On Historical Materialism: A Theoretical Revival

By Charles Wofford

What is the responsibility of the historian? Historians show how those things often taken for granted, taken as a fact of life, are relatively recent developments. Alternately, they show how those things one may assume to be strange and unusual have, in fact, been present for a long time. That approach fits neatly into the broader critique of ideology, and there is a reason Marx was so invested in history and historical method. He revealed the historicity of "nature" in, among other places, his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which were not brought to public light until the mid-20th century, well after the developments of "orthodox" Marxisms and Marxism-Leninism (Claeys, 2018). The effort was to expose Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the other political economists of the eighteenth century for treating historical developments (from which they had conveniently benefited) as though they were eternal nature. Writes Marx, "Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws" (Marx, 1844). If something is historical, that means it had a beginning. If it had a beginning, it can therefore have an end. Historical materialism - the exposure of capital's historical conditions of existence - was a sword forged to slay Mammon.

But a sword is only as good as the steel out of which it is made. Today, many introductions to historical materialism not only fail to show the real power of the Marxist analysis but obscure the nature of Marxist historiography. Some Marxist intellectuals (like Richard Wolff), acting out of the best intentions, recapitulate capitalist historiography. The purpose of this essay is to introduce historical materialism with academic rigor, and to get at its deeper project, i.e. setting a general theoretical foundation for a revolutionary understanding of historical development, with the specific purpose of thinking past capitalism. What is historical materialism, and what is not historical materialism? There are several issues, each to be framed as a critique: The critique of teleology, the critique of "modernity," the critique of technological determinism, and the ideological self-critique.

First, historical materialism is not a theory of history that sees "primitive communism" necessarily leading to "slave" systems, necessarily leading to "feudal" systems, necessarily leading to "capitalist," then to "socialist" and "communist" systems. Any thesis of overarching historical development following from some "necessary" internal logic ought to be seen as outmoded and historiographically suspect. Teleological views of history have been rightly abandoned by academic historians, and Marxism has shown itself flexible and powerful enough to outgrow its nineteenth-century trappings.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." But class struggle is not some mechanical, deterministic thing, like a clock. It is rather a dynamic process that may yield any number of results. Feudalism did not have to lead to capitalism, and capitalism arose not from feudalism itself, but from the ruins of feudalism. It is true that feudalism was only formally abolished (in France anyway) on August 4th, 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution. But feudalism, throughout the Medieval ages with which it is associated, was a largely decentralized mode of production. It was not the same thing as the absolutism of the French ancien regime, overthrown in the revolution of 1789, which aimed to consolidate power into the monarch (indeed, the entire concept of "feudalism" has been challenged by academic historians, and with good reason. Marxist intellectuals have been slow on the uptake, with even people like Richard Wolff casually referring to "feudalism" as though it is a widely agreed upon concept). Wood and Brenner note that absolutism, and the enlightenment which supported it, may be seen as a defeated historical alternative to the rise of capitalism. In any case, it is a mistake to see feudalism as flowing directly into capitalism by means of a bourgeois revolution; rather, feudalism was already on the decline, and capitalism and absolutism of the French monarchy were alternative ways out of the medieval era.

Capitalism did not have to emerge, and that is the fundamental lesson of historical materialism: capitalism is not necessary or natural, and therefore it is not something that any country or society "needs." The idea that certain modes of production must pass into others is an example of the old historian's fallacy of projecting the present onto the past, fallaciously assuming a greater homology between "modern" and "pre-modern" society than may be justified. It also justifies imperialist expansion against non-capitalist societies, as one believes that the imperialist may be acting to bring those societies "forward" in some greater sense, and that any suffering is justified in the name of "progress." Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016) had it right when she identified the point of historical materialism to be isolating what makes capitalism specific, what makes it unique, not how it may manifest age-old human practices like commerce. The job of the Marxist historian, then, is not to show how modern capitalist society has its seeds in the ancient past, but to show how things became the way they are in the relatively recent past. Marxist historiography, understood in this way, is empowered, rather than challenged, by the postmodern polemic against "grand narratives." "We agree, there are no 'grand narratives'" says the Marxist. "That is why we doubt the Thatcherite declaration that 'there is no alternative.'" Are capitalist triumphalism and capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009) not the ultimate "grand narrative?" Historical materialism is about creating a "theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change it" (Wood, 1995). It is not about shoehorning all of history into a preconceived theoretical framework. In this sense, much of the youtube left intelligentsia (with otherwise excellent user "Cuckphilosophy" as an example), recapitulates schoolboy-level understandings of these issues ("Marxism is a grand narrative, postmodernism is against grand narratives" etc).

The Marxist historian ought to search for the breaks, fragments, and gaps, the hidden or lost potentials. Why? Because in doing so we reveal capitalism in its historicity, and take it out of the realm of nature, and thereby bring to light the possibility of surpassing it. The apologists of capital have always situated capitalism as part of nature, never as part of history. Histories of capitalism discuss how commerce has been around for thousands of years, which is true. Yet the aim of such "histories" is precisely to de-historicize; to show how capitalism goes all the way back to the foggy pre-history of humanity, and how modern commercial society is just the culmination of all those tendencies. The Marxist historian will therefore seek the fragments and breaks, and not the continuities or the overarching narratives.

Second, a central project of the historical materialist is the critique of the concept of "modernity." The rise of capitalism, the rise of individual rights, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the French revolution of 1789 and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 are all sometimes taken as one unified package, lumped together under the term "modernity." This is an error.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as the "modern," but a critical engagement with the entire concept is necessary if we are to conceive of an alternative modernity to neoliberal capitalism, one that is not merely some form of nostalgia. Unfortunately, thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno still hold undue sway in leftist circles, although their historiography is flawed. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) Adorno and Horkheimer set out a general critique of modernity as overly rationalizing and systematizing the totality of human life. But they take "Enlightenment" in a broad definition, including in its ambit all of the features of modernity noted above.

A detailed account of why Adornian historiography is wrong deserves and entire book of its own, dedicated to the rise of capitalism in England, the French revolution, the German Aufklärung, and other topics. Moreover, I do not wish to state that Adorno and Horkheimer were the only leftist intellectuals guilty of severe historical and historiographical errors (Foucault also comes to mind). But Dialectic of Enlightenment still carries an august status in even some orthodox Marxist circles, when it misleads more than it illuminates.

The historical materialist critique of modernity begins with the following observations: The rise of capitalism in England, the French Enlightenment, the German Aufklärung, the scientific revolution, and the industrial revolution did not come to us as part of a unified package. Capitalism as we understand it arose in rural England (Wood, 2002; Brenner 1976; Marx, 1867), and was not initially tied to the 1789 French revolution. The bourgeoisie and the capitalists were not originally the same class: most French bourgeois were office-holders, lawyers, or intellectuals; they were not capitalists or even merchants. It was the long-established landlord class in England which emerged as the nascent capitalists, and their literature was related to agricultural "improvement" (which in practice meant yielding higher profits), not the "enlightenment" of the citizenry.

Immanuel Kant's famous reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" defines "enlightenment" as "man's exit from self-inflicted immaturity." He goes on to link this "exit" to "the public use of reason." Is this challenge of finding an "exit" through "public use of reason" not more in line with revolutionary leftist thinking than reactionary thinking? If a philosopher comes along who argues that the pursuit of progressive values (broadly defined) results in greater harm to humanity than otherwise, would we not regard such a figure as a reactionary? Why, then, do we give figures like Adorno a pass when they argue the same (or nearly the same) thing?

Adam Smith's famous passage on the invisible hand goes thusly:

"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and buy directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it." (Smith, 1776, emphasis added)

Smith's famous argument is echoed by 20th-century neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek:

"As decentralization has become necessary because nobody can consciously balance all the considerations bearing on the decisions of so many individuals, the coordination can clearly be affected not by "conscious control" but only by arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. And because all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected or disseminated, by any one center, what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for, all the individual decisions. This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and which no other system even promises to accomplish." (Hayek, 1944)

In no way can either of these passages be squared with Kant's appeal to "the public use of reason." Both Smith and Hayek argue explicitly in favor of the individual, private use of reason, and believe that the greater good is served via the aggregate of individuals pursuing their own private interests. Nowhere is this argument to be found in Kant, nor is it in Kant's peers in the debate (Moses Mendelssohn, Karl Reinhold, etc.) "The public use of reason must at all times be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of reason, however, may often be very narrowly restricted without the progress of enlightenment being particularly hindered" (Kant, 1784). Is Kant's statement not more easily squared with notions of public planning, and public ownership, rather than some assumed dialectical inversion whereby private greed promotes the public welfare? If the public use of reason is a main criterion, then the main inheritors of the enlightenment in the 20th century might be Salvador Allende and the Cybersyn project, or computer scientist Paul Cockshott's book with political economist Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (1993). Wood may be right when she wrote in "Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?" (1996)

"So this isn't just a phase of capitalism. This is capitalism. If "modernity" has anything at all to do with it, then modernity is well and truly over, not created but destroyed by capitalism. The Enlightenment s dead. Maybe socialism will revive it, but for now the culture of "improvement" reigns supreme...The only concept we need to deal with this new reality is capitalism. The antithesis to that, of course, isn't postmodernism but socialism." (Wood, 1996)

My goal here is not to exonerate that heterogeneous phenomenon called "the Enlightenment," which is itself arguably as obscurantist a label as "modernity." But if the main portions of the Enlightenment happened in France and the German states, and capitalism arose in England, the question must be asked, whence arises the idea that the Enlightenment and capitalism were two parts of a united and oppressive modernity?

The answer, I think, is in another misappropriated Marxist idea: base and superstructure. Because ideological developments are assumed to reflect materialist ones, some Marxists conclude that the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, coeval with the rise of capitalism, must therefore be capitalism's intellectual expression. But again, the main strains of Enlightenment thought were in France and the German states and promoted "enlightened absolutism." They had little in common with the literature of "improvement" that thrived on England, and which was used to justify the mass enclosures that took up special urgency after 1688, and which were associated with different notions of citizenship (such as the English Bill of Rights). The mistake arises from an excess of historiography and a dearth of history. Recall that one third of classical Marxism's foundation was English empiricism. Modern Marxists sometimes place such emphasis on Hegelian method that, though their sword may be made from great technique, the shoddy materials result in a shoddy weapon. A frail weapon will not slay the dragon of capital.

Historians have discussed the "English Enlightenment." However, the idea itself is contentious, as the main representatives of English enlightenment thought (John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, etc.) were fiercely conservative, while the main figures of the continental Enlightenment were often imprisoned or had to meet in secret to avoid persecution for their radicalism. The "English Enlightenment," was notably distinct from the continental enlightenment(s).

If pressed to choose a single date for the "birth" of capitalism in England, my candidate would be 1688. Capitalism had, of course, been in utero for many years, with the enclosures gradually increasing and the power of the landlords increasing with it. But 1688 was the original revolution, which first enabled the legalization of what we now call capitalism on a mass scale. The Bank of England was founded six years later, which began the long and complex process of redefining national sovereignty along lines of government debt (Goodchild, 2002). The Bank of England was taken over by the state, which amounted to the taking over of the state by the Bank of England. This bank could never crash because it was backed up by the state, which had the monopoly on violence to extract whatever taxes were needed to maintain the bank. This enabled the Bank of England to create infinite loans on the promise that they could always be paid back in the future. That in turn justified the mass creation of paper currency secured against those instabilities suffered by previous paper currencies. Hence, the "creation" of the wealth which eventually allowed for the industrial revolution.

A brief side comment: in Capital Vol I, Marx calls the emergence of capitalism in England the "classic form" of accumulation by dispossession. In a footnote he then writes:

"In Italy, where capitalist production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. There the serf was emancipated before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed him into a "free" proletarian, without any legal rights, and he found a master ready and waiting for him in the towns, which had been for the most part handed down from Roman times. When the revolution which took place in the world market at about the end of the fifteenth century had annihilated northern Italy's commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The urban workers were driven en masse into the countryside, and gave a previously unheard-of impulse to small-scale cultivation, carried on in the form of market gardening." (Marx, 1867)

This comment may seem to demolish the thesis of capitalism's origins in England. However, Marx is remarkably vague here. Why is England the "classic" case if Italy is the place where capitalist production developed "earliest?" One idea is that Marx realized at some level he was founding a whole discipline and method of analysis, and thus decided for his own convenience what counted as the "classic" case. However, such an explanation seems too contingent. A comrade suggested to me that early Italian capitalism was destroyed by the decades of invasion and warfare in Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century. Looking into this thesis further, I found that, combined with epidemics of Plague, he Great Italian Wars rendered low the opportunities for investment. As a result, those with capital, rather than investing in improving production, invested in buildings and art-hence the artistic bloom of the Italian Renaissance (Malanima, 2008). Their capital did not yield profit in the same self-perpetuating ways we associate with capitalism, and was turned into use-value, rather than maintaining and expanding itself as exchange-value. Implicit in this explanation is the idea that wealthy Italians would necessarily engage in capitalist behavior unless such behavior is deflected, and that sounds a little too close to the "Capitalism is human nature" position. Whether one agrees or disagrees with this particular analysis, the larger point is this: the capitalism that since consumed the world, the capitalism in which we are living- "our" capitalism-did not come from Italy. Early Italian capitalism was snuffed out.

Philosopher Philip Goodchild couches his analysis in a Nietzschean historiography, inquiring as to when, exactly, the "Death of God" occurred. He places it at 1694, the founding of the Bank of England and the merger of state and financial interests that had been kept apart for thousands of years. "It was this deed which caused the murder of God" (Goodchild, 2002). But if capitalism killed God, then capitalism must first have been born, and the moment of the birth of capitalism as a social system, albeit of course in its infancy, was 1688. Marx notes in chapter 27 of Capital that the 1688 "Glorious Revolution" enabled the "capitalist profit-grubbers" to engage in profit-grubbing on an entirely new scale. While his emphasis is mostly on land, enclosure, and the creation of a mass property-less proletariat, the creation of modern finance is a subject on which historical materialists ought to have much to say.

Third, technological development is not itself the locus of revolution. As Wood notes, the point of historical materialist analysis is that each mode of production has its own logic, and its own way of needing to be understood.

"It is one thing to say that capitalism uniquely fosters technological development. It is quite another to contend that capitalism developed because it fosters technological development, or that capitalism had to develop because history somehow requires the development of productive forces, or that less productive systems are necessarily followed by more productive ones, or that the development of productive forces is the only available principle of historical movement from one mode of production to another […] the principle is that at the foundation of every social form there are property relations whose conditions of reproduction structure social and historical processes." (Wood, 1995, 120-121)

A simple historical example may be used to further illustrate the point: The ancient Romans could have had an industrial revolution of their own. They had simple steam machines and they had wagons. But for some reason, the opportunity or the imperative never arose to stick a steam machine on the back of a wagon and have the steam do the work of pushing it. Had such a moment arisen, the industrial revolution might have been 1,800 years ago. If technology will save us, it would have done so by now. The lesson of historical materialism here is that the revolution will be a class revolution, not a technological revolution (also opening room for critiques of the pseudoscientific cult of Singularitarianism). Building on work done by Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood shows the particular historical circumstances that allowed capitalism to emerge when and where it did, and not before (Wood, 2002). Historical developments need to be seen as historical, not as metaphysical; they do not follow from some predetermined logic waiting for its moment of fruition. History means beginnings. Technology has been around long before capitalism, so the beginnings of capitalism cannot be essentialized to technological development, unless we are prepared to once again view capitalism as existing in utero from the foggy pre-history of humanity.

Fourth, historical materialism involves challenging the categories in which we tend to think as themselves products of history. While Wood emphasizes the falseness of "economic" vs "political," we should also be careful of categories like "base" vs "superstructure," as ripe for reification. The terms of our analysis should be fluid and open to self-critique. As Slavoj Zizek put it in his 2009 debate with Alex Callinicos,

"If communism is an eternal idea, then it works as a Hegelian concrete universality. It is eternal, not in the sense of a series of abstract features which can be applied to every situation, but in the sense that it has the ability, the potential, to be re invented in each new historical situation." (Zizek, 2009).

That is the genuine power of historical materialism, to take the past and re-member it so as to continually recreate the space for revolutionary thought "in each new historical situation."

In the preface to his classic The Making of the English Working Class (1964), E.P. Thompson notes the problems created in thinking of class as a "thing" rather than a process ("If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences"), and how such thinking engenders a framing of any sort of concept of "class consciousness" as embodying the worst caricatures of vanguardist organizational methods. The logical contradictions are clear:

"'It' - the working class - exists, and can be defined with some accuracy as a component of the social structure. Class-consciousness, however, is a bad thing, invented by displaced intellectuals, since everything which disturbs the harmonious co-existence of groups performing different 'social roles' (and which thereby retards economic growth) is to be deplored as an "unjustified disturbance-symptom.'" (Thompson, 1964, 10)

Thompson sees class-consciousness as something that exists empirically, and which ought to be studied. All classes have some kind of consciousness, and it is part of the job of the Marxist historian to study their historical development. In a similar vein, all movements have vanguards, and one may study those empirically too. This is the meaning used by Marx and Engels in the manifesto.

"The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement." (Marx and Engels, 1848)

One may say to a "non-political" person, that while they may not care for politics, others do, and they will not care for their interests. One may also say to those skeptical of vanguards that while you may not pursue a position to influence the movement in ways you think are positive, that does not mean others won't. And those people will not necessarily lead the movement in directions that you think are best. Refusing to recognize any notion of the vanguard is akin to refusing to recognize any notion of politics. As Lenin put it,

"But what else is the function of Social-Democracy [i.e. revolutionary socialism] if not to be a "spirit," not only hovering over the spontaneous movement, but also raising the movement to the level of "its program?" Surely, it is not its function to drag at the tail of the movement; at best, this would be of no service to the movement; at the worst, it would be very very harmful." (Lenin, 1902)

Why does one become an activist (taking that term in the broadest sense) if not because one thinks one has something to contribute? Do we, as socialists, not think that we have a better political program than non-socialists? Are we not, in essence, trying to convince more people to think in socialist terms?

"For there will always be found some who think for themselves, even among the established guardians of the masses, and who, after they themselves have thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread among the herd the spirit of rational assessment of individual worth and the vocation of each man to think for himself." (Kant, 1784)

In this vein, see Zizek's emphasis on the nature of an "authentic" master who "forces us to be free" (see, for example, his debate with Jordan Peterson). In this vein, perhaps psychoanalysis may indeed serve a revolutionary role in creating the "maturity" needed to recognize the prospects for an "authentic" vanguard.

Obviously, this essay has gleaned over complex issues with a broad brush. It is really only aimed at correcting some errors that I have seen in explications of historical materialism. As noted above, just the discussion of capitalism and the enlightenment from a historical materialist perspective is itself a book waiting to be written, and this essay does not pretend to be that. Moreover, I have not discussed why feudalism was on the decline already if not because of the very same things that led to capitalism, or the critics of the Woods/Brenner theses (like Jairus Banaji, whose excellent work will be the subject of another essay). I have also shown the limits of my own historical understanding regarding the nature of the economy of the Italian states during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But if we need a way out of "capitalist realism" and to show that, contra Thatcher, there are alternatives, then the first thing to do is look to the past for inspiration and understanding. Historical materialism is a method by which we may ensure that our backward glance is actually historical, rather than merely nostalgic. But it must be re invented as our understanding of history is re invented: historical materialism is a historiography, not a history. What historical materialism will tell you depends on which historical information you put into it. The good historical materialist is not just a communist but is a historian too. And that means really knowing history.

Charles Wofford is a communist and a PhD student in historical musicology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chomsky, Noam. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," The New York Review of Books, 1967.

Claeys, Gregory. Marx and Marxism (Nation Books, 2018).

Cockshott, Paul and Allin Cottrell. Towards a New Socialism (Russell Press, 1993).

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Verso Books, 2009).

Goodchild, Philip. Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002).

Greene, Gayle. "Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory." Signs 16 no 2, 1991.

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944).

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. "What Is To Be Done?" in The Essential Works of Lenin ed. By Henry M. Christman (New York: Benton Books, 1966).

Malanima, Paolo. "The Italian Renaissance Economy (1250-1600)." International Conference Villa La Pietra, Florence, May 10th-12 th 2008, Europe in the Late Middle Ages: Patterns of Economic Growth and Crisis.

Schmidt, James, ed. What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (University of California Press: 1996).

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Prometheus books, 1991).

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage Books, 1964).

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso Books, 2002).

Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Verso Books, 1995).

"Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?" Monthly Review July/August, 1996

Zizek, Slavoj. "Slavoj Zizek: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Marxism 2009." Video File. Youtube.com. 2009. Accessed May 18th, 2019. Relevant comment at 2:13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw&t=640s

A Time Machine to the 1970s to Save Us: Towards a Socialist Feminism

By Collin Chambers

The Marxist Feminist Kathi Weeks (2014, xi) suggests that "we are now at a point when the standard critiques of 1970s feminism can be approached as orthodoxies of their own need of unsettling". Feminism, Weeks (2014, ix) says, has a rather "exceptional relationship to its historical traditions. It is as if the clocks in the world of feminist theory run at a faster rate than those in other theoretical domains." Marxist theorists treat Marx as if he were still living, using his work done in 19th century to understand contemporary contradictions of capital accumulation (just read any of David Harvey's work). By contrast, feminist theory treats the theories produced in the 1970s with almost scorn and "as if it were the distant past, over and done." Since the cultural turn in the social sciences and humanities Marxism has been pushed aside. The work of Foucault and Judith Butler (and others) have come to dominate contemporary feminist thought which focuses on discourse and language as if it exists in air and separate from any material determinants i.e., the mode of production. However, as of late-and especially since the financial crisis of 2007/8-there has been a resurgence of Marxism in general and a renewed interest in feminist theoretical formulations from the 1970s within feminist theory in particular (e.g., Barrett 1980/2014; Benzanson and Luxton 2006; Bhattacharya 2017). This renewed and refreshed focus on Marxism within feminism is rooted in what Bhattacharya (2017) calls Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and this where I think the future of feminist thought is going towards (and should if we are serious about changing the oppressive world in which we live).

SRT theorists do not want to simply critique the sexist and patriarchal world we live in, but they want to change it and act upon their critiques politically. In this essay I argue that SRT is the most efficient way to understand oppression based on identity within a social formation that is dominated by the capitalist mode of production (which is most of the world). Additionally, I argue, since we are going back to the 1970s, we need to take Althusser's (2014) work on the reproduction of capitalism and ideology seriously again. I will do this first by first exploring the methodological and theoretical differences between intersectionality theorists and SRT. Then, I will to attempt to provide a historical-materialist conception of how oppressive ideologies get embedded into the capitalist mode of production to the degree that they become essential to the functioning and reproduction of that system (Sumner 1979). Finally, I offer some thoughts on how we can apply SRT to real political praxis.

Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT)

Intersectional thought has become so incorporated and ingrained into contemporary feminist though that Naomi Zack states that intersectionality "a leading feminist paradigm" (as cited in Nash 2008, 89). Intersectionality has a "theoretical dominance" of understanding and "conceptualizing identity" (Nash 2008. 89). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989 139), who coined the term intersectionality, defines it as taking seriously and understanding the "multidimensionality of marginalized subjects." It has become so entrenched in feminist thought that Nash (2008, 89) even calls it a "buzzword" that academics use to show that they are not abstracting away from difference even if their studies merely mention difference rather than seriously engage with it. Though there are similarities between intersectionality, originally coined by Crenshaw (1993), and SRT there are some key methodological and theoretical differences that have real political implications. As Bhattacharya (2017, 17) says: "what we theoretically determine has strategic import in the lived experience of our world." One key difference is that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is rooted in Marxist understandings of social formations (i.e., historical materialism) and intersectionality does not. This may seem knit-picky considering that perhaps SRT and intersectionality have similar political goals in emancipating oppressed peoples, but as we will see there is clear division between the two in regards to how they understand root cause to oppression (intersectional theorists tend to not deal with "root causes") (Nash 2008).

While class is an important aspect for intersectional theorists, it is simply one of the many "vectors" and "lines" of difference that intersect externally with each other and thus not any more important than race, gender, sexuality, etc. For example, Helma Lutz claims that there are "fourteen lines of difference," while Charlotte Bunch suggests that "social differences run along 'sixteen vectors" (as cited in McNally 2017, 96). The problem with intersectionality for SRT theorists is that intersectional theorists do not connect "interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality" back to the material base on which they arise from (Nash 2008, 89). It is as if these different "mutually reinforcing vectors" exist in air independently from any material determinants (determinant in the last instance). SRT takes the role modes of production play in social formations seriously.

Within intersectionality itself there has been critiques and modifications of the notion of separate preconstituted identities that externally relate with other most notably from Black Feminism and others (e.g., Kaur Dhamoon 2011; Nash 2008; Razack 1998). However, as McNally (2017, 96) points out: "these modifications continue to be plagued by the ontological atomism inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality theory: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other." Theoretically formulating identity in this fashion limits the possibilities for political solidarity across difference. What is the alternative then? Through Patricia Hill Collins' understanding of interlocking systems of oppression being a "part of a single, historically created system," David McNally argues for a "dialectical organicism" understanding of oppression, which "sees a diverse and complex social whole as constitutive of every part, and each part as reciprocally constitutive of every other" (as citied in McNally 2017, 106; 100). Althusser (1969/1996) calls this "overdetermination." Understanding oppression in McNally's dialectical and historical materialist fashion one sees oppression in relation to totality and in relation to the social whole that capitalist mode of production creates, rather than in in fragments as postmodernist and poststructuralist thinking emphasizes. Why this is beneficial not only theoretically, but politically will be explored below.

If read in a certain fashion, McNally's understanding of oppression in relation to capitalism and social reproduction may be looked at with a critical eye by certain feminist thinkers. For example, Gayle S Rubin (2011, 37) acknowledges that "since no wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized by the capitalist." However, Rubin continues: "to explain women's usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and the oppression of women." Rubin points out that women are systematically oppressed in social formations that can by no means be called capitalist or contain any signs of the capitalist mode of production and its relations. For example, foot binding in feudal China, or chastity belts cannot be explained in relation to capitalism or the reproduction of capitalism. However, I am not talking about capitalism per se, but rather the total system that the capitalist mode of production creates to ensure continued reproduction. The capitalist mode of production did not produce sexism, racism, heteronormativity, etc. In fact, the capitalist mode of production emerged from within sexist and racist social relations. However, the logics of capital accumulation have taken over them and transformed them to such a degree that it has made oppression of particular identities central and integral to the system's reproduction and has also changed these relations to the degree that these forms of oppression take on a historically specific character to the capitalist mode of production itself (more on this below). The social whole (i.e., the combination of the base and superstructure) that capitalism creates relies upon racist, sexist, heteronormative, ableist ideologies to sustain itself and reproduce itself.

This expanded notion of social reproduction that exists within SRT will help us better conceptualize and understand how each kind of particular oppression is ingrained in this complex web of the social whole created by the capitalist mode of production. Each particular mode of production creates its own particular complex web of social relations. As Rubin (2011, 39) states: "The realm of human sex, gender, and procreation has been subjected to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. Sex as we know it-gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood-is itself a social product." Additionally, the conceptualization sex/gender system, that Rubin (2011, 40) calls for to replace the term patriarchy, "is the product of the specific social relations which organize it." This means we can't fight heteronormativity without also fighting racism, ableism, etc., at the same time as they are all systematically integrated and connected all at once.

All of this has implications for intersectional theory because to be related systematically (i.e., a part of the social whole that a mode of production creates) involves more than simply intersection. Lines or vectors that intersect can do so at random and haphazardly. Systems cannot. Thus, with SRT: "These relations [of oppression] do not need to be brought into intersection because each is already inside the other, co-constituting one another to their very core. Rather than standing at intersections, we stand in the river of life, where multiple creeks and streams have converged into a complex, pulsating system" (McNally 2017, 107).

Before we go any further, we must clarify what is SRT exactly. In a general sense it is about understanding that the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process" (Luxton 2006, 36). This theoretically vindicates the equal importance of different and variegated types of work that exists in a particular social formation. Work that is done in the home, childrearing, work of care, etc. is equal and just as important to the functioning of the capitalist system as the work done in a factory, in academia, restaurants, etc. As Marx (275, my emphasis) says: "The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced." And this is done through social reproduction. Work that occurs outside production. Social reproduction as defined by Brenner and Laslett (1991, 314) is:

the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally. It involves various kinds of socially necessary work-mental, physical, and emotional-aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined means for maintaining and reproducing population. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided, and how sexuality is socially constructed.

Thus, this necessarily changes and expands orthodox Marx's notion of class. The traditional notion of class for Marxists can be defined by a person's objective relationship to the means of production (technology, machines, tools, factories, land, etc). One group of people own and control the means of production (the capitalist class), and another own nothing but their own labor-power which they are forced to sell to a capitalist, so they can earn a wage to purchase- through the capitalist market-their means of subsistence (the working class). For SRT this traditional conceptualization of class is correct, but not adequate and complete enough if we want to take the labor that is done outside the workplace as fundamental in reproduction of the capitalist system in general. Thus, the working class "must be perceived as everyone in the producing class who has in their lifetime participated in the totality of reproduction of society-irrespective of whether that labor has been paid for by capital or remained unpaid" (Bhattacharya 2017, 89).

This reconceptualization of class for Social Reproduction Theory helps us "restore a sense of the social totality to class," and through this we can "immediately begin to reframe the arena for class struggle" (Bhattacharya 2017, 90). Capital can extract more surplus-value from the unpaid-or under-paid in the case of domestic workers-labor that is done in the household. Capital is able to extract more surplus-value from the realm of social reproduction because the value of labor-power is defined by the value of the bundle of commodities necessary for the worker to come back to work the next day. This "sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker's replacement i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market" (Marx 1990, 275). If part of the reproduction of labor-power (i.e., the worker) relies upon the unpaid or underpaid domestic labor, which is done historically by women, the value of labor-power consequently remains low because that bundle of commodities necessary for the worker to reproduce his/her/their self does not have to include child-rearing, cleaning, cooking, care work, etc., thus, capital can pay the worker less and make increased surplus-value. Thus, through the SRT framework we can consider the struggle for better conditions within the realm of social reproduction as a class struggle as well rather than as simply a gender or woman's issue by itself.

Gender and Sexual Ideology, Capitalism, and Althusser

In the first volume of Capital Marx goes at length about the difference between the formal and real subsumption (or in other translations subjection) of labor under capital. Capital is a "coercive relation;" it forces all social relations to bend to its will. Capital first emerges in already-existing material and social relations which are mostly feudal, such as particular types of division of labor, a particular level of development of productive forces, gender relations, sexual relations, etc. As Marx (1990, 425) says: "At first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history." In the historical development of capitalism in England, capital finds the labor-process in its undeveloped handicraft form where workers have a degree of power in regard to the pace and type of work that is being done. However, "the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value" (Marx 1990, 425). Thus, the labor process has to be revolutionized to match the demands and logics of capital accumulation. The real subsumption of labor under capital occurs when "[i]t is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker" (Marx 1990, 425). The production process completely controlled and dominated by capital can dictate the pace of work and the type of work that is done by individual workers. As Marx would say, dead labor (machines, technology) under capitalism suck the blood of living labor-power like a vampire. I argue that a similar process occurs to other social relations such as gender, sexuality, and race once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a particular social formation. While I do not have enough room in this essay to explore how each social relation gets transformed in detail, I will use Barrett's (1980/2014) work (and others) to help us think through the role ideology, and in particular gender ideology play in sustaining the capitalist system itself and how it has been so transformed by the capitalist mode of production that they both cannot function as they currently do without each other.

Alan Sears (2017, 185) argues that "[g]endered norms are not simply a discourse but a set of everyday practices framed by a matrix of power relations that structure production and reproduction in capitalist societies." Ideas about masculinity do not just emerge from nowhere, they exist and are produced in particular historical epochs. It is historically specific to the capitalist mode production that production and social reproduction (work and life) occur in different spaces (though these spaces can be "porous" as some point out). The different lived experiences between this spatial division of labor between care/social reproductive labor, historically and contemporarily occupied by women, and wage-labor creates variegated ideas and understandings about the world (Smith 1990). In relation to this we can also see how "the formation of identities around erotic preferences (such as 'lesbian')" are a "product of capitalist social organization" (Sears 2017, 173). John D'Emilio (1992, 8) offers a compelling argument that capitalism created the material foundations for the rise of a homosexual identity:

Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity-an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to the one's own sex (see also Morton 2001 for a similar argument in relation to the Closet)

Can we not see here how capitalism emerges within a given set of gender and sexual relations and fundamentally changes them to serve its own needs i.e., formally subsumes them and constructs new ideologies around them? Michele Barrett (1980/2014) argues that there is an "integral connection between ideology and the relations of production." The classical view of "relations of production" are simply defined by class relations. Barrett says this is inadequate if we want to construct a historical materialist theory of the ideology of gender, sex, race, etc. Gender "ideology has played an important part in the historical construction of the capitalist division of labor and in the reproduction of labor power" (Barrett 1980/2014, 98). In addition, "[r]elations of production reflect and embody the outcome of struggles: over the division of labour, the length of the working day, the costs of reproduction" (Barrett 1980/2014, 99, my emphasis). If we take seriously Barrett's arguments about how gender ideology is a part of the relations of production and that they play a fundamental role in reproducing the capitalist system in general, then we must engage with Althusser's ideas about ideology and its apparatuses because Althusser (2014, 209- 217) argues that the relations of production play the determining role, "in the last instance," in characterizing a social formation. I want to turn to Althusser here because I think his concept the Ideological State Apparatuses can help schematically see and understand how the gender and sexual ideology that is embedded in the relations of production are reproduced and how they can be struggled over and thus changed to benefit oppressed groups under the capitalist mode or production.

Althusser (2001; 2014) complicates the orthodox Marxist theory of the state by differentiating two apparatuses where a ruling class consolidates and perpetuates its class power-the Repressive and Ideological State apparatuses respectively (RSA and ISA). The Repressive State Apparatuses, like the army, police, the courts, the prisons, function mostly though violence and the Ideological State Apparatuses function mainly through ideology (the ruling class' ideology):

the ISAs 'function' massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of 'the ruling class'.

It is largely within the ISAs where the relations of production are reproduced "behind a 'shield' provided by the repressive State apparatus" (Althusser 2001, 101). Examples of the ISAs are: Churches, the family, schools, law, communications (press, radio, television, etc), political ISA ("the political system, including the different Parties"), the cultural ISA ("Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.") (see Althusser 2001, 96). One may question the ISAs by saying how can the state be involved in matters that are "private" like the family, churches, literature, the Arts, sports, etc? Althusser states (2001, 97):

The distinction between the public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority.' The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is 'above the law': the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well 'function' as Ideological State Apparatuses.

Althusser does not mean the state owns the ISAs in any legal sense. He means that the ideology of the ruling class (which holds state power) runs throughout the different ISAs to reproduce the relations of production and thus the capitalist system as a whole. The ISAs do not reproduce the relations of production in any "functionalist" as some accuse Althusser as being (e.g., Barrett 1980/2014, amongst many others). Quite the contrary, Althusser (2014, 218-219, my emphasis) stresses that:

the dominant ideology is never…exempt from class struggle. […] the reproduction of the dominant ideology is not simple repetition, simple reproduction. It is not even automatic, which is to say mechanical…The combat for the reproduction of the dominant ideology is a combat that is never over; it has to be taken up again and again, and always under the law of the class struggle" (Althusser 2014, 219, my emphasis) [1]

One can see that change is possible both within the confines of the capitalist mode of production and even wholesale change of the mode of production if the political and material conditions allow it.

Synthesizing Barrett's and Althusser's ideas about ideology and the relations of production can be fruitful for oppressed groups under the capitalist mode of production. Even though Althusser did not necessarily theorize about gender, sex, race in any meaningful way or length, we can extend his notion of the ruling ideology that exists within each ISA as being composed of ideologies/discourses about gender, sex, race, ability, etc. With Social Reproduction Theory's expanded notion of class and class politics, we can conceptualize how oppressed groups can struggle politically to change their material and discursive relations i.e., by forcing a change in the dominant ideology in a particular Ideological State Apparatus. We can see this abstract claim if we look historically to the 1960s. The Women's and Civil Rights movements were movements that radically changed the dominant ideology that existed in the family ISA, the cultural ISA, etc. The movements from the 1960s (and other historical eras) can be broadly conceived as class struggles within the Ideological State Apparatuses. It is useful to think of class struggle in this broad conception because it can unite many people with largely different lived experience against the most organized class to ever exist in human history: capital.

Though these ideological changes within particular ISAs are important and do improve the lot of oppressed groups, as long as the capitalist mode of production exists these changes are limiting in two senses. One, the ideological changes get re-incorporated (i.e., appropriated) to the logics of capital accumulation and the production of surplus-value (i.e., capitalist profit from the exploitation of labor-power within the production process). Second, certain people within oppressed groups will always be silenced, excluded, etc., because complete "inclusion" (in quotations for the lack of a better word) and equality is impossible in a capitalist society where power relations are an ingrained structural feature. Capitalism is a class-based society and thus inherently unequal, exploitative, and oppressive.

I must mention in passing that these ideological struggles cannot be thought of as separate or divorced from their material bases. New ideas/ideologies do not just emerge from air, they are tied to the development of the productive forces:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution [(i.e., class struggle within the Ideological State Apparatuses)] (Marx 1970, 21).

Some scholars associate the move from Fordist standardized production techniques to more flexible, just-in-time production as being the material condition that undergirds the cultural shifts in the western capitalist counties to "postmodern" capitalism, a capitalism that is more "inclusive" to difference. It is a capitalism where women, and people of color can be CEOs, where there is an emphasis on "diversity" and "multiculturalism" (see for example Harvey 1989; Morton 2001). So-called multiculturalism becomes integrated into the logics of capital accumulation in postmodern capitalism. Everything from "coming out of the closet" to oppressed culture becomes commodified. One can enjoy postmodern capitalism if one can afford it. As the productive forces develop and change, so do the ideas/ideologies that correspond to them. The material conditions exist to sustain a socialist (and eventually communist) society, where poverty is eradicated and society in general can struggle to put an end to oppressions that exist in relation to identity in a real meaningful way rather than in a generic fashion as is the case in capitalist social formations. What is blocking this from happening is the capitalist class ideology that permeates through the Ideological State Apparatuses. This is where a range of political and social struggles can (and must) unite to end sexism, racism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.

Conclusion

In this essay I argued that Social Reproduction Theory is the best way to understand oppression based on identity and that we have to once again take feminist arguments originally produced in the 1970s seriously again. Through SRT's understanding of oppression and its broader conceptualization of class we can better act upon on our world to change it. We have theorized enough about how bad the world is, it is time to change it; this was emphasized in the 1970s.

Cinzia Arruzza (2017, 196) urges that "diversity must become our weapon, rather than an obstacle or something that divides us." We must build solidarity amongst ourselves if we are going to win and create a better world. However, the current political forms we have cannot do this type a work. We need a multinational communist party that is led by women, LGBTQ, and people of color that intervenes in a range of struggles based on exploitation and oppression and connect how each struggle/oppression connects to the broader social whole and totality of the capitalist mode of production. Not everyone sees their group-based oppression/struggles as class struggle. This is not necessary, but a political party that is involved in a multitude of struggles can overcome this problem. Arruzza argues that "[i]n lived reality, class, race, and gender inequality are not experienced as separate and compartmentalized phenomena that intersect in an external way: their separation is merely the outcome of an analytical thought process, which should not be mistaken as a reflection of experience" (Arruzza 2017, 195). Taking a time machine back to resurrect the Marxist feminism of the 1970s (that tended to ignore difference and suffered from essentialism at times) and to put it in conversation with a nuanced and contemporary Social Reproduction Theory can provide a theoretical and political plane of analysis that is useful for activists involved in many different struggles.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. 2001. Lenin and Philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review

Press.

---. 1996. For Marx. New York: Verso

---. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. New York: Verso.

Arruzza, Cinzia. 2017. "From Social Reproduction Feminism to the Worker's Strike." In

Social Reproduction Theory . Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya

Barrett, Michele. 1980/2014. Women's Oppression Today. New York: Verso.

Bhattacharya, Tithi., ed. 2017. Social Reproduciton Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Benzanson, Johanna., and Meg Luxton., eds. 2006. Social Reproduction. Montreal: McGill-

Queen's University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1993. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and

Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review, 43: 1241-99.

D'Emilio, John. 1992. "Capitalism and Gay Identity." In Making Trouble. New York:

Routledge.

Harvey, David. 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kaur Dhamoon, Rita. 2011. "Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality," Political

Research Quarterly , 64(1): 232.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. New York: Penguin Books

---. 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International

Publishers.

