Understanding the Role of Police Towards Abolitionism: On Black Death as an American Necessity, Abolition, Non-Violence, and Whiteness

{Photo credit: Ashley Landis/AP}

By Joshua Briond

In Blood In My Eye, the late great George Jackson writes: “the purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class—and race— sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics[...]Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.”  And while thousands across the country take to the streets to protest state violence, in the aftermath of the public lynching of George Floyd, we have been seeing the structural reality the likes of George Jackson (amongst other Black political prisoners and revolutionaries) brilliantly and elegantly theorized on and experienced, once again holds true. 

In this moment, it is crucial to understand the role of the police at their core, as merely a hyper-militarized bottom of the barrel armed force of the ruling class. Our ruling class owned media tries to portray both state and federal level police as neutral actors enforcing public safety—when in fact their role has always served to disrupt (radical) political activity by any means necessary. The past few days have sprung speculation regarding the police and media conspiring and exporting counterinsurgency—which is clearly happening. But what if, instead, we saw policing under white supremacist capitalism as inherently and in a constant state of counterinsurgency—because such an act is how empire sustains itself—especially if we know that, historically, police have surveilled, repressed and infiltrated individuals, organizations, and political parties that they have deemed ideological enemies because their interests represent a legitimate threat to the capitalist white supremacist status quo. 

“Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off, ignore it, isolate it with greater the corresponding violence from power. The only effective challenge to power is one that is broad enough to make isolation impossible, and intensive enough to cause repression to affect the normal lifestyle of as many members of the society as possible[...] Nothing can bend consciousness more effectively than a false arrest, a no-knock invasion, careless, panic-stricken gunfire.”

—George Jackson (Blood In My Eye)

The issue is not simply “police brutality.” But, the mere existence and functionality of the inherently anti-black, subservient to capital institution of polic[e/ing]. “Police brutality” like many liberalized frameworks, individualizes structural oppression and power. Such framing leaves space for reformism, as if there’s only certain aspects of policing that needs to be readdressed. It’s an undeniable fact that technically “not all cops kill” but instead of moral posturing, we can focus on the political and ideological functioning of policing in service of whiteness, capital(ism), and settler-colonialism, as being in direct contradiction of the lives and well-being of racialized, colonized, and working-class people. Focusing the problem on the mere existence of polic[e/ing], as an institutionalized direct descendant of chattel slavery previously branded ‘slave patrolling,’ we’re able to discuss the inherent (racialized & class-based) violences within the institution at-large. And it allows us to reckon with the entire institution instead of individual actors, their political or moral standing, as well as individualized notions of “justice” in the face of terror, violence, and death at the hands of the police. “Justice” under this racial capitalism, is an impossibility—an ideological liberal mystification. The scarcity in the realm of political imagination that [neo]liberalism champions leads to a reality in which many people’s analysis and understanding of “justice” is merely individualized imprisonment and tepid-at-best liberal reforms. Advancing our collective understanding beyond the individual “bad” or killer cop toward an understanding of structural violence, is crucial to building an abolitionist politic grounded in empathy and community.

We have been bombarded with dozens of videos and photos of cops kneeling, crying, giving impassioned speeches, and public displays of some of the most shallowest forms of performative solidarity—an age-old tactic wielded to “humanize” officers and neutralize the perceived threat in the protesters, while also attempting to control the media narrative —only for these same cops to turn around and within minutes unleash terror on the self-proclaimed “peaceful” protesters as they chant and march in-advocacy for the ending of Black terror and death at the hands of the police. If the mere pleading for the ruling class and its on-the-ground agents to stop massacring Black people with impunity is enough of a crime to be met with chemical warfare, “rubber” bullets, harassment, beatings, and mass imprisonment—what does that say about the functionality of these institutions? 

When we see agents of the ruling class in militarized “riot” gear, oftentimes comment sections filled with disapproval, American liberals claiming “they look like they’re in war,” and viral tweets from imperialist veterans not-so-subtly declaring that type of militancy should be preserved for Black and brown people and countries abroad—and not home. We must counter these liberal narratives by highlighting that there is no significant political, ideological, or moral difference between domestic police and the military. Both serve the same class and ideological apparatus and represent an occupying force wherever they’re stationed. The military predominantly operates as the global police of the world, or as George Jackson would call it the “international wing of repressive institutions.” But, when the domestic police are overwhelmed, they call in their big brother (US military) to help fight their battle—hand-and-hand as enemies of the people—in a mission to terrorize and politically repress racialized, colonized, and working class people. So when Trump says “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and grants the military immunity to terrorize and shoot protesters that is nothing more than the head of empire simply carrying on the legacy of terrorists-in-chief before him, reaffirming the purpose of the mere existence of the military, as fascist enforcers of capitalist, colonial, and imperialist violence and their right to do what they already do to colonized and oppressed people in third world and global south countries. 

We must realize that we mustn’t give cops, in all forms, the benefit of the doubt or go out of our way to plead to their conscience—in which most, if not all of them lack—because their articulation of the situation at hand, as evidenced by their preparedness and tactics, is that of war. And in all of its possibly well-meaning glory, going into battle with the mindset of pleading to their (lack of) conscience or going out of your way to prove you’re one of the “good” and “peaceful” protesters—through chants and other means—won’t stop the terror of chemical warfare that will transpire when the political performance ends. The police are uncompromising in their belief in the current oppressive social order, they have legally, morally, and politically pledged their lives to it, and we must be uncompromising in our fight towards tearing it down and building anew. There’s a reason cops show up to even the most “peaceful” of protests with militarized riot gear prepared at any moment to immobilize activists, organizers, and journalists while conspiring with the media apparatus to demonize protests and all of its participants.

 “The political act is defined as criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order.”

 —Angela Davis (If They Come in the Morning)

The nearly non-materially existing dichotomy between “good protester” and “bad protester” or “non-violent” and “violent” are not only useless identifiers, but an unfortunate fundamental misunderstanding of the structural powers that be, at-large. The ideology of Black liberation is inherently violent to the forces of capital and white supremacy. We must move beyond the media fueled tropes rooted in colonial moral posturing, that serves no one but our ruling elites. History has shown us, it does not matter whether or not you’re a “good protester” or “bad protester,” “non-violent” or “violent,” and/or “innocent” or “guilty.” If you are for liberation for Black people, you are a threat to the interests of capitalism and white supremacy, and must be systemically repressed, by any means. To fight for the liberation of Black people, especially but not limited to the skin that has historically marked criminality, makes you an enemy of said nation who’s global economy is predicated on the terror and death of the colonial, namely Black, subject. Liberation, and the pursuit of it becomes a racialized affair under a system of colonial and imperialist domination in-which whiteness—a system of racial othering—is exclusively depicted as proximity to power and capital, which Black and other subjects of said domination have neither. It is crucial for the sustainment of this moment that we, first of all, not allow media political discourse to divide and conquer the wide variety of effective tactics that have been wielded by activists and organizers since the beginning of time; while also collectively understand the functionality of police and prisons as they are: inherently anti-Black politicized tools of the ruling elite to maintain their hegemony.

“The legal apparatus designates the Black liberation fighter a criminal, prompting Nixon, Agnew, Reagan et al. to proceed to mystify with their demagogy millions of Americans whose senses have been dulled and whose critical powers have been eroded by the continual onslaught of racist ideology. As the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the state’s fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.”

—Angela Davis (If They Come in the Morning)

Our understanding of non-violence should be that of an organized and meticulous tactical approach exercised by the oppressed, as opposed to a moral philosophy, endorsed and preferred by the ruling class and its agents. We never hear the ruling class, advocate for non-violence with their singular approach when they are hegemonizing and tyrannizing oppressed peoples across the globe, while being cheered on and thanked by many of its citizens. Non-violence, as a moral philosophy, in a society where violence against the marginalized is the norm—where millions are incarcerated, houseless, subjected to state sanctioned violence, and live in poverty—is, in and of itself just another form of colonial physical and ideological subjugation and therefore, violence. But, so much of non-violence is predicated on the premise of legality—despite its social and political limitations. Laws are only laws because we, whether knowingly or not, coercively consent to them. At any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class. What we’re seeing on live display is the state and all of its willing agents and participants are very much willing to terrorize and self-detonate than grant Black people even the slightest bit of freedom; and history has shown us it is not only appropriate but necessary to meet them with the only language that they understand. 

