Bahro was not advocating that socialists convert to Christianity, but that they recognise the necessity for the re-creation of spiritual equilibrium. Socialists should be sensitive, he suggested, to the Christian precept 'Do not store up treasures on earth,' and to the fact that individuals require a basic level of security, not only in the material sense, but also in the sense of having favourable social conditions for the cultivation of their own inner development.

I was fortunate to meet and discuss these ideas with Bahro at a conference in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s, and we maintained a correspondence for some time after his return to Worms in Germany-though language difficulties rendered it short-lived. His political position revealed various hues of red and green before his life was cut short in 1997, but what remained at the heart of his philosophy was the unwavering belief that a spiritual awakening was needed to ensure the rescue of civilization. What was required, as he put it , was 'the reconstruction of God .'

Shortly before he embarked on a journey to investigate the 'alternative' community of Findhorn in the Scottish Highlands, I asked Bahro for his thoughts on the likelihood of a small country like Scotland gaining its independence and fulfilling his vision. He promptly replied that the problem is not that Scotland is too small, but that it's too big. At that time he was exploring the possibilities for 'autarkic equilibrium,' looking at what had worked in medieval forms of communalism fused with contemporary cooperative experiments and variations on the theme of syndicalism. I imagined his idea of self-sustaining communities as something akin to eco-balanced rock pools refreshed by a wider Scottish tide.

Seeing that another Scotland or another world is possible is one thing; sustaining the belief in our ability to effect that change is quite another, but that's where Bahro's ideas are so important. Faced with reversing the tide of industrialism, averting ecological catastrophe and avoiding nuclear annihilation, Bahro calls on all of us to sense and activate our own strength.

This was originally posted at Open Democracy.

Paul Tritschler is a psychology lecturer in Suffolk. Follow him on twitter @TritschlerPaul.

Gay Liberation through Socialist Revolution: A Political History of the Lavender and Red Union's Gay Communism (An Interview)

By Marquis M.

The following is an interview with Walt Senterfitt, a former member of the Lavender and Red (which was also briefly known as the Red Flag Union), in his home in Boyle Heights, LA, to see what today's revolutionaries can learn from the unique history of the Lavender and Red Union.

This interview looks at the development, history, politics, and legacy of the Lavender and Red Union, an early gay communist political organization that was based in Los Angeles from 1974 to 1977.

Regardless of the specific politics of the Lavender and Red Union (which should be seen as a product of their time and of their relationship to the rest of the mid-'70s US left), we can gain a lot from studying the experiences they made during their brief life before they decided to merge with the Spartacist League in 1977. One of the points that came up in this interview again and again was the perspective that queer people will not be able to win alone. If we want liberation, then we will need to fight together in the same struggles as all the other oppressed groups that make up the working class with us. We cannot only focus on building organizations that just address our own concerns or our own narrow community (which the Lavender and Red Union called 'sectoralism'). This lesson, and many of the other points discussed in this interview, continue to be of importance for those of us who struggle with pushing back against the liberal, reformist, and class collaborationist tendencies in our movements.

Marquis: You grew up in the south?

Walt : I grew up in the south, mostly in northern Florida in the era of de jure Jim Crow racial segregation. Being in an officially legally segregated society - schools, public facilities, neighborhoods - and my reaction against it, which was based largely on a religious impulse initially, was what initially propelled my political awakening. However, it was kind of stunted because I was a white kid in a fairly backward small Southern town without any allies or anybody much to learn from even. So I would follow things through the news, like the awakening civil rights movement of the late '50s and early '60s. When I began to try to reach out to young black people on the other side of town, I quickly got squelched rather vigorously by the town fathers coming down on my parents and threatening to fire them from their jobs if they didn't shut up their noisy and traitorous kid. So we worked out a compromise that I would cool it for six months in exchange for leaving home early and going to college in the north. Which I thought would be a decisive act of liberation and freedom because I would get away from a small Southern town.

And go to someplace where everything was enlightened....

Where everything was enlightened, non-racist, and kind! Well of course that also led to my political awakening at the next stage. Oh! It's not just the south! Racism is not simply a southern problem. It just has a different accent up here, and different forms. But my political activity was still within the confines largely of liberalism, but inspired by the Southern black civil rights movement and I was in fact organizing fellow university students from the north to support it, and to travel down south and participate in voter registration, and Freedom Summer, and liberation schools and things like that. And then increasingly also turning to community organizing in poor communities in northern cities. I dropped out of university without finishing. Partly over conflict over feeling impulses towards being gay but not being able to accept that yet, or not having a context, or not knowing anybody else.

You weren't in contact with any gay community?

No. Now remember this period was pre-Stonewall, we're talking early-to-middle '60s. I worked with SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and a group called the Northern Student Movement in Philadelphia after I dropped out and then moved to Washington D.C., worked for the National Student Association, which was basically a confederation of student governments. Unbeknownst to me until later it turned out to have been substantially secretly funded by the CIA together with thirty or forty other cultural and educational and artistic organizations in the US as a Cold War tactic because of the US government knowing that it wanted to be able to operate in third world and left movements internationally but wouldn't be able to get any traction if it were doing that in the government's own name.

So the whole story of the Lavender and Red Union goes back to the CIA.

No, but my own history does! So I ended up accidentally coming across this information and helping to expose it, in 1966, 1967. The government was at first going to deny it, but we had enough inside information that could corroborate it. So I got a call in the middle of the night from the controller of the NSA, the person who oversaw the relationship and the funding from the CIA, and he put this guy on the phone who at least said - and this was at three o'clock in the morning - that he was Richard Helms, head of the CIA, and he told me "Young man, you've betrayed your country..."

Congratulations!

"...we have ways to do deal with people, like drafting you and sending you to the front lines of Vietnam." I did stuff like write up the story and put it in a safe deposit box and write stuff telling my parents that if something happens to me.... But fortunately it became a big enough story with national press, and then they started unraveling all these different other organizations.... So I was an embarrassment but it also gave us some protection. Anyway. Not too long after that I left the NSA and moved to - I got married - moved to San Francisco, started an alternative school, was involved in the counterculture. And other ways of, you know, the whole mid-late '60s stuff that we were going to...

So you were kind of generically political. You didn't have a particular direction.

I knew that I was committed to social justice, to building a new society, but I was not primarily political in any organized way. Then in the course of that I also began to realize that I was queer, and that ultimately my marriage was not going to be sustainable in that context, so I came out, but fairly late, in my late 20s. This was two or three years after Stonewall. Stonewall helped me come out 'cause all of a sudden - OK, here are people that I can identify with, at least the radical wing of gay liberation was something that I could identify with. So I got involved in that a little bit late. Particularly since I moved back to Washington which was a bit late, since Washington D.C. has tended to be politically behind other parts of the country. For example, when I moved back to D.C. in '72 and the next year '73, I hooked up with a group of people and we wanted to propose the first gay pride in Washington, and we got shot down violently by the nascent gay community - "Oh no! You'll turn everybody against us! It will set us back for two years!" - just to have an open gay pride, which was already happening in New York, San Francisco, LA. So Washington was a few years later.

Had you been to a gay pride march before then?

No. I left San Francisco and I came out, and had been dealing with it pretty much on a personal level. So when I got to D.C. I was involved at the gay community level in terms of institution building, like helped to start a counseling center that was peer-based and sort of liberatory-based, not psychologically-based, started an alternative to bars for people that didn't drink or didn't like the atmosphere of bars to have social dances and interaction, started a VD clinic which later grew into a health clinic for gay men and ultimately for lesbian women.

That's a lot of things to start. Seems like you were very active.

Yeah, I was active. I was politically involved with what was left of the Gay Activist Alliance, which had already kind of gone rapidly up and down in DC. We fought things like the discriminatory and racist behavior of the gay bars. They would triple card black gay men in the city, or they would have a quota that when a bar got up to more than 10 or 15 percent black patrons, then they would start discouraging any more coming in on the theory that too many black people would discourage white patrons from coming. So we were fighting racism within the gay community, or within the institutions that serve the gay community. And with the people I was organizing with and with my own experience, looking back over the last few years, we became unhappy with this community building counterculture method of social change, and also with liberal pressure group politics for democratic rights.

Why were you unhappy with this? What did you see was limiting yourselves?

We weren't getting anywhere. Except short-term and limited demands. And the more you got involved and the more you opened your eyes, you saw that it was an interconnected system of exploitation and oppression, not just a question of a bad policy of the government, or incomplete or imperfect democracy, or not giving enough rights or equality to one group or another. It was a little inchoate but it was largely frustration with a lack of vision. I also personally felt frustrated with the New Left. We were basically informed by the New Left, and one of the things that was typical of the New Left is the old left is bad. They were wrong. That's associated with the Soviet Union. Nobody wants anything to do with them. At best they're stodgy, conservative, bureaucratic.... But the part that was frustrating me about this was that we didn't have anything to learn from the people who came before us. So frustration, or the New Left running its course, led to a number of people who were looking for a chance to study history and a chance to find theory that made sense, that would help explain the world, system, capitalism. At the same time there were beginning to be these generally Maoist pre-party formations, they called themselves - collectives that were aspiring to become part of the new communist movement, towards building a new party.

You mean like Revolutionary Union?

Yeah. Revolutionary Union, October League. Some of them had been around before, like the Progressive Labor Party. The Communist Workers' Party. And then some of the Trotskyist movement, which had been pretty much off to the side, but present, started coming in and intervening with the New Left in one way or another. So anyways, we found a woman who is now identified as a Maoist, who was a former Communist Party leader who had come down from New York to D.C. in the late '30s, early '40s. She agreed to teach the rest of us Marxism. So we collectively studied. We had a study group complex, as we called it, and there were 125 of us in 10 different groups of 12. So I got involved, while continuing the kind of the things that I've described before, in studying Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought - MLM-T3. On the one hand it was very exciting and it was like the first time I had read or study Marxism, other than reading the Communist Manifesto when I was a college freshman. This was like turning on the lights in a tunnel. It was like, Wow! Oh, yeah! OK! Class struggle! Working class! Capital! Fundamental contradiction! Exploitation! Class struggle driving motor force of history! Having that framework, rather belatedly, you know, because I was thirty years old or something coming to this, was exciting. We started having this trouble though, because I brought up homosexuality in the study group complex, and this woman said "No, we can discuss it, but the line's going to be unless you can show me different, unless you can show me the material basis for homosexuality and it's theoretical contribution to revolutionary struggle or the working class, you just basically need to know what's wrong with it. That it's like bourgeois...."

Bourgeois decadence?

Yeah... a symptom of bourgeois decadence. She wasn't so overtly homophobic. It was polite and soft in the language, but that was basically the line. It basically was the Chinese Communist Party's line. That this is one of the many deviations of human behavior that will disappear with socialism. I essentially got marginalized by this MLM-T3 study group complex. They didn't kick me out because I had some friends who respected me and who would have refused to allow that. But I saw that I was an uncomfortable minority. It made me think back to when I was a twelve year old boy in segregation Florida and there was nobody else there. So I started questioning. These people may have turned on the lights in the tunnel, but they sure do put blinders on. There's something wrong with this Stalinist-Maoist version of Marxism. And also, I wanted to be queer. A queer communist. A queer Marxist.

So through that study group you became Marxist.

Yes.

But you realized, "I am Marxist, but not this Marxism."

Yeah. So I started looking around and I found this little ad in a national gay paper that was about two lines at the bottom that said "Gay Liberation through socialist revolution!" I said, "What! Did I read that right? They sound like my kind of people!" So I wrote them from DC. They had just gotten founded about this time, '74 or early '75. In between my two years of nursing school, which is what I was doing my last few years in DC, I drove out here to LA to meet them to see what they were like. So I met them and was reasonably impressed, although they were awfully small. There were three to five of them total. I had discussions, and then I went back to DC and I started a little DC gay socialist study group that was using a kind of edited version of that same curriculum of this other study group complex, a little of the Mao and adding in a little Trotsky. Basically it was an introduction to Marxism. I wanted to recruit some other queers to Marxism so that I wouldn't be the only one. I also tried horizontal recruitment, as they called it - from the straight ones. So that went OK. One person ended up later moving with me to LA to join the L&RU and a couple others remained sympathizers. But I stayed in touch by correspondence with the people out here, the L&RU, and invited them to come to DC. We did a forum for this left milieu called 'Gay liberation through socialist revolution'. Later through struggle with the Spartacist League we dropped that slogan, but at the time it was cutting edge; it was the main slogan of the L&RU and of course it drove most people in the liberal and sectoralist queer community crazy - "What are you talking about socialist revolution, we just want equal rights". But we got 125 people to come out to that in DC, including some of the Maoists who spoke up and gave their line, but.... Since I got my nursing degree I came out here to join them.

So how did those three or five people in L.A come together?

I don't know exactly because I wasn't here and I don't remember the stories. I know they were all in the Maoist milieu and so they all had similar kind of rejection experiences to me. Because the Maoist milieu dominated the new left decomposition products of that time, and if you were a radical revolutionary anti-capitalist, that was the main game in town, with the Trotskyists having a little left field pocket, and then the anarchists - I don't know about LA, but they weren't a factor in DC. So then in '76 when I came to LA to join we expanded to 11. So we had brought in more people, including people that were less politically experienced. But there were some core politics, like we believed in a working class orientation, including implantation of cadre in industry and work in trade unions.

Can you explain what the implantation of cadre in industry means?

It's that you want to recruit people from the working class, but you also wanted to send people who may be from a petite bourgeois or working class background, but who became won to communism, into industry or into strategic places where they could help organize other workers or recruit from working class struggles and to work in the trade union movement. So out of our 11 we had two in communications, who were telephone workers and in the communication workers union, and me in health care, joining the health care workers union. We actually talked about that within the L&RU - you notice we weren't just talking queer politics, we were also trying to do our bit to help build a revolutionary working class movement. That's a part of the problem that we began to see here pretty soon. First of all, 11 is awful small, being out queer. And so being a gay liberation communist organization was not particularly helpful in organizing a revolutionary caucus within the communication workers union, or the nurses.