McNally, David. 2017. "Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social

Reproduction Theory." In Social Reproduction Theory. By Tithi Bhattacharya.

London: Pluto Press.

Morton, Donald. 2001. "Petaphysics of the Closet: Queer Theory as the Art of Imaginary

Solutions for Unimaginary Problems." In Marxism, Quuer Theory, Gender, edited by

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa L. Ebert, and Donald Morton. Syracuse, NY: The Red

Factory

Nash, Jennifer C. 2008. "re-thinking intersectionality." feminist review, 89: 1-15.

Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in

Courtrooms and Classrooms . Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rubin, Gayle. 2011. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Smith, Dorothy. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press.

Sumner, Colin. 1979. Reading Ideologies: An Investigation into the Marxist Theory of Ideology

and Law . London: University of Michigan Press.

Weeks, Kathi. 2014. "Forward: Re-encountering Marxist Feminism." In Women's Oppression

Today . By Michele Barrett. New York: Verso.

Notes

[1] I am quoting Althusser at length here out of necessity. There are plenty of misconceptions of Althusser's work in the social sciences and humanities in general and in Marxist circles in particular.

On Consumerism, Capitalism, and Ecosocialism

By Sebastian Livingston

This piece is intended to be an introduction to an ecosocialist approach to production and consumption. What we have today is a hegemonic obsession with mass production that is catastrophic to the evolutionary processes which allow the biosphere to uphold life as we know it. Capitalist modes of production based upon endless economic expansion and mass consumption disrupt the equilibrium of ecosystems by reshaping the metabolism of nature which regulates earth systems. Within this article I will discuss some issues that I see as problematic in achieving an ecological society and address possible solutions. This is not intended to provide a critique of consumers, my aim is to develop an assault on the hegemonic creation of consumer culture and its devastating impact in maintaining the status quo. This is not an outline for revolution, it is merely my attempt to put forth issues as I see them and contribute to the discussion about the construction of consumer culture as a barrier to achieving social transformation.

"Once upon a time the working class had nothing to lose but its chains; but now it has been absorbed within capitalism, is a prisoner of consumerism, and its articles of consumption own and consume it." -Michael A. Lebowitz

We have the productive means to fulfil our material needs and to liberate ourselves from alienated labor. However this idea is incompatible with capital which does not aim to address real human needs beyond what is required to reproduce itself. Rather capitalism is contingent upon the realization of wealth accumulation, an endless expansion that is based upon the production and consumption of alienated products. This mass production is a fundamental problem that restricts our ability to create an ecological society by being the unshakable cause of most of the environmental problems we face today.

In order to mobilize and attack expansive production, consumer culture must be attacked. This entails attacking the hegemonic institutions that spread consumerism, develop our identification with material goods, and enforce the association between goods and freedom. Capitalist forces expend great resources to ensure that we are socialized to identify ourselves with what we consume far more than with what and how we produce which creates a barrier between us and critical revolution. In fact, Americans are subjected to over 20 times the global average of targeted advertisements. We are made to identify so strongly with commodities that a rejection of capitalism will equate to a rejection of self and require a redefinition of freedom that will demand a revolution that stems beyond the workplace. Within advanced capitalism consumer culture serves as a counter revolutionary safeguard, a sedative. And as we come to identify with the products of our alienated labor rather than realize our alienation within the process of production we sink deeper into the veins of capital, becoming the reproductive organs of the beast.

The working class as a revolutionary subject is the force by which the world will be changed. However, change will only happen if the will to do so exists. The American social contract, which states that what we can achieve given our rights as free and equal people to ascend the social economic ladder with no barriers but our own determination, is a pacifier based upon dishonest assumptions. It enables the institutionalized ignorance of systemic oppression, inequality, and environmental exploitation while generating the individualism needed to ignore the roots of the problem. We need to change the course of the struggle away from a struggle for upward mobility, which is at the heart of the capitalist conflict, to one of economic sufficiency and cultural sustainability.

A struggle for upward mobility is a conservative struggle. It will aim to reform until reforms have returned the working class to a state of equilibrium within capitalist society or one of equally distressing productivism. The world cannot survive our economic system. We have an environmental crisis that requires complete recognition however such recognition will require a cultural revolution, one that rejects the products of alienated labor. In order to survive, capital must expand therefore it must synthesize needs and implement planned obsolescence in order to produce and maintain a market for its growth. A systematic manufacture of discontent places commodities as an affordable means of social achievement therefore contentment by upholding an understanding that has elevated capitalism to a position synonymous with freedom by the mere fact that it provisions the goods. This paves the way for a consumer culture that is impervious to systematic change.

Commodity accumulation leads people to not only identify with the means of destruction but it also paralyzes their ability to mobilize action against the ecological crisis. The resistance to capital must be built in communities most affected by modes of exploitation, those closest to the realization of capitals limits of sufficiency. Poor communities and communities of color are an ecosocialist revolutionary force and the movement must take root in these areas. We must aim to disintegrate links in the chain of capital reproduction by building community sovereignty which will enable the active thinking required to liberate humanity from our impoverished condition. We must acknowledge the multi-faceted struggle for ecosocialism as one encompassing the total impoverishment of humanity which entails not only the patriarchal plundering of earth's environment but also the systemic theft of our self-governing, self-realizing, debt free value.

It is widely recognized that the profit motivated consumer fueled industrial waste and pollution is a broad and time sensitive issue which must be addressed to prevent absolute ecological catastrophe. However, capital cannot provide a fix without dissolving itself. The climate issue is in a stage of terra incognito so the global environmental crisis will be positioned to fall onto the consumers and a new "green" market will conjure the illusion of ethical mass consumption and market growth (see Jevon's Paradox). Consumer culture identifies the free market with freedom in general which is a landmark of success for a system that must perpetuate itself through alienated production and identification with the products of alienated labor in order to avoid overthrow. In light of the urgency of our current ecological situation there is no alternative route to developing an ecosocialist bloc and dismantling advanced capitalism that does not entail the targeted dismantling of social identity with consumer goods. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

The continued existence of the biosphere as we know it depends upon the reduction of the human industrial impact. This stands in contrast to capital's need to portray the false idea that human needs are unlimited and that the earth and its natural limits are capable of accommodating such an absurd reality. It is implanted into the growth strategy to enforce such a notion, for once actual needs are fulfilled the market will stop growing so the system must manufacture discontent to raise demand. This demand situates society in a state of derangement which merges desires and needs while denying that consumption is culturally manufactured and that our culture is the stimulus for environmental instability.

In order to liberate mankind and do so in a way that enables a cultural symbiosis with nature we must seek a social model that distances itself from accumulation. This entails establishing the preexisting condition for revolution which is a class based insurrection against mass self-recognition in commodities. The ability to distain capital commodities will enable the induction into common knowledge the absolute limits of capital production. We must reinvent a human identity that is aligned with our place in nature as actors within an ecosystem. This in practice is counter hegemonic against the conservative forces surrounding capital exploitation of nature. We must see the impact of our consumption in disrupting the metabolism of nature, but we must recognize it as systemic and not limited to individual lifestyle politics. We must see the reality behind our identity with these alien products as a defining attribute of capitalism's incompatible relationship with the natural world and its alienating impact on human consciousness. We must recognize consumer culture as a coercive socializing agent of capital not simply a lifestyle choice made between masses of individuals.

Ecological society is made possible by limiting production to fulfill actual needs and to do so by means of maximizing use value. This will eliminate profit by redistributing surplus time back into society by means of reduced working hours and allocating surplus towards human and ecological development. A true cultural revolution will entail human efforts being aimed toward human liberation and ecological harmony. In order to achieve this the dominant social value system must be replace with one not dependent upon material haves and have nots. We can no longer define the pinnacle of achievement as the output capacity of our civilization and a person's ability to obtain a suite of commodities in a private wealth generating system. A new understanding of surplus will be developed to recognize the creative output of humankind as a common heritage made possible through historical efforts and the reshaping of natural environments, raising a new understanding of ourselves in nature history.

The obsession with production has generated circumstances which require an active assault on our cultural understanding of productivity. Productivism must be understood as an enemy to ecological and social balance. A new society will not arise like a phoenix from fire and ashes it will be built on the foundations of history which is entwined with social injustice, oppression, exploitation, and environmentally destructive forces. In building a socialist society we will be forced to deal with the inevitable cultural reproduction of capitalist ideals and do so in part by abolishing the emphasis on productivism. The socialist world view that maintains a possessive relationship between humanity and nature will be condemned to the same toxic existence as its capitalist predecessor.

In the construction of a new world there must exist the preconditions to harness the new order. A transformation from our current alienated world will not be carried out by a seizure of the means of production alone but must entail a seizure of our identity from the clench of alienated goods. The contentment with this capitalist arrangement of society will last until problems arise that cannot be diverted by means of it, such as the crossing of planetary boundaries and the global displacement of entire populations, an approaching inevitability of our economic model. A revolutionary condition is looming and a force beyond our timeless socioeconomic conflict is a driving element. Natural contingencies will arise which will push aside humankind's ability to negate systemic collapse. The readiness to adapt to and seize the state of nature and the state apparatus may not be present in the common stock of knowledge. The revolution may be ready for us, but we may not be ready for the revolution.

Ecosocialist Participatory Economy

Ecosocialist economies are not contingent upon growth, they are oriented toward the development of human potential which means that they do not aim towards commodity production as an end but as a limited means towards the fulfillment of human needs. Contrary to capital's logic human needs are not unlimited so as to develop an entire economic system around that premise is counter intuitive in its limited potential for human enrichment and its paradoxical existence in a world of finite resources. In ecosocialist society economic value will be transformed, prioritizing use value. Whereas in capitalist society economic exchange value dominates all forms of social worth, placing all other achievement in subordination to it.

Ecosocialism focuses on use value as the aim of productive output but use value is not the lens through which we view nature. Capitalism's utilitarian view of nature is divisive, it limits our ability to identify ourselves within the natural world. This is a cause behind capital's inability to see limits to expansive production. The logic behind capital production creates barriers where boundaries should be, making obstacles out of natural limits. It is not an issue of fossil fuels alone which deem our consumption immoral, for once achieved, a renewable energy structure will not erase the exploitative productive systems that capital relies upon. A clean energy source does not prevent the exploitation of nature and people for profit. It is only with the full self-determining power of workers to control their own destiny that we can produce an ecological economy.

The democratization of our entire society is essential in establishing an ecological order that is able to see the abolition of inequality and exploitation. Democracy must be established to a degree in which it allows people to truly control their own heritage. What is a common heritage of society such as the products of labor exist within a social commons therefore must be democratically regulated and distributed. People not profit must decide what is produced and what is consumed while taking into account the impact it will have on ecosystems and workers alike.

The environment is to be considered more than a source of raw materials and by what it generates to accommodate for human life alone. Our economy exists within the biosphere as a social ecosystem, a subcategory that is a part of a self-regulating earth system in which we as organisms alter at great expense to the harmonious flow of life. It is imperative that nature be protected from privatization by enacting democratic laws surrounding the regulation and preservation of environments from human exploitation. With our knowledge of environmental science we can reduce our impact and protect nature and the people who are most vulnerable to environmental instability.

In a democratic economy decisions must be weighed and votes balanced according to the degree in which the measure would affect the voter. Those most impacted will have more say. Worker, producer, and consumer councils are an organization structure that will accommodate for the diverse needs of each system while enabling the preservation of unique ecological limitations per region. A social opportunity cost will be considered in the process of what is produced in relation to its environmental and social exploitative relationship. This is a system in which a true social accountability is accepted and social production becomes normative. Privatization is criminal in a system such as this for it immediately reduces the democratic integrity that a social society operates on.

Major sources of inequality and power such as inheritance must be rejected in this system as it gives disproportionate social influence to people least affected, the deceased, which is then sequestered away from society and funneled into the hands of the few which leads to disparate power structures. Corporate decisions alike would be seen as anti-social however the democratization and worker ownership of the workplace can help eliminate this problem. It is necessary to state however that worker ownership of the enterprise will be a vital element of social society it is not a sure fire way to ensure the integrity of our biosphere is maintained. The bureaucratic development of social means of production can easily assume the same exploitative characteristics of a capital enterprise and it has in the past. Therefore a circulating responsibility structure should be implemented as well as an establishment of democratic council powers and social vetoes to ensure that what is produced is regulated according to the standards of the environmental treaties.

The world will experience a lifestyle shift that will enable a new standard of economic equality to become institutionalized. We will need to decide what people need to live a good life with health and opportunity. Necessities such as access to water, food, shelter, clothing, transportation, communication, education, health care, sanitation, culture, the pursuit of personal development must exist in the new social contract as a standard guaranteed to all. For most of the world's population the conditions of life will be vastly improved, while the minority wealthy classes will experience a neutralizing shift from excessive consumption to sustainable socially conscious living. We must ensure the elevation of impoverished people to an equal global standard while not barring their ability to achieve self-reliance.

In a society not bound by the limitations of economic growth, resources such as labor will be freed up to provide for the continual progress of our human legacy. The divestment of human capital from profit and power driven maintenance of consumer lifestyles will enable a social investment into more culturally enriching productivity. An ecosocialist economy is based upon evolution not expansion and when advancements in productivity sufficiently fuel society we will have achieved surplus time for all.

Environmental consciousness must be emitted into the common procedure of production in that what is taken and produced must be quantified not only by its human value but by the implications such maneuvers will have on the socioecological world. As producers within nature we have an obligation to not only sustain our environment but also improve it. As an eco-conscious society we must strive to enhance our relationship with nature by inventing an economy that produces more than neutral but positive environmental results. This will be achievable with a new productive philosophy and through a new division of labor as humans are liberated from hours spent supplying synthesized needs. Resources then can be redirected towards creative pursuits, science, engineering, and socioecological development motivated by ecological sustainability and social accountability, not economic profitability.

There is no question that capitalism is a self-serving system that has no place in an ecological social organization. The disasters it creates with its monstrous growth principles devour the earth as well as the minds and bodies of all who exist here. We must seek to build a resistance to this oppressive and exploitative system by focusing our efforts away from reform which only strengthens the system. We must establish community sovereignty to allow pre socialist conditions to exist in the hearts and minds of those who are most threatened by capitalist exploitation. The understanding of ourselves as social beings must extend its association to reconnect our society to nature and to do so by liberating ourselves from the shackles of consumer culture. In solidarity.

References

One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse

The Socialist Imperative by Michael A. Lebowitz

Creating an Ecological Society by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams

Parecon: Life After Capitalism by Michael Albert

Consumer Culture & Modernity by Don Slater

The Enemy of Nature by Joel Kovel

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York

The Immiseration of Labor: Capitalism, Poverty, and Inequality in Philadelphia

By Arturo Castillon

"...the more alien wealth they [the workers] produce, and… the more the productivity of their labor increases, the more does their very function as means for the valorization of capital become precarious."[1]

"...within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; …all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers..."[2]

The Theory of Immiseration

How are we to understand the contemporary economic situation of most people, who experience increasingly unstable conditions of employment and life?

This essay analyzes the growth of poverty and income inequality within the context of a developed capitalist [3] economy, using Philadelphia as a case study. Some might think that this city is an extreme example; for many years now Philadelphia has ranked the poorest of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.[4] However, the basic thesis of this essay is that immiseration is not an exception but instead a normal outgrowth of the capitalist economy.

The concept of immiseration is usually associated with Karl Marx, as he insisted that the nature of capitalist production resulted in the devaluation of labor, specifically the decline of wages relative to the total value created in the economy. For Marx, this meant that the proletarian class, [5] or working class, was fundamentally defined by precariousness, i.e. material instability, uncertainty, insecurity, and dependency. This theory stems from Marx's analysis of the changing organic composition of capitalist production and the reduced demand for labor that emerges as technology develops and labor becomes more productive. With increasingly productive machines, less labor produces more commodities at a faster rate, leading to the gradual replacement of labor by machines. Marx observed that the realities of capitalist competition necessitated this tendency towards mechanization and rising productivity. If a factory in the South restructures production to raise its productivity - allowing it to sell more commodities, at a faster rate, and at a cheaper price, while employing less labor-while a rival factory in Philadelphia does not, then after a while the factory in the South will run the factory in Philadelphia out of business. In order to protect their market from more productive competitors, therefore, capitalists must reinvest part of their capital into increasing productivity, or perish in the long run.

As capitalists competed and became more productive, Marx noted that labor became more impoverished: "The growing competition among the bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious."[6] In other words, increases in capitalist productivity were uneven in their effects-they benefited the capitalists, not the workers. As capitalism became more productive and labor produced more capital in a given amount of time, economic output increased; but at the same time, real wages stabilized and even declined, because the input of human labor stayed the same or declined relative to the output of capital.

This constellation of ideas would later be referred to by Marxists as "the immiseration thesis." However, this term is somewhat misleading since throughout his life Marx developed several theses about the absolute and relative immiseration of labor under different phases of capitalist development. Nonetheless, Marx always theorized the devaluation of labor relative to the self-valorization of capital, and in this sense, he did posit a general theory of immiseration.

An Uneven Economy

Even accounting for periodic crises and recessions, it seems that the US economy is strong and growing, locally and nationally, from the standpoint of those who rule it- the capitalist class.[7] It is still the largest national economy in the world;[8] the world's largest producer of petroleum and gas [9]; the world's largest internal market for goods and services [10]; and the world's largest trading power, [11] with roughly a third of this trade based in the export and import of international commodities, while domestic trade between regions in the US generates even more capital, accounting for roughly two-thirds of US trade.[12]

The majority of this trade is concentrated in the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US. Those ten metro areas, ordered by largest total trade volume, are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston. All the commodities that move throughout the nation, in freight trains, trucks, and shipping containers, flow through a vast transportation infrastructure made up of rail lines, roads, and ports that link these ten metropolitan areas in an extensive network of "trade corridors." New York and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Riverside, and San Francisco and San Jose are among the largest corridors within the national network.[13] These regional trading networks also provide access to distant markets that allows US capitalists to take part in global commodity chains. Still, the largest single part of capitalist value in the US comes from domestic trade.

Primarily as a result of their complementary industries in energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and mixed freight, New York and Philadelphia are the largest trading partners in the national interstate network, [14] making the New York-Philadelphia trade corridor the most valuable in the nation.[15] Because it serves as a crucial node in the national trade network, Philadelphia is home to the 7th largest metropolitan economy in the nation, [16] generating the 4th highest gross domestic product in the nation, and the 9th highest among the cities of the world.[17]

The Philadelphia metropolitan economy, which includes Camden, Chester, Norristown, and other peripheral cities and towns, continues to generate massive profits for those who own it. Still, for most people-who are not capitalists, but workers-wages are low, jobs are increasingly insecure, and poverty continues to grow.[18] Despite regional economic growth, poverty has increased more rapidly in Philadelphia than any other major city since the 1970s. However, this trend is not isolated to Philadelphia; poverty has steadily increased throughout the nation since the 1970s.[19]

During this same period which people became poorer, the national economy has continued to grow and wealth has continued to concentrate in fewer hands than ever before. After two decades of relative stability following World War II, US income inequality once again began to grow starting in the early 1970s and continued to grow despite rising business cycles in the 1980s and 1990s.[20] By 2013, the top 1 percent of households received about 20 percent of all pre-tax income, in contrast to about 10 percent from 1950 to 1980.[21] By 2017, the income of the top 20% of households in Philadelphia was up by 13% since 2007, while the income of the bottom 60% of households was below 2007 levels.[22]

While a strong national economy in the late 1990s helped drive down the number of people living in poverty for the first time in decades, this trend was short-lived. Not long after the 2000s began, the bursting of the dot-com bubble sent the nation into a recession, a regular occurrence in capitalism. Millions of people lost their jobs and incomes during the early 2000s, and poverty continued to grow even as the economy recovered by the mid-2000s. The onset of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 only accelerated this trend, and the number of people living in poverty grew even faster. Even with the end of the Great Recession, poverty continued to grow throughout the nation, and Philadelphia registered declines in typical worker wages during the first five years of the recovery. By 2010-2014, 14 million people in Philadelphia lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more-5 million more than before the Great Recession and more than twice as many as in 2000.[23]

Although poverty increased among white Americans in the post-Recession period, for Black and Latino Americans poverty rose even more sharply, locally and nationally. [24] In particular, Black Philadelphians today continue to experience record high levels of poverty [25] and low teen employment.[26] This racial disparity is the result of a longstanding pattern in which white workers, allied with capitalists (who are almost entirely white), exclude Black and Brown workers from the better-paying, more-secure jobs.