As Kwame Ture has noted, public pleas and non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscience, and the United States of America has none. Therefore, we must move beyond public outcries for vague calls for “love,” “unity,” and “peace,” waxing poetic, and pleading for our oppressors to somehow manage to adopt a conscience and do what goes against the very ideological and economic foundation of all their colonial institutions: stop terrorizing and killing us. We must move beyond the cycle of inaction and emotional appeals, through stagnantly and continuously debating the semantics of ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other moral and political posturing, when the reality of our situation is clear: Black lives can never truly matter under captivity of white supremacist capitalism and colonial patriarchy that directly and consequently begets Black oppression. How can it, when Black death is a necessity of racial capitalism and the institutions (such as policing and prisons) that exist to uphold it? So instead of public appeals to the ruling class and its agents to recognize the “humanity” in those relegated to slave; we recognized the reality in which racialized terror and violence is quite literally the point—as the mere existence of Black lives are in direct and inherent contradiction with the forces of capital—and a necessity for the continued maintenance of the current white supremacist capitalist, imperialist, (settler-)colonial order. It is crucial for us to remember that these institutions, namely policing and prisons, that continue to so violently persist, are merely an extension of European colonialism and slavery. 

“...with each reform, revolution became more remote[...]But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define [fascism] in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.’” 

—George Jackson (Blood In My Eye)

The only realistic solution to a reality in which anti-Black terror, violence, and death is an inevitability to the functionality of a system, is abolition. Yet, ironically enough, the lack of political imagination, beyond the electoral strategy and reformism, and the inability to envision a world, or even country, devoid of police and prisons is rooted in (anti-Black), racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage. The notion that an (uncivilized) people must to be, at all times, patrolled and policed, or else chaos and violence would reign, has been used as a justification for countless structural violences on the part of European peoples since the origins of colonialism. If we know criminality is inherently racialized, one must ask themselves: when you envision the criminal and/or “evildoer,” what do you see? What do they look like? More than likely it is someone who is non-white and/or poor. This is something we have to seriously grapple with, even amongst abolitionist circles. The vast majority of people who, for whatever reason, are incapable of envisioning a world without police and prisons, are simply unwilling to interrogate the dominant ideological apparatus that we have all, in one way or another, internalized. 

Emphasizing the largely classed and gendered based nature of crime, is of the utmost importance. Crime is not an “inevitable” aspect of society, but an inevitable reaction to socio-economic and political structural forces at-large; specifically poverty being an inevitability of capitalism while sexual, gendered, and domestic violences are an inevitability of colonial patriarchy. If we combat the systems, we combat the social reactions. 

Another thing we’re witnessing is white people moralizing the looting, destruction of, and “violence” towards inanimate objects (despite the fact that white history is that of constant looting, destruction, and violence) as result of their moral, spiritual, and political ties to land, property, monuments, and capital built on genocide and slavery. Whiteness being so inextricable to the foundations of capital(ism) and ultimately property, inhibits white people’s ability to extend such an empathy to the lives of Black people. Property and capital, being so inextricable to the foundations of whiteness and the construction of race, as a whole, ushers in the reality in which they become God-like figures. White people’s existence on this planet and their understanding of the world makes so much more sense once you realize that, white people, globally, are the police. Whiteness allows and entails them the “monopoly on morality” to be such a thing. Whether it’s with foreign affairs, and their paternalistic analysis of non-white countries, which ultimately leads to the justifying the actions of their imperialist government—even from “socially conscious” white folks. Or, in the case of how they overwhelmingly believe they maintain the prerogative to dictate the ways subjects of white oppression retaliate against said oppression (though, to be fair, they technically do). But, the point is: the entire logic of whiteness, as a deliberately political and social invention, makes it such a construct that’s—under white supremacy—inseparable from the role of the state. therefore, white people assume these roles as agents of the state globally—whether subconsciously or not.

And, of course, this is why we have been subjected to countless imagery on social media of white people (and those aspiring to be white by-way-of proximity to capital, power, and “respectability”) putting their bodies and lives on the line to protect capital (and physical embodiments of it) and private property—in a way that they would never sacrifice their bodies or even time for Black lives and liberation. Such an imagery should serve as a spit in the face to not just Black people, but all persons concerned with our liberation from the chains of capital. If persons of the white race are willing to put their lives on the line for their god: property and capital, but wouldn’t bother doing such a thing for Black people: what does that say about how they see us? We’re beneath inanimate objects on the hierarchy of things worthy of protection. But, it also just goes to show that as much as the white American is willing to die for property relations and capital—by any means necessary—we must be willing to live and die for our collective liberation. Let this be a moment in which we’re reminded that if there’s ever scenario in which our ruling elites are ever in-need of more armed protectors of the white supremacist status quo there will be countless ordinary white people, at the front of the line, fully prepared to live out their white vigilante idealizations and sacrifice their lives and bodies to save settler capitalism.

When Empire Comes Home: Poverty, Police Brutality, and Racism in a Zombie Age

By Connor Harney

As I write this, I am filled with hopeful dread. Dread at the prospect of what could come to pass—an America more brutal and repressive like the regimes it has installed abroad. Hope that the uprisings across the country might mean we have finally found the exit to the labyrinth at history’s end. It has become common among many on the left to call the current political economic order zombie neoliberalism. What they miss with that analysis is that it has always been a zombie, a shambling embalmed corpse with an insatiable appetite for labor living and dead—cannibalizing the product of all generations past. It feeds and infects, leaving in its wake a world after its own image. Corpses are not born, but they also do not die, they rot and decay. The stench of carrion marks the eternal present America has found itself in since the 1970s.

In this moment when the motor of history seems to be once again started, if in what may only be fits and stops, it seemed appropriate to go back to this article that was originally written in the wake of the murders of Mike Brown and Freddie Gray. In it, I tried to lay out the links between poverty, racism, and police violence. There is little in the main body, I would change. There are a few things that I would emphasize now that I did not then, which I will address here, and a few strategical points that will be added as concluding remarks.

Even as cities burn from coast to coast, there appears to be less of condemnation of the destruction of property. That reactions seem to come only from the most craven conservative voices and the most milquetoast liberals. What I think, whether right or wrong, is that many Americans have felt in the more than half-decade since Ferguson that they have no power—a sense only more pronounced by the recent trauma of the worldwide pandemic. This feeling of powerlessness is made known at both the barricade and the ballot box.

The fact that almost half the country does not vote, should tell you all you need to know about the state of the country and its politics. They are a vacuous empty spectacle that does nothing, but provide jobs for talking heads and water cooler talk for opposing spectators in the professional-managerial class. At the same time, this feeling of powerlessness manifests itself in uprisings as well, they’ve become a safety-valve for a beaten and battered populace to unleash pent up rage in the primal scream of protest. When I first wrote this piece, these uprisings were less cyclical, and most importantly, many did not understand the images of rebellion, their own experience of other kinds of powerlessness outside of that imposed by the historical racial caste system has taught them to.

Just as people have learned to understand the place of their own struggle alongside that of others, people find in these moments the strength that they have together. Indeed, it will only be together that we will overcome 50 years of stasis, our representatives certainly feel no need to do anything to earn our representation. As avatars of current order, both Trump and Biden epitomize the rotten bankruptcy of neoliberalism—it’s utter exhaustion under the current conditions. The careers of both men were born and sustained by the new political economic system forged from the crises of the seventies and institutionalized by the Reagan revolution of the eighties. One made his bones in the new politics of plutocracy and the other a plutocrat who build his fortune through the capture of politics. Both vultures not only helped picked clean the corpse of the New Deal order, they got fat from it. Now the skeleton of American society they left behind is on the verge of collapse, and neither has anything on offer.