Did the organization actually send people into these workplaces to organize? You said that was a strategy.

Yeah. At least one of the communication workers was sent in. The other may have been their to start with, but he was there in part with the idea of being an organizer within. And before we later moved on into the Spartacist League, we were training a couple or three other people for jobs for implantation. Apprenticeships, and skilled trades for example, and electrician, transport workers. We were aiming for somebody in the ports. Didn't get that far, though.

So the goal then in doing this workplace organizing, would not be to, say, organize a queer caucus in the health care workers union.

No. It wasn't. Not at that time. And it was also contrary to our politics.

Why was that?

Well, we were saying that the role of queers in the maintenance of American capitalism is not strategic in the same way that, particularly black people - and later other people of color - and women is. That American capitalism and the domination of the American ruling class is integrally dependent on maintaining the special oppression of blacks, in particular, and also increasingly Latinos and other immigrant forces, and women. And that gay people are probably not going to find, or likely to find, full democratic rights without the leadership of a radical or revolutionary movement. But it's conceivable that they could. And I think that in the outcome of the last few years you can kind of see that it's conceivable that the nominal granting of democratic rights can happen within the structure of capitalism. So we were saying that we wanted to organize around the things that were strategic and fundamental while also we fought for women's liberation - and we sort of saw the queer question as in some ways integrally related to that - and for full democratic rights for everybody, that we have to make a point of fighting for everybody, even unpopular or small minorities, whether strategic or not. Though we didn't organize gay caucuses in our trade union work, we did raise the demand that unions should support full democratic rights and oppose discrimination against LGBT people. That way, we established a track record of the importance of the unions and the working class fighting to defend gay people when under attack, as with all marginalized groups. So we were in a position to quickly mobilize support when pogrom-type attacks came, as later happened during the hysteria around AIDS.

Earlier you were talking about whether it was possible to realize full democratic rights under capitalism. I think you were saying that at least for the United States.

It's theoretically possible to do that.

But it's not possible to do that for, say, black people, because capitalism, in the US, is formulated on the foundation of racism. But you said that for queer people, it's more of an... open question?

Yeah. I would say, once again I personally don't see it fully, but it's possible to extend democratic rights more and more and more on things like marriage, on things like serving in the military. They could also do, although they haven't yet, on nondiscrimination in the workplace, or nondiscrimination in housing. All these are aspects of full democratic rights. They can grant that without threatening hegemony, rule, power, including power to exploit the working class as a whole.

In some of Lavender and Red's writing about their goals or demands for sexuality and for queer struggle, they talked about a vision of being able to actually move beyond gender distinctions entirely, and not have - obviously - straight, gay, bisexual; not have masculine/feminine gender roles, not being assigned male and female. Is that something beyond democratic rights, are those things that you think can be achieved under capitalism?

No, that's beyond democratic rights. I think that's part of what that ultimately needs the socialist revolution. But I think that's integrally related to, and you can contextualize it within, the "woman question", in the traditional Marxist terminology. In terms of the elimination of patriarchy. I think retrospectively we could have gone beyond this to expand the potential contribution of queerness. But it's still a terrain that was opened up. I mean we want to be able to, for example, socialize reproduction of labor to create freedom from those traditional sex roles, including forms of sexual partnering. So I would say that's tied to to the original liberatory vision of Marxism. And we were certainly into extrapolating on that, and talking about that, and envisioning and imagining, but on the other hand we're not utopians. We're saying you don't get these things just by imagining them, you get them by working to change the material bases and the structure of capitalism and class rule.

You saw that struggle for liberated gender and sexuality as being part of what you called the "women question", and also that's clearly part of the gay liberation struggle. So how did you separate out the gay question from women's liberation struggles and patriarchy, and separate it as something that was not strategic?

Well, by saying not strategic doesn't mean it's unimportant. But because you were asking me initially around caucuses and about how you would organize caucuses. And it gets back also to sectoralism. To the extent that we sort of made a hard line about this, it was because we were fighting against sectoralism, which we felt is really going to weaken and divert the movement, or building a powerful unified working class movement that can ultimately smash capitalism, and the solidarity necessary to do it. With sectoralism, the tendency is that it ends up focusing more and more on the particular gains and demands and organizing increasingly narrowly around those, and often then it leads to, as we can see time and time again, to bending away from a revolutionary purpose by making alliances and concessions with capitalist forces, particularly liberals, saying "Oh, you support us on this so we won't challenge your basic power." At it's worst sectoralism can lead to support for fascism. For a very authoritarian form of capitalist state as long as you got your crumbs, or your particular narrow interests were protected. So we were very motivated by fighting against sectoralism. We were talking in terms of how you organize the fight, and particularly when there's a justification for separate forms of organization. And that wouldn't necessarily be hard and fast for all time. For us, for a caucus in the health care workers union, or the communication workers union, it was much more important to have a revolutionary or a class struggle trade unionist perspective that we were uniting all people around, as opposed to prioritizing a gay caucus, or a series of caucuses that might be parallel, like a gay caucus, and a women's caucus, and a Latino caucus, and a this and that caucus. At another time or with a more "advanced" nature of the struggle, you might have some of these different caucuses, all of which were revolutionary and class struggle, and were united at the same time.

But going into an industry, the first thing you do would not be going to find the other queer people there.

Yeah. Right. So, since we're on the labor thing, I had gotten involved in the trade union struggle struggle activism at Kaiser here in LA as a nurse. I had been involved in the new RN union, including pushing the contract negotiations in the most militant direction I could, including some democratic rights demands, including for queer people, and for the right for Filipinos to speak their language - they had a rule that you couldn't speak non-English in the hospital even in off-duty areas. And then a strike was coming up from the "non-professional" workers - the vocational nurses, and the nurse's aides, and the housekeepers, and the dietitians. And so the question was, what are the RNs going to do?, because we were in a different union than the majority of the workers. The perspective of the union leaders was, "We will keep working. But we will work to rule. We won't do other workers' jobs. But we will cross picket lines and come into work to take care of patients because that's our highest duty and blah blah blah." I argued as a class struggle trade unionist, no, picket line means don't cross, working class solidarity is an important principle that we must - in the case of the US - reestablish as inviolate, and furthermore practically for all of you worrying about the patients, if we have a solid strike Kaiser will be much more likely to settle then if we do this piecemeal work-to-rule shit. I was putting this forward as the queer, and also the commie. I put forward a position that no, we need to commit, we need to take a vote to not cross the picket line. I won that argument, and Kaiser settled the strike the next day, without even actually having gone out on strike. That was an example - a small one - of the kind of trade union work and class struggle intervention into a workplace that we tried to do.

Is that part of the reason why you thought it was a necessity to go beyond just being a small gay socialist organization, so you could include people like your coworkers? Because you saw it as necessary to organize there, in the hospital, as working class people, and that being working class people was the primary point of unity in the workplace?

I think so. Plus we needed size and you've got to open it up and have it on a different basis if you're going to recruit size. We weren't exactly making headway recruiting out of the gay political organizations.

Why? Why do you think that was?

'Cause we were commies. I mean 'cause people were saying, "You're unpopular. I'm a pro-capitalist queer. I want to succeed. I just want the right to make it in this society free from discrimination." Or they'd say "Oh, my main problem is not as a worker, my struggle is against patriarchy and male bosses." We were increasingly seeing we were gonna be stuck in a niche that is not exactly a springboard to being part of a movement for power, as long as we were just isolated as a small queer communist organization. That's just setting aside the question whether we were effective or not in our organizing. But just by definition we were narrowing ourself to this little piece, whereas our basic idea - the more we thought about it, and the more we studied broader history and movements - was that we needed to build a party. That was our belief as people being won to Leninism. That we needed to build a vanguard or a disciplined democratic centralist party. So we needed to find somebody else to hook up with.

Did you focus on trying to win the gay community over to socialist politics?

We tried. But first of all this history is pretty short. We're talking here just a matter of three, four years maximum before we abandoned that narrow existence. We went to gay pride. We leafleted. We put out a newspaper. We intersected issues in the gay community like the Gay and Lesbian Center strike. We were active in a campaign to boycott some big bar in West Hollywood because of it's anti-black discriminatory behaviors, just like in Washington. And we would try to organize queer contingents in anti-war and Chilean solidarity demos or actions. We did those kinds of things that would be trying to attract attention. Although then increasingly we focused more on study to try to figure out where to go next. So we took a lot of time reading.

What were some of the challenges that Lavender and Red brought to the LA gay movement?

We basically criticized saying capitalism is the problem, not the solution. Capitalism cannot be reformed. We're not the only ones in a shaky boat here. That it's all of us or none. There's other oppressed groups and if we don't express and fight for solidarity with your working class fellow gays and lesbians, who are also maybe Latina, and maybe also black, then that even more bluntly poses, well, are you going to have freedom as a black sissy queer without also challenging racism? Without also challenging sex roles and patriarchy? So you put that out there continuously.

So pointing out that actually, despite who the leadership of these liberal gay organizations might be, the vast majority of the queer community was in fact the working class, was in fact not white. And so by being so narrowly focused, they were leaving most people behind.

Yeah. Without fighting the other sources of the oppression of our community.

What were some of the challenges that you brought to left organizations around Los Angeles?

Why are you all so backward? Defending the worst in bourgeois society or Stalinism?

Did you have conflicts?

Well, we had arguments. We would often be shown the door. We would go to meetings that were run by these Maoist organizations or popular front coalitions and speak up, including queer demands or just speaking as out queer communists, and sometimes we'd get thrown out, shown the door by the security squads. You know, they said "You're being provocateurs", or sometimes we'd be police-baited, or disunity-baited, or, in a couple cases, "Get out of here faggots - will the security show them the door". Twice, that I went to.

Despite the rejection that Lavender and Red got from the established Maoist left, you still remained very committed to the idea that what queer people needed was socialist revolution.

Yeah. We thought these weren't really socialists. They were corrupter socialists, this tradition. Also things were beginning to change. I mean, we were having some impact - not just us, other people. I mean these people were getting a bit embarrassed because they were trying to recruit people too, from a broader perspective, like ex-liberals or still liberals, and they were getting uncomfortable with this. We were also suspicious, though, because then people began to switch, including some of the Trotskyist groups, like not only the SWP [Socialist Workers Party], but Workers' World. We would point out the hypocrisy of these groups that a few years ago wouldn't talk about queer people, and now they didn't come out with some analysis admitting how come they were wrong and why they changed, they just suddenly started being friendly and welcoming and adding a few token gay demands to their kitchen sink demand list. We were telling other gay people, don't be fooled by this kind of pandering. Ask for their analysis. Where's their strategy. Where's their program. And, most fundamentally, do they have a program for overthrowing capitalism.

Seeing the class contradiction, seeing the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class as being the crucial linchpin, is that perspective what made Lavender and Red realize it was necessary to not just organize gay people, not just organize working class gay people, but also to be together with anti-racist and feminist, and anti-imperialist struggles?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You talked about how your perspective on feminism was that it needed to be working class feminism. And you came into some debates about that with feminist groups during the strike at the Gay Community Services Center, which was one of the first established gay social service organizations, and which ended up getting a lot of funding....

This was actually before I moved out from DC, so I just know this second hand. But the workers attempted to organize a union because there were wholesale and arbitrary firings. And we supported those workers, and to some extent we might have implanted the idea that you need a union, you need to organize and negotiate as workers with the management for wages, working conditions, and against arbitrary firings.

One account I was reading basically said that the Lavender and Red Union were the people who came to the workers and said, "You should go on strike", and that idea won out, but there is one quote from one of the workers who was speaking against Lavender and Red's proposal, saying "This is not a labor issue. Our fight is about lesbian feminism versus male dominated hierarchy." It seems Lavender and Red's position was that actually workers being fired for organizing against their boss is probably a labor issue.

Yes! I think so. That's not to deny, and we didn't at the time, that it's not also a feminist issue.

So how did that play out in that strike?

As I recall the workers lost, but our position got a substantial amount of respect. But there was some lingering disagreement, sort of like markers were cast down: OK, this is how they see it, this is how we see it. But it did raise the issue - for some people for the first time - that even in the nonprofit, NGO, social services sector, there are labor issues. That because we're a queer organization does not suddenly resolve capitalism or resolve the tendency of bosses and managers to exploit, and abuse, and mistreat workers. That workers have a right to organize. And I think we had some modest success in at least instilling these basic principles which we were fighting for.

How did Lavender and Red see this NGO-ization of the early gay movement affecting things and what was your position on it?

It hadn't really happened yet enough for us to take it up as that issue specifically, except in specific concrete cases like this one. We saw that strike as an example of that, that a voluntary organization becomes an institution. We didn't foresee that it was going to become a tidal wave, or the degree to which it became the dominant mode.

Lavender and Red's existence is very interesting because it was very contradictory in the sense that this group formed that saw there was no place for queer struggle in the revolutionary left, and then at same had a political understanding that there wass no place for queer struggle by itself. And so I guess Lavender and Red probably saw its own existence as something of a failure.

Well, yeah, it certainly was contradictory from the start. That contradiction was embedded in it. But I would say that's not necessarily a failure, to have then gone through and transformed ourselves, and whoever else we influenced, with a vision that was not only transformative but transitional to a different perspective. And we probably played a small role in helping to transform at least a corner of the left. I would say that we also, we and other people who came along after us or in parallel, did have struggles within the left to clarify, or rectify, or challenge leftover or former positions. And a lot of these contradictions still.... Well, I started to say still exist but....

But for the contradictions to exist in the left, the left would need to still exist.

Yeah, that's why I sort of backed off. No, the thing that I'm saying that still exists, because I saw it again in Act Up twenty years later, was the fight against - in less explicitly political terms most of the time - a sectoralist, single-issue approach versus any solidarity, integrated struggle, and anti-capitalist perspective. And that has existed in different movements in the queer community as well.

