President Thomas Sankara: A 70th-Birthday Tribute

By Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu 

This was originally published at Pan-African Review.

President Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara would have turned 70 on the 21st of December 2019. At the tender age of 37, however, he was felled by bullets from soldiers loyal to his best friend, Blaise Campaore. Thomas Sankara’s passion was Africa’s advancement; his experimental field was Burkina Faso. What President Sankara wanted to see in Africa, he strategized, mobilized and implemented in Burkina Faso. He would then present his successes to African leaders, while encouraging them to surpass his achievements. Thomas Sankara’s achievement are too numerous to be summarized in an essay or even be elucidated in any book, but a few key points will be here noted.

Perhaps, the first in Thomas Sankara’s achievement is his refusal to borrow a dime from the IMF or any other foreign government or agency, mobilizing instead his fellow citizens to invest in community development and to consume only what the land of Burkina Faso yielded. Likewise, President Sankara, at the risk of being a target of the malignancy of Western governments, strongly encouraged other African leaders to shun external aid and borrowing. Thomas Sankara implored African leaders to rethink governance by reorganizing governmental systems and expressing those systems along a different line from the West in order to reduce costs and simplify governance.

A Pan-Africanist who was deeply committed to the cause of African people, it bothered President Sankara that African leaders were not seriously investing in the progress and unity of the continent, but were excited about uniting and aligning with the West. At a 29 July 1987 meeting of African leaders in Addis Ababa, he decried the poor attendance often recorded at meetings where Africa’s advancement is discussed; “Mister President,” he asked the [O]AU chairman, “how many heads of state are ready to head off to Paris, London, or Washington when they are called to a meeting there, but cannot come to a meeting here in Addis-Ababa, in Africa?”

Like Patrice Lumumba, Sankara incurred the wrath of the French President, Francois Mitterand when Mitterand visited Ouagadougou in 1986. Citing the spirit of the 1789 French Revolution, President Sankara reprimanded France for its oppressive policies in Africa and for the disrespectful treatment of African immigrants in France. Mitterand was livid with rage. He was used to African leaders groveling and shriveling under the mighty-hand of France. The French President would toss his prepared speech aside and take on Sankara, concluding with the thinly veiled threat, “This is a somewhat troublesome man, President Sankara!” Many would say that Sankara’s days were numbered after that fateful visit.

Prior to the French President’s visit, Thomas Sankara, a man of deep philosophical convictions, had in 1984 dumped the colonially contrived and imposed name of Upper Volta to call the nation what they wanted to be known as, Burkina Faso, “Land of Incorruptible People.” That renaming exercise was paired with an asset declaration exercise where President Sankara made known his properties, consisting of one working and one broken down refrigerators, three guitars, four regular motorcycles and one car. Thomas Sankara capped his salary at $462 and forbade both the hanging of his portrait at public places and any form of reverence attached to his person or presence.  Burkina Faso is about Burkinabes and there are 7 million of them. This seemed to be his guiding principle.

Thomas Sankara believed and invested in the education of Burkinabes. Literacy rate was at 13% when he became the president in 1983, and by the time of his assassination in 1987, it stood at 73%. Under his administration, numerous schools were built in Burkina Faso through community mobilization, teachers were trained and women were strongly encouraged to pursue education and career.

Burkina Faso’s agricultural fortunes experienced a turnaround during Thomas Sankara’s administration. First, the consumption of imported goods was strongly discouraged and Burkinabes once more reclaimed their taste buds from France. Thomas Sankara redistributed idle-lying lands from wealthy landowners to peasants who were eager to cultivate them. In three years, wheat cultivation jumped from 1700 kg per hectare to 3800 kg per hectare. His administration further embarked on an intensive irrigation and fertilization exercise leading to an outstanding success across other crops including cotton. Burkina Faso soon become self-sufficient in food production, while cotton was used to make clothes, after having banned importation of clothing and textiles.

Convinced that the health of Burkinabes was paramount in any conversation regarding national advancement, President Sankara flagged off a national immunization program that–within weeks–saw the vaccination of over 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles. Access to healthcare was a basic human right of every Burkinabe and President Sankara mobilized communities across the nation to build medical dispensaries, thereby ensuring the proximity of primary healthcare to citizens in the most remote areas.

Infrastructural challenges were tackled headlong by President Sankara, mostly through the mobilization of citizens, both rich and poor, as construction workers in the building of access roads and other structures across the country. Within a short period of time, all regions in Burkina Faso became connected by a vast network of roads and rails. In addition, over 700 km of rail was laid by citizens to facilitate the extraction of manganese. In order to move Burkinabes away from slums to dignified houses, brick factories were built, which utilized raw materials from Burkina Faso. For the sake of emphasis, all these were achieved without recourse to borrowing or external financial assistance in a nation dubbed one of the poorest in Africa before Thomas Sankara became the President.

A man of integrity and transparence, Thomas Sankara expected nothing less from everyone in leadership position in Burkina Faso. Thomas Sankara refused to use air conditioning system as president of the country, since according to him, that will be living a lie as majority of Burkinabes could not afford such. Upon assumption of power, Thomas Sankara sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and commissioned the use of the cheapest brands of car available in Burkina Faso, the Renault 5. Salaries of public servants, including the president’s, were drastically reduced, while the use of chauffeurs and first-class airline tickets were outlawed.

Ever before women advancement became a buzzword globally, President Thomas Sankara led the way in advocating for the equal treatment of women. His cabinet was heavy with female appointees while numerous governmental positions were occupied by women. Female genital mutilation, polygamy, underage and forced marriages were outlawed while women were encouraged to join the military and to continue with their education even during pregnancy.

Thomas Sankara was passionate about the environment and its conservation.  He encouraged citizens to cultivate forest nurseries and over 7,000 village nurseries were created and sustained, through which, over 10 million trees were cultivated in order to push back the encroachment of the Sahel desert.

President Sankara pursued peace with his adversaries. On the morning he was gunned down, he was armed with a speech he had worked on all night, aimed at reconciling opposing factions in Burkina Faso and addressing the grievances of certain sections of the labor force. He did not live to present that speech.

In the short time he had, Burkinabes advanced as a nation and as a people. Outside of the already enumerated physical signs of progress, the social psychological impact on Burkinabes, of being truly and completely independence for the first time since the late 19th-century colonial incursion, was tremendous. Ironically, it was that same independence from France, termed “a deteriorating relationship” with the former colonial powers that Captain Blaise Campaore cited as one of the major reasons why he instigated the coup against Sankara.

Africa has produced much greatness; let it never be said that the continent is lacking in greatness. If truth be told, Africa’s great people of character and principle have often been silenced by forces of greed, exploitation and selfishness. Africa must then learn to build strong and enduring systems for the protection of virtue, the promotion of character and the vilification of vice. Africa would have been better than what it is today, if Thomas Noel Isidore Sankara were alive as an elder statesman to celebrate his 70th birthday anniversary. Yet, in death, he continues to serve as an inspiration to many Africans on what we can become as individuals and as a continent if we choose selflessness, commitment and passion for the continent and her people as the driving force behind our actions.

From Stolen Land to Riches: US Neo-Colonialism in South Korea

By Riley Bove

The history behind the division of Korea into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is a complicated matter that crosses many spheres. The history between the US and Korea dates back to the Joseon Dynasty when American missionaries introduced Christianity to the peninsula through mission trips and the building of orphanages. When the Japanese colonized the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the enslavement of Korean people, as well as the violent suppression of culture, language, and national sovereignty. After World War II and the defeat of Japanese colonialism, and the liberation of Korea, the US enacted both military and governmental control in the southern half of the peninsula. The Korean War was one of many conflicts during which US imperialism acted through proxies to contest the global struggle for socialism and national liberation through the US’s “containment policy.”

The point of this article is to explore the ways in which the US has enacted imperialism and neocolonialism on the Korean Peninsula since its division in the post-WWII era and into the present day. While much attention is paid to the devastation the US caused--and continues to cause--in the DPRK, this article focuses more on the divisive and exploitative role its played in the ROK.

The history of the exploitation of the Korean peninsula dates back to the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. By the 20th century, the Korean peninsula had already come under the Japanese sphere of influence and under the militarized gaze of the Meiji government. By 1910, Korea was fully under Japanese colonial rule. American missionaries had already been in contact with the Korean peninsula, starting the 1880s, spreading the evangelical faith throughout and beginning the connection between Korea and the West.  Japan had set its imperialist sights on conquering the rest of the Pacific by 1940. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was subjected to a brutal 35-year-long colonization by the Japanese. For example, Korean women experienced sexual subjugation under Japanese rule. In her essay, “The Korean “Comfort Women’: Movement For Redress,” Sarah Soh Chunghee states that, “Japan began drafting Korean women in full force from around 1937 when its army invaded China and the soldiers raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing” (1228). While occupying Korea, Japan forced women into sexual slavery and men, women, and children were murdered by the Japanese as they moved to fight the indigenous resistance  movements that emerged.

By the end of WWII, the liberation of Korea was underway as revolutionaries swept the Japanese imperialists from the peninsula. Both the Soviet Union and the US consolidated to rebuild the peninsula after the liberation movement. The Soviets helped the north establish a workers-led state and reclaim the land previously owned by landlords. There were preparations to have a “People’s Republic” in Korea that was of, by, and for Koreans. However, this never came to fruition. Anna Louise Strong, in her report for the CIA, writes that: “When the Americans landed in Korea, the Koreans had already a de facto government. A "People's Republic" had been declared a day earlier by a congress of Koreans themselves. General John R. Hodge, commander of the U. S. armed forces, dissolved this "People's Republic," and drove most of its members underground.”  Strong details how, between the liberation of Korea and the creation of the state of South Korea, a people’s democracy was already established in the south. However, the American forces overthrew the de facto government and established a US-backed puppet military dictatorship. The north established their own government without any assistance from foreign powers, while in the south, the Americans maintained their iron grip which has continued into the present day.