Both men find themselves more and more in a world that no longer exists, the rot has set in, the zombie gnashes its teeth, but seems unable to feast. Leaving them both Quixotic figures, fighting windmills, the ghosts of a formerly triumphant America. Trump finds solace in imperial brutality, unleashing death squads that were once reserved for freeing the developing world from Communists and terrorists, while Biden finds comfort in politics of performative conciliation, harkening back to a time of more civilized barbarism—before empire came home.

The question as people begin to feel the movement of history again is this: ‘will this be the end of the zombie’s long walk or will it find its appetite once again? Will this decayed matter give us fertilizer to plant the seeds of the new world?’

On a 2014 trip to Washington D.C, I could feel revolution in the air. The discrepancies in income were visible even blocks apart. High-end grocery stores were less than a quarter of a mile from public housing, which created the appearance of a war zone. Barbed wire menacingly lined the walls of the façade surrounding these buildings. I was surprised at the lack of police presence at first sight. Instead, every building was watched by at least three private security guards. When police appeared, they appeared in full combat attire: flak jacket, helmet, and what seemed to be a semi-automatic rifle. It was obvious to me at the moment, that the only way to sustain such disparities in income was through this show of force. Only through the militarization of the police and the supplementation by private security can the tensions created by such a reality be eased. It is no surprise killings of young black men by white police officers has resonated such response public outcry across the nation. The riot is merely the means by which those living under these conditions have tried to make their voices heard. Protest is simply giving voice to the voiceless. 

To say that these movements have sprung up sporadically out of nothing ignores the historical currents of the last fifty years. With the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, some believed the work had been done, hence the eventual acceptance by some of the idea of a post-racial America. Yet, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explained in a speech in 1967, “The gains in the first era of struggle were obtained from the power structure at bargain rates. It didn’t cost anything to integrate lunch counters.”  Further, “It didn’t cost the nation a penny to guarantee the right to vote. Now we are in a period where it will cost the nation billions of dollars to get rid of poverty—to get rid of slums, to make quality integrated education a reality. That is where we are now.”[1] King made this prescription nearly sixty years ago, but for the most part it has been unheeded.  Instead, we are in much the same place we were in 1967. This desire to gain economic and social rights along with the legal rights the black community had just gained gave birth to the black power movement of late 1960s and 1970s. Frustration in the lack of progress through non-violence gave rise to black-nationalist groups like the Black Panthers and their paramilitary the Black Liberation Army. These groups were brutally repressed by the Federal Government throughout that period and rendered irrelevant as a force for mass mobilization by the early 1980s. While conditions have only deteriorated in recent decades, for the most part organized movements have been few and far between. Instead, there have been infrequent uprisings against the continued oppression of poverty. The 1992 riots, for example were in response to the beating of Rodney King by the LAPD.  This vicious act of violence was broadcast for the entire world to see—brought condemnation, but no change. 

In American society, poverty and race often go hand, and for the historical reasons of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration are often disproportionately affected by fluctuations. The recession of 2008 has served to heighten existing disparities in wealth and brought upon a spirit of questioning of the very institutions that many in American society hold so dear. Occupy Wall Street brought forward a new dialogue that questioned the very tenets of capitalism. Suddenly, the rhetoric of the 1% and 99% became part of the everyday vernacular of many Americans. While the movement itself has petered out, its legacy still remains.  Today, low-income service workers are organizing across the country for a living wage. With all of these issues, there is one elephant continuously in the room, and that is the authority of capital and the capitalist system. To question any income equality is to question the very legitimacy of the system itself, and this awakening of consciousness has certainly shown no signs of slowing. Those who feel the failings of this system the most are the ones living in urban centers across the nation—as they are slowly pushed out by the processes of gentrification, outsourcing, and automation, as well as cuts to social programs meant to curb the worst abuses of poverty. 

Black and Hispanic communities who represent generally between 20% and 40% respectively of those living in poverty nationwide are disproportionately affected by this turn of events. This stands in stark contrast to the white communities, which represent 10% or less of those living at the poverty level. In the nation’s capital this difference is even more astounding.  The black community represents 36% of those living in poverty and the white community represents only 5%.[2]  The real level of these discrepancies is probably much higher, as these statistics are calculated using the U.S. Census Bureau’s definition of poverty, which is woefully inaccurate from any sort of moral calculus.  For instance, the poverty threshold given for a family of five in 2014 was just under thirty-thousand dollars.[3] Given these convergences of forces, it is almost as if American society has written off the plight of these communities in favor of the continued progress for the rest. It seems that American society has decided that black and brown lives do not matter. Is it surprising, then, that a new level of consciousness has arisen, in the wake of violence against young black men and women by police in urban areas? The protests that have emerged in response and that will likely continue to do so, represent the woeful cry of the unheard, who feel they have been stripped of their humanity.

One of the most frequent criticisms of these uprising has been the destruction of property. This phenomenon can be explained and justified on multiple levels. First, businesses represent part of the apparatus of oppression. They represent the process of gentrification and are viewed by members of those communities as the invading armies of an occupational force. These businesses are symbolic of the urban diaspora of black communities from their homes. The traditional inhabitants are being replaced by urban white professionals, who bring with them skyrocketing property values that are for the most part untenable for those living on one or two minimum-wage jobs. There is also the understandable disillusionment with the system that has failed these communities. These protests have let out the pent-up rage and cynicism, acting as a social-safety valve. Instead of rushing to judge the victims, it is our duty to question the very system that has relegated an already vulnerable community to the misery of poverty, despite the radical promise of the 1960s—a system that has not only failed to live up to that compact made all of those decades ago, but has choked, shot in the back, and severed the spine of the very will of the people. For those not convinced of the role of violence in protest, I will leave you with words of Malcolm X, who pointed out the hypocrisy of those who denounce protest simply because it does not comply with their own peaceful vision for social change:  

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.[4]

We as a people should all stand in solidarity with the oppressed people of this nation, from Ferguson to Baltimore, and decry the violence of the state. 

To which now we must add Minneapolis, and of course the cities in between now and then that have similarly erupted in righteous fury against those that act as an occupying force in communities across the United States. 

It remains unclear what will come of this nationwide rebellion against police violence and the stripping of state functions down to its essentials function as a repressive apparatus deployed to maintain class division.

While this moment appears exceptional, particularly in the light of the ongoing pandemic and economic depression, we should remain sober in our analysis, but also strident in our support. Frederick Engels reminds of this lesson, writing in February, 1848:

Our age, the age of democracy, is breaking. The flames of the Tuileries and the Palais Royal are the dawn of the proletariat. Everywhere the rule of the bourgeoisie will now, come crashing down, or be dashed to pieces.[5]

Of course, in hindsight, we know that the Revolutions of 1848 failed, ushering in an age of absolutist authoritarianism. The rebellion was crushed, but the specter of communism continued to haunt Europe, and later the whole world. But the more important lesson to draw in this case is that our optimism of the will should be tempered by pessimism of the will. 

We never know what will happen, but we should always act according to an analysis of our material conditions. In this case, without a working-class party, one that represents working people of all stripes, then these protests, like the ones that came before, will burn out without a change in the status quo—body cams and diversity training have utterly failed to stem the tide of police violence, and any likely concession that does not either outright abolish the police or remove their power over the stat purse likely will not either.

How then should communists orient them in these uncertain times? Support the struggles of the oppressed no matter their likely outcome. Continue to organize your workplace, link those struggles to those of community. Just as some bus driver unions have refused to transport arrested protesters in an act of brave solidarity. Help educate and learn from those in struggle. It is only our ability to understand our world that we can change it. Finally, remain militant, but not dogmatic. Understand that insurrection and the fight for reform our not mutually exclusive, one may right for one moment and not in the next. 

Whatever happens, let’s make sure the ruling class never forgets the name George Floyd.

Notes

[1] Martin Luther King Jr., “Hungry Club Speech,” May 10th, 1967, http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/hungry-club-speech (accessed September 25, 2015), pg 3.

[2] The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity,” State Health Facts, http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/ (accessed September 25, 2015).

[3] United States Census Bureau, “Poverty Thresholds,” Poverty, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/threshld/index.html (accessed September 30, 2015).