The De-Industrialization of Labor

How do we explain this disconnect between growing wealth at the top and deepening poverty at the bottom?

It's obvious in retrospect that the rise of poverty in Philadelphia and other former industrial centers is the result of a shift in the capitalist mode of production-from manufacturing industries to service industries, and from city to suburbs. During most the 19th century Philadelphia was a center of craft-based industrial production, well known for its diverse array of small and medium-sized manufacturing industries-textiles, metal products, paper, glass, furniture, shoes, hardware, etc. By 1900, manufacturing workers made up about one-half of the city's entire labor force.[27] However, manufacturing jobs began to decline in Philadelphia in the 1920s, and by the 1970s, the service industries came to eclipse manufacturing entirely. Rather than manufacturing, most people now work in the service industries-food service, retail, health service, and logistics sub-industries such as warehousing, transportation, and delivery services. This "de-industrialization" of the economy and workforce resulted in a loss of income for most workers.[28]

The de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the corresponding rise in poverty throughout the region, began earlier than most other cities in the North American Rust-Belt, shortly after the economic upturn that came with World War I (1914-1918), which resulted in growing mechanization, automation, and standardization of production on a national and global scale. In contrast, Philadelphia's manufacturing businesses for the most part continued employing the labor of highly-skilled craftsmen who worked in small and medium-sized firms, known as "workshops," which produced custom goods for niche markets. The "Workshop of the World," as Philadelphia was still known in the 1920s, could not compete with mass industrial production, for mass marketed consumption, by means of the unskilled and disposable mass assembly line workers of the factories in Northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The new system of mass industrial production signaled the end of the highly specialized manufacturing processes which characterized most of industrial Philadelphia before World War II.[29]

With the national economic downturn of 1929, major sections of the city's craft-manufacturing base began to collapse. By the 1930s, the only manufacturing businesses that remained in Philadelphia were the few that developed mass production methods-factories along the peripheries of the city in Manayunk, Germantown, Kensington, etc. These were the only manufacturing businesses in the city that could compete on a national level.

Eventually, the demand for manufacturing in Philadelphia would pick up as a result of the revival of the national economy during World War II (1939-1945), when federally-funded factories hired over 27,000 new workers.[30] The wartime economy opened new possibilities for Black workers to join the industrial workforce; while only 15,000 African Americans worked in manufacturing jobs in the city in 1940, their representation rose to 55,000 by 1943. Although this represented an increase in wages and jobs for Black workers, more than half of these jobs were in unskilled positions that offered the lowest wages.[31]

Despite a boost in production during World War II, Philadelphia's manufacturing industries began a steep decline during the peacetime transition. Industrial capitalists continued to face the challenge of superior competition, and this time the competition was increasingly global. International trade grew in the decades after the war, as European and Japanese manufacturers began to compete with US manufacturers. In this context, most factories in Philadelphia either went out of business or left the city. By 1955, fewer than 1,000 workers were employed in the city's formerly expansive textile industries.[32]

Black industrial workers hired during World War II were particularly affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs. A big factor in this process was the seniority system embodied in most union contracts, which meant that when recession, closure, or layoffs happened, those with the least seniority were the first to go. Since Black workers were usually the last hired, they were also usually the first fired.

By the early 1970s, when other major cities throughout the North and Midwest were beginning to experience de-industrialization, most of the manufacturing businesses in Philadelphia had already shut down or relocated to the suburbs, as well as to cities in the South and West of the country. The few industrial firms that remained in Philadelphia were those that invested heavily in automation and raised their standard of productivity.[33]

In the 1980s and 1990s the pattern of de-industrialization became international, as it began to hit most nations in Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the beginning of the 21th century, the Southern and Western cities of the US that once drew manufacturers from the older cities have also struggled with the loss of manufacturing jobs. After the economic crisis of 2008, the effects of de-industrialization only intensified on a global scale, especially in underdeveloped nations in the global South.[34]

Hence, the de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the concomitant rise in poverty, was mostly the result of capitalist market competition. Industrial Philadelphia was mostly composed of craft-based manufacturers that could not compete with highly-mechanized and increasingly-automated factories elsewhere. The manufacturers that kept up their profits in the face of competitors stayed in business by investing in technology that increased productivity. Some also relocated their businesses to cheaper, less-regulated labor markets. In the process, these transformations led to the devaluation and displacement of labor.

Besides the pressures of market competition, another important factor influencing de-industrialization was the militant resistance of the workers who carried out mass strikes and secured higher wages, pensions, health benefits, and better working conditions during the 1930s and 1940s. With the help of the leadership of the major industrial unions (the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations), the capitalist class responded to the workers movement by shutting down or relocating their facilities to the non-unionized South and West in the 1950s. In this way, de-industrialization undermined the power of the unionized working class, and took back the wages and benefits that the capitalists conceded to the workers in previous decades of struggle.

The Growth of Inequality

As capitalism reorganized itself, the service industries came to supersede manufacturing as the primary source of working-class employment. Today, the number of industrial jobs in Philadelphia represents only 5 percent of the total workforce of the city, while service jobs represent 40 percent of total employment, making the service industries the largest sector of the city's workforce.[35] Even within the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the region, they employ increasingly fewer workers, and those they do employ are increasingly part-time, part-year, and paid less.[36]

The social composition of the service industries is much more diverse than that of the manufacturing industries, which are highly unionized and still dominated by white men. Women make up over half of all service workers, while Black workers form a higher-than-average concentration in lower-paying service jobs. While service jobs have grown by 56 percent since the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of these jobs are part-time, part-year, require few skills, pay low wages, and offer few to no benefits. At the same time, the number of high-salary professional and managerial jobs has grown by 85 percent since the 1970s.[37] This means that de-industrialization has improved the earnings of those in the top-tier of the workforce, while most workers have seen their incomes shrink or stagnate since the 1970s.

Further exacerbating the livelihood of the urban proletariat, jobs have increasingly shifted towards the suburban peripheries of the city, after the pattern of large cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. This transformation was facilitated by the massive construction of interstate highways in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. While low-income populations in the region concentrate in Philadelphia, Camden, and a number of older urban centers, most jobs are now in the suburbs, often in areas accessible only by automobile, and distant from housing that is affordable to these workers. If city residents do manage to find a job in the suburbs, their wages are effectively lowered because of substantial traveling expenses; if they decide to move to the suburbs, wages are effectively lowered because of higher rent.[38]

The decline of manufacturing jobs was particularly devastating for Black workers, who concentrated in unskilled manufacturing jobs and in service jobs within the city, but were almost completely excluded from professional/managerial jobs and skilled trades. Due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, coupled with the suburbanization of the rapidly expanding service industries, Black workers have seen their incomes and jobs decline dramatically since the early 1970s. Although employment rates declined for both white and Black men since the 1970s, the black decline was twice that of whites. Furthermore, while there was an increase of employment for white women in Philadelphia since the 1970s, the employment rate for Black women hardly changed at all.[39] In this way, de-industrialization eroded the gains made by Black workers in the industrial sector in the decades after World War II.

The Immiseration of Labor

As I've shown, the transformation of the Philadelphia economy-from manufacturing to services, and from city to suburbs-has resulted in a deepening of poverty and inequality for most workers in this city. The question remains, why does capitalism develop itself in such a way that results in the immiseration of labor? This much is clear from the outset: nature does not produce, on the one hand, fewer and fewer rich people, and on the other hand, a growing army of workers who own nothing but their labor, which they must sell for an increasingly lower wage. The immiseration of labor results from the contradictions of what Marx called the "capitalist mode of production."

In brief, Marx argued that capitalism was distinct from all other modes of production in its unique aim: the creation of capital. Whereas other modes of production might find their purpose in producing useful things to satisfy human needs (communal production), or in producing a surplus of luxuries to satisfy a class of nobles (feudalism), capitalism, in contrast, produces the abstraction known as capital. Capital is not produced for the private consumption of its owner, the capitalist. If this were the case the aim of capitalist production wouldn't be the creation of capital but the consumption of things (or what Marx called "use-values"). Under capitalism, however, capital is not produced for use or consumption; capital functions as an end in itself-it is the starting and finishing point of production.[40]

Beginning with the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, capitalists made labor more productive by investing a greater part of capital into the instruments of production, introducing newer, more efficient, and more expensive machines. Such an accelerated development of the forces of production did not exist in any other mode of production before capitalism. Theoretically, this heightened level of productivity could raise people's standard of life while reducing the amount of time that they had labor for others. However, Marx was quick to point out that "[capitalist] production is only production for capital and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers."[41] Under capitalism, labor is only an instrument for the valorization of capital, i.e. capital accumulation, and nothing else. Instead of serving the needs of society as a whole, capitalist production serves the specific needs of capital accumulation, which requires the devaluing of labor in order for capital to expand. The immiseration of labor, therefore, is not an aberration, but a fundamental feature of the capitalist mode of production.[42] Thus, Marx concluded: "On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labor, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labor, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labor-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital."[43] This is a fundamental contradiction of capitalist development: as capitalism becomes more productive, and the means of production become more extensive and technically more efficient, the labor that works up those means of production becomes increasingly devalued and unnecessary.

According to Marx, the drive to accumulate capital at the expense of labor is not based on greed or any other negative psychological trait on the part of the capitalist, but rather survival - in other words, it is in the system's nature to operate this way. If a capitalist does not accumulate capital, if profits are not continually transformed into a further increment of value, then that capitalist is unable to keep up with competitors and eventually goes out of business.[44] This is what Marx refers to as the coercive law of capitalist competition. Workers lose their jobs and their incomes not because of the ill will of particular capitalists, but because the sole aim of capitalism is the valorization of capital, which depends on the maximum extraction of value from labor. In the face of obstacles like market competition and (to a lesser degree) labor struggles, capitalists perpetuate the accumulation of capital by reducing jobs/wages/hours, mechanizing and automating production, and relocating to cheaper, less regulated labor markets.

Marx provided us with the analytical tools for thinking about this internal contradiction of capitalist development-the contradiction between the declining value of labor and rising surplus value, i.e. the basis of capital formation. As capitalist production becomes more productive, the working class can only become more precarious, since the increasing accumulation of capital requires an increasing devaluation of labor. This contradiction is inherent to capitalism-it arises independently of the level of class struggle, fluctuations in wages, state interventions in the economy, or economic crises. At the same time, the relative intensity of the immiseration of labor can rise or drop with the limits set by the accumulation process, depending on the degree of control that workers as a class exert over the economy and the state. At different times in history workers have asserted their interests over and against the drive for capital accumulation, and as a result, have been able to gain a larger share of the total value that their labor produces. Still, for Marx, even if wages and standards of living rise for a time, this does not end the immiseration of labor. That would require the end of capitalism.

Implications for the Future

The story of the immiseration of labor in Philadelphia is particular, but not exceptional; it can serve as the basis for general observations on the dynamics of labor-capital relations within a developed capitalist economy. Capitalists in Philadelphia adapted to the challenges of market competition and labor struggle in much the same way that capitalists did in most mid to large-sized manufacturing centers-by shutting down, relocating, and/or automating production. Over time, the bulk of jobs in most US cities shifted to the services sector and to the suburbs. In every city that these changes took place the results where the same: the decline of wages and regular employment for the urban poor.

After having analyzed the antagonistic nature of capitalist production, we can see that the immiseration of labor is the natural result of capitalist development. Therefore, there is no prospect for a return to a so-called "golden-age" of capitalism characterized by moderate wages, benefits, and full-time employment. The easing of income inequality in the developed nations immediately after World War II was an exception, not the rule, in the history of capitalism. Outside of this brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, capitalism has not delivered on its promise of upward class mobility for most workers, and this promise can only continue to fade as capitalism continues to develop.

Today, most people find themselves within the throes of a drawn-out process of immiseration that shows no signs of reversing itself. Incomes have declined since the 1970s to allow for a greater acceleration of capital formation and accumulation. Even as total economic output continues to increase, and even as the job market continues to grow, working class incomes continue to decline, since most jobs are now in the unskilled, unprotected, low-wage service industries. Under these circumstances, the instability that a developed capitalist system subjects the employment and working conditions of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs.[45] The production process reaches a point of no return, continually reproducing a permanently marginalized mass of low-paid laborers with no hope of a professional career.

Rather than functioning as a site for upward mobility and income growth, the late capitalist megalopolis increasingly functions as a warehouse for low-wage service workers. Over the past fifty years, these structural trends have steadily asserted themselves on global level, especially in the global South.[46] As Mike Davis painstakingly details in his devastating book, Planet of Slums, poverty and occupational marginality are especially prevalent in the cities of underdeveloped nations, where urban existence is increasingly disconnected from mass employment. With unprecedented barriers to large-scale emigration to developed nations, slum populations continue to grow at an unprecedented rate in the global South. For Davis, this is the real crisis of world capitalism: the crisis of the reproduction of labor and the inability of capitalism to stabilize (yet alone improve) the livelihood of the proletariat.

The growing division of the workforce into 1) a small, privileged core of professionals and managers that can expect continuous, high-paying employment, and 2) a large periphery of precarious "floaters," to which capitalists provide little more than a low wage, for as long or as short a time as capitalists require these workers-this division will only widen as capitalism continues to develop. To the extent that most workers have access to increasingly irregular employment and smaller wages, the trend toward racial and class inequalities will persist, globally and locally. Black workers will continue to be the "last hired, first fired." White workers will continue to act as labor aristocracy, allying themselves with capitalists to monopolize the professional and managerial jobs, while relegating workers of color-especially Black workers-to the worst paying, least secure, lowest status jobs.

The housing market will continue to reflect the uneven distribution of income and jobs. The white workers who hold the managerial and professional jobs will continue to predominate in the suburbs, or in some comfortable, tree-lined areas of the city like Chestnut Hill, and in the gentrifying neighborhoods close to center city. In contrast, low-income workers will remain in the vast stretches of row houses in Philadelphia and Camden and in the older suburbs like Chester or Norristown.

The Struggle for a Classless Society

Capital seeks to gain the greatest return on its investment in labor and means of production. In pursuing this end, capital has reorganized the production process and with it the realities of working-class existence. This raises strategic questions from the standpoint of class struggle: what forms of struggle are developing today that point to a different future? If industrial production created a particular conception of class struggle, what do the service industries mean for the future of class struggle? What does working class power look like in the context of a service economy?

These are complex questions that must be explored via further research of the class composition and dynamics of class struggle in specific regions. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of this essay, which at the most serves as the groundwork for such an investigation. Still, on a general level, this research makes this much clear: as long as capitalism continues as the dominant state of affairs, the contradiction between capital and labor can only become more pronounced. Therefore, it is not enough to reform capitalism or morally condemn capitalists-we must develop a plan to overthrow the structure of capitalism in its entirety.

Of course, the design and implementation of such a plan would take different forms depending on the conditions of working class existence in different regions. Nonetheless, at its core, this plan must entail the abolition of private property in the mode of production and the organization of a system of production that is no longer carried out with the goal of capital accumulation, but instead in a way that is systematically regulated by society-not the capitalists, not the market, not the state, but society as a whole. The members of such a society would have to reorganize the production process in such a way that frees their labor from the constraints of capital-an external, independent force standing above society.

However, given the contemporary circumstances of late capitalism, it is unclear whether workplace-centered struggle is the primary organizational form for building this social project. Even though capital continues to accumulate in industrial production, employment has shifted from the sphere of direct commodity production (agriculture, manufacturing) to the sphere of circulation (services). In such an economy, workplace struggles pose little to no threat to capitalism. Even if workers took over every McDonalds or Walmart, the economy would continue to operate in highly automated essential sectors like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and logistics. If a proletarian revolution were to occur in such a context, the communization of production would not entail proletarian control of workplaces-as conceived by the traditional approach to labor struggle-so much as proletarian expropriation and elimination of workplaces, most of which are nonessential (i.e. most of the services industries) and serve no useful purpose outside of the context of capital accumulation.

The critical period in US mass industrial relations, which began about a century ago and saw a rapid growth in the power of industrial workers' unions in the 1930s and 1940s, was followed by capitalist counter-organization and restructuring. By the early 1980s it was clear that the New Deal order of relatively strong labor unions was over in the US. Today, the material basis for workplace oriented struggles has fallen apart, shattered by capitalist automation, deindustrialization, and decentralization.

Despite these difficulties, there is still no logical argument for why a classless society is impossible. Even when such a society can only be achieved with difficulty and struggle-in light of rising poverty and racial inequality; in light of constant imperialist wars; in light of the ecological destruction brought about by capitalism-in light of all that, there are still good reasons to fight for a world beyond capitalism, where production is carried out by an association of free people who collectively regulate their own labor. To be victorious, however, we must build organizations that correspond to the present circumstances, instead of simply inheriting the idealized and ready-made organizational forms of the past.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 793.

[2] Marx, Capital, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 798.

[3] "Capitalism" is the dominant mode of production in the world. It is defined primarily by the production, circulation, and accumulation of capital. "Capitalists" own the means of producing capital.

[4] Alfred Lubrano, "Throughout the country, incomes are rising. In Philly, their falling," http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/census-data-poverty-income-philadelphia-suburbs-20180913.html

[5] The "proletariat," or "working class," is the largest class in capitalist society. "Proletariats" do not own any means of production ( of their own and therefore must sell their labor-power (their ability to create capital) to those who own means of production (capitalists), in exchange for a wage which is a only fraction of the capitalist value they produce.

[6] Engels, Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 89.

[7] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, "U.S. Economy at a Glance," https://www.bea.gov/news/glance

[8] "Report for Selected Country Groups and Subjects (PPP valuation of country GDP)" . IMF. Retrieved 29 December 2017. Digital History; Steven Mintz. "Digital History" . Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved April 21, 2012.

[9] "United States remains the world's top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons" . EIA.

[10] "Trade recovery expected in 2017 and 2018, amid policy uncertainty" . Geneva, Switzerland: World Trade Organization. 12 April 2017. Retrieved 2017-06-22.

[11] Katsuhiko Hara and Issaku Harada (staff writers) (13 April 2017). "US overtook China as top trading nation in 2016" . Tokyo: Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved 2017-06-22. Office of the United States Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, "Trade and Economy," https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/economy-trade

[12] For overall trade patterns, see: Adie Tomer, Robert Puentes, and Joseph Kane, "Metro-to-Metro: Global and Domestic Goods Trade in Metropolitan America" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013). For export statistics, see: Brad McDearman, Ryan Donahue, and Nick Marchio, "Export Nation 2013: U.S. Growth Post Recession" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013).

[13] "Trade corridors" are streams of commodities that flow within and through spaces in regular geographic patterns.

[14] Source: Brookings analysis of EDR data.

[15] Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane, "Mapping Freight: The Highly Concentrated Nature of Goods Trade in the United States." Global Cities Initiative. A JOINT PROJECT OF BROOKINGS AND JPMORGAN CHASE. November, 2014. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Srvy_GCIFreightNetworks_Oct24.pdf

[16] "Gross Metropolitan Product" . U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. September 29, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.

[17] "Global city GDP rankings 2008-2025" . Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Archived from the original on May 31, 2013. Retrieved November 20,2009.

[18] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[19] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," The PEW Charitable Trusts, November 2017, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[20] "US Census Bureau. (2001). Historical Income Tables - Income Equality" . Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208142023/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ie6.html

"Shaprio, E. (October 17, 2005). New IRS Data Show Income Inequality Is Again of The Rise. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities" . Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://www.cbpp.org/research/new-irs-data-show-income-inequality-is-again-on-the-rise

[21] Wiseman, Paul (September 10, 2013). "Richest 1 percent earn biggest share since '20s" . AP News . Retrieved September 10, 2013. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130910/DA8NN7U02.html

John Cassidy (November 18, 2013). "American Inequality in Six Charts" . The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

[22] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[23] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, March 2016 https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[24] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[25] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[26] Brookings, "Employment and disconnection among teens and young adults: the role of place, race, and education." https://www.brookings.edu/research/employment-and-disconnection-among-teens-and-young-adults-the-role-of-place-race-and-education/#V0G0

[27] The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport, 1980), 141-168.

[28] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, (Temple University Press, 2008) . The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places , (UBC Press, 2017).

[29] Workshop of the World, "Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview,"

http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/overview/overview.html

[30] John Bauman, Public Housing: The Dreadful Sage of a Durable Policy, 57.

[31] Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, 99-107, 121-122, 125-133.