After the American “intervention” and toppling of the de facto “People’s Republic of Korea” government, the American imperialists  implanted a pro-US ally, Syngman Rhee, in order to govern the southern half of the peninsula. Rhee was a Western educated Korean who had anti-Japanese credentials but was fully in the pocket of Washington and Wall Street. Once Syngman Rhee was in power, he imposed his oppressive crackdown of all dissidence. In their essay, “Organizing Dissent against Authoritarianism,” Park Mi states that, “Even a moderate dissident became equated as a procommunist and pro-North Korean activity that was deemed to be prosecuted under the National Security Law” (263). The National Security Act (NSA) became the justification for repressive actions of the Rhee regime, including massacres that totaled in the hundreds of thousands. Park also details that, “Military confrontation with North Korea was used as an excuse to justify violations of human rights and the suppression of political dissidents” (263). The geopolitical landscape of a divided Korea was used by the South Korean-US government as a justification for the suppression of the people’s right to self-determination. At the same time in the United States, during the 1950s, McCarthyism reigned over the political landscape of post-war America. McCarthyism was defined as a “Second Red Scare”, a time of anti-communist setiment and political repression, in which the entire organized left was almost incapacited, with its leaders jailed or driven underground, and anyone who had any pro-communist or even pro-peace sentiments “blacklisted.” In the ROK, the Rhee regime enacted its own McCarthyism era under the NSA in order to snuff out and executed thousands of suspected communists.

After the Rhee administration was overthrown in the 1961 coup d’etat, Park Chung-hee rose to power and declared martial law under the Yushin Constitution, which allowed Park to openly violate civil liberties and assume total control of the government. Under his regime, worker unions and other types of mass organizing were suppressed and thousands of union members and organizers were brutally murdered. They faced sexual assault and rape as well as other forms of police violence. Student organizers, as well as organizations deemed to be Marxist oriented, were brutally suppressed under the Park regime.

Park was assassinated in 1979 and another pro-US dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, took power. Political and civil tension culminated in the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 in which 2,000 people, including student-led activist groups and anti-government demonstrators, were murdered by the military and governmental forces. Chun remained in power until 1988. Leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the Chun government attempted to make the city more “presentable”. Park Mi writes that, “the Chun government introduced a ‘beautification of the environment’ bill, which was designed to eliminate slums and unregistered street vendors” (278). The Chun government had attempted to gentrify the city, leaving the poor and working class citizens in poverty and forced many into homelessness. All while this was happening, the US government, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, actively supported and endorsed the brutal regimes. In the 1980s, the US sent a massive influx of capital to South Korea, and it was only during this time that the GDP of the South overtook that of the North.

At the end of WWII, the country had been transformed into one of the poorest countries in the world. The Korean War, which spanned from 1950 to 1953, economically devastated the entirety of the Korean peninsula. The US military and other allied forces fire-bombed and destroyed 22 of the 24 cities in the northern half. Thousands of people died in the war and hundreds of thousands of children become orphaned and displaced during and after the war. While the US fought under the flag of the UN, this was nothing more than a fig leaf for US imperialism. In one of the most infamous massacres to happen during the Korean war, a US cavalry regiment had opened fire on a crowd of South Korean refugees, murdering 150-300 of them. It would be known as the No Gun Ri massacre. Many years after, the US military attempted to whitewash the massacre and it still hasn’t been held accountable in its role of murdering civilians.

In her book, “From Orphan to Adoptee,” Soo-jin Pate critically analyzes the rise of militarized humanitarianism and the birth of transnational adoptions of Korean children after the Korean War. Pate writes that, “However, its location—its close proximity to the Soviet Union—made Korea extremely important to the United States” (24). Pate describes that even though the mountainous landscape of the Korean peninsula did not offer any crucial resources to the United States that they couldn’t get elsewhere, the close proximity to the Soviet Union made the Korean peninsula an important geopolitical area. This is true, but it is also important to acknowledge that Korea was and is targeted because the DPRK’s social and economic system remains antithetical to capitalism and imperialism.

Pate also writes about the conditions of post-war South Korea for orphans: “In addition, 100,000 children were left without homes and separated from their families so that by the end of the war, over 40,000 orphans resided in orphanages” (30). The devastation of the Korean war left children without parents and the orphanages that already existed were overfilled. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, along with American NGOs or non-governmental organizations, built more orphanages and provided materials for food and other necessities. Under the backdrop of the US military occupation and the Korean War, this type of humanitarianism became militarized. Pate also echoes this sentiment: “Militarism and humanitarianism became conflated through programs such as Armed Forces Assistance to Korea and Korean Civil Assistance Command, which produced what I call militarized humanitarianism” (34). Also under this backdrop of militarized humanitarianism, NGOs such as Holt International became frontrunners in the transnational adoptions of Korean orphans. With this, American families flocked to adopt children under the guise of “saving”. This type of savior complex often drove the NGOs like Holt International to be one of the most profitable companies in adoption of children. By contrast, orphans in the DPRK remained in the country, and the government provided them with excellent shelter, education, health care, and other resources. In the DPRK, war orphans were something like national heroes.

Images of “cold, hungry, and threadbare” children filling their stomachs with food donated by American and other Western countries inflated the image of the US military and others as saviors to war-torn children. A lot of these Korean orphans were exploited by public relations in the military in order to further conflate this trope. Images of children smiling and interacting with American servicemen became the poster for militarized humanitarianism. American media campaigns started to funnel money and editorials, describing the orphans as “victims of communism.”

With this mass campaign, American NGOs and other organizations donated immense resources. The influx of media attention and campaigns became the driving force of Korean adoptions. Pate describes the conditions of adoptions as follows: “The geopolitics of the Cold War and the discourse of Cold War Orientalism created a particular set of conditions that made the bodies of Korean children highly desirable” (87). She also writes that, “These children were highly desirable because they were perceived as exotic and cute and because they were perhaps the least threatening group of Asians that the United States had ever encountered” (87). Because of the anti-communist sentiment that plagued American society and Cold War politics, this made Korean children highly sought after for international adoption

 Korean children were seen as non-threatening because many of them were extremely young—infants and toddlers—so assimilation into American society would be easier than it would be with older children. Orientalism also played a part in the tropes of Korean children being more submissive towards assimilation tactics and being perceived as non-enemies. The fetishization of Korean girls had to do with similar orientalist tropes of East Asian women as docile and hyper-feminized. Pate describes the phenomenon this way: “the Oriental doll connotes femininity, exoticness, delicateness, silence, and docility, these very descriptions become assigned to the Korean female orphan” (94). This commodification of Korean women, in other words, relied on the racist, misogynistic, and imperialist view of Korean women as “doll-like”. As Pate writes, the interaction of Korean women with US military servicemen was used as a bargaining chip and to help maintain friendly relations between the US and South Korea.

Korean women and young female orphans were often forcibly recruited into sex work for the US military. These types of “camptowns” became a hotbed of sexual assault and rape. This form of exploitation towards Korean women echoes the brutal sexual violence that was forced upon Korean women by Japanese imperialists during the colonization of Korea and WWII. Soojin Pate wrote that, “the United States adopted a ‘boys will be boys’ policy toward camptown prostitution in South Korea. They were able to justify this policy by linking military prostitution to issues of national security. Citing a 1965 study on troop–community relations conducted by the Eighth U.S. Army” (58). The US military, as Pate argues, adopted a more “turning a blind eye” policy toward camptown and military prostitution. Sexual exploitation as US imperialism had evolved into the misogynistic sex industry.

Park Chung-hee had encouraged this sort of sexual exploitation as it fueled the South Korean economy. The Cold War era had turned South Korea into a neoliberal and capitalist hotspot. Even after the partial revitalization of the South Korean economy in the 1960s, political and inequitable economic woes dominated the geopolitical landscape of South Korea for decades. With the birth of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea’s economy was boosted by technological companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, primarily trading with its neo-colonial ally, the United States. Social issues such as high rates of suicide have been a consequence of the overbearing demands of production with little to no compensation for the workers themselves. As J. Sul wrote in an article for Anti-Imperialism.org, “I cannot state all the suicidal cases here, but note well that the suicide rate in South Korea is in the top among the OECD nations” (Sul). Toward the beginning of the 2000s, anti-American sentiment began in full swing in South Korea as two events, the 2002 Yangju highway incident where two Korean schoolgirls were fatally killed by a US military vehicle and the murder of Yun Geum-i in 1992 where a bartender was murdered by a US military private. These two events brought up the question of the USFK’s (United States Forces Korea) continued presence in Korea.

These are just some of the ways that US imperialism and neocolonialism manifest on the Korean Peninsula, and why the US’s presence in South Korea is detrimental and has only led to the division and exploitation of the ROK. However, the puppet regimes had also committed violence and murder with the full support of its neo-colonial ally. The US military occupation of South Korea remains the primary obstacle to peace and reunification of our homeland.  The United States needs to end its military occupation in South Korea and dismantle all of its military bases and facilities, paying reparations to all the peoples of Korea.

“For a colonized people: the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1960)

Riley Bove (Seungyoon Park) is a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition in Indianapolis.

References

Fanon, Franz. Les damnés de la terre. A verba futuroruM, 2016

Soh, Chunghee Sarah. “The Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Movement for Redress.” Asian Survey, vol. 36, no. 12, 1996, pp. 1226–1240., www.jstor.org/stable/2645577.