[4]  Malcom X, “Message to the Grassroots,” October 1963,  http://genius.com/Malcolm-x-message-to-the-grassroots-annotated/ (accessed September 25, 2015).

[5] Friedrich Engels, “Revolution in Paris,” in Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1845-48, vol. 6 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), 356, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1848/02/27.htm.

Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

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Reviving the Brazilian and Bolivian Left

By Yanis Iqbal

Left-wing politics has experienced a stratospheric decline in Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, the democratically elected president of Worker’s Party (PT) was ousted through a parliamentary coup in 2016. After this, a right-wing extremist named Jair Bolsonaro has assumed the presidency and has mercilessly blemished the healthcare through his bluff and bluster. This has led to more than 200,000 cases, 15,000 deaths and already 2 health ministers have resigned due to Bolsonaro’s adamant insistence on the use of hydroxychloroquine. Similarly, Bolivia has also seen the ouster of Evo Morales in November, 2019 through a rightist-military orchestrated coup which has led to the appointment of Jeanine Anez as the president who is an ardent catholic and racist. Anez has unleashed the “Bolsonarofication of Bolivia” in the Covid-19 crisis which has caused the erosion of the Unified Health System, the banishment of Cuban doctors and the reduction of myriad health and cash transfer programs.

The dramatic deterioration of the left in both the countries is causing an unprecedented damage to the people living in these countries. With the astronomic rise of the right-wing bloc, full-fledged neoliberalism has again dug its fiendish claws in the flesh of Brazil and Bolivia. A catastrophic situation like this necessitates the re-establishment of a new left-wing politics that is capable of waging a counter-war against the overtly barbarous and crudely capitalist right-wing camp. For this to happen, we need to critically analyze the previous structure of leftist governments and highlight its weaknesses and pro-corporate proclivities so that a truly revolutionary architecture can be built.

Throughout their existence as a prominent political-electoral force, the Brazilian and Bolivian left have been characterized by a neo-developmentalist statist agenda. This type of political project is foundationally a reformist program which fundamentally aims to reconcile antagonistic classes through the conquest of the state.

 The discursive construction of non-antagonistic class relations in a reformist leftist politics is regulated through the use of the state. State starts serving as the site of class unity where irreconcilable demands are negotiated and an unstable equilibrium is maintained through the concessions which the bourgeoisie is willing to grant to the working class. These class compromises are made to co-opt the working class into the restricted rationality of neoliberalism. The bourgeoisie not only co-opts the working class but also reformulates their demands through new anti-revolutionary perspectives and creates the intelligible terrain on which economic-political demands are made. Through the assimilation and reformulation of anti-capitalist forces, a polyclassist pact is produced which is presented by the state as a “revolutionary measure”. Therefore, the definitive role of the state in a neo-developmentalist system consists in its ability to cooperate with the capitalists and to set up itself as the mediating agent in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  

Due to its status as a moderator of class struggle, the state has to follow the rules of the global market and has to repeatedly constrict the social movements when they cross the thresholds defined by neoliberalism. Along with constriction, the state also enables a market ideology by generating a consumerist culture and encouraging possessive individualism. In this process of constriction and enablement, we need to highlight two important tactics.

(1) The first tactic of neo-developmentalist state refers to its attempts to help in the proliferation of a market-centric ideology through amorphous political lexicon. For example, the Brazilian state under the PT administration was increasingly adopting a class-insensitive political system by lumping together the working class in the category of the “poor”. This was done indiscriminately in the 2010 election campaign of Dilma Rousseff in which she was presented as the “mother of the poor”. Notions like these facilitated the erasure of the class combativeness of the working class by interpellating them as “impotent individuals” who could be rescued by the welfare policies of state. Along with the introduction of the category of the poor, the Brazilian state also added a consumerist tinge to its programme of fragmenting the working class. In a video released by PT in 2013, it was said that “college education, vacations, air travel, a home, a car, meat on the table and shopping are today a right for all”. The depiction of poverty reduction in terms of different possessions surreptitiously inserts a market logic in which economic status is measured in terms of access to specific goods and not on the basis of the ownership of means of production. The Worker’s Party has partly replaced the concept of the poor with the equally amorphous concept of nation and in a statement given by it in 2017, it said that “our experiences and formulations are not the property of the Worker’s Party; they belong to the heritage of the Brazilian people”.  This statement reflects the hesitance of PT to combatively confront the bourgeoisie of Brazil.

(2) The second tactic involves the direct efforts of the neo-developmentalist state to subvert class-based social movements. In this aspect, Bolivia serves as a paradigmatic example. In the December 2005 elections, Evo Morales had secured a majority with 54% of the votes and decided to build a constituent assembly which would encapsulate the popular will of the suppressed and indigenous people. Surprisingly, in September 2006, MAS (Movement Towards Socialism), the party to which Evo Morales belongs, decided that social movements could not send their representatives to the constituent assembly and only political organizations were allowed to do so. This decision was momentous because it came during the time of an aggressive class war in which the capitalists of the Media Luna (Half Moon) of the eastern lowlands, who owned the oil and gas industry, were belligerently trying to weaken the strength of the indigenist-leftist bloc by capturing state power. Therefore, the decision to debar social movements from joining the constituent assembly implicitly indicated the capitalistic tendencies within the Morales government. But this decision soon had to be revoked in April 2009 due to the opposition presented to it by the social movements.

Through the two statist tactics of constriction and active facilitation, the Brazilian and Bolivian states were able to contain the radicality of left-wing politics. By pursuing a regressively reformist policy stance, a newfangled marketized-welfare state was created which embroidered the unvarnished mechanism of capitalism with a left-progressive ideology. For example, Brazil was able to utilize the commodity boom of the 2000s to institute some welfare policies like the Bolsa Familia which benefitted 12 million families. There was also a 50% increase in the minimum wages and higher education was also made accessible. Along with the instauration of these programmes, there was also the concealed and simultaneous reprimarization of economy and the enhancement of a neo-extractive, agro-export economic infrastructure. This was the result of the supposed global market integration of Brazil which increased the economic dependency of Brazil on other countries. Brazil, under PT, also witnessed the construction of new dams such as the Belo Monte dam, Madeira river dams and 4 dams on the Teles Pires River. The increasingly export-oriented, environmentally damaging and extractive economy of Brazil was also obscured by the “democratization drive” in which participatory institutions such as the Participatory Budgeting (PB) was introduced. These democratic platforms actually professionalized the civil society, statified resistance movements and only allowed for “friendly dialogue” rather than serious power sharing.

A similar situation was seen in Bolivia during the question of oil nationalization. During the politically turbulent time in which the question of the nationalization of oil was gaining prominence, Morales had temporarily adopted a centrist position in which he supported Carlos Mesa’s soft-neoliberal decision to raise the level of royalties paid by oil corporations. But the adverse effects of this diluted neoliberal position were clearly shown by the mere 18% percent of vote which MAS garnered in the 2004 Municipal Elections. Morales had to reverse his position due to this electoral setback and in 2006 he announced the nationalization of Bolivia’s oil. This nationalization too was not complete because it did not expropriate these companies but increased the stakes of the state and raised the royalties and taxes. An incomplete Nationalization of oil was not the only measure which contradicted the post-neoliberalism of Bolivia. The presence of Chinese and Japanese mining companies on the salt flats of Altiplano, the increase in foreign direct investment from 278 million dollars in 2006 to 1.18 billion dollars in 2013 also questioned the growing economic independence of Bolivia.  But due to the commodity boom between 2006 and 2014, Morales’s Bolivia was able to increase its revenues and alleviate poverty from 64% of the population in 2002 to 36.3% in 2011. Extreme poverty too was reduced to approximately 17%. This compensated for its capitalistic economic edifice which remained intact despite these progressive measures.