So this approach against having a focus on just this one oppressed sector, and instead organizing in the united working class struggle with other oppressed groups - that's a perspective saying that revolutionary political organizations shouldn't be based only in one oppressed group. But is it a perspective saying that social movement groups shouldn't be only based in one community as well?

I personally wouldn't say that. I would say that there are rules for mass movements that are based in one sector, but there's always going to be the danger of that bending towards class collaborationism and accommodation with capitalism unless there's some countervailing active tendency. So I think, like your Chilean comrade was saying in that meeting a couple weeks ago, about there being different sectors of the popular movement, but then needing to have a party, a political organization, a formation, a structure, by which the unity of the struggles and the cross-fertilization and the critique and challenging takes place within the popular movement sectors. So I would say that I can certainly see - first of all, it's going to happen whether I or any other revolutionary approves of it - but I can see that it's not necessarily something to always to be fought and polemicized against, but to maybe be intervened within with a unified revolutionary perspective, and to have some way to link these together. And at times then it may outlive its usefulness. You could actually see if it's objectively becoming more of an obstacle in it's sectoral boundaries than it is a benefit in its mass mobilization potential.

Tell me a little bit about the transformation of the Lavender and Red Union. You said that after this period of intense activity, there was then a period of intense political study, saying "OK we've been doing this work in the left, in the gay community, where are we going?"

Right. Part of it was since we were coming out of a Maoist milieu, even though we weren't splitting from any explicit organizational connection, we felt like we needed to decide between the original Bolshevik vision of global international revolution, or as Trtosky concretizes, permanent revolution, versus the Stalinist/Maoist conception of socialism in one country, that, among other things led to accommodations with the...

National bourgeoisie.

National and international bourgeoisie. I mean, this was also Nixon in China time, you know. That shook up a whole lot of people in the Maoist left milieu - "What the fuck is he doing? The butcher of Vietnam being welcomed to Beijing!" That was the first big study. And so we came up with a document rejecting socialism in one country. So then we decided, OK we're basically committed to the Trotskyist tradition, so, which one?

It may seem interesting to someone that a gay communist organization would spend so much time studying the question of socialism in one country instead of spending that time studying sexuality and gender.

Well we saw ourselves as a part of - or wanted to be a part of - the global communist movement for revolution. And you can't just study one piece of that. You've got to try to find the central dividing lines or questions. That's the one that we encountered.

And it had a lot of importance in the context that you were in at that time.

Yeah, right now it might seem arcane and esoteric, but I think in the context why we did that instead of sexuality is not so hard to understand, because we were gay communists. Or gay revolutionaries. So he needed to study and sort ourselves out according to the key revolutionary questions that were facing us, as well as then we would expect to dialogue and counter with any putative partners about how they related to queerness and sexuality.

Basically at that point you're just choosing between Stalinism and Maoism and Trotskyism.

Yeah. This was a two stage process. The first was to choose Trotskyism and then to move to find out what form of Trotskyism. Then that requires a study of the Russian question. Is the Soviet Union a degenerated workers' state, or is it state capitalist, or bureaucratic collectivist? Once again a question that seems far removed from queer liberation, and I tell you people that we talked to about this said "Are you guys crazy?" Then somebody wrote a little headline on a story about the fusion of the Red Flag Union - as the Lavender and Red Union was known at that time - with the Spartacist League as "The fruits merge with the nuts".

After the Lavender and Red Union began studying the Russian question, there were a number of parties that came trying to....

Trying to pitch their version to us. We talked to the SWP, we talked maybe briefly to Workers World, although by that time nobody much had much respect for them; they had already gone over to Kim Il Sung as an exemplar of the revolution. Though maybe that came a little later. And the International Socialists [IS], and the RSL [Revolutionary Socialist League], which had been kind of a left split from the IS. We did talk to the Freedom Socialist Party too. They were the ones that were articulating the vision of socialist feminism. But it pretty much came down to between the Spartacist League and the Revolutionary Socialist League. It ended up being a twelve-three split. Twelve of us joined the Sparatacist League and three joined the RSL. It was partly a question of the way you came down on the Russia question. But it was also partly a question of style, temperament, and bent thing. The RSL was a little more loose, not such hard democratic centralist in their style. Right after the merger we were all in LA, and the Spartacist League was saying "OK, we're a national and international tendency, so you can't all stay in LA because we want you to spread out, so where are you going to go?" And some of us went to Detroit. Partly because the auto industry was hiring again. So there was going to be an opportunity of implanting a bunch of people in the auto industry after a period of stagnation and shrinking. As far as I know those three people who went with the RSL stayed in LA. The SL fraction split - a couple stayed here, some went to Detroit, Boston, Chicago, New York.

So the Lavender and Red Union mostly joined the Spartacist League, and the Spartacist League allowed you to filter out across the country. So what happened next? What was the legacy that you saw the Lavender and Red Union having within further organizing and militancy?

I think that one theme of this discussion is that we felt like we were able to express our deeper or broader political commitments through our involvement in a more comprehensive national and international revolutionary organization. To that extent I think we felt like it was successful for us as individuals and for the continuity of the political work or the political vision that we had. Later the SL certainly got more involved in queer struggle, even during the time that I was still there, which I was there for ten years. Like that case in Chicago. We were explicitly defending and mobilizing and getting labor union locals to defend a gay pride march in Chicago from a Nazi attack. And most of the rest of the left eschewed or shied away from that. The most they would do was say, "Oh, let's have a rally to protest the horror of the idea of the Nazis." And we're saying "Fuck that namby-pamby liberal-ass shit, let's stop them from coming here." Lavender and Red Union people had different skills. Some people continued to work in the communication workers' union, for example, only in a different city. Some people found skills as internal organizers, apparatus people. I worked in both health care and and in these anti-fascist mobilizations, and in the legal and political defense work. People went through with apprenticeships and were implanted into industry and industrial fractions. At that level, I would say that we also were able to bring the particular knowledge and skills of the queer community where there were opportunities to intersect, like with the anti-fascist organizing, and later in the AIDS movement, including infusing in the party - before the Spartacist League got totally isolated - and the other forces it it influenced in Europe, and Mexico, South Africa, Poland, Russia, with its commitment to queer liberation, queer rights as a part of a comprehensive communist party. That we brought that, our tradition and our personal histories into the broader life of this broader political organization; I think that had an impact.

You feel that the Lavender and Red Union was able to spread a bigger change to the rest of the left.

Yeah.

And so then you left after ten years.

Largely I burned out and just needed to take a few years off. But I was also beginning to question the continued relevance of the Spartacist League's fairly narrow application of Trotskyism and democratic centralism. Because I feel like the farther you get away from having a history of active involvement in leadership in mass workers' struggles, the more distorted, precious, esoteric, and just quirky the idea of embodying this tradition becomes. My own politics now, I would say I define myself as an anti-capitalist revolutionary, and sometimes I say I'm a communist. I mean readily I'll say that, it's just not always appropriate. But I'm not affiliated with any particular political organization or sectarian tradition. I'm still influenced by the Trotskyist tradition of Marxism more than any other single tradition, but I believe in, and I'm open to, more eclectic revolutionary anti-capitalist movement building. So there's this organization COiL [Communities Organizing in Liberation] that I've been an associate member of, and I'm a member of this Ultra-red political sound art collective that's international in three countries, and largely involved in trying to build a mass movement of tenants for housing justice, connected to the other struggles against capitalism that people in LA are engaged in right now.

You were involved in the AIDS movement after you left the Spartacist League.

I was. And I went back to school, got graduate degrees, and then AIDS kind of happened. So that's where I worked. I was involved in Act Up, and more broadly in pushing things within the AIDS movement that came out of that tradition that I've been a part of. Which is that an injury to one is an injury to all, that struggles against capitalism, against all forms of oppression, are indivisible. That you've got to solve the AIDS crisis with people who are also poor, black, trans, living in under-resourced countries, and that therefore the struggle has to be reflective of, or address, or connected to, struggles against all forms of oppression. And I've similarly found myself oppositional in many cases to people who said "No, the emphasis has just got to be on getting resources and focusing the attention of the system to solve this one crisis."

Any concluding wisdom on the lessons of the Lavender and Red Union?

Talking indirectly to the Turkish comrades, one of the things that we were attracted to from the Lavender and Red Union in the Spartacist League, is that the Spartacist League was committed to internationalism in an active way. Not just solidarity. But trying to found, or bond with, or establish relationships with revolutionary groups in other non-US countries. And that the US left should subordinate itself to an international revolutionary collective process, at least in ideal, and move in practical concrete steps. I still believe that.

To Live Among Broken Men: Theorizing Rape and Incest

By Danny Shaw

On April 9th, Ronald Savage rocked the hip hop world with his testimony about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Zulu Nation founder, Africa Bambaataa. Initially, the Zulu Nation dismissed the allegations "as nothing more than a continuation of the decades long HIP HOP COINTELPRO campaign to discredit and destroy the Universal Zulu Nation." However, as more survivors of Bambaataa's abuse emerged, the momentum shifted. It was clear that Bambaataa had abused children, other leaders had covered up for him and that a thorough investigation and process of healing was necessary.

While many people are understandably shocked that sexual abuse could penetrate the inner-most circles of pioneering Zulu Nation, this is also an opportunity for our communities to reflect on just how commonplace sexual abuse, incest, pedophilia and rape is.

The May 21st gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl in Brazil by 33 men and Brock Turner's rape of a 23-year old woman behind a dumpster at Stanford University are the latest high-profile examples of the everyday terror exercised against women.

Ronald Savage's story, my family's story, my story and so many other stories of survival highlight the need for a Marxist historical interpretation of sexual violence & incest. Marxism-the painstaking, socio-economic investigative method-does away with the vacuous theory that sick, depraved abusers are merely an aberration of the human spirit. The wide prevalence of sexual violence speaks volumes about the criminal, decadent nature of capitalism. There is a specific system that engenders the widespread abuse of women and children. The facts speak for themselves-one in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old and one in five women will be raped at some point in their lives.[1] 40-60% of Black women are abused before they reach 18 . 3% of men report they were raped.

A political orientation towards sexual violence and trauma reveals that it is the product of a specific, temporal confluence of factors. The dialectical materialist method, a profound examination of the deep-seated causes of a social phenomenon, explains why sexual violence and incest are both widely prevalent and inevitable under capitalism.

This article will examine the connections between poverty, patriarchy, rape and incest both in my own life and family and in the writing of organic intellectuals and community leaders who have honestly grappled with this urgent issue.

My story

I am a survivor of sexual abuse. Two different AAU basketball coaches, Jim Tavares and Jack McMahon, whose teams I played on, were known pedophiles. A 1999 Sports Illustrated article , "Every Parent's Nightmare," outlined the sexual abuse that hundreds of us survived at the hands of Jim Tavares.

Tavares preyed upon me and other young boys who came from poor homes where there was only one parent trying to make ends meet. He gained access to our homes by giving us money and taking us on trips across the U.S. to play in national Junior Olympic AAU championships. If I had a father or a family with money, I would not have been an easy prey.

Just as the marksman knows how to hunt and snipe, the molester knows how to prey on children and attack.

There is no need for me to repeat the details as the article outlines Tavares' pattern of abuse. Predictably, the authors, William Nack and Don Yaeger treat Taveres and the other coaches as society's outliers, extremely demented individuals who went astray. This article argues a different perspective-that rape and incest are inevitable and predictable products of a specific social system that we have the power to unmask, confront and overcome.

Theorizing rape and incest

I was raised by woman warriors. Many of the women in my family survived horrific episodes of rape, incest and sexual terrorism which I have written on elsewhere. From my earliest memories, I felt the pain and trauma of my mother, my sisters, aunts, grandmother and other women in my family seethe through my own being. Why did my loved ones and I endure degrading, sadistic abuse? Their scars and my own have been formative in my story. With no strong male role models, I was mentored by the pain and survival of women. All of the suffering they experienced and survived made me question from an early age the source of so much horror.

Sexual violence is bigger than African Bambaataa, the priests convicted of child molestation within the Catholic church and the sexual violence that occurred within my own family. Sexual violence is an endemic, society-wide phenomenon that we must tackle and resist with a broad, revolutionary approach if we want to spare our children from the trauma so many of us survived.

My family of mixed Irish, Scottish, English and Finish roots was not unique in terms of the intensity of what we survived. As I discovered through my travels to other continents, hearts, islands and memories, there are survivors of rape and incest spread across the world. The U.S. has the thirteenth highest rate of rape in the world.[2] My family, then, was not an exception, but rather the very incarnation of larger social forces at work.

A critical view of rape and incest challenges the widespread view that men intrinsically act like "pigs" and "dogs." No one can dispute that many of us men act like pigs and dogs, but what explains the pigicization or dogification of male behavior?

Feminist sociologist Maria Mies explains that "human sex and sexuality have never been purely crude biological affairs. 'Human nature' has always been social and historical. Sex is as much a cultural and historical category as gender is" (Patriarchy and Accumulation 23). In more proletarian terms, men are not born as piglets but are rather pigified-or groomed to be pigs-over time. The inverse is also true; we can fight to undo patriarchal socialization and create a safer, healthier world to raise our children in. It is this political orientation towards sexual trauma that guides our work as revolutionaries. We fight for another world not just because of the pain of the present but because of the infinite promise of the future.

Scarred children

The social scientist seeks to unearth the nature of the childhood that the rapist / molester experienced. A baby is not born a rapist or a sadist. The mainstream media's dominant perspective that rapists are biologically-flawed, unredeemable sociopaths projects a pessimistic view of humanity. While there may be individual examples of perpetrators who were biologically or mentally engineered towards violence, this is a rare exception and not the rule.