Moon, Katharine H. S. “South Korea-U.S. Relations.” Asian Perspective, vol. 28, no. 4, 2004, pp. 39–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42704478.   

Pate, SooJin. From Orphan to Adoptee: US Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Prism Key Press, 2011.

Sul, J. “Neoliberalism in South Korea: Financial Crisis, Fascism, and the Rise of Precarious Work.” Anti-Imperialism.org, 1 July 2015, https://anti-imperialism.org/2015/01/12/neoliberalism-in-south-korea-financial-crisis-fascism-and-the-rise-of-precarious-work/.

Mi, P. (2005). Organizing dissent against authoritarianism: The South Korean student movement in the 1980s. Korea Journal. 45. 261-288.

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

By Erica Caines

This piece was originally published at Hood Communist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Workers Unite. 

The Ballot and the Bullet: Building Socialism in ‘America’s Backyard’

By Matthew Dolezal

When faced with momentous external challenges — be they Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, or devastating hurricanes — the Cuban people have consistently risen to the occasion. In response to ongoing internal challenges, the popular new Cuban constitution (which took effect in April) entrenches the solid Marxist-Leninist foundation of the island’s socialist state while updating the 1976 constitution to better reflect the modern post-Cold War period.

Under the new constitution, each presidential term is five years, with a limit of two consecutive terms in office for those who serve. In addition, the role of Head of State is divided between the president and the newly established office of prime minister.

Other new rights and policies include the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, the right to legal counsel, and the (heavily regulated) use of private property and foreign investment to stimulate the economy (particularly to offset the revenue lost as a result of the continued U.S. blockade).

Despite the many exciting modernizations articulated by this fresh new document, much remains the same. Cuba’s Communist Party is still in only political party legally allowed to operate, and the state continues to control the land and means of production. The news media cannot be privatized, and, according to the new Magna Carta, Cuba will never return to the exploitative, pre-revolutionary capitalist system.

Bourgeois historians and pundits often glibly frame successful socialist governments as “authoritarian.” But from a materialist perspective, the vanguard party serves to protect the achievements of the proletarian revolution — including universal healthcare, education, housing, subsidized food, and land reform — from reactionary and imperialist threats (such as the CIA-backed coup Ernesto “Che” Guevara witnessed in Guatemala prior to the Cuban Revolution). In addition to the Communist Party’s general success, apologists for Western capitalism now have to grapple with the fact that significant democratic processes are occurring within Cuba’s one-party system.

The process to draft a new constitution began in August of 2018 and included the input of millions of Cuban citizens. Assemblies throughout the island were established, and thousands of “standard proposals” were debated for three months. In all, the old constitution faced 760 modifications. The proposed constitution was then featured in a referendum that took place on February 24, 2019. With massive voter turnout, the new constitution was easily passed when more than 85% voted “yes.”

Based on the long-standing solidarity between Cuba and its Latin American ally Venezuela, this recent constitutional process undertaken by the Caribbean nation may have been inspired by Venezuela’s ongoing Bolivarian Revolution. After the 1998 election of the popular Venezuelan revolutionary Hugo Chávez, the formerly discarded masses were not only lifted out of poverty, but politically empowered through a nation-wide upsurge in grassroots democracy.

As historian Greg Grandin wrote in 2013,

“Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as ‘new social movements,’ distinct from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked to — and subordinated to — political parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.”

Shortly after Chávez was inaugurated, Venezuelan citizens voted to replace their 1961 constitution with a new document that “expanded the rights of all Venezuelans, formally recognized the rights and privileges of historically marginalized groups, reorganized government institutions and powers, and highlighted the government’s responsibility in working towards participatory democracy and social justice.” This Bolivarian constitution includes mechanisms by which the document can be revised by the people through nation-wide participatory democracy. In 2007, for example, a series of constitutional reforms were debated for 47 days at more than 9,000 public events before a referendum finally took place.

At the height of the American civil rights movement, charismatic black liberation leader Malcolm X issued a powerful ultimatum — “the ballot or the bullet” — in his famous 1964 speech. The metaphor of the proverbial “ballot” and “bullet” can be useful in recognizing both the political and the physical dimensions of socialist struggle. A historical example of these two seemingly disparate themes merging was the short-lived alliance between Chile (“the ballot”) and Cuba (“the bullet”) in the early 1970s, iconically symbolized when revolutionary leader Fidel Castro gifted a personalized AK-47 to democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende.

But movements do not have to choose between these two options exclusively. Broadly speaking, Venezuela’s revolution emerged through the ballot box and was later protected through armed defense, whereas Cuba’s revolution was itself an armed struggle that would later evolve through ballot initiatives and grassroots democracy.

The ongoing Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions are impressive enough by themselves, but the material conditions they arose from and the hardships they have endured make them utterly awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, socialism doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It doesn’t grow in a petri dish. Building international socialism brings with it the baggage of constant imperialist assaults aimed at exploiting labor and extracting resources on behalf of global capital.

Now a spectre is haunting Washington — the spectre of the Monroe Doctrine. In its belligerent re-imagining of the 19th century foreign policy staple, the Trump administration has demonized and attacked the sovereignty of both Cuba and Venezuela. In conjunction with a new round of economic sanctions against the so-called “troika of tyranny”, former National Security Advisor and Bush-era war criminal John Bolton claimed last April that the “Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

Bolton also announced that the U.S. would reintroduce the Helms-Burton Act — a 1996 law that allows American citizens to file claims related to properties that were nationalized after the Cuban Revolution. However, as Dr. Arturo Lopez-Levy opined, “It is not the United States government’s responsibility or place to force the […] Cuban government to prioritize compensating Cuban right-wing exiles over demands for other reparations, such as for slavery or any of the many other abuses committed in Cuban history before or after 1959.” Furthermore, as author Saul Landau observed, “By 1991, […] the Castro government had settled claims with most of the nations whose properties it had confiscated and offered terms to U.S. companies as well.”

In addition, the Trump administration began restricting U.S. travel to the island in June and revived the half-century-long economic blockade that was briefly loosened under the Obama administration. These Cold War-inspired policies are certainly draconian, but it seems the American regime’s primary target is Cuba’s oil-rich ally across the Caribbean Sea. As John Bolton himself admitted, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

After winning the Venezuelan presidential election in May of 2018, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on January 10, 2019 to begin his second term in office. Then, on January 22, Juan Guaidó — a man whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of — suddenly declared himself “interim president.” Although Guaidó did not run in any presidential election, American politicians and pundits quickly praised this brazen U.S.-backed coup attempt, some even insisting “this is our backyard!” Washington’s latest regime-change effort in the Bolivarian Republic has thus far failed, but the Trump administration’s brutal economic sanctions have killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

Despite this rampant imperialism, there have been notable solidarity efforts — both between Cuba and Venezuela as well as internationally. However, in its overall capacity for both relevant material analysis and tangible solidarity, the American Left has gone astray. Steve Stiffler contends that the U.S. Left’s failure to properly frame Chavismo allowed right-wing propaganda to gain control of the narrative. This defeat in the realm of discourse led not only to the empowerment of far-right forces on the ground in Venezuela, but to a diminishment of the socialist support from within the empire that was once reliable.

An indispensable historical model we should look to for guidance is the Venceremos Brigade. In 1969, a group of young American radicals volunteered their manual labor to assist with Cuba’s sugar harvest in the wake of the crippling U.S. embargo. This primary delegation to the island included 216 brigadistas who helped cut sugar cane for six weeks. Since then, the Venceremos (“we shall overcome”) Brigade spearheaded solidarity efforts between Americans and Cubans, bringing in more than 10,000 people to engage in agricultural work, construction, and other projects. Former brigadista Diana Block recently recounted, “I had traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1977. At that time many radical U.S. political organizations looked to Cuba, and other global anti-colonial struggles, for inspiration and direction. Following Cuba’s lead, international solidarity was recognized as a key organizing principle.”

During my brief trip to Havana last summer I toured Museo de la Revolución, which was still a work in progress. A sizable mural of Fidel speaking to a crowd rested against a banister as workers on scaffolds renovated the neighboring room. After examining the intriguing exhibits, I browsed the items in the gift shop and came across a concise booklet entitled Notes on Che Guevara’s Ideas on Pedagogy by Linda Martí, Ph.D. In it, Martí emphasized the role of a humanistic philosophy in socialist society:

“Is humanism present in every daily decision made by every citizen of our country? Is this concept of a humanist conscience the basis of every analysis made of services, production, or education? Collectivism, as a new personality trait and an expression of humanism in interpersonal relations, was the object of study, inquiry, and experimentation of Che’s theory and praxis.”

Humanism — in an internationalist sense — can motivate the more privileged Western leftists among us to stand in solidarity with independent socialist projects of the Global South and denounce the neo-colonialist tendencies of the ruling classes. Our struggle, after all, is global. Whether utilizing the ballot, the bullet, or both, we should work toward the liberation of all people and consign Eurocentric rubbish like the Monroe Doctrine to the dustbin of history.

“The Neoliberal Project Is Alive But Has Lost Its Legitimacy”: An Interview with David Harvey

By Jipson John and Jitheesh P. M.

British scholar David Harvey is one of the most renowned Marxist scholars in the world today. His course on Karl Marx's Capital is highly popular and has even been turned into a series on YouTube. Harvey is known for his support of student activism, community and labour movements.

In an interview with The Wire, he talks about the problems arising out of the neo-liberal project, the resulting surge of populist politics and right-wing movements. He also talks about the relevance of Marx's critique of capitalism in the present context and the threat to labour from automation.

The interview has been edited slightly for style and clarity.