Due to an unstable compromise which the Bolivian and Brazilian governments had to maintain between the bourgeoisie and working class, there emerged certain cracks in the thinly veiled capitalism of both these countries. In 2015, Brazil saw the neoliberal re-adjustment of the economy in which unemployment rose by 38%, extreme poverty increased from 7.9% to 9.2% and there was 4.6% increase in self-employed workers, signifying the informalization of labor. These measures were enacted due to the decline in the windfall from the commodity boom which the Lula administration had utilized by exporting some major commodities to China such as iron ore, raw sugar and soybeans. But now the Dilma government had to mould its economy according to the rules of the global market which was experiencing a contraction. Bolivia too saw the emergence of economic – political fissures in which the Morales government started diluting and de-intensifying its revolutionary proclamations. From 2006 to 2013, the percentage of primary product exports as a share of total exports increased from 89.4% to 96%. This denotes the extractivist economic structure of Bolivia in which soybean production has increasingly assumed a major role. In Santa Cruz, large landowners and soy producers represent only 2% of the farm units but own more than 70% of land. Land ownership concentration is not only restricted to Santa Cruz but is rather the integral part of Bolivian economy in which the soy complex is the most prominent. In the capitalist circuit of soy complex, agro-chemicals and machineries are imported and these are then distributed to the agribusiness oligarchy of Bolivia which exacerbates the economic existence of small soybean producers by making soybean production a capital-intensive process.

Gradually, the fissures of reformist capitalism started widening and these ultimately prepared the fertile ground for the growth of a fascistic right. The right was able to expand its social base by re-articulating the various weaknesses of the weakly socialist governments. In Bolivia, for example, the right highlighted the transition of Evo Morales from a Mallku and a supporter of cabildo abiertos (open councils) to a caudillo or strongman. By portraying Evo Morales and his socio-economic system as authoritarian, the right paved the way for an extra-institutional paradigm of mobilization which used the idiom of leftist mass-based activism to unleash violence. Brazilian right also reaped the growing discontent of the masses and this was most visible when Jair Bolsonaro was touting himself as an anti-system presidential candidate who could change everything. This anti-system position then metamorphosed into an anti-democratic agenda which countered the meek reformism of the neo-developmentalist left with cultural-symbolic combativeness.

The unpropitious circumstances in Brazil and Bolivia are politically incapacitating the left. It seems that the left-wing camp in both these countries is still not adopting a new strategy and wants to rehash its hackneyed program of weak socialism. But it should now acknowledge that its dime-store developmentalism and unimaginative cesspool of socialist state conquest is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marxism. The Bolivian and Brazilian left apprehended the state as a pivotal instrument in the entire power project of leftism and ignored what Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had said. In Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had said that the state is the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Lenin had said that bourgeoisie state, “whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Bolivian and Brazilian leftists made their first fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the state as a universal apparatus which could guarantee the peaceful living of all the people. By universalizing the state and understanding it as an arbitrator above the class relations, the Bolivian and Brazilian left got ensnared in the vortex of bourgeoisie ideology which obviates the emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat is of utmost necessity because it involves the exterior dictatorialization of the bourgeoisie and the internal democratization of the organization of living. This internal democratization is diametrically opposed to the democratic drivel of the capitalism which is restricted to formal parliamentarianism and is fearful of genuine mass based activism. Therefore, the Brazilian and Bolivian left has to undauntingly espouse the strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat which alone can guarantee the complete annihilation of the bourgeoisie cultural-legal state apparatus and its replacement by a new revolutionary state which in unwilling to make invisibilize class struggle.

The second mistake made by the Brazilian and Bolivian state follows from the first one. By not smashing the old state apparatus and refusing to support the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Brazilian and Bolivian state discarded the concept of communism and substituted it with socialism. Dictatorship of the proletariat is only present during the phase of socialism which Lenin defined eloquently as “a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism”. In this situation of socialism, the socialist state has to establish itself and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the objective of constantly decentralizing its power and always working towards the goal of communism or classless society. But the Bolivian and Brazilian states did not regard socialism as a goal towards communism but as a destination in-itself. Due to the erasure of communism, both the states instituted socialism not as a contradictory and tensional period of continuous class struggle in which the state is present to empower grassroots movement, but as a period of “class collaboration” in which different classes live as unified individuals under the state authority. This entrenchment of class collaboration is quite similar to the idea of the 1936 Soviet constitution in which Stalin had anointed Soviet Union as the “State of the whole people”. Brazilian and Bolivian left can navigate their way through their Stalinist embroilment by reinstating communism as the primary objective and seeing socialism as a period of intense class struggle and devolution of power.

The two remedial measures mentioned above can greatly facilitate the construction of a new revolutionary strategy which is politically potent and economically exhaustive. These stratagems can be crafted only if the reformist left of Bolivia and Brazil admits that there is no alternative to class struggle and produces a cohesive communist campaign which openly opposes the peremptory pronouncements of neoliberalism.

Socialist Revolution, Women’s Liberation, and the Withering Away of the Family

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

Originally published at Left Voice.

In college, I read a lot of theorists who called Marxism “class reductionist.” They claimed that socialism only attacks economic problems and ignores oppression. But, as I began to study Marxism, I found these oft-repeated tropes about Marx only addressing class are far from the truth. 

From the very beginning, Marxists have taken up the question of gender oppression — sometimes with more clarity, sometimes with less, but always discussing it. A brief overview: In 1879, August Bebel wrote Woman and Socialism. In 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he traces the roots of gender oppression to the creation of private property. He argues that there is nothing biological about patriarchy, monogamy, or the two-parent family unit. Later, Clara Zetkin was the editor of the German Social Democratic Party’s women’s newspaper Equality. She fought for women to become subjects of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy. 

But for me, it is the Russian Revolution that best illustrates Marxist ideas made reality in relation to the fight against sexism and for women’s rights. It demonstrates that for leading Marxist thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky, revolution alone was insufficient to rid society of patriarchy. Rather, revolution was just the beginning of a profound social transformation of women’s role in society, as well as a transformation of all social values and culture. This is demonstrated by the laws enacted by the Bolshevik Party that led the revolution, as well as the broad debates about women’s rights within the party. 

Yet, as Lenin put it, equality in law does not mean equality in life. As a result of the civil war that followed the revolution, and the international isolation of the first workers’ state, the economic conditions for women’s equality did not exist. Under these dire circumstances, Stalinism took hold, erasing workers’ victories and especially women’s victories won in the Russian Revolution. The emergence of Stalinism created the false idea that Marxism, and socialism more broadly, are unconcerned with sexism and patriarchy. 

Women as the Spark for the Russian Revolution

The context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is one of complete misery for the country and its people. Russia had gone through a series of wars: with Japan in 1904-05, a failed revolution in 1905, and World War I in 1914. During the World War, prices went up 131% in Moscow and women spent hours waiting in the biting cold for basic necessities like wheat and sugar. 

Marx believed that the socialist revolution would begin in advanced industrialized nations. Russia, however, lagged far behind the economic and productive power of countries such as Germany. Peasants made up 80% of the population — mostly illiterate and isolated from the political debates in the cities. Peasant life was based on a strict division of labor and women were taught to be obedient to their father and later their husband. It was only after 1914 that women were allowed to separate from their husband, but only with a man’s permission; likewise, women could only get a passport or a job with a man’s permission. 

There was a small but strong proletariat in Russia’s cities. World War I played an important role in increasing the weight of women workers in the Russian proletariat: as men went off to war, more and more women joined the workforce. Women made up 26.6 percent of the workforce in 1914, but nearly half (43.4 percent) by 1917. On top of the miserable working conditions, women industrial workers also faced gendered inequality. They earned lower wages and were not allowed to organize in the same unions as their male colleagues.

However, women were the spark that ignited the Russian Revolution which would topple the Tsar and create the conditions for the Bolsheviks to take power. In late February 1917, the women in Petrograd factories left their workplaces, going to neighboring factories calling on the men to also leave their jobs and join the strike. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda stated, “The first day of the revolution — that is the Women’s Day, the day of the Women’s Workers International! All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on that day!”

After the February Revolution, workers organized delegate assemblies, called soviets, to make decisions about the burgeoning movement. Women participated in the soviets, although to a lesser degree than men. The Bolshevik paper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) was relaunched in May 1917 and discussed equality of the sexes, as well as the need for the state to provide communal facilities for taking care of household chores, traditionally imposed on women. 