According to Family Violence Interventions for the Justice System, men who witnessed their fathers' violence are 10 times more likely to engage in spouse abuse in later adulthood than boys from non-violent homes.[3]

Men who commit brutal violations of children's inner-sanctity most often experienced this violence themselves as children. They internalized their own skewed view of themselves and the world. They never knew what it meant to be complete, integral, loved or healthy. Broken from an early age, if not in the period of gestation, they learned to reproduce the insidiousness. Buried in their own self-torment and self-hatred, they struck out against what was most precious and vulnerable around them, children and women. Deprivation begat deprivation.

A system of patriarchy shapes the behavior of the rapist who shows an utter disregard for the humanity of women. The potent combination of poverty and patriarchy mold the acting out of the self-depreciation in a particular way. Having never known inner peace, the impoverished and unhealthy psyche annihilates the peace closest to it. Only a thorough exploration of the violator's childhood and formative years can begin to connect the missing dots.

Broken men

In addition to being criminal and perverse, sexual violence against children, women and men is a self-effacing behavior. To subject a defenseless child or woman to sexual abuse is the work of a broken man. The question before us is what overarching forces convert so many men into vile, demented creatures, who carry contempt for life itself in their fractured hearts?

Black Panther Soledad Prison Field Marshal, George Jackson asserted before white supremacy: "You will never count me among the broken men!"

A 25-year-old sociologist-with a PhD earned in the streets of LA and the prison cells of San Quentin-Jackson theorized about the outward reflexes of the broken man. Informed by a keen understanding of the wanton ruthlessness that surrounded him in America's internal colonies (ghettos) and prisons, Jackson refused to become ensnared in the trap that pitted Black on Black, man against woman, and oppressed against oppressed.

In Soledad Brother, Jackson charted the source of the broken reflexes-petty fights, alcoholism, rape and murder. From solitary confinement, within an 8-by-12 foot prison cell, Jackson sought to dominate the insidiousness so that it did not dominate him.

Like another great anti-colonial thinker, Frantz Fanon, who was writing in the same time period in Algeria, Jackson observed how his contemporaries acted out their trauma in reactionary ways because of their conditioning and precisely because they were deprived of a penetrating, revolutionary understanding of social reality.

The political economy of rape, Part I: The abuser

It is only in the social laboratory of intense class exploitation and misogyny that so many rapists can be called into existence. My analysis is not an attempt to justify Bambaataa's abuse nor apologize for the rapist but rather an effort to explore the malignant social forces that call so many rapists into existence.

In such a profoundly patriarchal society, different social-psychological forces act on men and women's psyches. Men are expected to be protectors and breadwinners. But what happens when their whole world-and with it their entire self-image-has been obliterated by material reality?

Too many men-conditioned by misogyny and deprived of employment and dignity-are broken men. In their deranged psyches, formed in the crucible of a materialist and patriarchal society, they seek to assert and insert themselves in twisted ways as "men" in a society that rejected and emasculated them. The inability to live up to their socially contrived ideals renders them depressed and broken.

Women in oppressed communities are hit the hardest by rape. Some 34.1% of Native American women have been raped. The next highest percentage was among mixed race women, 24.4% of whom reported being raped.[4] Incapable at this historical juncture of articulating their social rage in a revolutionary direction, the oppressed misdirect their fury in reactionary ways.

Rape is about power. Rape is one demented form of misdirected vengeance in which the oppressed assert power when they have lost control over their surroundings. Soldiers, under stress of battle, also often become ruthless perpetrators of rape, or gang rape, while pillaging the wealth of the conquered.[5] Alcohol and drugs-the traditional opiates of the oppressed-further distort reality, ensuring the stunting of proactive, revolutionary sentiments.

The origin of patriarchy

Two questions now confront us: what is the nature of the dog-eat-dog, patriarchal rat race that defines everyday working-class survival and how did we arrive at this point?

Bourgeois science argues that sexism and racism are inevitable. Because they see these learned behaviors as a product of man's nature, they seek to convince everyone that these systems of domination have always existed.

History proves otherwise, debunking the prevailing ideas of the historical defeatists.

Friedrich Engel's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State documents the existence of matriarchal societies for thousands of years. Thoroughly researching what he calls "primitive communist societies," Engels shows that for the bulk of the human timeline, women were in positions of power in the family and community.

One prominent example was in the Taíno culture of Quisqueya, what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The warrioress and cacica (chief), Anacaona, went off to battle and led resistance against the Spanish invaders, with her partner, Caonabo, taking charge of the home and raising the children. In 1503, upon capture she was publicly executed because she refused clemency in exchange for being the concubine of one of her captors. The Spanish colonizers were determined to eradicate the leaders of any resistance to their double enslavement of Native and African women.

Marxists pinpoint the emergence of private property, surplus and profits-or class society-as the origin of patriarchy. The origins of rape, incest and violence against women are the result of what Engels called the "world historic defeat" of women. With the development of private property and "the right" to inheritance, the son was elevated above the daughter as the heir to the estate. Just as the enslaved of the colonized countries existed as chattel property for the colonizers, women too were converted into their property; the masters and lords could do as they wanted with "their" women.

Under feudalism, the lord's "droit de seigneur" empowered him to take a "serf's wife" into his bed before she married and slept with her husband for the first time. In other words, the lord was allowed to rape the daughters and mothers of the exploited class because they were his property. This "droit" or "right" also entitled the lord of the estate to prey on peasant girls and to violate their virginity whenever he chose. This was often ceremoniously witnessed by male members of the court who were powerless to intervene.[6]

Social systems theory

Every social system merits its own analysis but feudalism, slavery and capitalism share these predominate features: 1) the sanctity of private property 2) the prioritization of profits over human dignity and 3) the relegation of women to a position of the slave's slave in the productive process.

Where does patriarchy fit into this exploitive economic base?

Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation tracks how for centuries women's unpaid, invisible work enabled the massive theft of the surplus labor of the wage earner. The productive process rested on the exploitation of the workers' labor which was not possible without the wife's behind-the-scenes toil. The woman then was the serf's serf, the slave's slave and the wage laborer's laborer.

To dig up the historical roots of the monstrous epidemic of rape and incest in the U.S. context requires a profound historical reckoning with one of its original sins-slavery.

The legacy of slavery

Through the dehumanization of Blackness, the slavocracy justified infinite predations upon the bodies of Black women and Black men.

The entire slave quarters were at the disposal of the slave traders and masters. The Portuguese slavers built their castles with a master bedroom that had two doors leading to two corridors. One corridor led to the slave quarters, where there was an army of slaves at the master's sexual disposal. The other corridor led to confession, where the slavers asked their priests and their gods for forgiveness for their acts, before committing the next round of transgressions.

W.E.B. Du Bois' masterpiece Black Reconstruction in Americacaptured the white Southerners' attitude toward the Black man and woman. In order to capture the dehumanization process, Du Bois cited a visiting German sociologist, Carl Schurz, who was hired by President Andrew Johnson to study the South: "Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a Negro, they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro woman, they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery."[7] In his gripping sociological portrait of the antebellum South, Du Bois breached theunbreachable and spoke the unspeakable: "Southerners who had suckled food from black breasts vied with each other in fornication with Black women, and even in beastly incest. They took the name of their fathers in vain to seduce their own sisters. Nothing-nothing that Black folk did or said or thought or sang was sacred" (p.125).

The very essence of slavery was the breaking of the Black mind, body and soul.

A culture of white rape of Black women-hiding behind its antithesis, the publicly-flaunted, genteel South and morally-robust Bible Belt-has traversed centuries. The myth of the "Black rapist" was used to mask the identity of America's original rapists-a wealthy class of roughly 60,000 white slave owners. The myth of the Black rapist served to deflect focus away from the slave master's abuse of Black and white women and funnel mass discontent into "populist" campaigns, such as lynching and state executions. Society was mobilized in pursuit of "the boogey man" while the true "boogey-man" held the noose.

Describing the typical slave master, Du Bois wrote: "Sexually they were lawless, protecting elaborately and flattering the virginity of a small class of women of their social clan, and keeping at command millions of poor women of the two laboring groups [Black and white] of the South" (p. 35).

Lawrence Konner's remaking of Alex Haley's Roots in June 2016 served as a vivid reminder that the slave owning class used rape as a weapon against the Black family.

Slavery birthed patterns of rape and incest that our society has yet to heal from.

Rape and brokenness in Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved is a gripping account of the twin terrors of sexual violence and slavery.[8] A cursory examination of the central characters of Beloved reveals the wanton, white supremacist terror unleashed on Black America.

Halle and Paul D represent generations of Black men pinned down and broken by slavery. Sexual violence against Black men, women and children was one of slavery's preferred weapons "to break" their slaves.

Halle was Sethe's partner and father of her children. After witnessing a gang of white men rape his wife, Sethe, and then drink her breast milk, Halle went crazy. Feeling powerless, he disappeared for ever from the family unit because what "he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig" (68).

Paul D, Sethe's friend, confidante and a fellow slave, alludes to a rape he suffered on the Sweet Home plantation: "Saying more might push them [Sethe and Paul D] both to a place they couldn't get back from. He [Paul D] would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lids rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him" (73).

The scars from the whip, tattooed onto Sethe's back, form a chokecherry tree, symbolizing the slave experience. The barefoot, poor white woman Amy who helps Sethe deliver her fourth child, Denver, describes the scar: "A trunk-it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got plenty of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern [darn] if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom" (79). According to Morrison's' poignant metaphor, "the fire on her back" is the Black nation, which despite the indescribable abuse, is strong and full of life, giving birth to future generations who will carry the scars but resolutely confront the slave master's terror.

Slavery and rape pushed Morrison's characters to extremes. When the slavecatchers came to abduct Sethe's four children and sell them out of state, Sethe resisted the only way she could. As she breastfed her youngest daughter, Denver, she simultaneously beat her other daughter, Beloved, to death, to save her from the horrors of slavery. Her two young boys and Denver were soaked in their sister's blood and only survived the grueling scene because of the intervention of another slave.

Toni Morrison recreated these tormenting images in order to bring slavery alive for the reader. Without understanding this original sin, little else can be understood in the American narrative.

Historical trauma

Dr. Joy Degruy Leary explored the effects of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome on generations of African Americans.[9] The slave system was a breeding ground for incest within the slave quarters, as well. Upsetting the traditions and stability of the family, slavery disempowered the husband figure and humiliated the father figure. Slavery was crafted to make the oppressed internalize a sense of shame and humiliation.

Men, women and children were packed into barns and stables unfit for human existence. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglas described the barbarism he was born into in Baltimore, Maryland.[10] Deprived of space and privacy and unable to clothe their children, the masters packed multiple families into shacks, without mattresses, blankets or adequate clothing. Slavery was a vortex of bestiality that spiraled out of control destroying human connections.[11]

Unable to stand down the oppressor, the emasculated slave-the trapped lion-projected his hatred towards those at home.[12] Sexual transgressions were the reincarnated transgressions of the master, once again unleashed on the double victims, Black women and children.

This historical trauma-set in motion-by a four-century long reign of terror reappears in families today. The conventional wisdom and oft-repeated, racist claim that "slavery occurred so long ago and Black people should just get over it" is designed to disconnect the terror of the past with the terror of the present. Sethe, Baby Suggs, Beloved and Toni Morrison's other characters remind us that the legacy of slavery lives within, and part of that legacy is sexual trauma.

History offers context for the harrowing fact that 40-60% of Black women are sexually abused before they are 18 . Failure to spiritually and consciously come to terms with the historical trauma damns the present fighters to wallow, unconsciously or semi-consciously, in the past. This is an apt metaphor for the survivor of sexual violence, whose only way out of the trauma, is through it.

From chattel slavery to wage slavery

The enslavement of Africans in the Americas was one branch of the patriarchal system Engels denounced and the most vicious reenactment of boss-worker relations which played out in other social systems. Slavery was America's original sin, upon which the descendant systems of exploitation were based.

The heir to slavery, capitalism-through its disempowerment of women-continues to be a breeding ground of sexual violence.

The following formula synthesizes the reproduction of the class system and the cycle it sets in motion. An exploitative economic base (i.e. serfdom, slavery, industrial and extractive capitalism) gives birth to internalized discord, self-hatred and a distorted sense of identity among the exploited, leading to the acute need to numb and escape (i.e. alcoholism) which is intertwined with violence projected outward and acted out at home, resulting in the victimization of the next generation, which grows up damned by both the exploitative economic base and a demoralizing family environment.

This exploitative economic base and internalized oppression again sets in motion a cycle that repeats itself with individualized symptoms that are reflective of the same disease.

The political economy of rape, Part II: The abused

The disempowerment of women is both economic and psychological and transcends national borders. Rape has a specific economic, not geographic, terrain. Not unique to the U.S., the dominant economic model-patriarchal capitalism-produces dependency.

Because housework is not compensated, the mother figure finds herself trapped.

Deprived of an empowering education, self-esteem and social and economic rights, many oppressed women cannot see beyond their immediate environs. The coterminous forces of women's oppression feed off one another, trapping women and children within the male-dominated, misogynist household.

Testimony

The testimonies and writing of organic intellectuals struggling against patriarchy and capitalism highlight the fact that the political economy of rape traverses national boundaries.

A scene from Germinal, Émile Zola's epic novel, captures the power dynamics within the miner's home. Half-starved and still sullen from the coal mines, the protagonist, Maheu arrived from the bowels of the earth demanding his dinner and sex. Showing total disregard for his wife, Maneude's humanity, he bends her over, raping her in front of the children, as they prepare to bathe in a basin. This scene from a French mining family's home was a snapshot of the twin evils of capitalism and patriarchy that have acted upon women for centuries.

In Don't Be Afraid Gringo, Elvira Alvarado described the typical social existence of the Honduran campesina (peasant woman). In her testimony, Elvira provides poignant snapshots of the cruel social terrain where patriarchy and economic disempowerment produce violence against women and children. Like the French miner a century before, the banana plantation worker existed to produce surplus value for transnational business. The housewife in the plantation worker family produced the conditions necessary for the exploitation of the wage laborer. She was doubly exploited. For both the boss and the sub-oppressor, for 365 days a year, it was open season on women like Elvira Alvarado.