Could you trace the origin of neo-liberalism? What were the structural reasons for its emergence?

The idealist interpretation of liberalism rests on a utopian vision of a world of individual freedom and liberty for all guaranteed by an economy based on private property rights, self-regulating free markets and free trade, designed to foster technological progress and rising labour productivity to satisfy the wants and needs of all.

In liberal theory, the role of the state is minimal (a "night-watchman" state with laissez faire policies). In neo-liberalism it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal freedoms.

These liberal and neo-liberal utopian visions have long been critiqued as inadequate because as Marx so clearly shows in practice, they both support a world in which the rich get richer at the expense of the well-being and exploited labour of the mass of the population.

Keynesian policies and the redistributive state after 1945 proposed an alternative utopian vision that rested on the increasing empowerment of the working classes without challenging the power of private property. In the 1970s, a counter-revolutionary movement arose in Europe and the Americas organised by the large corporations and the capitalist classes to overthrow the Keynesian system and to replace it with a neo-liberal model (along with all its ideological baggage) as a means for the capitalist class to recuperate its waning economic strength and its fading political power.

This is what [Margaret] Thatcher, [Ronald] Reagan, [Augusto] Pinochet, the Argentinian generals etc did throughout the 1980s. It is continuing today. The result has been rising economic and political inequality and increasing environmental degradation across the globe.

You describe accumulation by dispossession as one of the most important characteristics of neoliberalism. How does it work and what are its structural consequences?

Capital can accumulate in two ways. Labour can be exploited in production to create the surplus value that lies at the basis of the profit appropriated by capital. Capital can also accumulate by thievery, robbery, usury, commercial cheating and scams of all sorts.

In the theory of primitive accumulation, Marx points out how so much of the original accumulation of capital was based on such practices. These practices continue but have now been supplemented by a mass of new strategies.

In the foreclosure crisis in the USA of 2007-8 maybe 6-7 million people lost the asset values of their homes while Wall Street bonuses soared. Speculation in asset values (land and property for example) provides a non-productive avenue for accumulation.

Bankruptcy moves by major corporations (e.g. airlines) deprives employees of their pension and heath care rights. Monopoly pricing in pharmaceuticals, in telecommunications, in health care insurance in the USA provide lucrative avenues for profiteering. Increasing extraction of wealth through indebtedness is evident. Rentier extractions based on accumulation by dispossession (e.g. acquiring land or mineral resources illegally or at cut rates) have become more common because the rising mass of global capital is finding increasing difficulty in procuring productive uses for surplus capital.

Even during Marx's time, there were several critiques of capitalism. How do you differentiate Marx's critique from these strands?

Many of the critiques of capitalism were based on moral categories (evil and greedy capitalists versus impoverished and badly treated workers or more recently, environmentally callous capitalists versus the ecologists). Marx's critique is systemic. Moral and ethical objections remain, but Marx treats them as secondary to the systemic problem of why and how to replace the capitalist mode of production and its disastrous laws of motion by some other way of meeting human wants and needs.

Do you think capitalism has reached a dead end, especially in context of the 2008 crisis? Can capital recover?

Capital is not at a dead end. The neo-liberal project is alive and well. Jair Bolsanaro, recently elected in Brazil, proposes to repeat what Pinochet did in Chile after 1973.

The problem is that neo-liberalism no longer commands the consent of the mass of the population. It has lost its legitimacy. I already pointed out in The Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) that neo-liberalism could not survive without entering into an alliance with state authoritarianism. It now is moving towards an alliance with neo-fascism, because as we see from all the protest movements around the world, everyone now sees neo-liberalism is about lining the pockets of the rich at the expense of the people (this was not so evident in the 1980s and early 1990s).

Marx believed that capitalism would die out due to its internal contradictions. You don't agree with this. Why?

Marx sometimes makes it seem as if capital is destined to self-destruct. But in most instances, he looks on crises as moments of reconstruction for capital rather than of collapse. "[C]rises are never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the balance that has been disturbed," as he says in Volume 3 of Capital.

Where he does see capital ending, it is because of a class movement. I believe my position is in agreement with Marx. Capitalism will not end of its own accord. It will have to be pushed, overthrown, abolished. I disagree with those who think all we have to do is wait for it to self-destruct. That is not, in my view, Marx's position.

You consistently argue that Marx talked not just about value at the production level but also the arena of realisation. Could you elaborate this in the present context?

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx recognises that value is created in production and realised in the market. If there is no market, then there is no value. So value is dependent upon the contradictory unity between production and realisation. Realisation depends upon the wants, needs and desires of a population backed by the ability to pay.

The history of capitalism has been about the production of new wants, needs and desires (e.g. consumerism of various sorts and the production of daily forms of life to which we must conform in order to live reasonably such as automobiles and suburban living). I now teach an audience where everyone has a cell phone (which did not exist twenty years ago). To live in most US cities, you need an automobile which pollutes.

Marxists have paid a lot of attention to production, but have neglected issues of realisation. In my view, it is the contradictory unity of the two (which Marx mentions as crucial but does not elaborate upon) that should be the focus of our attention. Extraction and appropriation of value (often via dispossession) at the point of realisation is a political focus of struggle as are the qualities of daily life.

German socio-economist Wolfgang Streeck has identified five problems of capitalism in his How will Capitalism End. Instead, you identified 17 contradictions, not problems, of contemporary capitalism. What is the difference between problems and contradictions regarding the crisis of capitalism?

Problems have solutions. Contradictions do not: they always remain latent. They can only be managed and as Marx points out, crises arise when antagonisms are heightened into absolute contradictions. The contradiction between productive forces and social relations cannot be solved. It will always be with us. The contradiction between production and realisation will always be with us, etc.

I listed seventeen contradictions in order to emphasise that crises can arise in many different ways and that we need to develop a theory of crises which understands their multiple sources so we can get away from the "single bullet" theory that too often haunts Marxist thinking.

Under capitalism, automation causes significant job loss all over the world. Even the World Bank has raised concerns regarding automation. What is the challenge of automation under capitalism? What effect will it have on working class politics?

The parallel with automation in manufacturing and AI in services is useful. In manufacturing, labour was disempowered by tech change. Plus, offshoring with tech change is much more important. But manufacturing did not disappear. It continued to expand in different ways (e.g. fast food restaurants that produce hamburgers rather than factories that produce automobiles).

We will see much the same thing in services (we check ourselves in or out in supermarkets and airlines now). The left lost the battle against automation in manufacturing and is in danger of repeating its dismal record in services. We should welcome AI in services and promote it, but try to find a path towards a socialist alternative. AI will create new jobs as well as displace some. We need to adapt to that.

What do you mean by 'new imperialism'? What is its basic characteristic? How is it qualitatively different from classical imperialism?

I called it "the new imperiliasm" since it was an explicit theory advanced by the neo-conservatives in the US in the run up to the Iraq war. I wanted to critique that, not to get back to Lenin's theory, but to point out that the neo-liberal world order was sucking out value in all kinds of ways from all manner of places (e.g. through commodity chains). This was, of course, the topic of Brief History of Neoliberalism, which followed on from The New Imperialism. The two books should be read together.

There is an argument and belief, even among left intellectuals in the West, that the global south delinking from globalisation will result in a return to pre-modernity. What is your take on this? What should constitute the development agenda of the global south?

I think the idea of a total delinking would be disastrous. But I think selective delinking and the search for autonomous regionalities though bioregionalism is a good idea. The idea is to build alternative geographies of interrelations, but the global perspective (e.g. on global warming) is critical.

Study on cities is one of your areas of interest. You analyse cities as spaces of surplus appropriation. How does this work, especially in the context of neo-liberal cities? What is the importance of the right to city?

Urbanisation and capital accumulation go hand in hand and that is one of the aspects of Marxist thought that has been historically underdeveloped. Now half of the world's populations live in cities. So questions of daily life in environments constructed for purposes of capital accumulation is a big issue and a source of contradiction and conflict. This is emphasised politically by the pursuit of the right to the city: e.g. class struggle in and over the qualities of urban life. Many of the major social movements in recent decades have been over such questions (e.g Gezi Park in Istanbul).

Your condition of post-modernity looks into its material base. On a philosophical level, what is the larger influence of post-modernism on social life? What about the idea of post-truth?

Like many other broad-based, and to some degree incoherent cultural movements, the post-modern turn created positive openings along with absurdities and retrogressive impacts. I liked the fact that it opened up perspectivism and emphasized space, but I could see no reason why this would be antagonistic to Marxism, since in my own work, I emphasize how to integrate space, geographies and perspectivism into Marxism.

At the end of the day, as Eagleton pointed out at the time, the movement went too far in seeing "no difference between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness" such that "he who has the smoothest tongue and the raciest story has the power." It "junked history, refused argumentation, aestheticized politics and staked all on the charisma of those who told the stories." Donald Trump is a product of this post-modern excess.

In the initial stage, we thought internet as the great liberating force. But over the course of time, big monopolies emerged, profiting from the digital space. Cases like Cambridge Analytica reveal how personal data is being manipulated by these monopolies. What is the danger it poses? How to liberate internet as a public utility?

There is no such thing as a good and emancipatory technology that cannot be co-opted and perverted into a power of capital. And so it is in this case.

How do you locate the emergence of Donald Trump? How can the rise of populism in different parts of the world be addressed?

He is a post-modern president of universal alienation.

Does the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jermy Corbyn in the U.S. and UK elections respectively make you hopeful? Were they just election mobilisations? What should be the form and content of present day socialist politics?

There is a big difference between mobilisation and organisation. Only now, we are beginning to see elements on the left that see that building an organisation is crucial to gaining and holding political power.