The stage for the October Revolution, which ended the provisional government and brought about the world’s first workers’ state, was prepared by women’s radical activism. It was the tireless organizing work of Bolshevik women such as Alexandra Kollontai that allowed the Bolsheviks to win over the majority in the soviets and take power in the October Revolution. Women also participated in the October Revolution by providing medical help and even joining the Red Guard. 

What Did the Bolsheviks Think About Women’s Issues? 

The Bolsheviks saw women’s role in a given society as a measure of the society as a whole; it wouldn’t be until women had achieved full equality that they could consider the socialist revolution ultimately successful. After the revolution, immediate measures for women’s liberation were taken. The Bolsheviks put forward four primary means to support women’s equality: free love, women’s participation in the workforce, the socialization of domestic work, and the withering away of the family.

The Bolsheviks believed that women should not be coerced to marry or to remain in a marriage as a result of family obligations or economic pressures. Relationships should be based exclusively on love, not social coercion. The Bolsheviks did not believe that they could immediately take up the task of building new types of relationships, recognizing that the revolution alone would not do away with centuries of patriarchal traditions, beliefs, and morals. Rather, they sought to destroy the  social basis of the bourgeois family and the inherited beliefs that keep women oppressed. Furthermore, they believed that women should have complete equality with men in the workplace and encouraged women to organize, vote, and run for positions of leadership in unions and soviets. 

Long before the Wages for Housework campaign, a global feminist movement that grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972, the Bolsheviks argued that there was nothing natural or biological about women doing domestic work or even raising children. This was an ideology perpetuated by capitalism that had no place in a socialist society. Liberating women from “domestic slavery” was a central discussion within the party. Trotsky writes,

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. 

Unlike the Wages for Housework campaign, the Bolsheviks sought to take housework out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of the workers state. The Bolsheviks did not want to maintain domestic work in the realm of the household, equally dividing those banal tasks between men and women. Rather, they wanted to divorce these tasks from the family unit and socialize domestic labor. In this way, the family and women in particular would shed much of their “reproductive” role. 

Equality in Law

The Bolsheviks put ideas into practice. In 1918, less than a year after the revolution, the Family Code was passed, which historian Wendy Goldman calls the “most progressive family legislation ever seen in the world.” It took the church out of the business of marriage and made matrimony a civil affair. It not only legalized divorce, but made it accessible to every married person without requiring a reason. The code ended centuries-old laws that assigned all property to men and provided equal rights to children born outside of a registered marriage. If a woman did not know who the father of her child was, all of her sexual partners would share responsibilities for child support. Importantly, it made women equal to men in law. A law as progressive as this has not been won to this day in the United States, as the Equal Rights Amendment was not confirmed by enough states. The author of the family code, Alexander Goikhbarg saw this law as transitory —it was not meant to strengthen either the state or the family, but to be a step towards the extinction of the family. 

In 1920, abortion was legalized, making the Soviet Union the first country in the world to do so. Prostitution and homosexuality were no longer banned in the USSR either. Additionally, the Bolsheviks opened public cafeterias, laundromats, schools, and day care centers as a step towards the abolition of women’s double shift at the workplace and at home. It was a step towards socializing domestic work, liberating individual women from the responsibility. 

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks saw women’s political participation as central to the advancement of the Soviet Union. They organized Zhenotdel, the women’s section of the party, made up of workers, peasants, and housewives who organized women at the local level. Delegates from Zhenotdel were elected for internships in the government as well. As Wendy Goldman argues, it was an important way for thousands of women to get involved in the party, as well as in politics more broadly. 

Equality in Life

Although the Bolsheviks made major advances by passing laws, they were very conscious that this was insufficient to guarantee true equality. Lenin says,

Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law. But that is not enough. It is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life. We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state… The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

Although the Bolsheviks stressed the material basis for inequality, they also knew that a profound personal change would have to occur in members of the new Soviet society. However, this change in people’s ideas was not divorced from the changes in the organization of society — a social reorganization won by proletarian revolution. In this sense, it is a reminder to us that simply changing people’s ideas is insufficient to create true equality. Sexism does not only exist in people’s minds, but in institutions and the organization of society. 

The Struggles of a Young Worker’s State

The young workers’ state faced considerable challenges in its first years. It was attacked by 14 imperialist armies and survived because of sacrifices made by workers and peasants in the Red Army. After a world war and then a civil war, the people of the Soviet Union faced starvation and high unemployment. 

Women suffered the most under these conditions. Although under explicit orders not to do so, women were laid off before their male colleagues. The 13th Congress of the Bolshevik Party discussed this problem explicitly, making new regulations to protect women’s employment. They said, “that the preservation of women workers in production has political significance.” 

A tenet of communism — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability — can only work in a society of plenty. Advanced capitalist mass production provides such a basis. However, when there isn’t enough, a select group will decide who has and who does not — a bureaucracy. This is why Lenin and so many other Bolsheviks placed their hopes in a German revolution, which would ensure that the USSR would not remain isolated. It would put German industry and the goods it produced under the control of the working class. However, the German revolution was squashed, leaving the Soviet Union to fend for itself. It is from the conditions of scarcity that the counter revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy emerged, reversing the advances made during the early years after the Russian Revolution. Stalinism went on to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, based on the theory of “socialism in one country.”

Stalinist Counterrevolution and Women’s Rights

The Stalinist bureaucracy staged a counterrevolution which murdered the Left Opposition inside the Bolshevik Party, locking up, exiling, or killing those who attempted to carry on the legacy of the 1917 revolution. Theorists who wrote about the withering away of the family such as Nikolai Krylenko were arrested and murdered, while the author of the 1918 Family Code was imprisoned in an asylum. 

At the same time that Stalin began to put forth the idea of socialism in one country, he also re-criminalized homosexuality and prostitution. In 1936, Stalin ended women’s right to an abortion, with Stalinist leaders arguing that women had the “honorable duty” to be mothers.

In order to put forward such reactionary ideas about gender, Stalin squashed the women’s department within the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as all women’s organizing on the local level. His government campaigned to bring back traditional gender roles, the very gender roles that the Bolsheviks had worked to break with. By 1944, Stalin had organized awards for women based on how many children they had. The “Order of Maternal Glory” was created for women with seven to nine children, and the title “Mother Heroine” for those with ten or more. 

The Left Opposition and the Bolshevik Legacy

As Stalin continued to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, Trotsky created the Fourth International, a grouping of communists dedicated to the legacy of the Bolsheviks. The Fourth International was against the Soviet bureaucracy and for power to the working class, not just in one country — as Stalin wanted — but around the world. 

The Transitional Program, which laid out the tasks for the Fourth International, argues that women’s rights are central for the socialist revolution. Trotsky says, 

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers.

Far from any class reductionism, Trotsky sees the organization of women in a revolutionary party as a central task for communists.

What Can We Learn?

One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution and it has been decades since a revolution has been able to shake capitalism. Some believe that revolution is impossible. Others believe that a workers’ revolution will create laws based on the racist, sexist, or homophobic attitudes that some workers hold today. Many equate Marxism with the struggle against exploitation, not the struggle against oppression. 

Yet when the Bolsheviks took power and immediately made laws supporting women’s rights, they knew the revolution did not and should not stop there. They had no illusions about even the most progressive gender legislation in the history of the world, on its own, ending patriarchy. The Bolsheviks knew that these laws created the foundation for liberation, but were not libration in itself. Instead, they had lively debates about how to organize the material conditions of the new society to root out oppression against women. They wanted to make sure women had full participation in work, education and politics— but not by taking on a double or triple burden of housework, childcare and paid work. They discussed socialized childcare and domestic work, as well as the withering away of the family as an organizing unit of society. Even the young workers’ state did not yet have the material conditions to realize this dream, but they took real and substantive steps in that direction. Stalinism put an end to all these dreams, reverting the Soviet Union to patriarchal norms. 

It’s been a long time since the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of thinkers who have made key contributions to socialist feminist thought since then, especially in the realm of sex, sexuality and queer theory. Social reproduction theory builds on key Marxist ideas, and there have been huge developments in a discussion of desire, sexuality and queer theory. These are all important to thinking about a socialist revolution in the 21st century, which would create the material foundations for the liberation of gender and sexuality. 