Describing her everyday routine, Alvarado explained that she worked the land and attended to her husband and eight children: "Even when we go to sleep, we don't get to rest. If the babies wake up crying, we have to go take care of them-give them the breast if they're still breast-feeding, give them medicine if they're sick. And if our husbands want to make love, if they get the urge, then it's back to work again. The next morning, we're up before the sun, while our husbands are still sleeping" (p. 52). Robbed of autonomy in both spheres of her life, Alvarado existed to produce for the oppressor and sub-oppressor.

Enraged by his powerlessness, Elivira's husband subconsciously recreated his exploitation lower down on the social hierarchy where his violence had no repercussions. The state's monopoly of violence ensured that his humiliation had no positive, externalized revolutionary social outlet. Meanwhile, he was socially sanctioned to drink himself into oblivion and lash out at home. Family was the private domain where the exploiteds' pent-up anger crystalized. Having learned well from his boss, he recreated the violence onto his wife and children, the only social figures disempowered enough to tolerate the wanton abuse.

What the husband considered sex or "his marital right," constitutes rape for many women like Elvira Alvarado. Her words deliver the point home: "I've heard that there are men and women who make love in all different ways, but we campesinos don't know anything about these different positions. We do it the same all the time-the man gets on the woman and goes up and down, up and down and that's it. Sometimes the woman feels pleasure and sometimes she doesn't. We don't have any privacy either, because our houses are usually one big room so we have to wait until everyone is asleep and then do it very quietly. We just push down our underpants and pull them back up again" (47). For the Honduran housewife, sex, like cooking and cleaning, was a chore or an obligation. Stripped of her self-determination, both the home and the wider society were a forcing house of male domination.

'Stay in your place'

Employing the same literary genre as Elvira Alvarado, the Bolivian mining activist, Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, wrote Let me Speak! The Testimony of Domitila A Woman of the Bolivian Mines.[13]

Her autobiography deepens our understanding of patriarchy as a weapon to divide the miners. The misnamed "barzolas" were working class women employed by the mining bosses as reactionary shock troops to attack and humiliate the miners' wives.[14] When the Housewife Committee refused to stay quiet and confined in their homes and came into the streets to protest, the "barzola" shock troops threw tomatoes at them, accused them of sleeping around and physically attacked them.

The disempowerment of the Housewives' Committee was the disempowerment of the working class. Preoccupied with secondary contradictions, the exploited protagonists-the miners-lost sight of the primary contradiction between labor and capital. Blind before the oppressor's strategy to keep them in their confinement, they prevented the fruition of class unity. The divide and conquer strategy sought to confine women to the home, "shame" them and stunt their ability to make world-historic change.

"Women hold up half the sky" but when they are held back, the entire working class is confined to a social inferno. Capitalism and patriarchy have a codependent relationship; they feed off one another. The crushing of one hierarchical system necessitates the overthrow of its twin.

Women's liberation is humanity's liberation.

The role of class

Centuries of state-sanctioned and state-enforced rape established a legacy that continues to play out today.

Angela Davis' Women, Race and Class looks at the triple burden Black women confronted the span of American history.[15] Davis examined the rampant sexual abuse committed by white male employers within the home against Black women forced by poverty into domestic labor. How many bosses, supervisors, sex tourists and other men in high positions still believe they have unfettered access to Black and Brown women's bodies?

There is also sexual abuse in other layers of class society. Daughters and sons of rich families have survived sexual trauma. The widespread occurrence across class divides illustrates the omnipotence of sexism under capitalism. A rich woman may also find herself psychologically stuck. In contrast to a working-class woman, she may possess the economic resources to flee but may face the judgement of her family who will threaten to "cut her off" if she dares to forge her own independence. Raised to be pretty and thin, some upper class women may not possess the skills to move on. Patriarchy is pervasive and even privileged women-who from an outside perspective appear to have it all-struggle within their gilded cages.

A culture of impunity

In addition to raising the rapist, capitalism offers the rapist free reign.

The story of the anonymous young woman who was drugged and raped behind a dumpster at Standford is chilling. Although her rapist, Brock Turner was caught and found guilty by a jury, a judge only gave him six months in jail because "a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him."[16]

Turner's light sentence is not the exception. Factoring in unreported rapes, only 6% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail; 15 out of 16 will walk free.[17] Every 107 seconds a woman is raped in the U.S. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, twenty million women in the United States have been raped. The study asserts that the number could be three times as high because only 1/3 of sexual assaults are reported.[18] There is no accountability. There are no popular reprisals. In too many cases, no one dares confront the perpetrator. Often, the sadist moves from one generation to the next.

In my own abuse case, when I was 16, I contacted the Plymouth county District Attorney's office in 1997 to file a report. It was four years after the abuse. The DA said he had 73 similar complaints against the basketball coach, Jim Taveres. After hearing my statement, the public official concluded, for at least the 74thtime, that he "did not have conclusive proof" to put Jim Tavares back away in jail.

Capitalist society, from the U.S. to Brazil is, in essence, a school of unchecked patriarchy and pedophilia.

On May 21st on this year, a 16-year-old Brazilian girl was gang-raped by 33 men, some of whom then went on social media to boast about their acts. It is tragic that it took such a heinous case to re-highlight the rape culture that threatens every Brazilian woman.

In Brazil, the statistics are even more deplorable than in the U.S. According to the Brazilian women's organization, Rio de Paz, every 72 hours, 420 women are raped in Brazil.[19]

The liberal observer remains shocked at the harrowing rape statistics while failing to realize the very cause of the horror; a depraved system can only produce depravity. Incest and rape are not natural or inevitable phenomena, but rather symptomatic of the current economic and social order. Token efforts to raise awareness among children about their rights and to facilitate violence prevention workshops are important in the short run but will do little to erase the overall problem. An end to the suffering requires a systematic overhaul of existing class relations.

Denial is complicity

There is another rung in the social inferno that is oppression to which we must descend in order to more fully understand the plight of the survivor.

There are other social actors who become complicit in the crimes spawned by a criminal system. Many mothers-too traumatized to stare the truth in its eyes-became indirect apologists for the offender, giving cover to the crimes with their silence. Feeling powerless before the crime of the century, too many times they have internalized and projected their own subconscious guilt and self-hatred onto the victims. Instead of appearing on the historical stage as the ultimate defenders of their daughters, how many mothers have appeared as collaborators of the crime?

Silence, reproduced between generations, extends the lease life of the pain. Silence within the family is collusion. Denial is collusion. Covering up is collusion.

Sapphire's novel Push, brought to the cinema in the 2009 film Precious, graphically documented the complex relationships that resulted from incest.[20] Sixteen year-old Claireece "Precious" Jones is pregnant with her father's second child. The heartbreaking novel examined how Precious' mother, Mary, instead of protecting and defending her daughter from her rapist husband, Carl, turned the blame on her daughter. Precious was the object of her mother's scorn. Stripped of a childhood and her parents' affection, Precious had to learn to navigate society on her own.

The mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles who looked the other way were knee-deep in the swamp of insidiousness. Patriarchy pervaded their lives; more concerned with protecting the reputation of the family before the good town-folks, they sacrificed their children's health and happiness-their childhoods-so they could keep smiling at church on Sundays. They too were deeply affected by patriarchy and rape culture. Converted into silent bystanders, enablers and perpetuators of the insidiousness, they ignored the truth and blamed the victim. They too were broken; the illusion of an "American dream" was worth more to them than truth and redemption.

Internalized blame

When we paint the entire sorry portrait, we see the convergence of the different social-emotional factors acting on the survivors. Overwhelmed by the insidiousness, the matriarch escapes into booze or god. The primary witnesses often subconsciously rewrite history. Denial buries the dagger deeper into the chest of the abused. Searching for acceptance and validation, they find blame and hatred.

Unable to externalize their anger; the pain consumes the survivor, resulting in the cyclization of the insidiousness i.e. heroin, addiction, cutting, anorexia, morbid obesity, alcohol etc. Every form of self-injurious behavior is an agonized cry for help.

Heroin, bulimia and other self-loathing behaviors are a giant middle finger to America; no one ever cared about me, so why should I care about myself? Heroin and bulimia are rebellions devoid of direction and grit, a quest without a compass.

Robbed of support from the patriarchal society, the survivor slips into self-torment. Nince Inch Nails' lyrics, famously covered by Johnny Cash, capture the "Hurt:"

I hurt myself todayTo see if I still feelI focus on the painThe only thing that's realThe needle tears a holeThe old familiar stingTry to kill it all awayBut I remember everything.

What have I become?My sweetest friendEveryone I know goes awayIn the end.And you could have it allMy empire of dirtI will let you downI will make you hurt.

The Somali writer, Warsan Shire writes: "Not everyone is okay with living like an open wound. But the thing about open wounds is that, well, you aren't ignoring it. You're healing; the fresh air can get to it. It's honest. You aren't hiding who you are. You aren't rotting."

The suppression of pain is ineffective because pain will only find other outlets. We, survivors, can run and escape all the way to the grave but until we cough up all of the pain, there can be no thorough-going healing. Silence is not an option. Some form of therapy is necessary to help survivors understand the roots of their self-harm and to find meaning in an alienating society.

Ronald Savage and other survivors of abuse are heroes. Protectors of future generations, the survivors fought to overcome "the shame" patriarchy imposed on them and tell their stories.

Digging up and speaking the pain is the first step but it cannot happen without outside support. Because class society seeks to atomize and isolate the survivor, there must be an effort to collectivize our pain in a supportive, conscious community setting. There are 12 step programs and support groups called Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and Incest Survivors Anonymous. There are also research-validated treatments such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that are effective for assisting those whose trauma has led to severely self-harming or suicidal behavior. These methods help the survivor see things differently and not blame themselves. Healing occurs when the survivor recognizes that they are good and beautiful and let's go of the poisonous negative thoughts and low self-esteem that the abuser and patriarchy have instilled within them.

As I argued in an article on trauma, addiction and capitalism, a survivor who is able to theoretically grasp the hell-hole they were born into, begins to empower themselves to turn on the class system, the source of their trauma. A revolutionary's work is to provide a political orientation towards trauma. If overcoming fear and denial is the individualized part of healing, revolutionary organizing against the monster, responsible for the crimes of the century, is the collective part of healing.

Therapy, support groups and the party, working together, all play their role in helping the survivor rise up on the society that violated them.

Our responsibility

Afrika Bambaataa was a pioneering hip hop voice who resisted injustice and capitalism, but this did not mean that he was beyond all of its insidiousness-patriarchy, white supremacy and homophobia.

On June 1st, 2016, Julien Terrell, cofounder of The Renaissance Zulu Chapter 64, issued the following statement condemning the covering up of Bambaataa's sexual violence against teenage boys and announcing the chapter's separation from the traditional Zulu Nation: "Many have said that Bambaataa's accomplishments in hip hop should not be included in the critique of his so called personal life. I say that any so called political and cultural commitment that does not transfer to your personal actions is NOT a commitment at all. It's nothing but talk and the time for putting ego aside has come. He [Bambaataa] is still lying but there is space for humility and compassion that the victims have offered despite the pain he caused. I hope those that are close to him support him in stepping to the allegations with integrity. That is what this culture is supposed to represent."

As revolutionaries and community leaders, we all carry the social baggage of the old world and must hold one another accountable for our actions. As Terrell explains, we have a responsibility to uproot and go to war with all of the contradictions, less they chaotically spill out and hurt others.

Socialism is healing

Experiments in rehabilitation in the U.S. are limited today because of the "lock them up and throw away the key" strategy of the state. In a transformed society, the abuser would undergo isolation, therapy, rehabilitation and slow reintegration. Reconciliation would involve the recounting of their own childhoods and the social crimes they went on to commit. There is no healing in denial. Anything short of a full, public admission and acceptance falls short of justice.

In a socialist society, inherited with all of social baggage of capitalism it will take generations to do away with all of the wicked inheritance-white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, individualism, consumerism etc. As the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and other socialist societies can attest, in a new world born of the old-with all of the birth marks of wickedness and depravity-there will be no shortage of challenges for nations reborn.

The ruling class vilifies these human experiments in social re-organization in order to contain our dreams and ground our visions, less we conceive of emancipation from the current social disorder. The unofficial religion of the U.S. today is anti-communism, for this very reason.

From the perspective of the extractors of surplus value, what has to be protected is not the right of a little girl to a childhood but their own unfettered access to profits. The anonymous survivor of rape at Stanford, the 16-year-old Brazilian girl, Ronald Savage and all of the nameless survivors-caught in the crosshairs of patriarchy and exploitation-demonstrate the urgency to organize for the toppling of the capitalist system.

Dr. Martin Luther King called for "a revolution in our nation's priorities." A socialist society would immediately and decisively intervene to halt and reverse the monstrous patterns of incest and rape.

Towards a culture of women's liberation

What would a world based on freedom-as opposed to necessity-look like? There is no way to predict the future but we can assert that it will not look anything like the degradation-what Engel's called "pre-history"-that today's oppressed communities and families confront.

In a healthy future, crystal meth, domestic abuse, and trauma itself will be remnants of a dark, distant past from which we will have emerged.

The goal then is to convert our current society into a school of women's liberation.

Society's superstructure must be torn up from the roots and reorganized to concretely confront the scourge of misogyny. The advertising industry sexually objectifies women. Viacom, General Electric and the entire mass media produce music and videos based on chauvinist caricatures of women as objects, shallow gossips, video vixens, hoes, thots and gold-diggers. Many actors in capitalist, consumer society are guilty in playing a role in the reproduction of rape culture. They cannot be let off the hook.

Socialist society will project empowering reference points through billboards, education, TV and social media.