In the British case, the rise of momentum alongside a resurgence of party building provides hopeful signs, as does the manifesto for bringing key elements of the economy into the public domain (which is different from nationalisation) as a political strategy. But the problem is that many in the parliamentary Labour party are as yet unsupportive. As yet, we do not see enough of this sort of thing in the U.S.

There is surge of right-wing politics across the world. The latest is example is the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Is the world moving towards fascism, similar to the 1930s and 40s? What is the political economy behind the sudden rise of ultra right-wing politicians like Bolsonaro in a Latin American country which was famous for left politics?

Alienation produced by neo-liberalism managed by the Workers Party, coupled with widespread corruption, produces a mass base prone to be exploited by neo-fascist delusions. The left failed to organise and now has to do so in the face of repressions.

Your course on Marx and Marxism has been very popular worldwide. How relevant is Marxism today? What do you think are Marx's contributions?

Marx wrote the beginnings of a stunningly perceptive analysis of how capital works as a mode of production. Capital was developed in Marx's time in only one minor part of the world. But it is now everywhere, so Marx's analysis is far more relevant now than it was in his time. Everyone who studies Marx carefully recognises this, which in some ways, explains why political power is so desperate to repress this mode of thought.

There exist significant despair and dissatisfaction among the common masses under neo-liberal capitalism. Where does the hope for a better world lie? What sustains your hope?

In spite of all the attempts at repression, people are increasingly seeing that there is something wrong with not only neo-liberalism, but also capitalism. It plainly does not and cannot deliver on it promises and the need for some other form of political-economic organisation is becoming ever more obvious.

This interview originally appeared at The Wire .

India's Dowry System and Social Reproduction Theory

By Valerie Reynoso

The practice of paying dowries is rooted in ancient tradition. It began as a Hindu religious requirement in the Manusmriti, a text from around 1500 BC that dictated the way of life and laws for Hindus. Ancient Hindus would gift each other during a wedding as a cultural requirement. Fathers were obligated to gift expensive clothes and jewelry to their daughters and to gift a cow and a bull to the family of the bride. When a woman moved in with her husband, she was provided with money, jewelry and property to secure her financial independence after marriage.[1] Over time, the dowry system has developed into a fully-formed, patriarchal, capitalist mechanism in which Indian women are reduced to being socially-reproductive providers.

In modern-day India, dowry has shifted from financial independence for brides to a system of groom prices in which women have virtually no control over their finances within a marriage. Dowry prices are negotiated verbally between the families of the groom and the bride. The settled price is paid to the family of the groom once married; however, there is often further demand for more money once the bride moves in with the husband. When these new demands are not met, it can have fatal consequences for the bride. [2].

The social reproduction and commodification of women's bodies, as well as the enforcement of private property under capitalism, has resulted in women being rendered as tools for patriarchal exploitation. Social reproduction refers to the work that goes into producing workers who then have their labor exploited in the name of capitalism by the upper class. Social reproduction relates to feminism and gender power dynamics because women are socialized to carry the burden of housework, childcare, and socially reproducing their husbands who then go off to work. In the case of the dowry system and the Indian women subject to it, this dynamic is further intensified due to the demands for dowry and increased patriarchal violence when this demand is not met. Social reproduction theory is the understanding of the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process."[3] It is a historical-materialist analysis which builds on the premise that race, gender, and class oppressions are connected and occur simultaneously under capitalism. This theory explores the relationship between oppression and exploitation.

These oppressive systems have turned dowry culture from one rooted in ancestral tradition where women are socioeconomically uplifted to one where women are socioeconomically exploited, abused, and killed in the name of money and patriarchy. This deviation of the connotation dowry has also signifies how gender is informed by organizational violence, through which the submission of underclass women is maintained by means of financial, physical and psychological abuse. Indian women are seen as assets to elevate the hierarchical status of the men they marry through the forced provision of dowry.

The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 outlawed people from demanding or giving dowry as a pre-condition for marriage. Section 498a of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) states that any female death within the first seven years of a marriage will be automatically concluded to have been a result of dowry harassment. Section 304b IPC refers to cruelty against brides. These laws were designated preventative measures but they have evidently not been effective in implementation, as it is difficult for many dowry victims to make time to go to court in order to get help. [4]

According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, 8,233 dowry deaths were reported in 2012, a rate that equals one victim every 60 minutes. This statistic does not include unreported dowry deaths, since women are discouraged from reporting abuses. Some ways women are abused in demands for dowry is by being blackmailed, beaten, burned alive, threats of having their children taken away, and murder. The National Crime Records Bureau also reported that police throughout India have charged around 93% of accused in dowry deaths and only 34% of them have resulted in convictions. In 2017 the Hindustan Times reported that there had been 15 dowry deaths in the capital of India alone between 2012-2017, but none of these cases resulted in conviction. There are approximately 27 million total pending cases in the Indian legal system, which delays the dowry cases of women even up to 20 years[5]

It is considered a stigma for women to return to their parents' home after marriage. Social norms enforce the "sanctity" of marriage along with a lack of financial independence, all of which prevent rural women from telling the truth about abuses over dowry. Many survivors of burnings are coerced to lie and say it was an accident or attempted suicide out of fear of further abuses by their husbands.[6]

Under the current Dowry system, women are seen as a burden to their families. It is common for families to save money for the future marriages of their daughters from birth, such as taking out loans, selling land, and going in debt in order to save for the daughter's dowry. Infanticides are rampant given that many girls are killed at birth because of the financial burden of dowry. Other families also perform sex-selective abortions if the baby is determined to be a girl. For girls who are not aborted or killed at birth, they typically live a life of poor nutrition, abuse, and illiteracy in rural areas of India particularly. Girls are starved in preference of their brothers and are also discouraged from pursuing an education because they are usually married off at a very young age in order for the family to collect, give, and solicit dowry. As a result, girls become financially dependent on their husbands at a young age. Even when doctors note that the burn patterns on women do not match their claims of self-infliction, they are not expected to report it and usually do not. In court, doctors are only asked to say whether or not the woman was fully conscious and able to make a statement to the police. Sometimes police harass women who report dowry abuse and discourage the women from reporting. [7]

The repression of women and girls under the current dowry system represents the relationship between the processes of producing human labor power and the processes of producing value, as indicated by the concepts defined by social reproduction theory.[8] Indian girls living a life of abuse and negligence, for the direct material benefit of their male counterparts, is similar to how capitalists need human labor power in order to extract profit from the value production they do not produce themselves .[9] Indian women are the bearers of the labor power it takes in order to socially reproduce financially dependent men, such that Indian girls are starved and denied education and job opportunities in the name of dowry, so that boys may take advantage of these instead. The dowry system provides Indian men with socioeconomic power that is derived from the physical exploitation of Indian women, who are controlled by financial subordination and sexist gender roles that limit them to the home. This cycle of social reproduction is continued when Indian girls are married off by their families to a husband to whom they will owe a life of servitude and financial dependence. Seeing that marrying off Indian girls at a young age is driven by the collection and solicitation of dowry, their bodies are being commodified as a vessel through which their families can accumulate capital. This happens until the woman is severely abused or murdered when demands for more dowry can no longer be satisfied.

Moreover, the price of dowry varies per one's socioeconomic status. Underclass grooms typically demand smaller dowries but it is still a financial burden for poor families who do not have the means of paying it. Parents will raise money for the dowry by selling land or going bankrupt after the marriage. Lower castes of India, such as the Dalit, obtain money for their daughters' weddings by leasing their sons into bonded labor. Many cotton farmers who have committed suicide in large numbers due to failing crops also did so due to the increased price of dowry, which also increased their debt to unmanageable levels. [10]

Solutions for the human rights epidemic surged by the current dowry system have been posed. In 2006, web entrepreneur Satya Naresh had created the first dowry-free matrimonial site in India and in 12 years only 5,399 men had registered. Naresh stated that not many people have registered for it due to greed - in many cases, even when a man does not want a dowry his parents will still want it and force him to undergo it. World Bank lead economist Dr. Vijayendra Rao stated that a substantial shift in gender norms is required in order to end dowry violence, such as reducing gender discrimination, and increasing female education and socioeconomic independence, in addition to further legal reforms[11].

Ultimately, dowry is a means of enacting socially reproduced violence against women in India through socioeconomic repression and misogyny. The elimination of socioeconomic disparities and gendered oppression, as well as a structural challenge to capitalist modes of production, are needed. This is the only path where Indian women may enjoy equal rights and protection.

Notes

[1] "A Broken Promise; Dowry Violence In India," Pulitzer Center, February 9th, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/broken-promise-dowry-violence-india

[2] Ibid.

[3] Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017).

[4] Ibid.

[5] "'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India, The Guardian, accessed February 9th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/18/death-by-dowry-claim-by-bereaved-family-in-india

[6] "A Broken Promise; Dowry Violence In India," Pulitzer Center, February 9th, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/broken-promise-dowry-violence-india

[7] Ibid.

[8] Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] "'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India, The Guardian, accessed February 9th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/18/death-by-dowry-claim-by-bereaved-family-in-india

The Nature of the Left: On the Question of Human Nature

By Corinne Hummel

There seems to be a shared cynicism among some members of the Left and the ideologues of liberal democracy: that sexism and racism belong to human nature. While the liberal may use this assertion to justify and necessitate the state, the anarchist may hold this assertion alongside a rejection of the state. In either case, the possible organization of society is restricted by the assumption of innate characteristics. It is unscientific to attribute these products of consciousness to biological determinism, and the implication in this attempt to apply positivism to the human lifeworld is cynical; where potential is limited by subjective observations of the anathema. Recognizing that such cynicism is incompatible with scientific socialism, I aim to explore the ideological genealogy of the Left, along with the topic of human nature. Because there have been many contributors to these theories, I will only name those necessary for the purpose of this discussion.