But we cannot leave the legacy of Marxism to those who pervert its meaning to crude class reductionism. We cannot allow Marx’s legacy to be mired by Stalinism and the patriarchal, counterrevolutionary view of gender and society that it upheld. We should draw lessons from the Bolshevik’s revolutionary tradition for women’s liberation. 

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

[Artwork by Mara Garcia, @magavitart]

By Eric Kerl

Originally published at Rampant Magazine.

he social, political, and economic crisis currently unfolding, shaped by a global pandemic, is a damning indictment of modern capitalism. In its first two months, more than 30 million people in the United States have lost their jobs. While business leaders cavort with the Trump administration and right-wing states’ rights advocates demand to reopen the economy, the crisis will only deepen. Indeed, many economists predict that the fallout will be the worst since the Great Depression.

The crisis of the 1930s culminated in the rise of fascist power in Europe. In the United States, it ushered in the New Deal coalition and the expansion of the welfare state. But, by the end of the decade, only the slaughter of World War II finally jumpstarted the global economy through sheer barbarism and unrestrained weapons production.

Like Donald Trump and the rest of today’s ruling class, leading capitalists of the 1930s had little to offer the majority of people after the stock market crashed in 1929. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness mushroomed. As the crisis deepened, the industrial overlord, notorious anti-Semite, and failed presidential hopeful Henry Ford advised poor people to take up sharecropping to feed themselves. With paid advertisements in newspapers across the country Ford claimed, “Stocks may fail, but seedtime and harvest do not fail.”[1] Meanwhile, ecological catastrophe devastated the dustbowl-ravaged Great Plains and displaced more than 3.5 million people. By 1934, the Yearbook of Agriculture announced:

Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production. . . . 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil.

While millions went hungry, Ford partnered with the growing Nazi war machine. During the first six months of 1932, Ford’s meagre operations in Germany struggled to make money. Although the plants were ridiculed as “foreign” by the wave of German nationalism, Ford swooned over Hitler’s new plans to shift automobile manufacturing into overdrive, fueled by government cash.  By 1937, Ford was a certified manufacturer of trucks and cars for the Nazi regime’s military.

Back in the United States, Ford summoned the police and National Guard against unemployed workers. During the spring of 1932, three thousand unemployed workers protested outside Ford’s behemoth River Rouge complex in Detroit demanding relief. Police attacked the protesters, injuring dozens. Four workers were shot and killed, including Joseph York, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed worker. The following day, York’s girlfriend, Mary Grossman, faced down the murderous cops:

Yes, I was there. I’m not sorry. I did it for starving millions. Blame capitalism which is the cause of all suffering. Now don’t talk to me![2]

Similar protests erupted in cities around the world, often organized and led by Communist Party members and other radicals. Politicians and media outlets routinely decried the reds and riots of unemployed. International headlines of the time read: “Spanish Jobless Riot,” “Canadians Attack City Hall,” “British Hunger Army Ready to Invade Commons,” “Police Battle Reds with Tear Gas at Detroit Factory,” “Police Protect President from Hunger Parade,” “German Jobless Charge Cabinet, Plunder Dole,” “Red Rebellion Flares in Spain,” and “Batons of Police Halted Red Mob in Washington Riot.”

Yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union noted at the time, “It is a matter of common knowledge among relief workers that vigorous demonstrations—so-called ‘riots’ by the unemployed, produce an almost miraculous effect in loosening the public purse-strings.”[3]

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

During the first month of 1928, nearly two years before the stock market crash of 1929, the entertainment industry magazine Variety expressed its anxiety for Chicago’s theater business. Unemployment, the article noted, was the highest since 1922. And theater-goers had reason to be uncomfortable: “The horde of ’boes and panhandlers infesting the Loop makes New York Times Square parasites seem like a coterie of philanthropists in comparison.” Still, the article remained naively optimistic. “Because of sound financial qualities, it is believed by authorities here the unemployment wave will be relieved considerably this year.”[4]

Instead, the number of unemployed Americans surged from 3 million to 15 million. By 1932, half of Illinois’s workers were jobless. In Chicago, where 60 percent of the state’s unemployed lived, a deep social crisis was underway. One report noted at the time,

There are several Chicago garbage dumps, some of which are under city supervision and some private. About a dozen places where garbage is dumped were visited by different members of the committee; and in every place where “soft” garbage, such as the remains of food, were found, people were reported to be picking it over and eating from it at the dump or taking it home to cook.[5]

The influence of communists and revolutionaries helped galvanize the unemployed into a fighting force, and authorities grew panicked about the increasing militancy and organization of the movement. While cops beat marchers in Detroit and New York City, Chicago police ransacked offices of unemployed and radical organizations throughout the city. Despite the repression, 50,000 workers mobilized in Chicago streets on March 6, 1930, for a national day of action billed as International Unemployment Day.

Less than a week later, three policemen were shot and eleven “communists” were arrested at the north end of Michigan Ave during a “riotous demonstration.” Those arrested included Bryan Moss, Ben Koblentz, Mrs. Anna Rejba, Martin Rich, Evelyn Weiner, William Bart, Frank Cordisco, William Bart, Morris Krivin, Anna Grossman, and Ida Mittelman. Their defense lawyer was Albert Goldman, an antifascist organizer who later emerged as a leader of the fledgling US Trotskyist movement, lead counsel for the Teamsters during the 1934 Minneapolis strike, and a mayoral candidate in Chicago. Ultimately, a “communist parade” preceded their acquittal, “in which several thousand men and women, half of them Negroes, participated.”[6]

The following July, the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League initiated a call for a national conference of unemployed councils.[7] More than 1,300 delegates from CP-affiliated organizations and unions met in Chicago. Black workers comprised an important number of the representatives and the conference highlighted racial justice demands in the unemployed movement.

As unemployed workers flooded into Chicago from the Midwest and South in search of jobs, unemployed councils blossomed in neighborhoods across the city. Rent strikes, anti-eviction blockades, and street mobilizations occurred across the city and demonstrations targeted the role of cops in carrying out the evictions and repression. One Chicago Tribune article described a typical action;

300 men and women gathered outside the stations. Policeman Dominick Varsetto, assigned there, closed the door. Members of the group pounded upon it until they broke the glass, but no further damage was done. At that moment Liet. Make Mills of the industrial squad and Capt. Phil Parodi of the Maxwell street stations arrived with eight police squads. Leaders of the crowd made soapbox speeches before the gathering dispersed. Liet. Mills arrested five alleged ringleaders: Joseph Shoster, no address; Edward Van Horn, 642 Liberty street; Joseph Bebko, 1717 West Madison street; and James Adams, no address.[8]

Still, aid to one hundred and forty-three thousand Chicago families was cut by 25 percent, and perishable food supplies were slashed by half in 1932.[9] In neighborhoods across the city, Chicago’s poor rebelled in a firestorm of organizing and riots.

On a cold, rainy Halloween, 2,500 unemployed gathered at the corner of 22nd and Wentworth. On the city’s West Side, 3,000 gathered at Union Park. In Washington Park on the South Side, 2,000 protesters gathered. Along with thousands from other parts of the city, they converged in the Loop, wearing red armbands, red dresses, and carrying red umbrellas and red flags. One journalist reported,

As the singing, shouting, hunger armies moved toward the meeting place from north, west and south, their forces were constantly increased. Detachments joined on the end of the lines until, by the time the three groups were a few blocks apart in the loop, a total of some 15,000 persons was moving.[10]

Military veterans carried a banner that read, “Wilson’s heroes; Hoover’s hoboes.” Other contingents included a group of Italian antifascists and “a platoon of children, 7 to 10 years old, carrying empty milk bottles.” Unemployed Black workers highlighted the case of Scottsboro and pressed the issue of racial justice.