In Cuba, where class relations are organized differently, the incidence of such crimes against women and children is far less common. After 1959, Cuba outlawed the exploitation of women in advertising. Housing, education, transportation, health care and a job were guaranteed social and economic rights. A society that had ceased to be a patriarchal, dog-eat-dog world took the bite out of the dog.

Though we can only make conjectures about the future, we can be sure that it will look nothing like this hell-on-earth that exists today.

Only a new, socialist society can provide real healing and in the words of martyred Irish revolutionary, Bobby Sands: "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children." We fight so that no little child or adult ever again has to live with what Ronald Savage and all survivors live with-the pulsating scars of incest, abuse and rape buried beneath their skin.

Thank you to Emmanuella Odilis for the feedback, edits and support. As the tears and truths emerge, the words and strength stream fourth…

This was originally published at Liberation School.

Notes

[1] "Statistics about Sexual Violence." National Sexual Violence Resource Center. 2015.

[2] Chemaly, Soraya. "50 Actual Facts about Rape." Huffington Post. December 8th, 2014.

[3] 1993.

[4] National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence against Women Survey. 1998.

[5] It is not uncommon for cops to use their batons to violently penetrate their captives. This has nothing to do with homosexuality, but are rather acts of aggression, power and contempt.

[6] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's well-known opera Marriage of Figaro is about precisely this, peasants and servants, in the early dawn of the revolutionary movement in France, conspiring and outsmarting a philandering count who sought to prey upon the young women of an Italian village.

[7] Page 136. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1935.

[8] New York: Penguin. 1987.

[9] DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Uptone Press, 2005.

[10] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: 1845.

[1] Frederick Douglas' testimony conjured up images of what Haitian families endure today in exile in the Dominican Republic. According to my research living and organizing within the Haitian communities of the D.R., the results are eerily similar with women and children twice victimized - by a system of anti-Haitianismo and by the alienated male sub-oppressors within the exploited Haitian community.

[12] There is a reactionary, "nationalist" trend that posits that Black men are damaged because they were not allowed to play a "traditional" patriarchal role. This chauvinist position submits that the solution is to allow the Black male to assume their "proper" place as patriarchal protectors. It should be stated that patriarchal "protection" in any class society, including pre-colonized Africa, has its own antithesis of rape and abuse.

[13] Originally published in Spanish as Si Me Permiten Hablar. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1978.

[14] This group expropriated the name of Maria Barzola, an Aymara activist assassinated in 1951 by the Bolivian government.

[15]On the plantation, Black women were at the same time domestic, breeder and field slave. As she picked cotton, tobacco or sugar, she laid her baby down beside her just out of arm's reach. Still reeling from the pain of childbirth, she was forced to contribute to the productive process. She was thrice enslaved.

[16] Fantz, Ashley. Outrage over 6-month sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford rape case. CNN. June 7, 2016.

[17] Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) calculation based on US Department of Justice 2010 Statistics.

[18] "Raising Awareness about Sexual Abuse Facts and Statistics. U.S. Department of Justice.

[19] Bearak, Max. "Women's Underwear Strewn on beach in Rio to protest Brazil's rape culture." The Washington Post. June 8th, 2016.

[20] Vintage. 1997.

The Science of Corrosive Inequality

By Nick Partyka

Pictured: "Sharing the Wealth" (Oil on Canvass 66" x 48") by Mark Henson

As the Presidential campaign season begins to get into full-swing, inequality will become a prominent topic, and misleading conventional narratives will abound. Both the presumptive nominees of the two major political parties have addressed this topic at length already, and will certainly have much more to say as the general election phase kicks-off. Inequality is a prominent topic because we are still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis that spawned the Occupy Wall-Street movement, which did much to put the issue of economic and political inequality back on the table for discussion. This is why the topic came up in the 2012 Presidential election cycle, and why during this election cycle one candidate in the Democratic Party's primary was able to attract a very large following by focusing predominantly on this issue. The success of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump shows that the issue of inequality, and its various social, political, and economic effects, still resonates deeply with large portions of the electorate on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide. This is the case, principally, because a great many non-elite Americans are still living with the economic consequences of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

Inequality, political and economic, not only helped to inflate the bubble whose bursting caused the crash, but it also determined in large measure who benefited from the bailouts and the "recovery". Rising inequality from the 1970s on helped funnel more and more wealth to the top of the income scale. These people spend their money very differently from others. When this group has surplus income, they are very likely to purchase financial instruments. As more and more wealth was channeled into their hands by the economic and political policies of neoliberalism, as championed by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher, the demand for financial products grew correspondingly. Further, after the financial sector was deregulated in the late 1990s, this process of financialization only picked up speed. Once home mortgages were securitized, that is, made into financial instruments, the stage was set for the collapse. After the crash, elites used their political and economic clout to divert bailout funds from America's proverbial 'main streets' to Wall-Street. This, combined with fiscal policy choices, that is, the choice by bourgeois politicians not to use it as a tool to combat unemployment, is why the so-called "recovery" has not extended all that far down from the top of the income scale.

In order to know what kinds of solutions are necessary to address the problem of inequality it is important to know what kinds of problems it produces, as well as their scale. Scientists and scholars studying inequality, and its various impacts, have revealed a number of striking conclusions about the nature and extent of the social, political, and economic, impacts of inequality. When taken together these various research results paint a very clear picture of the corrosive effects of economic inequality on society, economy, and democratic politics. The totality of these wide-ranging effects constitutes a significant threat to a society aiming to be democratic and egalitarian. In what follows, we will examine some of these interesting studies and their results to see what they reveal about the multifaceted impacts of inequality on persons, societies, and democracy. What we will find is that the scale of the problem far outstrips the scale of most of the mainstream solutions proposed; even those put forward by the self-proclaimed (though quite incorrectly)"socialist" candidate in the Presidential primaries.

Piketty on Inequality

It seems a safe bet that few would have predicted the overwhelming success that a hefty tome on economic inequality by a French economist would achieve in the spring of 2014.[1] The 2011 Occupy Wall-Street movement did much to bring the issue of economic inequality in society, as well as its many social and political effects, into the public consciousness, as well as into political debates. Nevertheless, Thomas Piketty's book, and its success, caught many totally by surprise, and set off a vigorous debate, and vitriolic reaction, upon its translation into English. Both liberals and radicals pointed to his work as evidence, as confirmation, of what they have been saying for many years. On the other side, conservatives seemed wither to accept his findings, but dismiss his policy suggestions, or to find technical "flaws" with his data or methodology as a way of undermining all his conclusions. Using mainly tax-return records, from several countries, Piketty's work presents the most comprehensive view of the historical evolution, and structure, of income inequality throughout the industrialized world. Several highly significant, and well-established, conclusions result from his research.

First, Piketty confirms empirically several notions the left has asserted, namely, income inequality in the United States has returned to a historic high level, and it has been rising since the 1970s. The level of income inequality in the United States, especially the growth of incomes at the very top of the income spectrum, has, according to Piketty, revived the social significance of capital in the 21st century, and is bringing back the more patrimonial economy that dominated earlier centuries, until the period between 1914 and 1975. That is, once dynamic and equalizing societies are now increasingly reverting to the kinds of more rigidly defined, and largely hereditary, social relationships and attitudes that dominated the economy and society of the Gilded Age, as well as preceding centuries.

Second, and very importantly, Piketty's research provides much needed context for perceptions of growth, both of capital and wages. What Piketty's historical research reveal is that average annual growth rates, even in this most recent and most fecund epoch, are actually rather small. Average annual growth rates for the most productive societies, in the most productive era, are still only about 1 - 1.5% per annum. Capital, on the other hand, has grown on an average of 4-5% per annum over the same historical period. This observation gives rise to one of Piketty's fundamental conclusions, namely the law (r>g).[2] This law is the biggest source of divergence in market economies, because it directly implies that a capital, however small, will with time invariably become a large capital; exogenous shocks, natural catastrophes, and acts of God notwithstanding. What this law also implies, and very significantly, is that the economic and social landscape of the mid-20th century is an economically and historically unique, and likely non-replicable period.

Why did economic inequality decline in the United States during the middle part of the 20th century? Piketty's answer is that this decline was largely the result of the confluence of historical events, namely the World Wars and the Great Depression. It is the historical conjuncture of these events in this period, as well as the political and social response to them, that accounts for the uniqueness of this era. Piketty's fundamental law (r > g) was able to be broken in this period because of the exigencies of combating foreign military foes and domestic economic woes. One of the most significant results of the efforts to combat both is that working people in the Unites States accumulated during the war years the largest stock of disposable income ever. It was the spending of this money, as well as exploiting the United States' position as global hegemon, that fueled the post-war economic boom up until the mid-1970s. When the economic effects of the 1914-1945 period wore off, inequality began to rise again.

Inequality & Social Mobility

One of the major implications of Piketty's conclusions was on the topic of social mobility in the United States. Many on the left have been arguing for some time that social mobility in America is much lower than commonly thought, and Piketty's data on inequality seems to support just such an argument. If economic inequality in a society is very high, and growing, then social mobility is likely to be low. The reasons for this are that as economic inequality increases, so the economy comes to be more and more patrimonial, and thus economic divisions come to settle more and more into sharp caste divides. This is, of course, because in a capitalist society, income determines the extent of an individual's, or a family's, ability to consume, that it, their income determines the range of their consumption choices.

One thing Piketty's work demonstrated clearly was just how stark income inequality is in America. What he also, very importantly, showed that the growth of inequality in the United States since the 1970s is due principally to the rise in the incomes of the wealthiest 1%, and .1% of income earners. [3] This increasing concentration of wealth among the wealthiest certainly bodes ill for high levels of social mobility. One of the main features of a patrimonial economy is that, at least from the point of view of social mobility, it is not dynamic. Piketty appeals to interesting evidence from 19th century Victorian literature to demonstrate this fact. In a highly patrimonial economy the ability of individuals at the very bottom of the economic scale to advance into the "middle-classes", let alone into the top 10% or 1%. A patrimonial economy also makes it very easy for those who have accumulated wealth to be fairly confident of never falling below the "middle classes", if one falls out of the elite classes at all. One of the most striking features, at least to modern readers, of Piketty's use of the economic evidence in Victorian novels, is that with conservative management an accumulated fortune is unlikely to be dissipated, and thus to be transmitted to the next generation.

The notion that classes, or castes, define American society is anathema to many pundits and commentators. Thus the vigorous attempts to rebut, dispute, and discredit Piketty's work and conclusions. This image of a patrimonial economy does not square well with the cherished nostrum of capitalist society as dynamic and highly socially mobile. To some extent this belief in mobility is evidenced in empirical studies. What these studies often compare are the economic, or educational, outcomes achieved by parents and their children. What they reveal is a strikingly low-level of social mobility, at least as defined by the "rags to riches" mythos of America. Indeed only .2% of those born into the bottom 20% of the income scale will end up rising into the top 1% of income earners. And, as one might expect, the picture is more bleak for persons of color, and other marginalized groups.

What some researchers found is that the picture of social mobility in America is much more complex than simplified narratives from right or center-left suggest. The reality for the majority of Americans is rather fluid, in that people enjoy bouts of relative prosperity and affluence, as well as bouts of relative poverty and deprivation. If such a picture of social mobility were not shocking enough, research taking a different tack suggests that social mobility is actually much lower that the picture presented by inter-generational studies mentioned above, and has been very low throughout history. [4] Economist Gregory Clark studied the prevalence and endurance of 'elite' surnames in elite institutions as a way of measuring social mobility with societies.

Using a variety of sources, including Census records, tax returns, death records, graduation records, and others, Clark makes a case that the rate of social mobility in the United States is much lower than contemporary estimates suggest. He argues that the common perception of very slow long-term mobility is more accurate than the estimates presented by social scientific research. For the case of the United States, Clark first identifies certain elite surname groups, as well as underclass surname groups. Then, he looks to test the prevalence of both groups among occupations identified as high status. Clark uses membership lists, mainly from professional associations, of doctors and lawyers as the high status occupations. Among the elite surname groups in America Clark lists Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, what he calls the 1923-1924 rich, and pre-1850 Ivy League graduates. The underclass groups are black Americans, and a groups Clark terms New French settlers. What his research concluded was that elite surnames show a very strong persistence, between 0.7 and 0.9, over the long-term, that is, for Clark, at least three generations.[5]

Another very interesting body of research suggests that humans have innate physiological and physiological reactions to the particular stresses induced by scarcity, by having less than is needed to make ends meet. Researchers found that these reactions impair humans' long-run decision making faculties, even if boosting short-term focus, resulting in patterns of behavior that lead the poor to be likely to remain in poverty. [6] The experience of scarcity causes people to 'tunnel', that is, focus on immediate goals and concerns, and thus to neglect many other important goals or other things one values. While this focus does yield an important benefit in increased productivity, the long-run consequences can lead to what researchers call a 'scarcity trap'. As one tunnels in on pressing immediate goals, the things that fall outside ones view are neglected, and thus become shocks as they suddenly appear on the tunnel of the person experiencing scarcity. As one reacts to each successive shock, even when "shocks" are predictable and routine events, one resorts to increasingly dodgy schemes to make ends meet. This is how people end up in, and unable to extract themselves from, one or another of the many kinds of scarcity trap.

This is only compounded by the fact that the experience of scarcity imposes a kind of tax on humans' cognitive capacities, such that as scarcity increases one comes to have less and less of the most important mental resources for escaping scarcity. Will-power is a finite resource, and the effects of scarcity are such that this resource is heavily depleted by scarcity, and the tendency of humans to psychologically obsess about their deprivations. Moreover, scarcity erodes intellectual capacities, in some studies the effect was the equivalent of as much as 13 or 14 IQ points. Thus, as scarcity taxes one's cognitive capacities, shocks continue to arise, and one must constantly react, always seemingly one step behind. Thus, one will end up making poorer, more impulsive decisions that meet short-term needs, but at the expense of the individual's long-term goals and interests. Scarcity, in this way, perpetuates scarcity, leading people to remain locked into debt and poverty. Unfortunately, even when poor people do escape poverty, or debt, they often fall back in because they lack any kind of buffer or cushion. The truth is that the poor tend to stay poor because of the physiological and psychological effects of the experience of scarcity, and the rich tend to stay rich because of the effects of abundance.