Beginning with Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations was such an apt observation of the activity of economic life that it catalyzed dozens of 19th -century successors in the realm of political and economic philosophy. Smith presented capitalism as moral and natural, and asserted that the state should not interfere in the liberty of the individual in the market. Hegel thereafter presented an ontological wedge between Smith's work and its influence, theorizing that liberty is achieved when the rational and universal principles of the self-determination of the individual become objectified in the laws of the state. Influenced by both Smith and Hegel, Proudhon became the "father of anarchism" as he argued for collective ownership of the means of production and insisted that individuals should have a right to the full product of their individual labor. He imagined a market society constituted of free-associating collectives, with the state reformed into a "regulating society" with the sole purpose of supporting this activity. As an associate of Proudhon, Bakunin rejected the idea of a reformed state, and instead advocated for a syndicalism which would end the state, as he declared the state to be inherently oppressive.

Bakunin's communist contemporary, Karl Marx, developed his theories of social phenomena and political economy through critique of Smith and Hegel. Marx noticed that Smith's depiction of capitalism as "natural" was scientifically unwarranted. Smith's methodology was teleological: he neglected to critically explain how capitalism emerged, as his "invisible hand" was expressly providential. And where Hegel concluded the human experience is decided by our consciousness, Marx added that our consciousness is informed by our material relations, an idea known as "dialectical materialism." Bakunin promoted collective ownership of the means of production, but disagreed with Marx over collective control of the means of production, as he believed that would result in oppressive hierarchies. Bakunin betrays himself in his declaration that Marxist communism would lead to a "parasitic Jewish nation." Marx was deeply critical of Bakunin, and the two were positioned as adversaries. An interesting turn occurred in Italy where Cafiero, a young advocate of Marxism, joined the more popular Bakuninist side, bringing with him significant influence from Marx. In 1880, Cafiero and his associates made a formal declaration that the individual appropriation of the products of individual labor leads to wealth accumulation based on merit, and that the state becomes necessitated and reinforced by this condition of inequality. So, the Italian Bakuninists, influenced by Marx, shifted the ideas of collectivist anarchists toward what became known as anarcho-communism.

Kropotkin, a naturalist, made significant theoretical contributions to anarcho-communism when he published a series of essays in 1890, which were later combined under the title "mutual aid: a factor in evolution." In these works, Kropotkin used examples from the animal kingdom to argue against survival of the fittest. Inspired by Darwin, he used the methodology of evolutionary biology to claim that cooperation is naturally selected for, as a consciousness. This means that anything not considered cooperation, such as violence, is an expression of consciousness belonging to an unfavorable evolution. Kropotkin faults the earliest formations of centralized states for enchanting humanity toward authority. The crux of this theory is that in the presence of hierarchies, biological tendencies for cooperation are suppressed in an alteration of consciousness. Kropotkin stated that it is only when all individuals' needs are met that the individual can be free, creatively, and for all individuals' needs to be met, there must be cooperation. According to his hypothesis, such cooperation prerequisites a higher consciousness. Kropotkin's empiricist methodology, when applied to sociology, was not immune to subjective idealism. He claimed to be logically outside the realm of metaphysics, yet he demonstrated Hegel's one-way dialectic in which consciousness decides existence. His conception of the naturally evolved consciousness presents a very agreeable outlook on the nonviolent potential of humanity, but it becomes overshadowed by a cynicism that collective consciousness cannot transcend its subjective perceptions of hierarchies.

Looking at non-human species to interpret human sociobiology will produce a variety of contradictory examples, until it becomes a pseudoscientific double-edged sword. Our view of ourselves as we see it in the world around us is subject to the most determined of biases. The reactionary cites the behavior of lobsters to justify class society, while the leftist claims that white supremacy is congenital. In a study of apes, all were given a banana except for one, and that one reacted violently. When looking at human history, we see those with accumulated wealth enacting violence, as conditions of perceived resource scarcity threatened the reproduction of wealth. Homo Sapiens have existed for roughly 200,000 years while capitalism has existed for no more than 700 years (including its precursors). Capitalism is distinct from the trading activities of ancient civilizations, just as you would not call primitive nomadic peoples "colonizers." The birth of capitalism is marked by the expropriation of the means of production, which was preceded by wealth accumulation. Natural disasters, presenting resource scarcity, were likely causes of the transferring of the commons into private ownership. In the work of Carl Nicolai Starcke, we learn that the emergence of patriarchy, first instituted within the family, was preceded by the establishment of private property. Patriarchy first emerged in those primitive societies which uniquely had a gendered division of labor in which private property became solely undertaken by men. Property, at this point in history, was the means of production: animals or land necessary for reproducing existence. This particular development depended on geography. In the harsh climate of Northern Europe, primitive societies were more dependent on herding animals than growing crops, and in these cases there was a gendered division of labor for biological reasons. Men came to inherit the herds because pregnant women could not care for the herds. The subordination of women occurred after their separation from the means of production, as it became the private property of men, but the original separation was not itself subordinating. Similarly, slavery in the Roman Empire was not based on race: the accumulation of wealth, requiring reproduction and protection, caused the state apparatus to develop a market for human labor as property. As capitalist production expanded, sexism and racism became ideological constructions, institutionalized in the service of entrenching support for continued expropriation of the means of production. The witch hunts and colonialism appearing in the late 15th century occurred 100 years after feudal crises had developed pre-modern capitalism.

Compelled by the lack of technical rigor in Wealth of Nations, Marx investigated what is unique to capitalism in its influence on human behavior. In addition to wealth accumulation and perceived resource scarcity, he theorizes that there is alienation occurring in the mode of production. The mode of production is the way in which society reproduces its existence: it is the material and social relations of labor. In capitalism, the instruments of labor, and the products of labor, do not belong to the laborer. To understand Marx's theory of alienation requires his concept of "base and superstructure" wherein the base is the mode of production; the relations of which are reproduced into the superstructure as societal norms and institutions. In the capitalist mode of production, the worker is estranged from the value of their labor while the capitalist is estranged from the labor of the value they extract. Performing these mechanistic roles alienates the individual from the self: from rationally knowing the fulfillment of need, as the only need becomes wages or profits. Marx was inspired by Darwin as well, in conceiving of history as a complex, yet quotidian, process of change and the response to change. Alienation is what the individual experiences when reality contradicts the rational motivation of the species-being: when the individual's labor is not for the self-determination of the individual, which is simultaneously unique and universal, as a being of a social species. This alienation is reproduced outwardly because material (social) relations inform consciousness, from which behavior cannot be isolated. In capitalism, the behavioral response precipitates evidence of humanity's spirit, though as a broken one, and the empiricist unjustly casts these behaviors as both irrational and belonging to human nature. It is from this cynical perspective that the ideologues of liberal democracy necessitate the utilitarian state to ensure civilization progresses. But for Marx, the ills of society are products of contractual agreements in which can be no real consent. The norms and institutions of the superstructure reinforce, through violence and ideological mystification, that which produces them.

For Kropotkin, capitalism is a byproduct of the state. For Marx, the state is a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Marx understood the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production as preconditioned by rational responses to perceived resource scarcity in stateless primitive societies. The theories of Marxism and anarcho-communism were developed through distinctly different methodologies. When the mode of reproducing existence is not accounted for as an objective material reality of consciousness, observations will be subject to an idealism in which it is possible to misknow reality. For this reason, agreements found among leftists may only superficially bridge an epistemic divide. Marx said, "Proudhon does not know that all of history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature." He meant that one simply cannot say what is innate: behavior is the response to a changing material reality transmuted by the subjective consciousness. Marx contended that we should consider humanity apart from our conceptions of nature because history cannot be explained in the non-human natural world. Marxism is scientific socialism because of dialectical materialism: a process philosophy which overcomes the limitations of empiricism, rationalism, and subjective idealism. It is a more complete theory of social phenomena. By this method, the institution of science can be understood to be oppressive due to it being ideologically reinforced as a reproduction of the oppression in the base of society. When it is recognized, by the historical application of dialectical materialism, that capitalism is responsible for the environmental plunder of colonialism, it is possible to conclude that our societal conception of "nature" has been white supremacist. I conclude with the suggestion that the cynical perception of "human nature" is the result of ideological mystification producing an epistemic impasse.

"Ideology does not exist in the 'world of ideas' conceived as a 'spiritual world.' Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them. Ideology represents individuals' imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence. Ideology has a material existence. There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology. There is no ideology except by the subject and for the subjects. Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects."

- Louis Althusser

The Capitalist Coup Called Neoliberalism: How and Why It Went Down

By Colin Jenkins

Rich people have always had class consciousness because... they want to stay rich. This collective consciousness led the "founding fathers" of the United States to set up systems of governance that would, first and foremost, protect them (the wealthy, landowning minority) from the landless, working majority (slaves, indentured servants, laborers). Since then, the rich have had undue influence on every aspect of US life: housing, food production and distribution, education, media, and politics. As capitalism has developed well into its late stages, this has led to large concentrations in wealth and power, and thus influence.

In order to maintain control, the rich have learned over time that minimal concessions must be given to the working class to avoid societal unrest. Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas described this process as using the state to steady the "unstable equilibrium." This instability is produced by capitalism's tendency to pool wealth at the top while dispossessing the majority. For much of the 20th century, capitalists in the US were successful in maintaining an internal equilibrium, mainly due to their ravaging of the so-called "third world" through colonialism and imperialism. With this massive theft of resources throughout the global South (Africa and Latin America), a robust "middle class" was carved out from a mostly white sector of the US working class. This "middle class" consisted of workers who were provided a greater share of the stolen loot than their class peers, and thus awarded the "American Dream" that was widely advertised.