[32] Gladys Palmer, Philadelphia's Workers in a Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), page 37.

[33] Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City, (Temple University Press, 1991).

[34] David Koistinen, Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England (University Press of Florida; 2013)

[35] Larry Eichel and Octavia Howell, "A Key Driver of Poverty in Philadelphia? The Changing Nature of Work," January 2018, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/analysis/2018/01/08/a-key-driver-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-the-changing-nature-of-work

[36] Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/#sthash.FIcRzwW3.dpuf

[37] Adams, Bartelt, Elesh, Goldstein,Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, 56.

[38] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region , 37.

[39] Philadelphia , "Economic Erosion," pages 55-56.

[40] Capital , 769.

[41] Capital , vol 3: 358.

[42] Capital , "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 772-773.

[43] Capital , 798.

[44] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 582.

[45] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 580-82.

[46] "Inequality on the Rise?: An Assessment of Current Available Data on Income Inequality, at Global, International, and National Levels," Servio Vieira, December 2012, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_papers/bp_wess2013_svieira1.pdf

Marx for Today: A Socialist-Feminist Reading

By Johanna Brenner

Considering his work as a whole, Marx had little to say directly about women's oppression or the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. (1) And some of what he had to say was, well, misguided. Yet Marxist feminists have drawn on his thought to create a distinctive approach to understanding these issues. (2)

Marxist feminists begin, where Marx does, with collective labor. Human beings must organize labor socially in order to produce what we need to survive; how socially necessary labor is organized, in turn, shapes the organization of all of social life. In The German Ideology, Marx articulated this foundational starting point:

"The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they actually are; i.e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will." (MECW 5:37)

When Marx refers to individuals who are productively active in a definite way, he is thinking primarily about the production of material goods. Marxist feminists expand the notion of socially necessary labor to include that part of collective labor that meets individual needs for sustenance and daily renewal as well as birthing and rearing the next generation.

The term "social reproduction" has been developed to refer to this labor. (3) By social reproduction is meant the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life on a daily basis and inter-generationally.

Social reproduction involves various kinds of socially necessary work - mental, physical and emotional - aimed at meeting historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined needs and, through meeting these needs, maintaining and reproducing the population.

Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided, how adults receive social and emotional support, and how sexuality is experienced. From this starting point, we can see how gender and gender relations - such as a gender division of labor - are social, historical constructs, embedded in structures of social reproduction.

Actually existing capitalist societies each have their own histories and trajectories of change, and gender relations are structured across a diverse terrain. While recognizing this complexity, socialist-feminists have drawn on Marx's work to analyze how patriarchal relations work in capitalist societies. By going back to Marx's texts, I want to highlight some aspects of this socialist-feminist theoretical framework.

Social Reproduction and Gendered Division of Labor

That we speak of production on the one hand and social reproduction on the other is, in part, an artifact of both the (masculinist) development of Marxist thought and the nature of the capitalist mode of production. In capitalism, the work done in households, although crucial to the reproduction of human beings, is separated off from the production and circulation of commodities. In comparison, with the exception of slavery, in pre-capitalist class societies, households organized through marriage and kinship were the basic unit for organizing the production of material goods as well as human care.

As Marx pointed out, in capitalist production commodities (including commodified services) are both use values and exchange values. (MECW 35:45-46) That is, they meet a need (otherwise there would be no point in making them); but they are not produced in order to meet needs. Rather, they are produced to generate surplus value - or profit.

From the point of view of the production of use values, waged and unwaged labor form a unified process which has, as its end result, the reproduction of human beings. The separation of what is, from the point of view of production of use values, an integrated process into two different types of labor (commodified and uncommodified) is a result of capitalist class relations of production, not a universal fact of human social life.

This separation parallels the emergence of divisions between the public and private spheres, between family and work, between the state and the economy. These are also a hallmark of capitalist societies. These double separations - economy/household and economy/state - have shaped the history of gender relations and women's struggles to change them within capitalist societies.

Until now, all known systems of social reproduction have been based on a gendered division of labor (albeit sometimes quite rigid, at other times more flexible). Although this pattern appears to be mandated biologically - by the physical requirements of procreation and the needs of infants - the distribution of the work of social reproduction among families, communities, markets, states and between women and men has varied historically. This variation can be analyzed, at least in part, as the outcome of struggles around class and gender, struggles that are often about sexuality and emotional relations as well as political power and economic resources.

In societies that preceded capitalism, property rights were vested in male household heads and formed the basis of patriarchal authority - literally the rule of the fathers. For capitalist class relations to emerge, this system of property rights had to be overthrown. The forcible legal and extra-legal processes through which men were deprived of their property and turned into wage laborers threatened to undermine this patriarchal system - at least for the working class. Observing the extreme exploitation of women and children in the 19th century factories, Marx argued in Capital, Vol. I:

"However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes…Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery." (MECW vol. 35:492-493)

Although Marx was vague about how this higher form of family and relations between the sexes would be constituted, he was quite clear in his critique of the bourgeois family where male property owners continued to hold sway over their wives and children.

"But you communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production." (MECW 6: 502)

Marx insisted that there was no "natural" or "transhistorical" family form. Thus, he argued, in Capital Vol. I, "It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historical development." (MECW 35:492).

While Marx never developed his analysis of this historical evolution, his notes on the family in pre-capitalist societies point to a more dialectical approach than that taken by Engels, for whom the introduction of private property determines the "world historical defeat of the female sex." For example, Marx points to the simultaneous emergence of hierarchical rank and men's collective control over women (as captives/slaves) in clan societies prior to the development of private property. (Brown 2013)

Marx was in one sense right about the long-run possibilities for challenging patriarchal family relations that inhere in women's access to wage labor. However, his critique of exploitative employment, while exposing the destruction of women's and children's health and well-being, also drew on ideals of feminine virtue that were central to the "separate spheres" gender ideology of his age - thus the reference to the "corrupting" influence of factory work under capitalism. (4)

Marx tended to conflate physical and moral health in his scathing critiques of 19th century working conditions, and reserved special condemnation for instances where gender differences were undermined, as in his selection of this quote from a commission report in Capital Vol. I:

"The greatest evil of the system that employs young girls on this sort of work consists in this…They become rough, foul-mouthed boys, before Nature has taught them that they are women…they learn to treat all feelings of decency and of shame with contempt…Their heavy day's work at length completed, they put on better clothes and accompany the men to the public houses." (MECW 35: 467)

An even more important problem with Marx's analysis is that he does not fully incorporate the sheer amount of caring labor required for human survival, and insofar as he does pay attention tends to assume that it is naturally women's work. Marx occasionally indicates the importance of women's domestic work, as, for example, in Capital, Vol. I describing the disastrous consequences for the family (and the increased profit for the employer) in the employment of women and children alongside men:

"Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children's play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family. The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour time necessary to maintain the individual adult labourer but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour-market, spreads the value of the man's labour-power over his whole family." (MECW 35:398-399)

Marx goes on to argue that because the family must rely more on purchasing commodities rather than domestic work, "[t]he cost of keeping the family increases, and balances the greater income." Increasing the number of wage earners does not raise but lowers the family's standard of living, because "economy and judgment in the consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence becomes impossible." In other words, the value inherent in women's domestic skills is lost.

During the U.S. Civil War, which disrupted the cotton trade, textile workers in England suffered massive layoffs. Here, Marx argues, the women operatives "had time to cook. Unfortunately the acquisition of the art occurred at a time when they had nothing to cook. But from this we see how capital, for the purposes of its self-expansion, has usurped the labour necessary in the home of the family." (MECW 35:399).

Marx thus identified a central contradiction of capitalism - that although capital depends on the reproduction of labor power, the demand for profit threatens to undermine the reproduction of laborers themselves. Marx captured this conundrum in his famous ironic comment in Capital Vol. I: "The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfillment to the labourer's instincts of self-preservation and of propagation." (MECW 35:572).

Labor power differs in a fundamental way from other factors of production. The capitalist who invests in machinery can be reasonably sure to get the fruits of his investment. Indeed, as a rule, capitalists must invest to raise productivity in order to cut costs and compete. In contrast, the capitalist has no hold over the children of his current employees and so is reluctant to pay a wage that can support them. There is thus a tendency toward pushing wages below the bare minimum:

"In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly pre-supposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part, for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the labourer's necessary consumption-fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital …If labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards zero." (Capital Vol. I, MECW 35:595-596)

From this perspective, the capacity of the working class to reproduce itself depends on the working class itself - on the level and extent of class struggle. Through struggle over the length of the working day, over wages, over the conditions of work, over the extent of the welfare state and other public services, working-class people have wrenched from capitalist employers the means to care for themselves and their children.

At the same time, the forms these struggles took - how working-class men and women defined their goals, organized their forces, developed their strategies - were shaped by institutionalized relations of power and privilege formed around race, gender, sexuality and nationality. In particular, working-class women's responsibilities for caregiving, and the conditions under which they do this work, have often disadvantaged them in relation to men within both informal and formal arenas of political contestation and decision-making.

On the other hand, women find a ground for respect, authority and power in their care responsibilities. And where women cooperate across households in order to accomplish their work in social reproduction, they create the social basis for collective action. Women's location in the labor of social reproduction, then, is a resource for resistance as well as a source of disempowerment.

By undermining older forms of individual patriarchal control over women's labor within family households, capitalist expansion has opened up possibilities for women's political self-organization - but the organization of social reproduction in a capitalist economy where millions are, from the point of view of capitalist employers, nothing more than a "surplus population," constitutes the basis for new forms of women's oppression.

Some feminists have named this a shift from private to public patriarchy, because it is based in the first instance on men's collective access to public power rather than on their direct control over household members through property ownership. The question remains, however, why are men able to sustain greater access to public power, given that bourgeois democracy at first in principle and, through decades of feminist struggle eventually in fact, confers equal citizen rights on men and women?

Compelling answers to this question have been developed by feminists who start from the observation that discourses of gender difference are central to the constitution and legitimation of political power. (5) Although discourses of gender difference certainly have an effect, from a Marxist feminist standpoint, we would add that ideas do not sustain themselves without some grounding in everyday experience.

This was of course one of Marx's great insights when describing the "fetishism of commodities." That relationships between people come to be seen as relationships between things is a reflection of the wage relation in commodity production. This is not a "false consciousness" in the sense of ideas imposed by cultural and social forces; rather, it is a world­view that expresses, or is consonant with, actual experience under the relations imposed by the commodity form.

In the same way, to understand how male domination sustains itself in any given moment, we have to look for the underlying social relations that confer a logic on, make sensible and even productive, discourses of gender difference.

The resistance of capitalist employers to investing in the reproduction of labor power, competition among workers, the individualizing pressures of the wage form itself, all push in the direction of privatizing rather than socializing caregiving work. But so long as caregiving remains a private responsibility of households whose members must engage in substantial hours of both waged and unwaged labor, the gender division of labor will retain a compelling logic.

Of course, individual and family survival strategies based in a gender division of labor are not simply the outcome of rational responses by men and women to material difficulties. They also reflect women's and men's interests and desires which are shaped socially and culturally as well as economically. (6)

Class Relations and Social Reproduction

Three other features of the capitalist system that Marx identified are helpful to us in thinking about how social reproduction - and the gender division of labor within it - have come to be organized and changed over time.

First is the drive toward commodification that arises from capitalist competition and the search for new arenas for profit-making. Here again, we see the two-sided nature of capitalist expansion - in enabling challenges to patriarchal forms, and at the same time limiting what those challenges can accomplish.

As capitalism penetrates all areas of human activity, use values are turned into commodities - things to be bought and sold rather than given, bartered or produced for one's own use. The conversion of use values into exchange values (commodities) ties people more firmly to the capitalist economy, because in order to consume one has to earn.

On the other hand, ever-expanding possibilities for consumption allow and encourage new forms of individual identification and self-expression. As Rosemary Hennessy points out, in the early 20th century:

"(S)tructural changes in capitalist production that involved technological developments, the mechanization and consequent deskilling of work, the production boom brought on by technological efficiency, the opening of new consumer markets, and the eventual development of a widespread consumer culture…displaced unmet needs into new desires and offered the promise of compensatory pleasure, or a least the promise of pleasure in the form of commodity consumption…This process took place on multiple fronts and involved the formation of newly desiring subjects, forms of agency, intensities of sensation, and economies of pleasure that were consistent with the requirements of a more mobile workforce and a growing consumer culture." (Hennessy 2000: 99)

The spread of consumerism, wage labor, urbanization, the decline of small businesses and the related rise of new professions whose practitioners were a driving force toward state regulation of bodies (e.g. medicine, public health, social work, psychology) all laid the basis for a reorganization of sexuality and family life, particularly in the middle class. Older patriarchal norms of motherhood, marriage and sexuality were overturned, but replaced by a heteronormative regime that re-inscribed the gender division of labor. (7)

By the end of the 20th century, intensified commodification, as Alan Sears argues, had not only generated the spaces of open lesbian and gay existence, but also consolidated gay visibility around a class and race specific identity that relies predominantly on the capacity to consume. (Sears 2005: 92-112)

The more life becomes organized around the production and consumption of commodities, the more people are encouraged/allowed to regard every aspect of their humanity as a potential for making money. The logic of possessive individualism and the commodification of labor power that is its foundation creates a powerful drive toward regarding affection, sexuality, and even biological reproductive capacities as commodities that can be bought and sold.

As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, describing the spread of capitalist social relations: "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify." (MECW 6: 487)

The infinitely repeated counterposition of modernity and tradition, culture and nature, sacred and profane in contemporary political discourses revolves around the dualism between exchange value and use value - between that which can or should be sold and that which cannot or should not be.

There is no way out of this dualism, and therefore out of the debate, so long as the conditions under which people possess their bodily capacities are governed by the scarcity and insecurity of life under capitalism. In a context of coercion, which is always present so long as people are separated from their means of survival, it is difficult to distinguish labor that is meaningful and freely chosen from that which is not.

The commodification of procreation (not all of which requires new reproductive technologies) offers new fields for profit-making, while also expanding access to biological parenthood for new groups: gay men (e.g. egg "donation"/surrogacy), lesbians (e.g. sperm banks) and infertile heterosexual couples (e.g. surrogacy, in vitro fertilization). Commodification of procreation undermines ideals of motherhood as a naturally mandated identity and challenges religious and biologically based legitimations of patriarchal family relations, replacing them with contractual norms of choice and consent.

At the same time, commodification of procreation also opens up new possibilities for generating profit through the exploitation of women's reproductive capacities (e.g. in surrogate pregnancy and egg donation), while defining women's access to these new forms of earning income to be their right as "free" wage earners. (8)

A second feature of capitalist production relations that shapes the organization of social reproduction and the gender division of labor is capitalist control over the work process. As Marx points out, insofar as workers control important aspects of the production process they have a basis for resistance; therefore, capitalist employers seek to minimize workers' control through deskilling and through supervision.

In Capital Vol. I, Marx distinguishes between the coordination required for a complex cooperative labor process and the very different work of control necessitated by the capitalist character of that process, which creates an "unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he exploits."(MECW 35: 336).

He goes on to say, "If then the control of the capitalist is in substance two-fold by reason of the two-fold nature of the process of production itself - which on the one hand is a social process for producing use values, on the other a process for creating surplus value - in form that control is despotic."' (MECW 35: 337)

Managerial strategies for controlling labor create, incorporate and reproduce relations of power and privilege organized by race, gender, nationality and sexuality (Burawoy 1979; Munoz 2008). Processes of gendering, racializing, and sexualizing bodies and identities, embedded in capitalist management, take up and reinforce hegemonic constructions of gender dualism that are central to the gendered division of labor in social reproduction. At the same time, strategies of working class resistance to managerial power at the workplace and in the broader society also reflect relations of power and privilege organized by race, gender, sexuality, etc. and may constrain management in ways that benefit some workers at the expense of others. For example, local labor markets, and therefore the wages of different groups of workers, are shaped by political processes and not only economic ones.

The consequence of workers' loss of control over the ways in which labor is coordinated - and the capitalist drive to extract as much surplus labor as possible - is that the full range of human needs cannot be incorporated into decisions about how production is organized.

In no capitalist society is production organized to take into account, to actively support, and to provide for, the socially necessary labor of care. This work is extensive, highly skilled and labor intensive, even though it is often thought of as unskilled and inherent to feminine nature. Even the most "family friendly" welfare state regimes, such as Sweden, do not intrude substantially on private firms' employment policies.

A third feature of capitalism is that exploitation takes place through the free exchange of the wage contract, and therefore requires the separation of political and economic power. One of the most important shifts in the organization of social reproduction in capitalist societies over the past century has been the emergence of the welfare state - the expansion of public (government) responsibility for education, healthcare, and childrearing, as well as increased (and often oppressive) state regulation of families, especially those in the vulnerable parts of the working class (e.g. immigrants, oppressed racial/ethnic groups, the poor, single mothers).

Although it is tempting to understand these developments as state managers acting in the longterm interests of the capitalist class - stepping in to guarantee the reproduction of the labor force when the capitalist employers will not - we might instead follow Marx's lead in focusing our attention on the self-organization of the working class.

In Capital Vol. I, describing the victory that enforceable legal limits on the working day represented, Marx sarcastically describes the "conversion" of factory owners and their ideologues to the ideal of regulation following their defeat at the hands of the working class:

"The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still 'free'[of regulation]. The Pharisees of 'political economy' now proclaimed the discernment of the necessity of a legally fixed working-day as a characteristic new discovery of their 'science.'" (MECW 35: 300)

The extent and form of government expansion into social reproduction is the outcome of reform struggles in which middle-class and working-class men and women, not only capitalist employers and state managers, played important roles. As products of struggle, state policies reflect the level and purposes of women's political self-organization but also the different resources and power available to women and men in different classes and racial/ethnic groups.

Moreover, the terrain on which these groups have engaged is hardly neutral. Developments in the capitalist economy provided political openings and political resources - for example, by drawing women into wage labor - but capitalist class interests also placed constraints on what could be won.

These constraints have been exercised mainly in two ways. First, especially in the liberal market economies, capitalist employers have consistently - and for the most part successfully - resisted government intrusions on their business practices and significant taxation of their profits. More fundamentally, state managers and legislators are ultimately dependent on economic growth and prosperity, which in turn is controlled by capitalist investors. (9)

By acknowledging these constraints, we can better understand how and why state welfare policies have institutionalized rather than challenged the gender division of labor. For example, in the early 20th century United States, the first government programs to support solo mothers emerged out of a period of intense working-class mobilization and politicization; a broad women's movement that engaged organized women workers and Black clubwomen, but whose activists and leaders were predominately white and middle-class/upper-class women; and the interventions of new professional groups who offered their expertise to manage, uplift, and assimilate the unruly classes.

In the context of powerful opposition from the employing class and reflecting its constellation of race/class forces, the movement's predominant discourses sought to legitimize government provision by asserting that paid work was detrimental to good mothering. (Mink 1995; Brenner 2000)

Conclusion

Many contemporary feminist activists and thinkers recognize that gender relations cannot be abstracted from other social relations - of class, race, sexuality, nationality, and so forth. Marx hardly resolved the question of how we might theorize this totality of social relations. (10) Still, his analysis of capitalism as a mode of production provides a fruitful starting point for a feminist theory and practice that might not only understand this totality but also engage in movements that can finally transform it.

This originally appeared at Solidarity .

All the Ways Bernie Might Lose: A Socialist Critique of Social Democracy

By Andrew Dobbs

The largest political organization on the US left, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) just informally polled its members as to whether or not they should immediately endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for president. About a quarter of the group could be bothered to vote, and they supported the Sanders endorsement three to one. DSA's membership grew eleven-fold since the last presidential election, with most observers giving Sanders credit for raising the popularity of "democratic socialism," his self-described philosophy. The outcome makes sense.

Despite many revolutionaries likewise joining DSA, the political center of gravity in the organization seems to be in favor of electoralism and collaboration with the Democratic Party; DSA's endorsement of Sanders now seems to be a foregone conclusion.

This is a profound display of willful historical ignorance. DSA's growth is an encouraging sign in some ways, but they are on the precipice of plunging into failure the way so many leftists have in recent decades.

There are six generally possible outcomes for this exercise, each with clear historical antecedents that demonstrate the ease with which the ruling class would blunt any electoral effort even calling itself socialist. It is crucial that DSA members remember this history and resist the well-trod path to embarrassment they are considering right now. Here are the ways history has shown a campaign like this one can be destroyed.