Inequality and Personality

Beyond its effects on the rates of social mobility, and how this affects people's lives, inequality also seems to change who people are on a deeper level. Inequality has some interesting, and disquieting, impacts on what people think, their attitudes, their moral values, their perceptions of situations and of other people, and more. Wealth, or the lack thereof, impacts on individual's personality in many ways. It directly provokes the question of whether the wealthy and the poor are qualitatively different sorts of persons, or whether they are constructed that way by their social environment. The results of empirical research suggest that the experience of inequality, from the top or the bottom of the economic scale, has profound effects on our personalities. The clear implication is that our personalities are in some very significant ways shaped by the contingent realities of the social environment.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, and its aftermath, came much scorn, and condemnation of Wall-Street's recklessness and greed. The Great Recession brought increased scrutiny to the 1% as a class, and to the mis-deeds and cupidity of the finance industry and financial institutions in the lead-up to and during the 2007-2008 Crisis. The treatment of the whole matter by the federal government angered many citizens, and further fueled the public's fury and indignation. One of the threads that emerged from this storm of vitriol that was poured on Wall-Street bankers was comparing corporate CEOs to sociopaths. The callousness, selfishness, and nonchalance with which many in the financial industry profited from the crash which they themselves had both created and precipitated, even as others were being fired en masse, made many Americans think of corporate CEOs as basically sociopaths. Some pundits took this to the logical conclusion and compared clinical symptoms of sociopathic behavior to the characteristics of successful CEOs. As it turns out, a growing body of empirical research is suggesting that the wealthy are indeed very different from others, e.g. morally and emotionally, as a result of their wealth.

A series of creatively designed studies by researchers Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, Michael Kraus, Stephane Cote, and a host of collaborators, has revealed some very interesting results about the moral and emotional differences of rich people from persons of lower social class. Piff and Keltner, et al , demonstrated in both naturalistic and laboratory settings that those of higher social class, i.e. the wealthy, are more likely to lie, cheat, steal, and break the law than their counterparts in lower social classes.[7] On the naturalistic side, they found that wealthier drivers, as determined by the model of the car, were more likely to illegally cut-off both other drivers at intersections and pedestrians at crosswalks. On the laboratory side, they found that in experimental simulations those of higher social class, even if artificially created, were more likely to lie, cheat, and steal in order to win prizes. Moreover, in experimental simulations, even those whose position of wealth and dominance had been engineered as part of the experiment, showed the signs of feeling entitled to their totally un-earned wealth. Other research found that those who had attitudes characteristic of social dominance were found to be more likely to come to feel entitled to their position in the inequality hierarchy, or to believe the "legitimizing myths" of inequality. [8]

Other studies have produced similarly striking results. One study showed that lower-class individuals were more "empathically accurate" than their wealthier counterparts. 'Empathic accuracy' here refers to the ability of persons to correctly judge or predict the emotional states of others. [9] They hypothesize that since poorer people have to rely more on others to get by, they become more accurate at judging other people's emotional states, since their success in obtaining cooperation depends on managing the emotions of others. In another study, Kraus & Keltner demonstrated that the wealthier subjects in their experiments were less likely to pay attention to others, as demonstrated by a prevalence of "disengagement cues", e.g. looking at one's cell phone while others are talking.[10] A further study revealed that the wealthier subjects were more likely to have a predominance of "self-oriented affect", that is, the rich are more likely to think about themselves before others. [11] In yet a further study, Stellar, Keltner, & colleagues, demonstrated that wealthier subjects were not only slower to feel compassion, but reported feeling less compassion, for others experiencing suffering.[12] Higher social status individuals were also shown in one experiment to be stingier than their less wealthy counterparts.

Inequality, in addition to warping the perceptions and sensibilities of the rich, also distorts the perceptions of the working-classes. Kraus, Piff, and Keltner found in one study that those of lower social class position were more likely to favor contextual explanations over dispositional ones, because of a perceived lack of personal control over the outcome.[13] This means that poorer people tend to explain, or rationalize, their own choices, or the events of their lives in terms of external causal factors, that is, factors over which they as individuals do not have control. This perceived lack of control is characteristic of how researchers Melvin Kohn, Carmi Schooler, and their collaborators, understand the concept of alienation.[14] Their research demonstrated important connections between inequality in levels of alienation between high and low status groups in the workplace. The difference between the high- and low-status positions in the workplace roughly matches the colloquial "blue collar", "white collar" distinction, where the latter type of jobs contain an abundance, and the former a paucity, of opportunities to exercise "occupation self-direction", that is, control over their work. Each of these groups was found to have a distinct set of values and social orientations associated with it.

The correlation between the social stratification position of lower-status workers within the firm, and the personal values, social orientations, and psychological functioning that predominate among these workers is troubling.[15] The results obtained by Kohn and Schooler, et al, demonstrate that the more alienated low-status group are more likely to have specific set of values, attitudes, and social orientations. In particular, more alienated, "blue collar", workers tend to take on personality traits like authoritarianism, conformity to authority, resistance to change, and a focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the law. This is in turn related to the lower levels of psychological functions, or intellectual flexibility, observed among the high-alienation, low-status workers. This research also shows that the observed connection between these traits and social-stratification position within the firm are mediated by the division of labor in the typical capitalist firm, whereby the low-status workers are denied opportunities to exercise self-direction at work. Of course, we should note that an individual's social-stratification position with the firm is in many ways correlated with, and even determined by, that individual's social class in society generally. This latter is not a conclusion issued by the research we've been discussing, but rather a more general observation about the fit, under capitalism, between low-status persons and those who perform the low-status work in society.

One very telling, and worrisome, result of the work of Kohn and Schooler, et al, is that alienation experienced in the workplace spilled over into the non-work life of workers, effecting their leisure time preferences. The rate of interest in discussing non-political matters was found to be consistent across both the high- and low-alienation groups. However, interest in discussing political topics was distinctly lower among the high-alienation group. Moreover, the intellectuality of the preferred leisure time activities among highly alienated workers was seen to be much lower than among their counterparts in the low-alienation group. As a further kind of informal test, the researchers conducted their survey in two separate parts. One part of the survey covered non-political topics, the other political topics. After controlling for Swedes' cultural tendency to comply with researches requests, they found, quite suggestively, that the political part of the survey was returned later on average by the high-alienation group. This specifically political withdrawal by the high-alienation, low-status workers will have profound implications for the well-being of political democracy.

Inequality & Health in both Individuals and Societies

A growing body of research in public health has shown that economic inequality is highly related to certain significant socials ills, e.g. high levels of violence, as well as higher rates of illness and early death among those of lower class position in society. Building off this work on the "social determinants of health", Richard Wilkinson presents an argument that societies with more inequality are also, e.g. less trusting, less cohesive, less sociable, more prejudiced, and more violent. [16] He begins by noting an apparent paradox. Modern societies are more wealthy and productive, and with more luxuries readily available, than most of our ancestors would have ever dreamed. He cites the example of indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water as luxuries often taken for granted. And yet, modern societies also appear rife with unhappiness, e.g. high rates of suicide and depression, illness, violence, and early death. Wilkinson links the sources of these manifestations of unhappiness with economic inequality and its social, as well as physiological, effects.

Wilkinson's work successfully showed that almost all the social problems that are indicators of unhappiness, are more concentrated in poor areas, and more common among poor people. He argues that, as a result of the "epidemiological transition", the most common causes of death for all in developed countries shifted from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. What he found is that health is graded by social status, that is, largely by income. His results demonstrated that as income increased so did health, according to a range of metrics, and vice versa. He appeals to a range of studies to help show that social problems indicative of unhappiness are caused by the same sources of stress as chronic diseases. Wilkinson points to three main categories of psychological risk factors, namely, early childhood social and emotional development, being more socially isolated, and high or low social status.

As inequality in a society rises, Wilkinson argues, the social relationships of that society increasingly become characterized by relations of dominance and subordination, that is, by increasing social distance. The more this latter is the case, the more the sense of autonomy, or of self-direction, decreases for the proverbial have-nots as their dependence on the haves increases. In Wilkinson's causal mechanism, increased inequality leads to increased competition for social status, and subsequently the adoption of anti-social values and attitudes as people become more detached from and less reliant on others. These latter values progressively erode social relations and community life, and thus contributing to the social problems afflicting society. Basically, the psychological factors that create unhappiness, produce ill health and other social issues through increases in stress associated with inequality, and deprivation. For, indeed, as Wilkinson acknowledges, the connection between economic inequality and ability to access consumption goods will play a large part in explaining the connection between inequality and ill health.

On the one hand, inequality makes societies less healthy. For example, one study based on data from the U.S. General Social Survey by Kawachi and Kennedyet al, Wilkinson cites, demonstrates that states with higher inequality were less trusting than in more equal states. [17] Two studies by Robert Putnam and colleagues, one conducted in the U.S. and the other in Italy, found that the strength of community life varied with the level of inequality. The more inequality there was, the less likely people were to be involved with social, or civic organizations or activities.[18] Building off others' data for ten U.S. cities, the more inequality there was the more hostility three was.[19] Moreover, as Wilkinson notes, there are more than fifty studies showing a relationship between inequality and homicide rates.[20] Other studies have shown that higher rates of economic inequality were related with increased racial prejudice, as were lower social status for women. [21] Lastly, but by no means least, studies have shown that where inequality is greater political participation decreases, when participation is measured by propensity to vote.[22]

On the other hand, inequality also makes individuals less healthy, resulting in the early death of those on the short-side of social inequalities. All three of the main psychological risk factors for unhappiness and stress, and thus illness, that Wilkinson identified are directly related to economic inequality. Pre-natal and early childhood stress have been linked by studies to a range of later life health problems. The scientific evidence points to the stress hormones like cortisol as an important influencing factor.[23] Social isolation, that is, lack of embeddedness with a robust network of friendships, and other social connections, has been shown to be related to higher mortality rates. [24] Low social status has also been shown to be related to higher rates of mortality. What may be the most striking thing about what some of the research in this area suggests that, yes the material conditions attached to poverty matter, but that the position of inequality, of subordination and deprivation, itself produces negative consequences for health.[25]

Compounding these effects of inequality on health is the visibility of inequality, which research has found further increases inequality. [26] Subjects were experimentally manipulated into higher and lower status groups, the higher the status the more the initial endowment of the participant. The subjects participated in a game designed to test their choices given specific incentives. Basically, the experiment consists of a turn-based game where fake money is waged. The participants can choose to act cooperatively, i.e. contribute to a common pool or bank. Alternatively, players can also choose to act selfishly, and defect from cooperation, and thus gain more money for themselves than if they had cooperated. The outcome of each round depends on the choices of each of the players, and each of the player's choices effects the choices of each of the other players. The researchers found that when the levels of inequality were more visible in these experiments the outcomes of the games were more unequal distributions of wealth than in games where the levels of inequality were invisible to the players. If the visibility of wealth increases inequality in the distribution of wealth, then it stands to reason that, given the link between inequality and social health, visibility of inequality will exacerbate the negative health effects of inequality.

Inequality is Anti-Democratic

I am in deep agreement with Wilkinson when he asserts that the surprise should not be so much that inequality is as harmful to ourselves and to society as it is, but rather that we should have forgotten this. For, indeed, when we look back into the history of our modern democratic political culture, we see that the concern about economic, and thus social and political, inequality has been a major one. Both the ancient Greek and Romans had important laws, not always scrupulously abided, that limited land ownership by individuals. The idea behind these laws was to attempt to preserve a wide distribution of land-ownership, because owning land and political and social independence were linked. Indeed, in ancient minds, the former was the necessary material foundation of the latter.[27] For the Greeks , someone who depended on another for work, for a livelihood, would be thought of as an unreliable citizen. This was because the relationship between employer and employee, patron and client, is one of domination and subjugation. If one's ability access important subsistence goods hinges on the disposition of another, then one is unlikely to oppose that other politically; especially in a time when political debate and voting was done face to face, and in public. The rise of patron - client relationships was in part responsible, in the case of the Romans, for the fall of the republic.

Consider the classic slogan of the French revolution, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité", or liberty, equality, and solidarity. As Wilkinson rightly notes, each one of these values, is a demand, and is addressed or related to inequality. We've seen already that inequality lead to subordination, which is the anti-thesis of democratic political relations. Solidarity has to do with our understanding of social relations themselves, and their quality. A robust democratic culture must maintain a certain level and quality of social cohesion, built on relationships that affirm liberty and cooperation. We've see already that research shows that as inequality increases the quality of social relations decreases, importantly, inequality was found to decrease levels of participation. Equality can thus be seen as the basic pre-condition for liberty and solidarity. This is because of the importance of the material bases of liberty and solidarity, and the link between access to these material bases and income. Thus, the most essential foundation of any democratizing reform must be a change in the distribution of levels of access to the material pre-requisites of a decent life, the enables substantial political participation.