The US "middle class" was a crucial development for the rich because it provided a buffer between them and the masses. Due to the relative comfort they were allowed, "middle-class" workers were more likely to support and collaborate with capitalists, even at the expense of their fellow workers who were left struggling for scraps from below. After all, for there to be a middle class, there must be a lower class. Under capitalism, the lower class is the invisible majority by design. The capitalist class shapes dominant culture from above, the middle class serves as the standard bearer of this culture, and the lower class clings to survival mode in the shadows of society. The key for the rich is to keep the invisible majority in check. The "middle class" has always played a crucial role in this.

Despite this balancing act that was maintained for decades, capitalism's internal contradictions became predictably volatile heading into the latter part of the century, culminating into what economist Michael Roberts refers to as the profitability crisis of the 1970s . As the capitalist system was approaching this crisis, US society had already begun confronting social ills stemming from systemic white supremacy, patriarchy, and the Vietnam war. Naturally, this moved into the economic sphere, as workers and students began to successfully tie together the array of social injustices to the widespread economic injustice created by the capitalist system. The existence of an invisible majority, the victims of capitalism and its corollary systems of oppression, was uncovered. This scared the rich, enough to where they felt the need to fortify their previously unshakable privileges. After the groundswell of liberation movements that formed during the 60s, which was fueled by a wave of (working) class consciousness from below, the rich decided to organize and weaponize their own (capitalist) class consciousness to protect their assets, collectively, from the threat of democracy.

In examining what had gone wrong in the 60s and why so many people had the audacity to demand more self-determination, the notorious Trilateral Commission convened in 1973, bringing together economic and political elites from North America, Europe, and Japan. The Commission, as described by Encyclopedia Britannica , "reflects powerful commercial and political interests committed to private enterprise and stronger collective management of global problems. Its members (more than 400 in the early 21st century) are influential politicians; banking and business executives; media, civic, and intellectual leaders."

In 1975, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki published a report for the Commission, titled: "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies." In assessing the various movements that gained momentum in the 60s (racial justice, economic justice, anti-war, etc.), the report determined that these "problems" stemmed from an "excess of democracy." Huntington specifically noted that, "the vitality of democracy in the United States in the 1960s produced a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority." The solution to this, according to the report, was to reverse direction - decrease "governmental activity" and increase "governmental authority" to restrict democratic impulses from the masses and maintain the capitalist power structure internally, while retaining "hegemonic power" internationally. In other words, rather than government serving people and regulating capitalists, government should serve capitalists and regulate people.

Since maintaining a "middle class" had become such a fragile proposition, the capitalist class forged a new direction. Rather than rely on this historical buffer and continue the concessionary and fickle balancing act , they decided it would be more effective to simply take ownership of the legislative and judicial process. This process began when executive officers from several major corporations joined together to form private groups like the Business Roundtable, for the purpose of "promoting pro-business public policy." In other words, to make sure that the "excess of democracy" which occurred during the 60s would never return. Why? Because any such mass movement toward relinquishing power to the people is a direct threat to capitalist profit and corporate America's existence as a collection of unaccountable, authoritarian, exceptionally powerful, private entities. The Business Roundtable, which included executives from corporations like Exxon, DuPont, General Electric, Alcoa, and General Motors, gained instant access to the highest offices of the government, becoming extremely influential in pushing for corporate tax cuts and deregulation during the Reagan era.

Since the 1980s, the Business Roundtable has run roughshod over American workers by using the federal government to:

- reduce consumer protections,

- obstruct employment stimuli,

- weaken unions,

- implement "free trade" agreements that spur offshoring and tax havens,

- ease environmental protections,

- increase corporate subsidies,

- loosen rules on corporate mergers and acquisitions,

- open avenues of profit in the private healthcare system,

- privatize education and social programs,

- and block efforts to make corporate boards more accountable.[1][2][3][4] [5]

As political momentum developed within corporate America, additional players jumped aboard this strategic and highly coordinated capitalist coup. While groups like the Business Roundtable targeted legislation, the US Chamber of Commerce (CoC), a "private, business-oriented lobbying group" which had already served as a popular vehicle for turning (capitalist) class consciousness into action since 1912, shifted its focus onto the court system. Since then, the CoC has used its immense resources to influence US Supreme Court decisions that benefit big business, a tactic that has become increasingly successful for them over time. The CoC's business lobby had " a 43 percent success rate from 1981 to 1986 during the final years of Chief Justice Warren Burger's tenure," a 56 percent success rate from 1994 to 2005 (the Rehnquist Court), and boasted a 68 percent success rate (winning 60 of 88 cases) during John Roberts first seven years as Chief Justice. The CoC improved even more on its pro-corporate, anti-worker attack in 2018, winning 90 percent of its cases during the court's first term. As Kent Greenfield reported for The Atlantic ,

"One measure of the [2018 term's] business-friendly tilt is the eye-popping success rate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the self-proclaimed "Voice of Business." The Chamber filed briefs in 10 cases this term and won nine of them. The Chamber's victories limited protections for whistleblowers, forced changes in the Securities and Exchange Commission, made water pollution suits more difficult to bring, and erected additional obstacles to class action suits against businesses. Only the geekiest of Supreme Court watchers monitor such cases. But the Chamber pays attention, and it pays off."

Groups like the Trilateral Commission, Business Roundtable, and Chamber of Commerce have taken prominent roles on the front lines of the 40-year, capitalist slaughter of American workers, but if there was a single, powerful element that solidified this coup it was a memo written in 1971 by Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo, or Powell Manifesto, as it has come to be known, made its rounds among corporate, economic, and political elites during this crucial time. Powell, a corporate lawyer, board member of nearly a dozen corporations, and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, sent the memo to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor, Jr., as a call to action for corporate America.

Powell's memo was a diatribe against any and all elements that would dare to question capitalism. While giving mention to "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic," the memo focused on what was viewed as the most immediate threat - the same "excess of democracy" referred to in the Trilateral Commission's report. "What now concerns us is quite new in the history of America," wrote Powell. "We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts" throughout the working class. Powell took special interest in those "from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians" whom he regarded as small in size but "the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking."

Powell's memo laid out a blueprint for the capitalist coup that is now referred to as neoliberalism , including everything from identifying and listing the enemies pushing for self-determination, criticizing the business community for its apathy and lack of urgency in recognizing this growing threat, suggestions for how business executives and the Chamber of Commerce may proceed in obstructing these democratic impulses from below, and even laying out detailed plans on how to infiltrate campuses, the public, media, the political arena, and the courts with pro-capitalist action and propaganda.

Reclaim Democracy, an activist organization based in Montana explains,

"Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy."

At a time of monumental capitalist regrouping and coalescing against the "dangerous rise" of self-determination, the influence of Powell's manifesto is difficult to underestimate. It provided ideological fuel to the birth of a substantial corporate lobbying industry, which produced immeasurable pro-business and anti-worker legislation for decades to come. The memo also served as a wake-up call to capitalists throughout corporate America, supplementing the formation of groups like the Business Roundtable and urging forceful actions from the US Chamber of Commerce. The results, according to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, were undeniable:

"The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping - a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980. On every dimension of corporate political activity, the numbers reveal a dramatic, rapid mobilization of business resources in the mid-1970s." [6]

The real-life effects of this capitalist coup have been disastrous for most. US workers have experienced declining or stagnant wages since the 1970s. As a result, many must rely on credit (if lucky enough to qualify) even to obtain basic necessities, which has resulted in skyrocketing household debt across the board. The debt-to-disposable income ratio of American households more than doubled from 60% in 1980 to 133% in 2007. Meanwhile, any hope of saving money has disappeared. While the household "savings rate roughly doubled from 5% in 1949 to over 11% in 1982, it looks like a downhill ski slope since then," and registered in negative territory by 2006. Conversely, as designed, the rich have benefited immensely, to the point where income inequality has increased to pre-Great Depression levels . Those who orchestrated the coup (the top 1%) claimed about a quarter of all wealth during the 1980s, and now own over 40% of all wealth in the country. To put this in perspective , the bottom 90% of all Americans combined account for barely half of that, claiming 21% of all wealth.

And, perhaps most importantly, the coup helped fund the growth of a massive capitalist propaganda machine to convince the working class to support our own demise. This includes everything from a co-opted and recalibrated liberal media, a rise of right-wing talk radio, and the birth of the Fox News network - all designed to do one thing: "inform and enlighten" workers on the wonders of capitalism and American exceptionalism, the friendly nature of big business, and the "excessive" dangers of self-determination.

As Powell noted in 1971, "If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose (of marketing and selling the idea of capitalism), it would be a statesman-like expenditure." And statesman-like it has become, running interference and garnering " manufactured consent" for a capitalist coup that has been cemented over the course of four decades, six presidential administrations, a Wall Street run amok, and a massive transfer of generations (including future) of public revenue into private hands.