Losing: the Jackson Outcome

Far and away the most likely outcome for the Sanders campaign is the most likely outcome for all presidential campaigns: they lose. There are about a dozen Democrats running with at least a few more still waiting to jump in, and by definition all of them but one - at most - will lose. Sanders supporters have fooled themselves to a great extent about his chances and popularity, a trend reminiscent of how the left perceived the Jesse Jackson campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

In light of Jackson's later foibles and eclipse their eagerness now seems absurd, and even at the time he was deeply controversial. The left did not acknowledge this. "The more Jackson gains, the more he upsets both the right and the established Democratic Party leadership," an article following early 1988 primaries in the socialist newspaper Unity said. "These are further signs it will be an uphill fight all the way - but Jesse Jackson can win!"

This sentiment sounds familiar to those who have followed Sanders supporters online. Those arguing that the Sanders campaign could be used to build political power subsequent to the election even if he loses should ask themselves what we have to show for the Jackson campaigns.

The Party Thumb on the Scale: the 2016 Outcome

The other, more exigent lesson from 2016 should be to remember the ways the Democratic Party's establishment went out of their way to block Sanders from the nomination. Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile admitted that the party was being run by Clinton's campaign even before the nomination was settled, confessing that "if the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead."

Before her later confession Brazile used her position at CNN to obtain planned questions for Clinton prior to a primary debate, and the debates themselves were clearly scheduled by the DNC to minimize viewership and shield the front-runner Clinton from insurgent challenge.

Of course, the most likely outcome if none of this had happened would still have been a Clinton nomination, but they weren't going to take that chance. Afterwards there was effectively no accountability for this scheme. What would keep them from pulling out the stops to direct the nomination away from Bernie and towards one of the other, less concerning candidates again? Nothing, but for whatever reason DSA is considering playing a rigged game.

Sabotage the Election: the McGovern Outcome

Even if Bernie does overcome these profound obstacles the party could sabotage his chances in the general election. We know this because they did it the last time a modestly leftist candidate won the party's nomination, George McGovern in 1972.

McGovern backed an immediate end to the Vietnam War, a massive reduction in defense spending, what would now be termed a universal basic income, amnesty for all draft resistors, decriminalizing pot and even went on to coin the term "Medicare for All." The Democratic Party's leadership went out of their way to crush the campaign. The urban political machines central to the party's operations of the era mostly stayed at home, and the large unions stayed formally neutral or endorsed Nixon.

McGovern was crushed in the largest landslide in modern history to that point. He would likely have lost no matter what, but the party's leadership made sure that it was a total rout so that no Democrats would get the wrong idea about running on the left again.

The same mechanisms are not necessarily available this time, but one is already presenting itself - Howard Schultz. The billionaire has made it clear that his campaign is about blocking Sanders from being president, and there is every reason to believe that key Democrat thought leaders, influencers, and organizers could legitimize him and send enough of the electorate over to him to cost Bernie the race. Sure, it would re-elect Trump, but it's not like they didn't hate Nixon back in the day, too. The ability to maintain their control of the party and the comfort of their class is worth four more years of what amounts to annoyance for them.

You can be sure that the corporate media would frame the whole thing as Sanders' fault as well, questioning whether his "socialist" politics had alienated voters and opened the door for four more years of Trump. DSA will be villains, and whatever gains they have now will be gone.

Making Bernie Sell Out: the SYRIZA Outcome

This outcome may be the one the ruling class would enjoy most. Bernie wins the White House only to be compelled to betray all of his stated principles and enact the very sort of abusive capitalist policies DSA et al. got behind him to stop.

Again, this has happened when actual leftists have won office. One notorious example was in 2015 when the Greek leftist party SYRIZA rode a wave of mass outrage over EU-led economic bullying to win that country's general elections on a militant, anti-capitalist platform. A few months later the SYRIZA government held a nationwide referendum on whether or not to capitulate to EU austerity and bailout demands. 61% of voters said no - there was a clear mandate to struggle against the neoliberal impositions of European finance.

Only 8 days after the referendum, however, Prime Minister and SYRIZA leader Alex Tsirpas gave in to an agreement even more harsh than the one voters rejected. The agreement's terms included tax increases - especially on farmers - major service cuts, raised retirement ages, increased contribution requirements for insurance, slashed wages, canceled labor contracts, and major privatization of state assets.

The next US elections could very well happen in the context of a major recession, according to a variety of indicators. If Bernie were to come to office with unemployment soaring, stocks plummeting, growth at next to nothing, etc. would he really pull the trigger on gutting some of the largest industries in the country, the insurance and medical industries, for example? Would he raise taxes on the wealthy - and even the middle class, as would be necessary for most of his programs? Or would he delay the big stuff "for now" and focus on the very same kind of austerity any other candidate would take up?

The fact is that his whole program is dependent upon capitalist industry creating profits and managerial/technical wages to tax to fund his programs. But the rate of profit for US firms is less than half what it was during the New Deal era, and average economic growth has declined by more than two-thirds. This downgrade is what prompted neoliberal gutting of the welfare state in the first place.

If DSA members really are socialists they should know that capitalism isn't just mean or ugly, it's doomed. Any political program that rests on the idea of allowing it to persist by just rearranging its output through taxation and government expenditure is also dead on arrival.

Make the Economy Scream: the Venezuela Outcome

Even if Bernie accomplishes the near impossible task of winning and then actually pursuing a socialistic program, he can expect pointed economic warfare to crush his movement once and for all. "If you try this, you'll end up like Venezuela" is not a prediction or a possibility, it's a warning.

Because both the Bernie agenda and the Bolivarian program to date have assumed the continued existence of private production and finance, a capital strike can immediately produce crucial shortages and financial disruption. In Venezuela they stopped importing toilet paper, beer, and flour used for staple baked goods, or they hoarded them and drove up the price to make money off the black market. Banks refused to provide dollars to Venezuelan sovereign accounts so they could not pay debts and their currency collapsed.

Similar economic warfare plagued Chile when a "democratic socialist" took power there in 1970. The CIA worked with the AFL-CIO to organize middle-class owner/operators like truckers, taxi drivers, and shopkeepers to go on strike. This plunged the country into chaos as shelves went empty, pumps ran dry, and transportation became impossible. By the time September 1973 rolled around there was substantial support for a coup just to try and bring consumer life back to normal.

Now imagine if hospital companies announced that "Medicare for All" just won't cover their bills so they are shutting down half the facilities in the country. Pharmaceutical companies could announce they are ceasing production of chemotherapy drugs - they just can't afford to make them under "socialism." Store closures, layoffs, 401(k)s going broke, the list is endless really.

Actual socialist governments face many of these threats and many other hardships, but they prevent the worst by expropriating entire industries and putting them under public control. Sanders is not planning for any such thing, and the right-wing unrest liable to follow would be presented on every channel and newspaper as "peaceful protest" in glowing tones. Bernie does not want to eliminate the ruling class, and so they will rule over him too, one way or the other.

Social Chauvinism: the "Democratic Socialist" Outcome

Finally, the most pernicious outcome of all would be what many DSAers might consider victory. Bernie could win the election and enact a social democratic reform effort with huge new benefits for people living in the US without doing anything whatsoever for the billions of people around the world exploited by our system as a whole.

This again is a well-established historical possibility. The social democratic movements of Europe that created the welfare states of those countries all depended upon imperialist extraction. The Iranian coup against Mossadegh was fully backed by the same Labour government that founded the National Health Service. France's first "socialist" president, Vincent Auriol, waged war in Indochina, overthrew the government of Morocco, jailed Tunisian independence leaders, and pursued a brutal war of repression in Madagascar. Even in the US, the "Great Society" came at the same time as the Vietnam War.

Bernie would fit right in this tradition if he got everything he wants. He's promising more drone strikes, continued military spending, ongoing hostility to anti-imperialist governments and a transfer of exploited surplus not back to the workers we stole it from, but mostly to middle-class folks in this country.

This isn't socialism; it's imperialism with a human face. Its days are just as numbered as any other capitalist program, and at best we'd get what Europe got - a generation or so of social democracy followed by ever-deepening austerity and reaction. If this is what DSA is looking for, by all means they should endorse Bernie.

Conclusion

As DSA, for whatever reason, lines up behind this folly, actual revolutionaries need to leave the organization and do something else. The great news is that there is a burgeoning, if still loose and immature, network of revolutionary collectives popping up in communities all over the US. Even if there isn't one where you live, the folks who have done it elsewhere can give you insight on how to get going. Find them, reach out, and start building something new so that we don't waste time doing what we know has never worked.

Let's remind each other of this truth staring us in the face from repeated historical experience. For the moment it means treating Bernie as the obstacle and danger he is so that we can instead fight until victory, always.

Renewable Energy under Capitalism: Why It Won't Happen

By Thomas Sullivan

Renewable energy is usually agreed to be the way forward. Nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal; all can revolutionize the way we generate power and prevent the dangerous warming our planet is experiencing. However, we haven't adopted these sources of energy in any systematic, widespread way. To examine why, this paper will explore a Marxist interpretation of why such technologies would not be adopted.

In his third volume concerning Capital, Karl Marx discussed what will cause the end of Capitalism. He theorized that over time, the profitability of a capitalistic economy would fall. Eventually, the system would become untenable and collapse into a new system (Marx, n.d., pp. 153-164). To understand the mechanism of this demise, we will need to explore the basic foundation of Marxism.

The Marxist worldview holds one key point as fundamental to production; nature, and by extension labor, is the source of all value. But a pile of wood, while of nature, will remain such, unless labor is applied to make something useful from it. Likewise, no one will purchase that pile of wood as a chair unless some work is done to make it a chair. In the capitalist system, the wood, as means of production, is separated from the labor. Workers who would perform labor do not own the wood or the chair they produce. (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1970)

The capitalist owns and profits from the chair, while the worker is paid a set wage. We can understand this wage as the embodiment of the value being added to the basic components through labor power. The average time the average means of doing this required work is important to determining how much this wage value is adding to the final value. This average is called the socially necessary labor time. The capitalist then needs to buy other items for production, the wood, the polish, the nails, the factory. All the components and other fixed costs can be viewed as the non-labor aspect of a products value. From this, the product is brought to market and sold for a value higher than the wages and non-labor value put together, called the exchange value. The difference between the exchange value and the other two values is called surplus-value. As the labor power purchased by the capitalist has already been paid for, the worker gains no value from any of this process. All together this process represents a very high concept view of Marx's labor theory of value. (Sekine, 1997, pp. 3-6)

From this theory, we gain two insights into what motivates the actions of capitalists. The increase of the surplus-value by way of negotiating a higher exchange value and by decreasing the necessary labor time value. Internally, a capitalist company would only be able to do this in the short-term by marketing, for higher exchange value, and by controlling the price of labor value, the wages of workers.

Marx uses the theory of value to predict how technology will allow for greater automation and result in a fall in rates of profit over time. This represents the greatest achievement within the theory in the view of the capitalist, the elimination of wages as an expense. There is a short-term advantage with the adoption of automation. However, Marx's fundamental point of labor being what gives a product value shines through. The initial boon is generated by the labor that was used to install the automation. Over time, there is no labor input and no value generated by the production besides occasional maintenance. The necessary labor time to produce more from the existing automation becomes zero. This eliminates the value that would be added by labor. As such, the exchange value of the products drops as well. The capitalist would need to increase production in order to recover costs, only to find no-one able to afford their products. With workers having been replaced by automation, they have no income of which to afford the products.

As an example, we can look at the agriculture industry in the United States. Upwards of 40% of produce are left unharvested or otherwise uncollected for sale. The stated reason of cosmetics (dents on bananas, spots on apples, etc.) can be seen as an artificial attempt to limit the availability of these products, inflating the exchange value of them. (Johnson, et al., 2018) The value of these products has been falling and requires this manipulation due to the decrease in the necessary labor time for their production. Parallel to this, the number of Americans involved in agriculture has decreased from 11.77 million in 1910 to 2.05 million on 2015 (Herrendorf, Rogerson, & Valentinyi, 2014). Automation and advanced machinery have made the labor required to farm and harvest miniscule compared to the amount being produced. The lack of scarcity destroys all value for the capitalist and requires the waste of edible products to limit supply. As this type of automation and value loss spreads up the production chain, more industries will become as such. They will have little labor required, the scarcity of their products eliminated, and massive waste required to maintain profitability.

This can also be explained using common capitalist economic understanding. Let's say that demand for corn is at 100 bushels. We can chart this as a line graph from the demand of 1 bushel at $100 and 100 bushels at $1, descending from the top left of a chart to the bottom right. We can then chart all possible supply amounts in the inverse, trending from the bottom left to top right; 1 bushel for $1 and 100 bushels for $100. Where this demand and supply line meet would be the equilibrium of the market, the price and supply the producer should set. When there is an increase is the quantity available, there is a corresponding shift to the right for the supply line. With the wider availability of the goods, demand normally shifts to the right with the quantity increase. The market is then able to readjust, allowing the producers who are providing the higher quantity the ability to sell more products at a lower rate. They can outbid the competition for the existing demand and capture the market. However, there comes a point where demand cannot increase anymore; the consumer can only eat so much corn. A producer will introduce a new technology or process that increases the quantity in an attempt to undermine competitors, but the market cannot accommodate the extra quantity. As such, the supply line shifts right, the demand line stays the same, and the price drops. The price drop does not correspond with an increase in sales, reducing the overall profitability of the market. (Free, 2010, pp. 69-78)

So how does this apply to renewable means of energy production? Understanding the tendency for rate of profits to fall can show us why a new green revolution would be avoided by capitalists. The current system of relying on coal, oil, and natural gas offers a limited supply, and therefore scarcity, that can be exploited for the maximum profit. Renewable energy offers unlimited sources and is not capable of being exploited in the same manner. While solar panels may require labor to produce and install, that initial value is all that would sustain solar power production from then on out. The automation of solar energy production is built into the system and therefore very little necessary labor time when compared to oil. The exchange value for this energy production would be too low to cover a company's costs, let alone create profit. This greatly affects the necessary labor time of any part of the subsequent supply chain, energy storage, transportation, and sale. Meanwhile, the massive amount of labor required to locate, extract, process, transport, and eventually sell traditional energy products makes the exchange value something capitalists can easily extract surplus-value from.

Likewise, supply and demand can be applied in a way similar to agriculture. With the quantity of crude oil/natural gas limited, there is already a system of controlling the supply. The limited and specific locations of the quantity means the producers are able to extract exact amounts for supply to maximize equilibrium within the market. This wouldn't be the case for renewable energy. With numerous sources of the quantity in question and the inexhaustible nature of those sources, producers would not have the same level of control over supply. If renewables were to be implemented in a systematic way, energy supply would quickly outpace demand. Some manipulation on the part of the producer would be required to maintain marketability.

With this understanding, we can see why the profit-driven motivations found in capitalism will not result in any reduction in the use of fossil fuels until the market for them literally dries up. Renewable energy offers only lower profits and the requirement of new methods of market manipulation for energy producers. If it is in our nature to do what is in our best interest, then those with the means to choose our energy production are of a nature that would resist this change wholeheartedly.

References

Free, R. C. (2010). 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook. London: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Herrendorf, B., Rogerson, R., & Valentinyi, A. (2014). Growth and Structural Transformation. In P. Aghion, & S. N. Durlauf, Handbook of Economic Growth (pp. 855-941). Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V.

Johnson, L. K., Dunning, R. D., Bloom, J. D., Gunter, C. C., Boyette, M. D., & Creamer, N. G. (2018). Estimating on-farm food loss at the field level: A methodology and case study on a North Carolina Farm. Recources, Conservation & Recycling, 243-250.

Marx, K. (1970). Critique of the Gotha Programme. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, K. (n.d.). Capital Volume III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. New York: International Publishers.

Sekine, T. T. (1997). An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, Vol. 2. Ipswich: Ipswich Book Company.

Between Developing and Defending the Cuban Revolution

By Joshua Lew McDermott

Recently, I picked up Leon Trotsky's forgotten classic "Their Morals and Ours: Marxist vs. Liberal Views on Morality." The pamphlet offers a scathing critique of what today is known as the "horseshoe theory," wherein the far left and far right are considered morally identical from the standpoint of liberalism, because both employ radical (and sometimes) violent tactics. This viewpoint will be familiar to anyone who has watched the corporate media decry anti-fascist activists as indecipherable from the neo-Nazis they combat.

The crux of Trotsky's argument, which is astoundingly relevant today, is not only that liberals are embarrassingly inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to passing moral judgments (the lack of outrage from moral crusaders on Yemen's genocide, Hillary Clinton's destruction of Libya, and many other instances of imperial aggression has long been deafening), but the fact that liberals derive their morality from an ahistorical universalist ideal means that liberal morality inherently serves the rich and powerful. Adherence to abstract and eternal moral laws such as "thou shalt not steal" or "always obey the laws of the land" leads to a remarkably reactionary system of ethics. For example, is it immoral for a starving man to steal a loaf of a bread from a bakery owned by a wealthy business owner? In liberal societies, in which property is the ultimate sacred cow and morality is not contingent upon material/historical context, the answer is "yes." Never mind the relevant economic and legal structures which enabled the business owner to become wealthy and led the other man to starvation.

What's more, Trotsky also grapples with the notion of "the ends justify the means" morality, a sentiment which was doubtlessly tested by Communist regimes throughout the 20th century, sometimes to indefensible ends. Yet, the cynical exploitation of sincere revolutionary upheavals by authoritarian figures does mean that there is a divine law which proves that means can never be justified by ends, as pragmatist John Dewey pointed out in his relatively agreeable response to Trotsky's piece. Again, the true determent of morality for any activist who sincerely cares for other humans being must be based upon a sober calculation of real-world facts and contexts and driven by a sincere desire to create a fair world for all people. As Che Guevara famously said, "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."

I do not bring up this moral debate to comment on morality as such or to arbitrate in the often absurd, abstract, and counterproductive clashes within the leftist social media sphere between what's become known as "tankies" and "ultraleftists," but because I found the deficiencies of liberal moral outrage especially cogent and consequential while on a recent educational trip to Havana in July 2018 which I took with a small organization known as La Luchita (run by a lovely and well-meaning husband and wife couple) tailored towards building networks between grassroots American and Cuban organizers and activists.

In an interesting dynamic, the American group, of which there was maybe fifteen of us, largely consisted of vaguely progressive activists, mostly in their late-twenties, who were nonetheless highly critical, or even outright dismissive, of Cuba's socialist project. For one week, we met with a cross-section of Cuban activists, from civil-society activists to students to university professors, all with legitimate critiques and praises of the Cuban revolutionary experiment. As one would expect, almost none of our hosts viewed "the Revolution" (as it is referred to on the island) in simple black-and-white terms, though some were more apologetic than others. The same cannot be said for many of the Americans, who were quick to confirm any anti-revolution bias by latching onto any critiques offered by the Cubans, but slow to acknowledge any triumphs of the revolution. The Americans were, as far as I could tell, not conscious that their knee-jerk responses to the most laudable aspects of the revolution (when finding out that wealthy persons were forced to give up any extra homes they owned in order to provide housing to the poor, some of the Americans audibly gawked) were highly reactionary, a condition indicative of so many American progressives. This blindness is symptomatic of gaining a "progressive" education sans any sort of class-analysis, a condition which defines so many well-meaning activists here. This is a symptom of hailing from an imperial heartland wherein questions of class are largely considered irrelevant, where billionaires such as Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey are even considered radical by some. This selective blindness is the result of not of an absence of ideology, but the product of living deep beneath an invisible ideological shroud: for my colleagues, it seemed, anything good in Cuba was the result of some nebulous category vaguely defined as "Cuban culture" and anything bad in Cuba was due to socialism. For example, on nights out socializing in the city, the beauty of the fact that people from all professions (one night we went out to a jazz club with a group of Cubans comprised of a dentist, a professor, students, a cigar-factory worker, and a janitor) and races intermingled to an extent unimaginable in the U.S. seemed largely to be lost on my American counterparts. "That's just how Cuba is," I imagine they assumed, not realizing the huge strides made for the poor and Afro-Cubans since the fall of the Batista regime.

As a Chinese colleague of mine who travels to Cuba regularly once pointed out to me, Cuban society does not rest on a cult of personality, as in China, nor is it defined by social engineering and violent state control: police presence was almost non-existent within the city. At risk of romanticizing a country with many serious problems, I felt a deep authenticity and cohesiveness in Cuban society I have not experienced in any other country. The difference between Havana or Mexico City or Freetown, Sierra Leone, or any major American city could not have been starker.