Inequality is also anti-democratic because it skews the outcome of public political deliberative institutions and processes, as well as "competitive" elections. A recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated that that the majority of the U.S. electorate had little or no control over the legislative outcomes of their "democratic" institutions. That is, as their research shows, there is no statistically significant connection between the preferences of the majority of voters and the legislative outcomes of their political institutions.[28] The wealthiest elites have a statistically significant lead over the rest of the American citizenry in the likelihood of their preference being realized in public policy and law. The recent Citizens Untied ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court only further entrenched the role of money in the contemporary American political system, by legally equating money with speech. It is very likely because people perceive the way that their political elites serve economic elites and their interests much more than those of the proverbial "common man". This is also very likely behind the deep decline in voter participation in America over a period of many years. It is also almost certainly part of why other research found that a full one third of survey respondents replied "not at all" when asked, "(H)ow democratically is your country being governed?"[29]

Conclusion

Economic inequality is thus highly corrosive of democracy because it limits social mobility, creates ill health and social problems, warps the personalities of those involved in un-democratic ways, and distorts the outcomes of the political process in favor of the wealthy. Inequality lowers mobility and results in more rigid social hierarchies divided by class, that is, by income. The result of this is a society in which a great gulf opens between these classes as their social, political, and economic experiences become increasingly divorced from each other. Further, because of the link between income and consumption, there is a connection between income inequality and health; both in persons and in societies. Inequality makes people more stressed, triggering physiological reactions, that when sustained over long durations produce consequences leading to more illness and earlier death. Inequalities in societies, in particular inequalities in income, resources, and opportunities, help produce unhealthy social maladies like increased violence and crime, reduced levels of compassion, higher levels of hostility, reduced levels of trust. In essence, inequality tends to decrease social cohesion, and the robustness of participation in community life, leading to increased levels of social isolation. Inequality also leads to the creation of social and economic conditions, and structures of work, under which individuals are incentivized to become persons with anti-democratic values, attitudes, and preferences. Increases in exposure to relationships of domination and subordination lead those subordinated to taken on adaptive preferences, e.g. the specifically political withdrawal noted in the work of Kohn & Schooler et al.

What we can see now is that the responses to the problem, really problems, of inequality are woefully inadequate to address the wide range of maladies created or exacerbated by inequality. Raising taxes on the rich, and spending that money on social programs sounds like an appealing solution. But, from what we have just seen, this strategy is not capable of providing real solutions to the variegated social, economic, and political problems related to high levels of inequality in society. Tackling the problem of inequality will require much more robust measures. What should be clear from what we've discussed here is that the political and economic problems of economic and political inequality cannot be addressed singly or in isolation. Only a comprehensive strategy addressing them all simultaneously will suffice to effect real change. The economic power of capitalists gives them political power, which they use to preserve and even enhance their economic power. Unless the very social and economic foundations of this feedback loop are extirpated, the hold of bourgeois elites on both economic and political power is unlikely to be broken. This is why even a successful "political revolution" would be ineffecti ve in combatting inequality; let alone reversing the four decade old trend towards rising inequality. The only effective means of combatting inequality, and its myriad of detrimental consequences, is the seizure of political and economic power from the capitalist class by a working class that is conscious of itself as a class both in-itself and for-itself.

Notes

[1] Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the 21st Century. Tr. Arthur Goldhammer. The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014.

[2] In this equation r = average annual rate of growth of capital, and g = average annual rate of growth of income, or output. See Piketty, (2014), 25.

[3] See Piketty (2014); figs.8.5 - 8.10

[4] See Clark, Gregory. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press, 2014.

[5] See Clark (2014) ch.3.

[6] See Mullainathan, Sendhil & Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. Picador, 2014.

[7] Piff, Paul, et al. "Higher Social Status Leads to Increased Unethical Behavior". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol.109 no.11 (2012): 4086-4091.

[8] See Wilkinson (2005), 196.

[9] Kraus, Michael W., Stephane Cote, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy". Psychological Science. Vol.21 no.11 (2010):1716-1723.

[10] Kraus, Michael W., & Dacher Keltner. "Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A thin Slicing Approach". Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.1 (2009): 99-106.

[11] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm". Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.4 (2011): 246-250.

[12] Stellar, Jennifer, V.M. Manzo, Michael W. Kraus, & Dacher Keltner. "Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Response to Suffering". Emotion. Vol.12 no.3 (2012): 449-459.

[13] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class, Sense of Control, and Social Explanation". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol.97 no.6 (2009): 992-1004.

[14] Kohn, Schooler, and their colleagues take their conception of alienation from work done by Melvin Seeman in the early 1960s. See; Seeman."Alienation and Social Learning in a Reformatory". American Journal of Sociology. Vol.69 no.3 (1963): 270-284. Also see; Seeman, & John W. Evans. "Alienation and Learning in a Hospital Setting". American Sociological Review. Vol.27 no.6 (1962): 772-782.

[15] See; Kohn, Melvin. Class and Conformity: A Study in Values. 1969. University of Chicago Press, 1977. Also see; Kohn and Schooler, et al. Work and Personality. Ablex Publishing, 1983.

[16] See; Wilkinson, Richard. The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. The New Press, 2005.

[17] Kawachi, I., B.P.Kennedy, K.Lochner, &D.Prothrow-Smith.1997. "Social Capital, Income Inequality and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol.87 no.1: 21-32.

[18] See; Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster. 2000. Also see; Putnam, R.D., R. Leonardi, & R.Y. Nanetti. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton University Press, 1993.

[19] Wilkinson (2005), 51.

[20] Wilkinson (2005), 47-50.

[21] Kennedy, B.P., I. Kawachi, K. Lochner, C.P. Jones, & D. Prothrow-Smith. "(Dis)respect and Black Mortality. Ethnicity & Disease. Vol.7 (1997): 207-214. Also see; Blau, F.D. & L.M. Kahn. "The Gender Earnings Gap - Learning from International Comparisons". American Economic Review. Vol.82 (1992): 533-538.

[22] See Mahler, V.A.."Exploring the Subnational Dimension of Income Inequality". Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper 292, January, 2002. Also see; Blakely, T.A. B.P. Kennedy, & I. Kawachi. "Socioeconomic Inequality in Voting Participation and Self-rated Health". American Journal of Public Health. Vol.91 no.1(2001): 99-104.

[23] Wilkinson (2005), 81-85.

[24] Wilkinson (2005), 78-81.

[25] Wilkinson (2005), 73-76. Also see; Shively, C.A., & T.B. Clarkson. "Social Status and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis in Female Monkeys". Arteriosclerosis & Thrombosis. Vol. 14 (1994): 721-726.

[26] Nishi, Akahiro, Hirokazu Shirado, David G. Rand, & Nicholas A. Christakis. "Inequality and Visibility of Wealth in Experimental Social Networks". Nature. Vol.526 Oct., (2015): 426-429.

[27] See; ; Havell. H.L.. Republican Rome. 1914. Oracle Publishing, 1996. Also see; Hanson. Victor Davis. The Other Greeks. University of California Press, 1999.

[28] Gilens, Martin & Benjamin I. Page. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". Perspectives on Politics. Vol.12 no.3 (2014).

[29] See World Values Survey Wave 6 (2010-2014).

Cuba's Achievements and the Imperialist Threat

By Curry Malott

The following speech was delivered by Curry Malott June 10th at the Paul Robeson house in West Philadelphia as part of a PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) sponsored event featuring Cuban revolutionary Luisa Campos. Since 1996 Campos has been the Director of the Museum of the Literacy Campaign in Havana, Cuba. Around forty people attended the event, which also included a speech by leading figure in the Black radical tradition and resident of North Philly, Dr. Monteiro.

Needless to say, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the PSL, defends socialism in Cuba. In these short remarks I will explain why we defend socialism in Cuba and highlight some of what we defend in socialist Cuba.

Since the historic defeats suffered by the socialist movement in the late 80s and early 90s, it has become increasingly difficult for workers' states, such as Cuba, to survive. The struggle for socialism is a global struggle and as communists in the U.S. we naturally defend any gains in this movement. All oppressed people have a stake in defending socialist Cuba. Special economic reforms, beginning in the 1990s, have been enacted in Cuba to cope with this increasingly difficult period, driven by decades of strangulating U.S. sanctions, and we stand with them in solidarity.

Now as the stigma of socialism is beginning to dissipate in the U.S., due to the Occupy movement, the movement for Black Lives, and the Sanders campaign, which are responses to growing suffering stemming from the deepening crisis of capitalism itself, more and more people are interested in learning the truth about Cuba.

As we stand with Cuba, we acknowledge that the overturning of capitalism does not necessarily mean the end of the struggle. We know that anytime a capitalist class is displaced by a working class revolution, the former exploiters will become counter-revolutionaries and do everything in their power to restore capitalism, and ultimately their capacity to exploit. External imperialist forces will also direct their destructive power towards the restoration of capitalism wherever gains have been made toward the negation of the negating capitalism system.

The 1961 failed Bay of Pigs invasion is an example of Cuba's former capitalist class exiled in Florida working in cahoots with U.S. imperialists to violently restore capitalism in Cuba. The long history of economic sanctions, assassinations, including the assassination of literacy volunteers, sabotage, and other forms of U.S. terrorism aimed to overthrow Cuba's workers' state are further examples of how imperialists will always be an external threat to workers' states and movements wherever they exist in the world until they are defeated once and for all time.

We therefore support Cuba's workers' state and their right to self-defense and self-determination. We support the enormous gains that the Cuban people, through their revolution, have made correcting the extreme poverty, suffering, and depravation that marked the pre-socialist era.

At the core of the Cuban Revolution and the force behind transforming the country into a much more socially just society, we defend the Rebel Army that, became the embryo of the new state and was instrumental in carrying out the early revolutionary measures of land reform and other economic decrees

We therefore defend the institutions that the Rebel Army transformed into, such as the National Institute for Agrarian Reform and the National Institute of Housing and Savings. For example, only three months after the ousting of the Batista regime utilities and rents were cut in half and evictions were banned. The following year an advancement was made under the Urban Law Reform of 1960 transforming half of the nation's tenants into home owners and eliminating landlordism.

Similarly, the private ownership on a large scale of the means of production - the tools and material needed to create the wealth of society - was gradually ended. For example, under the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 the amount of land that could be held by a private interest was reduced to 1,000 acres, and by 1963 that had been drawn down to 163 acres. At the same time large parcels of unused land were handed over to peasant collectives. As a result, over 15 million acres of land had been expropriated from foreign corporations by 1963, which marked the end of capitalism in Cuba and the strengthening of the global struggle for socialism.

These transformations allowed the Cuban Revolutionary government to use the wealth created by Cuban labor for the benefit of the Cuban people and to support workers and peasants in other parts of the world struggling for their own self-determination. Of course, this is one of the reasons why U.S. imperialism would like to see capitalism fully restored in Cuba, that is, as a blow to the global working class movement.

Contrary to popular belief, however, this process of transforming capitalist power into socialist power in Cuba was not carried out without widespread participation among the people. This stems from the Revolution itself where the overthrow of the Batista regime was not the sole product of Che, Fidel, and their small band of guerillas, but was a popular revolution where over 20,000 Cubans gave their lives fighting in it. From January 1st 1959 the end of the capitalist class in Cuba and its repressive regime was set in motion and carried out through a series of trials and well-defended policies.

For example, the early housing and land reforms were supported by massive mobilizations of one million or more taking to the streets to let the remaining capitalists know where the people stood.

Another example is the over one hundred thousand youth who came out to volunteer to transform Cuba from a nation of illiteracy to a nation of literacy. This task was accomplished relatively quickly as a result of the suspension of secondary education for a year. Rather than go to the schoolhouse, for a year the youth went to workers and peasants and taught them how to read. This was not only effective in defeating illiteracy, but it is reported to have helped foster a sense of unity across the country transforming the youth who had not fought in the Revolution into veterans of it anyway. It is surely not an exaggeration to assume that the post-1959 mass mobilization movements contributed as much psychologically as materially to the ongoing success of the revolution.

A major part of this has been the Committees in Defense of the Revolution that were organized block-by-block in 1960. These committees helped to protect the country against counter-revolutionaries while simultaneously contributing to the fostering of widespread political participation amongst workers and peasants. Today there are approximately 8.5 million members of the Committees in Defense of the Revolution in a country of 11.5 million. This is what people's democracy looks like.

Every two and a half years there are elections for the 186 municipal assemblies and every five years for the National Assembly of Peoples' Power. There are assemblies for all 15 provinces and a special assembly for the youth. Adding to the real power held by the Cuban people every public official is immediately recallable. To get elected a candidate must receive fifty percent of the vote plus one. If no candidate receives this, then a second round of votes are cast. Over 88 percent of Cubans participate in these elections. Undoubtedly contributing to this high voter turnout is the fact that Cuban elections are free from campaign spending.

In stark contrast to this is capitalist democracy, as practiced in the U.S., where recent successful presidential campaigns have cost nearly 4 billion dollars and senatorial campaigns between 80 and 90 million. Consequently, workers tend to feel so alienated from any real sense of political power that the average voter turnout in the U.S. is between 50 and 60 percent. In some of the most impoverished and oppressed cities in the U.S. voter turnout can be as low as 22 percent of registered voters as is the case with Trenton, NJ.

Perhaps what Cuba is most known for in the U.S. is universal health care and advances in vaccine research. Cuba is also an international leader in training doctors throughout the so-called third-world, and sending thousands of doctors around the world wherever they can help to alleviate suffering. This is solidarity, and this is why Cuba has so many friends around the world and in the U.S.

What all of this points to is the fact that the class that rules in Cuba is not the capitalist class, but the workers, and we stand with them shoulder to shoulder.

While U.S. imperialist forces have been working to restore capitalism in Cuba since the day after the ousting of Batista, current signs suggest that they are once again ramping up their efforts. The U.S.'s movement toward normalizing relations is a great victory and a testament to the strength of the revolution, but in the eyes of the U.S. government this is viewed as a new tactic designed to undermine socialism in Cuba. That is, if U.S. corporations and banks, and the C.I.A., can get a foothold in Cuba, they can foster the emergence of a new capitalist class.

All the gains of the Cuban revolution-its independence from U.S. imperialism as well as the social gains like literacy, full employment and health care-are guaranteed by the strength of the Cuban working class. We are confident that they can succeed in the face of any threat, and we are fully committed to supporting this fight from the belly of the beast.

Curry Malott is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the author of multiple books, including most recently, History and Education: Engaging the Global Class War.