Notes

[1] "The Business Roundtable and American Labor," a report by J. C. Turner, General President International Union of Operating Engineers, AFL-CIO (May 1979). Accessed online at http://laborrising.com/2013/07/union-organizing-and-the-business-roundtable-and-american-labor/

[2] "The Anti-Union Game Plan," Labor Notes (July 2, 2018). Accessed online at https://labornotes.org/2018/07/anti-union-game-plan

[3] Lafer, G. (October 31, 2013) "The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012," Economic Policy Institute. Accessed online at https://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/

[4] Gilbert, D. (2017) The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (SAGE publications)

[5] Goldfield, M. (1989) The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (University of Chicago Press), p. 192

[6] Hacker, J.S. & Pierson, P. (2011) Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster)

The Lies Social Democrats Tell: FDR, the New Deal, and Social Fascism

By Zach Medeiros

On June 12, Bernie Sanders gave a much-advertised speech about democratic socialism at George Washington University. Stuck in a distant second to perennial, burning-human-garbage-pile Joe Biden, eclipsed in media coverage by mildly charismatic mediocrities like Pete Buttigieg and even Elizabeth Warren, a charitable interpretation of this move could see it as a well-intentioned effort to assuage some very Amerikan fears about socialism, and perhaps gain some traction in the polls in the process. No doubt electoral opportunism played a role, because you don't get to stick around in the Senate for so long without learning how to play the game. While some may argue that Sanders was trying to make socialism more palatable for a US audience, I believe the speech represented something far more significant. Last week, Bernie Sanders ripped his mask off and with a heavy dose of historical revisionism showed his so-called socialism for what it truly is: social fascism.

Social fascism is a phrase that's unfamiliar to most people in the United States, who typically have better or more pressing things to do than study the internal debates of the Communist International in the 1930s. In imperialist countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and much of Europe, social democracy (a mixed capitalist economy with a more or less robust welfare state, originally designed to take the sting out of revolutionary socialist movements) takes the form of a "kinder, gentler" fascism, at least for citizens. You can look at how Europe and its children treat refugees to understand what social democracy means for non-citizens. The wealth and privileges of Western social democracy, of course, are impossible without the looting of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Third World diasporas within Western countries - in other words, imperialism. [1] Whereas socialists believe in class conflict and class struggle, social democrats/fascists believe in class collaboration. This is the dangerous notion that classes with completely, inherently contradictory interests (capitalists and workers) can unite and work towards a mutually-beneficial goal. As an ideology and practice, class collaboration produces and rationalizes such phenomena as millionaires and billionaires in supposed Communist parties, toothless unions led by labor aristocrats who like to golf with the boss on weekends, and the total suppression of worker's power in the name of national unity or the 99%. It is intellectual and material quicksand. As George Jackson wrote, "the only way we can destroy it [fascism] is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class." [2]

Just as social imperialism is nothing but the same old imperialist gore and exploitation hiding behind socialist trappings, social fascism is essentially fascism wearing a socialist mask. The social fascist is the one whose heart bleeds for the struggling worker while sending the cops or the troops to break up an unauthorized strike, or the modern-day Gestapo to deport workers who dared to cross colonial borders without permission. The social fascist is the one who calls not for an end to the mass robbery of the Third World, but a fairer distribution of the stolen goods. The social fascist is the one who preaches revolution and revolt, just so long as it ends right before the power of the capitalist class begins.

With that in mind, we can return to Bernie's speech. Parsing through the usual populist spiel, we get to the heart of his argument: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was a democratic socialist, and his New Deal programs, while incomplete, were outstanding examples of what democratic socialism is all about. In an age of resurgent right-wing extremism and oligarchic domination, Sanders argues that the solution is taking up the "unfinished business of the New Deal" and carrying it to completion. Anyone who peddles this line with a straight face is a damn fool, a liar, or both.

Actual socialists and revolutionaries like George Jackson pegged Roosevelt and his New Deal for what they were decades ago. Casting aside all of the glittering myths about that era and grinding them into dust, Jackson identified Roosevelt as a fascist, plain as day. Writing about the beginning of the Great Depression, Jackson said "under the threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and dangerous. FDR 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." [3] Roosevelt was not some great, noble champion of the common people. He and his advisers, along with the capitalists who backed them, were simply farsighted enough to see that an unprecedented capitalist crisis required an unprecedented capitalist solution: fascism. Like so many of their counterparts at the time, the Amerikan bourgeoise had to come up with a way to contain the upsurge in revolutionary consciousness without fundamentally undermining the capitalist system. The draw of fascism, which extolls class collaboration instead of class struggle, the violent repression of leftist alternatives and "dangerous" minorities, and a shower of crumbs to satisfy the restless masses, must have been obvious.

In his speech, Sanders claimed that "We [in the United States] rejected the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler - we instead embraced the bold and visionary leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then the leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party." This is ahistorical nonsense. Roosevelt was an unabashed admirer of Benito Mussolini, the Founding Father of fascism. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to Breckenridge Long, the US Ambassador to Italy, writing that he was "much interested and deeply impressed by what [Mussolini] has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble." In another letter a few weeks later, Roosevelt told a friend who had also complimented Mussolini: "I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman." [4]

These were private letters not meant for public consumption, so one could hardly rationalize them as simple diplomatic flattery. They were also written over a decade after Mussolini seized power and abandoned all pretense of democratic rule, so Roosevelt could hardly claim naivete. After meeting with Roosevelt in 1934, the Italian general and fascist hero Italo Balbo reported to Mussolini that the president "manifested toward Your Excellency feelings of the highest esteem and liking because of the work of restoration performed in Italy…the President also spoke words of appreciation for the labor organization of our country and displayed in general a spirit of true understanding for Italy." [5] So much for FDR's rejection of fascist ideology! Like so much of the Amerikan bourgeoise, who published glowing tributes to Fascist Italy in outlets like Fortune magazine, Roosevelt looked at what Mussolini was doing not with horror, but with open glee and envy. Why wouldn't they? The Fascists had literally beaten the revolutionary sectors of the working class into submission, co-opted the rest of the population into the tight embrace of the new corporate state, and seemingly resolved the crises facing modern industrial capitalism. As far as Mussolini was concerned, the feelings were mutual.[6] It was only with the outbreak of World War II that Mussolini and Fascism had to become enemies in the eyes of the United States.

As telling as personal affinities can be, they are not sufficient for demonstrating the fascist nature of Roosevelt and the New Deal. To return to Jackson, we must see the New Deal as an essential part of Amerika's long walk into fascism. When we move past the "deceptively better working conditions and illusory wage increases," the softer hand directed towards (white) labor, we can see that the New Deal was hardly more than capitalist reformism.[7] To prevent a revolution and save capitalism from itself - indeed, to entrench capitalism even deeper than before - the ruling class had to reexamine the role of the state. Contrary to libertarian capitalist dogma, the state has always played an essential role in the establishment, defense, and spread of capitalism, but the chaos of the 1920s and 30s required a qualitative change. Monopoly capital and the state had to undergo a corporate-style merger. The military-industrial complex and massive consumers' market (boosted to incredible heights by the productive boom of World War II) satisfied the short-term economic interests of white labor, which cared little for social liberation. Their leaders were brought into the fold and provided with cushy perks. The radicals and revolutionaries were killed, jailed, exiled, or ostracized into irrelevance. [8] This is the part of the picture that Bernie Sanders doesn't paint.

As J. Sakai put it, "the victory [the Euro-Amerikan proletariat] gained was the firm positioning of the Euro-Amerikan working class in the settler ranks, reestablishing the rights of all Europeans here to share the privileges of the oppressor nation. This was the essence of the equality that they won. This bold move was in the settler tradition, sharing the Amerikan pie with more European reinforcements so that the Empire could be strengthened. This formula had partially broken down during the transition from the Amerika of the Frontier to the Industrial Amerika. It was the brilliant accomplishment of the New Deal to mend this break." [9] New Africans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed nations under the heel of the United States saw no such benefits. They were lynched, deported, massacred, impoverished, and brutalized during the New Deal years as surely as they were before and after. Social democracy for whites, fascism for everyone else: this is the legacy that Bernie Sanders eulogizes, the model that he asks us to "complete." This is not socialism. It's a damn lie.

Socialists, and anyone serious about building revolutionary change in Amerika, should not defraud or lie to the people. It is our responsibility to speak plainly, to own up to hard, unpleasant truths, and educate and be educated by the masses. That is the exact opposite of what Bernie Sanders is doing. Like his idol Roosevelt, Sanders isn't interested in dismantling capitalism. He wants to save it. He isn't interested in establishing a revolutionary socialist society and a worker's state. He would sooner die, and no doubt would vote to send in the troops to crush anyone who tried. He has no curiosity for decolonization, no appetite for anti-imperialism, not a shred of concern for the most basic principles of socialist internationalism.

Instead, he offers only a few adjustments to the machinery of death that is the United States. He wants to piss on your leg and tell you it's raining. Would some of these adjustments help some people, if by some miracle he could get half of them enacted? Undoubtedly. But at what cost? With more stolen wealth taken from the colonized world and colonized people? At the direction of a state-owned lock, stock, and barrel by the capitalists and imperialists? We no longer have the luxury of time to tinker with the machinery of death. Reformism is the shovel we'll dig our own grave with. Anyone who identifies as a socialist must understand that the task before us is not to "reclaim" Amerika, but replace it with something better: for the sake of oppressed and exploited people here, for the sake of oppressed and exploited people everywhere, and for the sake of all life on this planet.

Notes

[1] Black Red Guard, "Ideological Social Democracy Is Social Fascism: Yet Again." https://medium.com/@BlackRedGuard/ideological-social-democracy-is-social-fascism-yet-again-6cbc43cc4bff

[2] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye. 120.

[3] Ibid. 164.

[4] David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965. 190.

[5] David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jackson, 170-171.

[8] Ibid, 173-174.

[9] J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern.

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

By Valerie Reynoso

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

Lessons in Assimilation

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Layers of Proletarian Exploitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modern Prison Labor

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

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

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

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

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

Artisanship as Subversiveness

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

[2] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

[7] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[23] Ibid. pp. 20.

[24] Ibid, pp. 24.

[25] Ibid. pp. 31.

[26] Ibid. pp. 22.