I experienced the absolute strangeness of walking across a major city at 1am while seeing children and families enjoying the public parks free from fear, of knowing that every person I saw had full access to one of the world's best healthcare systems and the right to basic human necessities such as housing and employment, still makes my head spin. Where was the oppressive state presence I had heard so much about? The crime-filled streets? I felt I had caught just a small glimpse, for the first time in my life, of the potential harmony that we, as human beings, could achieve in society. What stood out to me most, perhaps, was the prevalence of dignity. Yes, Cuba has tremendous poverty. But the poverty is different than that in the U.S., where social isolation and a lack of access to even the most basic goods abounds despite our unfathomable wealth.

When I raised these insights with my fellow American travelers, the response was not surprising, nor altogether wrong: "you can't tell someone else to be grateful for what they have if you have more than them," one American told me when I expressed concern that the thawing of Cuban-American relations would hasten the-already-quickening erosion of Cuban social welfare. Many of the Cubans we met were under the impression that this would mean more, not less, prosperity for all islanders: to build upon Steinbeck's famous "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" sentiment: it seemed that many of even the poorest pro-American Cubans assumed (in large part due to American cultural influence that the government has long tried to keep out of Cuba) that they themselves would be the casino and resort owners once capitalism comes back to the island (this was often spoken of as an inevitably). Imagine the surprise of some of my Cuban friends, then, when I told them of growing up in America without health insurance, of experiencing homelessness and abject poverty. As any international traveler can attest, American cultural products, such as Hollywood films, have been remarkably successful at one thing: convincing many of the world's poor that poverty does not exist in the U.S.

Regardless, my American traveling companion was right: as an American who benefits greatly from being a citizen of the world's imperial center (take for example, the ease with which I can attain a visa for travel) with just a few relatives from Cuba and little experience on the island myself, I am in no position to tell Cubans they ought to be grateful for living under a government which has, undoubtedly, at times weaponized the threat of imperialism to silence legitimate dissent. Like many other members of my generation and as a young adult recovering from a childhood in Mormonism, there is little I dislike more than living subject to a governance structure which cannot allow for deviation. But, context and material facts do matter if we, as socialists and activists wanting to change the world, are to give any sort of fair appraisal of the Cuban Revolution. The liberal, postmodern project which reduces all legitimate political activism to thoughts and actions based solely upon one's own life experiences and identity categories is antithetical to social solidarity and all forms of class-politics and anti-imperialism. Case-in-point: after informing another American colleague that I was, in fact, a communist, she replied: "I believe subscribing to any sort of label or ideology destroys the political imagination." I don't doubt her sincerity, but neither do I doubt that her aversion to an actively radical ideology was inherently ideological. It is precisely this sort of nebulous belief in the moral superiority of the (nonexistent) apolitical which explains why so many well-meaning liberals can call a revolution which eliminated illiteracy and homelessness in a generation "monstrous," just because some wealthy people lost their second homes.

Regardless, it's important that all freedom-loving people acknowledge the right of Cubans to self-determination, whatever that means for Cubans. Yet, it's also important that anyone who puts stock on truth and morality acknowledges the great successes the revolution has entailed for inhabitants not only of the island, but for the poor all throughout the world, including especially Africa, where Cuban soldiers helped fend off apartheid and Cuban doctors continue to save countless lives. Socialists, in particular, have a political and moral obligation to denounce the U.S. embargo and calls for regime change.

As for appraising what the revolution can teach non-Cuban socialists about how to fight for a better world going forward, the crux of the matter was illustrated for me in a debate over a single word. One of the Cuban activists, an anarchist, asked me: should Cubans be "defending" or "developing" the Cuban Revolution? To defend the Revolution, he told me, assumes that the revolution was a specific historic event that occurred in 1959 and is now complete. According to him, this imagining of the Revolution entails stagnation, nostalgia, authoritarianism. Instead, he argued, Cubans must develop the revolution; this means emphasizing the need for evolution, growth, self-reflection. For him, an end to Cuba's socialist economy (in its present form) would be a step in the right direction as it would mean an easing of state control and an allowance for the sort of dissent necessary for evolution.

For a communist activist I met, however, if one is not defending the revolution, one is working with the project of American imperialism to defeat it. "The revolution has this much room to maneuver," he told me, squinting through an imperceptible slit between his thumb and index finger. This does not mean that this individual was uncritical of the Communist Party; on the contrary, he offered some of the most insightful critiques of the Cuban system. Nor does this mean that the anarchist comrade was not aware of the threat of U.S. economic imperialism. But to act like it will be good for Cuba to simply throw open its borders and government to unchecked American influence, as many American liberals attest, is not only naive but ideological par-excellence: an end of the Cuban socialist project will no doubt mean suffering for the average Cuban.

In other words, the Cuban revolution is not black-or-white. The Cuban government has long been stuck between a rock and hard place. We have an intellectual and moral responsibility to note that if the Cuban socialist government does, in fact, fall, it is more than likely that the millions of Cubans that the revolution lifted out of poverty, taught to read, offered education and healthcare, will face dire consequences in that brave new world of authoritarian neoliberalism that has always defined counterrevolutionary regimes in Latin America, from Pinochet to the newly elected president of Brazil.

Socialists in the 21st century have an obligation to acknowledge the successes of the revolution and to reject the off-hand moral denunciation that liberals are so quick to heap upon any political organization which dares to buck the conventions of the capitalist ruling system. Is Cuban Socialism perfect? No. No system made by humans will ever be and workers should always be free to critique and develop existing socialist projects. But resistance to capitalist exploitation, to poverty, to imperialism, cannot exist if we hold ourselves to an absurd, abstract, and inconsistent moral standard designed to protect the status quo. Revolution is not easy nor morally straightforward. But Cuba has lifted millions from abject poverty and offered its people and people throughout the world dignity and true sovereignty. For this, it deserves our praise, solidarity, and defense, as do all Cuban people, whether they believe in developing or defending revolution. Ultimately, what the Cubans decide to do about their revolution is up to them, but all socialists have an obligation to defend the island and its revolutionary government from outside aggression.

The Actuality of Revolution

By Jodi Dean

This essay originally appeared at Liberation School .

Revolution today names more a problem than it does a solution. We know that revolutions happen, but we have a hard time believing in revolution. We have a hard time believing in revolution because we are no longer confident that the revolutionary process leads in an emancipatory egalitarian direction. There are revolutions, but they are not for us, not the revolutions we were hoping for, not proletarian revolutions.

We no longer believe in revolution because we no longer adopt the perspective from which we see ourselves as revolutionaries, the perspective of the communist party. Absent this political perspective, only capitalism with its permanent crises, innovations and transformations appears as capable of effecting revolutionary change. Fortunately, the crowds and demonstrations of the last decade suggest that a new party perspective may be emerging. The collective practices and intensities exhibited in current struggles, as well as the limits against which these struggles falter, are renewing the salience of the party question on the Left. As people experience their collective power, the desire for something like a party is reemerging, a party as the organized site of our belief in revolution.

In this essay I focus on two, seemingly opposed, approaches to organization and revolution. I begin with Georg Lukacs's account of the Leninist innovation: the realization that the core of historical materialism is the actuality of the proletarian revolution. The force of this innovation comes from anticipation, the capacity of the future revolution to coordinate the actions that will bring it about. I then turn to the present and the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The problem with their account is that it precludes the temporality - or conception or logic of time - that would produce revolutionary practice. Revolution is present as potential, a possibility that flows out of what we are already doing. There is no revolutionary break, no negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials in the forwarding of emancipatory egalitarian aims. Theirs is thus a "revolution without revolution." In contrast, the future projected in Lenin's assumption of the actuality of revolution coordinates political action to bring revolution into being. The party anticipates the revolution, materializing the belief that makes revolution possible not just as an outflow or overflow of present possibilities, but as an effect of the negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials and the forcing of others.

My argument relies on Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion of "projected time." Dupuy introduces "projected time" as a name for "coordination by means of the future," that is, as a term for a temporal metaphysics wherein "the future counterfactually determines the past, which in turn causally determines it. The future is fixed, but its necessity exists only in retrospect"(1). From the perspective of the future, what led to it was necessary. It could not have been otherwise because everything that happened led to it. Before an event occurs, there are possibilities, options. After something happens, it appears inevitable, destined. Projected time assumes a future inevitability, establishing this inevitability as the fixed point from which to decide upon present actions.

Projected time might seem strange. Dupuy explains that it is actually "the temporality peculiar to someone who carries out a plan that he has given to himself to carry out"(2). Planning makes clear how projected time is not a prediction of what will happen, a fantasy about what one wants to happen, or a set of proposals regarding what should happen (3). Instead, a certain outcome generates the processes that lead to it. Again, in this temporal metaphysics, the future is not the inevitable effect of a chain of causes. The future is itself the cause. The future produces the past that will give rise to it.

Dupuy developed the metaphysics of projected time in the context of an investigation of catastrophe. People have a hard time believing in imminent disaster, even in the face of abundant information that the worst is about to happen. Dupuy concluded that the obstacle preventing people from acting is not one of knowledge but one of belief. They know what will happen, nevertheless they do not believe that it will happen. Projected time addresses this level of belief. Dupuy wagers that since it is "more difficult to reject a fate than to avoid a calamity, the threat of catastrophe becomes far more credible if it appears to be something that is inevitable"(4). That very inevitability can mobilize the determination and imagination necessary for avoiding the inevitable.

A view from the future

Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought is Lukacs' account of the enormity of Lenin's theoretical contribution: Lenin realized Marxist theory in practice. Because he grasps "the actuality of the revolution," Lenin can explain the events around him in its terms. He posits a certain future - the revolution - and lets this future guide action in the present. Lenin thus identifies the mechanism through which organization mediates between theory and practice. The projected future of revolution generates the practices that materialize the belief necessary for its realization.

Projected time tells us how to read Lukacs's claim that "the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism" (5). The revolutionary future determines the actions that bring it about. Historical materialism is not primarily an account of the past. It is a relation to a specific future, one where "revolution is already on its agenda" (6). A distant future lacks coordinating capacity. Lenin, however, made the actuality of revolution into the point from which actions are considered. This certain future enables choices and decisions. It cuts through the manifold conflicts of groups and individuals within the masses, as well as the economic fatalism that contributes to capitalism's own response to crises.

The actuality of revolution is the presupposition on which Lenin's concept of the party rests. The projected future of proletarian revolution causes the Bolsheviks to select "single-minded revolutionaries, prepared to make any sacrifice, from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole." The party does not make the revolution. Nor does it try to pull along inactive masses and present them with a fait accompli. Instead, it anticipates the revolution. Given that the period is revolutionary, that the proletarian revolution is on the agenda, what form of organization follows? Lenin's answer is the "strictest selection of party members on the basis of their proletarian class-consciousness, and total solidarity with and support for all the oppressed and exploited within capitalist society" (7). Why? Because of the way the proletariat develops its own class-consciousness and becomes able to put it to use in the context of revolutionary upheaval.

In the course of its revolutionary movement, the proletariat encounters differences within and without it. The internal differences involve economic differentiation within the proletariat (e.g., the infamous "labor aristocracy"). The external differences refer to the other classes that are part of the revolutionary alliance. Differences within the proletariat hinder class unity. Some workers, perhaps those with more education or experience in union leadership, tend to see their interests as allied with the bourgeoisie. Differences between the proletariat and other social strata create confusion, particularly as crises intensify and the revolutionary period gets nearer. The multiplicity of interests within the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed pulls them in different directions. Not every potential present in the masses forwards the revolution. Figuring out the correct path, and keeping together the alliance through which all can win, becomes increasingly difficult.

Lenin's model of the party responds to the pull of these differences by providing an independent organizational space for the "fully conscious elements of the proletariat." Lukacs writes, "It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution " (8). In the party, even the most seemingly trivial decision becomes significant, that is, made in light of the projected future of proletarian revolution. A party decision cuts through myriad possibilities, directing action in one way rather than another.

Lukacs's account makes clear that even as this view of the future provides the party with its organizational form, it is the party that sustains the view. He addresses the debate between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Kautsky argues that the party is the precondition of revolutionary action. Luxemburg argues that it is the product of revolutionary mass movement. Lukacs finds each view one-sided: "Because it is the party's function to prepare the revolution, it is - simultaneously and equally - both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement" (9). The party's role as producer is itself a product of the projected future of proletarian revolution. The party is a product not only of events as they unfold and to which it responds but also of the future that calls it into being, the future that enables it to guides its responses toward it.

Crucial to Lukacs's argument is the party's combination of flexibility and consistency. The party has to learn from the struggles of the masses, adjusting its interpretations and practices as necessary. Responses to the present in light of the projected future are inscribed into party structure and theory. Learning from the struggles of the people is possible because of the party's anticipation of the revolution. The party thereby unites the discoveries that arise from the mass struggle with the actuality of the revolution. Belief in revolution arises out of the combination of theory and action: actions appear as revolutionary because the future revolution is calling them into being.

In sum, Lukacs presents the actuality of revolution as a projected future. Every decision, every tactic, every compromise anticipates the revolution. To the extent that party practices are coordinated by the future, they both manifest belief in it - as opposed to the more abstract knowledge of revolution posited by social democrats - and help bring it about. Lukacs insists that the actuality of revolution distinguishes Lenin's position from both social democrats and left-wing purists. From the perspective of the former, the revolution is always too far off, the proletariat never mature enough, the unions still too weak. From the perspective of the latter, the ripeness of the moment dictates a pure politics, a radical insistence on principles without compromise. Unlike either, the actuality of revolution involves the political time of anticipation and struggle, a time when the future guides the party prepared to usher it in.

Revolution today

In the final volume of their influential trilogy, Hardt and Negri announce: "Revolution is now, finally, becoming the order of the day" (10). Their theory of revolution arises out of an account of the biopolitical character of capitalism in the late twentieth century. Networked communications have transformed the process of production, contributing to its homogenization, decentralization/deterritorialization, and informatization. Knowledge, affect, and communication play a greater role; labor has become "increasingly immaterial" (11). The result is a fundamental change in the relation between production and the reproduction of life: rather than separate from and subordinated to the demands of productive work, "life infuses and dominates all production" (12). With its biopolitical turn, capitalism subsumes the entirety of the social.

On the basis of their analysis of changes in production, Hardt and Negri claim that today "the perspective of revolutionary action has to be conceived on the biopolitical horizon" (13). Such a revolution is a "revolution in life," that is, a revolution that exceeds the range of demands and expectations associated with the labor movement.

Biopolitical revolution has a distinct temporality. In contrast to the projected future provided by the actuality of revolution, revolution today "is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an "exceeding" present that in some sense already contains the future within it" (14). Instead of a future with the capacity to coordinate action in the present, revolution coexists with and within non-revolution. Unable to imagine a future revolution, we cannot use its actuality to decide our tactics. As a distinct component of political action, tactics falls by the wayside, displaced by potentials within biopolitical production.

Hardt and Negri imagine revolution as an analogous "kind of simultaneity," the excess and limit to capitalist command over the biopolitical production it can never fully capture or control. Biopolitical labor is generally autonomous from capitalist command, emerging out of networked cooperative practices. Capital seeks to capture, expropriate, and discipline these practices, even as it itself depends on the creativity that their autonomy unleashes. Bypassing commodification, capital extracts value directly from social relations themselves.

Hardt and Negri highlight the democratic dimension of biopolitical labor: the same networked, cooperative structures that produce the common generate new democratic capacities, and even "make possible in the political sphere the development of democratic organizations" (15). For this reason, Hardt and Negri reject "vanguard organizations." The vanguard party corresponds to a different, earlier, structure of labor (a different technical composition of the proletariat). According to their periodization, the vanguard party fits with the early twentieth century's professional factory workers. The deskilled workers of the mid-twentieth century fit with that period's mass party. The political form appropriate to biopolitical labor, the one appropriate to us now, they argue, must be democratic, cooperative, autonomous and horizontally networked. The vanguard party is inadequate, "anachronistic," because it doesn't look like the networks of contemporary biopolitical production.

This argument is not convincing. Complex networks are not the horizontal, cooperative and autonomous forms that Hardt and Negri imagine. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's work on complex networks demonstrates, free choice, growth and preferential attachment produce hierarchies, dramatic differences between the one that is most chosen and preferred and the many that are not (16). The most popular node or item in a complex network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular and so, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This hierarchical structure is pervasive in communicative capitalism. Blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and giant internet hubs like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Baidu all reflect the power law distribution of links in complex networks. The few get a lot; the rest get very little, almost nothing. The idea appears in popular media as the "80/20 rule," the "winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the economy," and the "long tail" of the many. The ostensibly creative, cooperative and democratic character of networked communication does not eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us. And, as Barabasi's work on complex networks makes clear, this hierarchy is not imposed from above. It is an immanent effect of free choice, growth and preferential attachment.

A political form mirroring biopolitical production would not be horizontal and democratic. Its democracy would produce power-law distributions, unequal nodes or outcomes, winners and losers, few and many. We see this phenomenon on Twitter as people fight through trending hashtags: hashtags provide common names that serve as loci of struggle. When they trend, they rise above the long tail of the millions of unread, unloved Tweets coursing through the nets. The democratic element - people's choice to use and forward - produces the inequality that lets some hashtags appear as and even be, for a moment, significant. The fact of emergent hierarchies suggests that an emergent vanguard may well be the political form necessary for struggles under biopolitical conditions.

The structure of the complex networks of biopolitical production indicates that, contra Hardt and Negri, a vanguard party is not anachronistic at all. It is instead a form that corresponds to the dynamics of networked communication. This structure indicates an additional problem with Hardt and Negri's rejection of the vanguard party. They characterize Lenin's party as involving an organizational process that comes from "above" the movements of the multitude. Historically, this insinuation is clearly false. The Bolsheviks were but one group among multiple parties, tendencies and factions acting in the tumultuous context of the Russian Revolution. They were active within the movements of the oppressed workers and peasants. The movements themselves, through victories and defeats, short- and long-term alliances, new forms of cooperation, and advances in political organization gave rise to the party even as the party furthered the movements.

Finally, Hardt and Negri criticize Lenin's party on the grounds of identity. For them, the party is a "new identity," and they think that revolution today must aim at the abolition of identity (17). Lenin's party is not an identity; it is a process whereby the distinctions of what Hardt and Negri associate with identity are smoothed out and a collective revolutionary will is generated (18). The party functions through the installation and maintenance of a gap within the field in which identity is given, not as a new identity.

For Hardt and Negri, the goal of revolution is "the generation of new forms of social life" (19). They describe revolutionary struggles as a process of liberation that establishes a common. Such a process, they argue, consolidates insurrection as it institutionalizes new collective habits and practices. Institutions, then, are sites for the management of encounters, extension of social rupture, and transformation of those who compose them.

The resemblance between these institutions and the vanguard party is striking. The party involves a common name, language, and set of tactics. It has practices that establish ways of being together. Its purpose is occupying and extending the gap within society that class struggle denotes. As Lukacs insists, Lenin's concept of party organization prioritizes flexibility and consistency; the party has and must have a capacity for self-transformation. What Hardt and Negri describe as the extension of insurrection in an institutional process is another way of theorizing the party.

Because they disavow the party, their version of democratic organization lacks a position that can anticipate the revolution and thereby materialize belief in its actuality. The future does not exercise coordinating capacity. Hardt and Negri emphasize that revolution is "squeezed in the vise between past and future, leaving it very little room for maneuver." They write, "even when revolutionaries think their actions are sufficient to launch us into the future, the past bursts through to reimpose itself." And they conclude, "Revolution's creation of a new form of government holds off the past and opens toward the future" (20). Rather than products of the revolution they produce, revolutionaries in Hardt and Negri's version remain at a distance from the future. Their actions seem disconnected from it, uninformed by it, and hence all the more under the sway of the past. Revolution opens to the future, but a projected future does not call into being the forces that will have produced it.

Lacking a vision of the future capable of orienting action, Hardt and Negri outline instead a platform of demands without a carrier, without a body to fight for them. Their model of institutions suggests that a party or parties could be such a carrier, but rather than presenting their platform as a party platform, Hardt and Negri present them as demands to be made to existing governments and institutions of global governance. The demands are for the provision of basic means of life, global citizenship and access to the commons. They acknowledge that "today's ruling powers unfortunately have no intention of granting even these basic demands" (21). Their response is laughter, "a laugh of creation and joy, anchored solidly in the present" (22). No wonder they do not present their demands as the platform of a party. The demands are not to be fought for. They mark potentials present already in the biopolitical production of the common, limits to capitalist control.

The identification of egalitarian potential in what generally seems a bleak and miserable present is laudable. Absent a party oriented toward its realization, though, it is hard to believe that this potential is stronger than, say, a neo-feudalism of globally connected fortress-cities surrounded by impoverished scavengers competing for access to a better life via networked gaming platforms and desperately defending their last bits of fresh water and arable land from refugees fleeing ever intensifying resource wars while the tiny class of global billionaires eat caviar in gold-plated jets. No practices coordinated by means of the future materialize this belief. Precisely because our setting is one of exploitation, ownership, competition and struggle, our sense of the present has to be tied to the future that results from the realization of some potentials rather than others. The party is the form for this realization insofar as through it the future can produce the actions that will have brought it about.

Conclusion

Across the globe, crowds are rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. These mobilized crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Having come up against the limits of immediacy and horizontality, activists and organizers alike are thinking again about institutional forms like the party.

Hardt and Negri imply that the party form is outmoded. I have argued that not only do contemporary networks produce pow- er-law distributions of few and many but that emergent hierarchies - particularly when understood in terms of the vanguards and practices that already emerge out of political movement - point to the ways that party organizations emerge. Current examples of this tendency include the adoption of common tactics, names and symbols that bring together previously separate, disparate and even competing struggles. When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole. Separate actions become themselves plus all the others. They instill enthusiasm and inspire imitation.

A global alliance of the radical Left, or, better, a new party of communists, can be knit together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups: militants skilled at direct action, artists adept with symbols and slogans, parties experienced at organizing, issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern, mutual aid networks addressing basic needs. If this new party is to be an agent of revolutionary time, it will have to continue to foster and even amplify the common practices and tactics capable of materializing revolutionary belief. This fostering and amplification requires discipline, choices, conscious planning, and decisions regarding what to prioritize and how to allocate resources and energies. Precisely because of the multiplicity of the experiences of the oppressed, we need the party as the form through which we discipline ourselves, through which we produce the collective political will that will push revolutionary tendencies in an emancipatory egalitarian direction.

Many of us are convinced that capitalist crises have reached a decisive point. We know that the system is fragile, that it produces its own grave-diggers, and that it is held in place by a repressive international state structure. Yet we act as if we did not know this. The party provides a form that can let us believe what we know.

References

1 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Economy and the Future, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 110.
2 Dupuy, 116.
3 Projected future thus functions differently from the program put forth by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future,
London, Verso, 2015.
4 Dupuy, 129.
5 Luka�cs, 12.
6 Ibid. (italics in original)
7 Luka�cs, 30.
8 Luka�cs, 29.
9 Luka�cs, 32.
10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 344.
11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, Empire 365.
12 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 365.
13 Commonwealth, 239.
14 Commonwealth, 242-243.
15 Commonwealth, 354.
16 See my discussion in Crowds and Party, London, Verso, 2016, 12-13.
17 Commonwealth, 334.
18 As Luka�cs writes in �Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,� �the Communist Party as the revolutionary form of consciousness of the proletariat is a process by nature,� 316, italics in original; and, �the party exists in order to hasten the process by which these distinctions are smoothed out,� 326�the distinctions Luka�cs is referring to are stratifications within the class.
19 Commonwealth, 354.
20 Commonwealth, 360.
21 Commonwealth, 382.
22 Commonwealth, 383.

This essay was originally published in our book, Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World , published on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Prisoner Prophet: Revisiting George Jackson's Analysis of Systemic Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing US Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new - both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters - Trump's emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in US history. In response to this seemingly hyperbolic trend, Godwin's Law has become a well-known rule of thumb, proclaiming that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."

Anyone that has participated in an online political discussion knows Godwin's Law to be reliable. It is almost inevitable that folks will compare modern-day politicians to a perceived authoritarian figure (most popularly, that of Hitler). Claiming this law is a way to shame those who make the comparison, as if it has reached the level of the boy who cried wolf, growing increasingly nonsensical as time goes on.

Enter Trump, a man who reached the highest office of the land by appealing to fascistic tendencies, both through his projections and by the misdirected pool of angst that has accumulated during capitalism's late stage - neoliberalism. Under a neoliberal agenda that has dominated the political landscape since Reagan, capitalism has been unleashed like never in history, leading to massive inequality, obscene amounts of wealth being transferred from public coffers to private hands, and an overall erosion in American life that effects everything from medical care and debt to education and public utilities.

The unleashing of the capitalist system has left many financially desperate and hopeless. And it has left most wondering why things are so bad. Capitalism has shaped every aspect of American culture, including the ways in which we view and think about the world. One of the most penetrating notions is that of individualism. American life has long been tied to ideas of "rugged individualism," "exceptionalism," and "pioneering" and "exploration." Over centuries, the country's collective psyche has owned this - to the point where systemic problems are routinely framed as individual ills, and broad areas of study are reduced to "generalizations" by snarky social media comments. Thus, the most important tool we have as historians, social theoreticians, and activists - systemic analysis - has been essentially shut down by dominant culture.

The term "systemic fascism" may seem redundant to some, but the redundancy has become necessary to combat the individualistic modes of thinking that have trapped much of the American public. This framing tendency has never been more evident than in the liberal obsession with Trump, the individual. Even among sectors of the Left, who have joined in the liberal chorus, everything has become about Trump - Trump the racist, Trump the fascist, Trump is destroying America, Trump is an embarrassment to the highest office in the land, our problems are due to Trump. These sentiments are the result of a collective myopia that is produced by capitalist culture and its hyper-focus on the individual - a key propaganda tool that is used to not only obscure the reasons that most of us struggle, but also to avoid any sort of collective solution to our problems.

George Jackson, Prisoner Prophet

On August 21st, 1971, George Jackson was shot and killed by a prison guard in San Quentin during an alleged escape attempt. He was 29 years old. Jackson, who was imprisoned a decade earlier on an armed-robbery charge, died three days before he was to begin a murder trial stemming from the death of a guard. A year earlier, Jackson made national headlines when his 17-year-old brother, Jonathan Peter Jackson, had attempted an armed insurrection at the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael, California in order to free the "Soledad Brothers" (George, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette), the trio of inmates who were accused of killing the guard in retaliation for the murder of three Black prisoners a month prior.

Jackson was a scary figure in the American conscience. On the heels of a tumultuous decade that included a fierce Civil Rights movement, a corollary black power movement, and a series of liberation movements rooted in radical democracy, the country was still reeling. Major figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X were known by all, but many of the radicals working in the trenches of these revolutionary movements were discarded, both through a deliberate erasing from above and a general fear of facing hard truths about American history and society.

During his time in prison, Jackson developed and refined thoughtful analysis through voracious reading that informed his experience as a Black man growing up in a white-supremacist society. While he became known more for the violent incidents that were destined along his revolutionary path, Jackson was a prolific writer and theorist, particularly on the topics of capitalism and fascism. Along with fellow prisoner W. L. Nolen, Jackson founded the Black Guerilla Family, a black liberation organization based in Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theory. Jacksons' ideological formation had taken place with the help of Nolen during the late 60s while in San Quentin. As he later explained in his collection of prison letters, "I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison, and they redeemed me."

While other valuable works on systemic fascism - most notably Robert Paxton's 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism - have made their rounds during Trump's political emergence, Jackson's analysis has remained largely uncovered. To continue to ignore it would be a mistake for two reasons. First, it comes from a genuine working-class view, unadulterated and immune from the confines of academia. In other words, Jackson's insight was formed purely from a place of organic class-consciousness and subsequently refined and confirmed through self-study. Second, it comes from the view of a hyper-marginalized member of the working class from within the epicenter of imperialism. As a Black man in America, and thus a subject of America's internal colonization, Jackson could not ignore the powerful, underlying effects of white supremacy on the class nature of systemic fascism. The unique history of American slaves and descendants of slaves makes this inclusion an absolute necessity for any analysis of American fascism.

Capitalism and State Repression

Understanding fascism as the inevitable systemic conclusion to Americanism is crucial. Only then can one realize that Trump is not "bringing fascism to America," but rather that fascism was built into the American project from day one. The most reductive way to view fascism as a process is to gain an understanding of the social and economic systems that breed not only extreme hierarchies, but also extreme forms of domination and subjugation within these hierarchies. In the United States, the most influential system is capitalism. It exceeds all else, including politics and government, because it is rooted in the one thing that dominates all else - money. Capitalism concerns itself with two goals: growth and profit. In its narrow-minded pursuit, things like humanity, democracy, freedom, liberty, Earth, and the environment cannot be considered. They are nuisances to be co-opted or destroyed. And, the late stage of capitalism that we are living through is the culmination of this co-optation and destruction.

In order to understand the systemic fascism that is rising before our eyes, we must understand the historical seeds of Americanism that have provided it with a fertile breeding ground. Jackson understood this better than most, as laid out in his two prominent works, Blood in My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. The authoritative nature of capitalism, which relies on inherently dominant mechanisms of private property and labor exploitation, is key in this development, as has been seen in four major phases: (1) capital accumulation that has produced a completely unchecked capitalist class, (2) a formation of the corporate state through the literal purchasing of governmental institutions by the capitalist class, (3) increasing economic hardship for a majority of Americans, and (4) a complete reliance on state violence both home (militarized policing) and abroad (imperialism/war) to control working-class angst and develop new markets outside of the United States to replace living-wage labor.

As early as 1970, Jackson recognized this coming era because he understood America's roots and the historical trajectory of capitalism. More specifically, he recognized the emergence of monopoly capitalism as a formative stage in the transition from bourgeois democracy to the early stages of fascism. "The trends toward monopoly capital began effectively just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant political force inside Amerikan society," explains Jackson. "As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new corporativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital can in no way be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois democracy. The forces of monopoly capital swept across the Western world in the first half of this century."

This transition opened the door for the neoliberal era, which began shortly after Jackson's death and was designed to cement the capitalist system in a newly formed corporate state. The most obvious elements of this pattern are that of political cooptation and direct state repression.

"Corporative ideals have reached their logical conclusion in the U.S. The new corporate state has fought its way through crisis after crisis, established its ruling elites in every important institution, formed its partnership with labor through its elites, erected the most massive network of protective agencies replete with spies, technical and animal, to be found in any police state in the world. The violence of the ruling class of this country in the long process of its trend toward authoritarianism and its last and highest state, fascism, cannot be rivaled in its excesses by any other nation on earth today or in history."

The ultimate expression of this state repression is, and always has been, found in the nation's criminal justice system. With the advent of laws, so-called rights, criminal procedures, police, courts, and prisons, the illegitimate systems of dominance (such as capitalism and white supremacy) have long been given a façade of legitimacy, and thus have become naturally classist and racist. In the end, these systems of so-called justice only target those at the bottom of socioeconomic hierarchy, serving the same purpose that a head on a spike served in Medieval times - a warning against all those who dare challenge the embedded power structure. Jackson elaborates,

"The hypocrisy of Amerikan fascism forces it to conceal its attack on political offenders by the legal fiction of conspiracy laws and highly sophisticated frame-ups. The masses must be taught to understand the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real underlying economic motive of crime and the official definition of types of offenders or victims? The people must learn that when one "offends" the totalitarian state it is patently not an offense against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the privileged few. Could anything be more ridiculous than the language of blatantly political indictments; "The People of the State vs. Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee" or "The People of the State ... vs. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins." What, people? Clearly the hierarchy, the armed minority."

This national system of domination and incarceration mimics its international cousin of imperialism, which exists to serve capitalism by carving out new markets, gaining control of resources, and forcing populations into wage servitude. This process comes full circle from its international face (imperialism and foreign occupation) into a national face (domestic occupation and mass incarceration). Jackson continues,

"In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources (the international wing of the repressive institutions has spent one and one-half trillion dollars since World War II), whatever the cost in blood (My Lai, Augusta, Georgia, Kent State, the Panther trials, the frame-up of Angela Davis)! The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.) are no less determined. The mayors that curse the rioters and' the looters (Mayor Daley of Chicago has ordered them summarily executed in the streets) and ignore the fact that their bosses have looted the world!"

In terms of domestic authoritarianism, the ultimate tool is the prison system. In the United States, especially following a series of 1960s radical grassroots movements once referred to by the ruling class as an "excess of democracy," much of the state's repressive apparatus has transformed from covert (i.e. COINTELPRO) to overt (prison industrial complex, "The New Jim Crow"). Jackson had pinpointed this repressive institution prior to its massive expansion that began in the 1980s, providing insight to both the capitalist underpinnings of the prison system and the cultural baggage that comes with it.

"The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class - and race - sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order - it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics. One can even pick that out of those Vital Statistics. Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships. The cultural traits of capitalist society that also tend to check activity - (individualism, artificial politeness juxtaposed to an aloof rudeness, the rush to learn "how to" instead of "what is") - are secondary really, and intended for those mild cases (and groups) that require preventive measures only. The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me."

Jackson recognized the inherent connection between authoritarianism and capitalist modes of production, and most specifically the working class's subordinate relationship to capital. This systemic class analysis is something sorely missing today, further obscured by the focus on Trump as an individual phenomenon capable of shaping society. Uncovering these important roots comes in the deduction of capitalism as an inherently fascistic system, reliant on the forced separation of the masses from the land, and thus feeding on coerced labor since day one. "The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy's state-supported and developed industries in 1922," Jackson writes. "Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred 'party lines' on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state."

Redirecting Revolutionary Rage Into Empty Outlets

An important part of Jackson's analysis is the role that is played by moderates and liberals within a political system that is arranged for the specific purpose of placing everyone in a war for inches - a war that is fought on a predetermined battleground which benefits the ruling class, whether the capitalists themselves, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, or the politicians that exist to protect these embedded systems. In other words, electoral and legislative reforms are designed to appear as "progress" atop a landscape where meaningful/revolutionary progress has been rendered structurally impossible. This lesson is perhaps the most valuable for today's Left which, despite decades upon decades of evidence to the contrary, continues to give in to delusions of electoral and legislative potential.

As Jackson tells us, "elections and political parties have no significance when all the serious contenders for public office are fascist and the electorate is thoroughly misled about the true nature of the candidates." This applies to candidates from both capitalist/imperialist parties whom are (knowingly or unknowingly) the products of carefully-constructed systems of dominance. The point of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, three branches of government, and all their "checks and balances" was not to promote and encourage real democracy, a government of and for the people, but rather to obstruct such a thing, therefore "protecting the opulent minority from the majority." Within this arrangement, protest is allowed, voting is allowed, relative free speech is allowed, and even some forms of civil disobedience are allowed because such actions can be contained and rendered harmless from a structural point of view. Thus, fascistic tendencies have been allowed to flourish under the cover of liberal democracy, evidenced by the fact that any activity which develops as a true threat to its growth is brutally shut down.

"Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange. The establishment does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary rage is redirected into empty outlets which provide pressure releases for desires that could become dangerous if allowed to progress…

One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph."

Under bourgeois democracy, elections largely represent an illusion of choice but still allow for some short-term concessions from the ruling class, if only as a way to quell inevitable clashes. Since the emergence of monopoly capital and neoliberalism, elections have become even less effective, rarely leading to even minor reforms or concessions. In fact, "with each development in the fascist arrangement," with each vote for representatives within this arrangement, "the marriage between the political elite and economic elite becomes more apparent. The integration of the various sectors of the total economic elite becomes more pronounced." This natural fusion was never more realized than in the early 20th century, a time of historic capitalist crisis and political upheaval. Jackson illustrates the liberal response to the mass desperation that struck the land, ultimately choosing to solidify the capitalist hierarchy at the expense of the revolutionary moment and the prospects of radical democracy:

"There was positive mobilization of workers and the lower class, and a highly developed class consciousness. There was indeed a very deep economic crisis with attendant strikes, unionizing, lockouts, break-ins, call-outs of the National Guard. The lower class was threatening to unite under the pressure of economic disintegration. Revolution was in the air. Socialist vanguard parties were leading it. There was terrorism from the right from groups such as Guardians of the Republic, the Black Legion, Peg-leg White-type storm troopers and hired assassins who carried out the beginnings of a contra-positive suppressive mobilization. Under the threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and dangerous. F.D.R. was born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role was to form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political and labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism - his role was to limit competition, replace it with the dream of cooperation; to put laissez faire to rest, and initiate the acceptance of government intervention into economic affairs."

The Only Real Resistance to Fascism is Socialism

In discussing the emergence of monopoly capitalism, Jackson echoed the later theoretical developments of Malcolm X by recognizing an inevitable war between the oppressed of the world and their oppressors. "To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed," Jackson tells us. While the forces of monopoly capital, white supremacy, and imperialism gained strength, an "opposite force was also at work, i.e., 'international socialism' - Lenin's and Fanon's - national wars of liberation guided not by the national bourgeois but by the people, the ordinary working-class people."

As capitalism in mature form, fascism can only be effectively countered by socialism - the development of radical democratic economies where the people own the means of production and operate them in a way that benefits all of society, eliminating the brutal competition for basic human needs for which capitalism has thrived on for so long. And socialism must develop in a way that represents a formidable attack against the absurd levels of capitalist brutality we are witnessing, which include an arsenal of weaponry and resources, and the will to cause mass environmental and human destruction like never before. In other words, as the default conclusion to capitalism, fascism can only be countered with deliberate, conscious, and forceful organizing. Jackson elaborates:

"At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism's response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism's dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy's rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried - a consciousness that was compromised."

Socialism, as a radically democratic system, must develop from below. It must do so in a way that overcomes the dark forces created throughout dominant culture by capitalist degradation and alienation. As a country defined by a racial caste system which has obstructed class consciousness, we must recognize that any class struggle formed absent a crucial understanding of white supremacy is doomed to fail. Because, without recognizing and eliminating these internal divisions rooted in conditioned fear, the working class will remain a splintered and impotent force against fascist advancement. Ultimately, ours is a material struggle, but it is one that has been fortified on a "psycho-social level." Jackson provides crucial insight,

"We are faced with the task of raising a positive mobilization of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has "gone through" a contra-positive, authoritarian process. Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid, traditional fear of both blacks and revolutions. The resentment of blacks, and conscious or unconscious tendencies to mete out pain to blacks, throughout the history of Amerika's slave systems, all came into focus when blacks began the move from South to North and from countryside to city to compete with whites in industrial sectors, and, in general, engage in status competition. Resentment, fear, insecurity, and the usual isolation that is patterned into every modern, capitalist industrial society (the more complex the products, the greater the division of labor; the higher the pyramid, the broader its base and the smaller the individual brick tends to feel) are multiplied by ten when racism, race antagonism, is also a factor. There is certainly no lack of evidence to prove the existence of an old and built-in character assassination of programmed racism (what class controls the nation's educational facilities, prints the newspapers and magazines that carry the little cartoons, and omits or misrepresents us to death?) has always served to distract and defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one. Then also to account for the seemingly dual nature recognizable in the authoritarian personality (conformity, but also a strange latent destructiveness), racism has always been employed as a pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people historically processed to fear, to feel the need for a decision-maker, to hate freedom."

In conclusion, Jackson provided us with an optimistic call to action just prior to his death, urging the working-class masses to squash fascistic tendencies and conflicts within our milieus, while keeping our collective eye on the prize - a new society for all people, built on cooperation and a mutual respect for all life.

"There must be a collective redirection of the old guard - the factory and union agitator - with the campus activist who can counter the ill-effects of fascism at its training site, and with the lumpenproletariat intellectuals who possess revolutionary scientific-socialist attitudes to deal with the masses of street people already living outside the system. They must work toward developing the unity of the pamphlet and the silenced pistol. Black, brown and white are all victims together. At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new identity, the unpredictable culmination of the revolutionary process. We will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution - the one for new relationships between people."

Understanding the systemic nature of fascism, while certainly daunting, should not be disheartening. It provides us with the truth behind the dark days we are witnessing. It allows us to uncover the roots to our current place in history. And, most importantly, it gives us a material perspective on where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading as a nation - replacing the hopelessness of confusion with the purposefulness of understanding. George Jackson is one of many revolutionary prophets who dedicated his life to passing on the insight needed to take control of our collective future - a future that will be determined by our conscious, deliberate actions from this point forward, and ours alone. A future that must be won through a hardened attack against powerful people guarding centuries-old systems of oppression. Cowardice, inaction, apathy, and infighting may ultimately be our downfall, but George Jackson and others like him made sure that ignorance is not.