Less than a month later, “a genuine united front of working class organizations was constituted” in Chicago to fight the 50 percent reduction of relief. Unemployed organizations from across the city, along with the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and the Workers League, organized the event. As one participant described:

The call for the conference signed by the three organizations met with a huge response everywhere. The masses reacted as never before, and the conference bore testimony of this fact. 750 delegates representing 350 organizations made up the conference. Included in the conference were over 40 church organizations composed entirely of unemployed workers, the Farmer-Labor Party, the A.F. of L., fraternal organizations, the TUUL.[11]

The city’s authorities responded with a wave of repression, arrests, and deportations of unemployed and radical organizers. While the Chicago Police Department flaunted its racism and brutality routinely, the frequent deployment of cops also provided opportunities to exhibit their bumbling idiocy. On a Saturday afternoon in 1934, just four days before Thanksgiving, four thousand Chicagoans marched to City Hall with demands for unemployment and relief benefits. Nearly two hundred cops were stationed inside the building “in case trouble developed.” When none developed, one of the jackass cops “tossed a few firecrackers under the feet” of a Black cop. A frenzy of gunfire erupted inside the building and seven cops were shot in the barrage of friendly fire.[12]

Winning relief

Like Henry Ford’s sharecropping schemes, government and business leaders had no genuine relief to offer millions of poor and hungry workers. Genuine programs, of course, were organized and advocated by the unemployed themselves. In Pennsylvania, insurgent rank-and-file coal miners pressed their demands for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill.[13] In Charlotte, North Carolina, the unemployed council organized militant, interracial demonstrations in support of the bill.[14] In Chicago, hundreds of delegates from the Illinois Workers Alliance, Emergency Workers Union, and other organizations of the unemployed—representing about 750,000 workers—endorsed the bill in the fall of 1934.

The Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was unveiled by the Communist Party in the summer of 1930 and quickly won the endorsement of three thousand five hundred local unions. As Chris Wright described the bill,

In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organisations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.[15]

The bill was eventually co-opted and presented to Congress by the self-described “La Follette Republican” Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a rabid isolationist and Nazi sympathizer.[16] Like the homegrown fascist radio personality Father Charles Coughlin he railed against the crimes and inequality of capitalism. But his neck swelled over the threat of communism and its advocacy for racial justice.

Nevertheless, the groundswell of action and organizing by socialists, communists, and unemployed workers—Black and white—ensured that Lundeen’s bill would “extend to all workers, whether they be industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional workers, and to farmers, without discrimination because of age, sex, race, color, religious or political opinion or affiliation.”[17] Indeed, a New York Post poll showed that 83 percent of its readers preferred the more radical Lundeen bill over the Social Security Act.

The strength and popularity of the unemployed movement and genuine relief coincided with a massive strike wave that reached from San Francisco to Minneapolis, Toledo, and the textile mills of the South. While sectarian squabbles often counteracted the potential for solidarity in other areas of work, the Communist Party and Socialist Party both appealed for common, united front approaches to unemployment. For the CP, their united front demands included:

1. Decisive wage increases and reduction in hours, supporting a bold strike movement to win them

2. For the immediate enactment of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill

3. For the immediate enactment of the Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill to secure for the farmers the possession of their lands and tools, and to provide abundance of food to the masses

4. For the immediate enactment of the Bill for Negro Rights

5. For the united struggle against war and fascism

6. For the broadest possible united action in localities, in factories, in trade unions, and on every question affecting the workers and toiling masses, to win better conditions[18]

Ultimately, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was defeated in favor of Roosevelt’s watered-down policies of the second New Deal. But it was not a foregone conclusion that something more radical—genuine relief—was within the grasp of the unemployed movement.

And, the current crisis of unemployment and poverty will not be magically solved by today’s politicians. Only our own self-activity can win genuine relief from this most recent and profound crisis of capitalism.

Notes

[1] “Henry Ford on Self-Help,” advertisement prepared and paid for by the Ford Motor Company as a contribution to public welfare, Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1932, 14.

[2] “15 Arrested After Police Slay Four in Unemployed Riot,” The Pantagraph, March 8, 1932, 1.

[3]  Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 158, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[4] “Chicago’s Heavy Breadline Tells of Unemployment,” Variety, February 1, 1928, 12.

[5] Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 157, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[6] “Jurors Acquit 11 Alleged Reds; Fired by Judge,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1932, 19.

[7] Solomon, Mark, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 148.

[8] “Seek to Raise Cash Pending U.S. Relief Loan,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1932, 2.

[9] “Relief to 143,000 Chicago Families Is Cut 25 Percent,” Alton Evening Telegraph, October 27, 1932, 1.

[10] Robert T. Loughran, “Radicals Parade under Guise of ‘Hunger March’,” Freeport Journal-Standard, October 31, 1932, 1–12.

[11] Albert Glotzer, “Stalinists Make Right About Face in Chicago Unemployed United Front,” The Militant, Vol. V, No. 28 (November 26, 1932), 1–2.

[12] “Hunger March is Peaceful but 7 Policemen Hurt,” Jacksonville Daily Journal, November 25, 1934, 8.

[13] Walter Howard, Anthracite Reds Vol. 2: A Documentary History of Communists in Northeastern Pennsylvania During the Great Depression (iUniverse, 2004), 152.

[14] Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party, University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 73–74.

[15] Chris Wright, The Hidden History of American Radicalism: The Campaign for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill” Counterfire, April 25, 2020, https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21138-the-hidden-history-of-american-radicalism-the-campaign-for-the-workers-unemployment-insurance-bill.

[16] B.W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).

[17] M. Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 22.

[18] United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 231.

Beneath Conspiracy Theories, the Class War

[Illustration by Anastasya Eliseeva]

By Aragorn Eloff

It is unsurprising that, as we confront the black swan event of the global pandemic, there has been an upsurge in the spread of conspiracy theories. Historically, narratives around malevolent, all-powerful forces controlling reality in various ways have often emerged in times of social unrest and uncertainty, where large numbers of people find themselves socially adrift or unable to control fundamental aspects of their lives.

While the typical response to conspiracy theories is to view them as the product of ignorance or delusional thinking, this is complicated by the fact that history is full of many real instances of powerful people colluding in secret at the expense of society. The numerous price-fixing scandals uncovered in South Africa in recent years surely also constitute conspiracies, as do corporate cover-ups around the world, many of which we know about only as a result of people questioning the presentation of reality and correctly connecting the dots to map out underlying truths.

It is clear though that what we more commonly describe as conspiracy theories – exemplified in the current period by the linking of 5G networks to Bill Gates, vaccination and microchip implants, for instance – are markedly different from these real-world examples. As social and psychological research has shown, conspiracy theories of this kind are not amenable to empirical enquiry and subsist for long periods of time in the absence of any reasonable evidence. Those adhering to such theories tend to exhibit little interest in testing their underlying claims and will often simultaneously believe in conspiracy theories that outright contradict each other.

As The Conspiracy Theory Handbook published by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication observes, this suggests that conspiracy theories function in a similar way to ideology, with belief being more a case of underlying psychological motivators – dealing with feelings of powerlessness, coping with threats or explaining confusing events – than the result of careful research and reflection. If this is true, it becomes important to understand these drives and the social contexts within which they tend to arise. This is especially vital when we acknowledge that many conspiracy theories contain, albeit figuratively, a kernel of intuitive truth.

Indeed, as Marxist group Aufheben writes in an article titled “The rise of conspiracy theories: Reification of defeat as the basis of explanation”, conspiracy theory, like left politics, often has a sense “that the world is structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act in their own interests and against the interests of the majority”. Distinct from the kinds of concrete political analyses that are able to explain these unequal power relations in terms of complex dynamics involving myriad social, political, economic and historical forces, however, conspiracy theories operate with a highly simplified understanding of these aspects of social reality, turning social forces into individual Bond villains and systemic conditions into cabals of all-powerful evildoers. This simplified narrative structure, which tellingly reflects dominant modes of subjectivity and the cult of the personality that has arisen under neoliberalism, also partly explains the appeal of conspiracy theories for large numbers of people looking for a stable foothold in an increasingly complex world.

As simplistic as they may be, it is through empathetic and nuanced engagement with conspiratorial narratives that we can perhaps best grapple with, and nurture meaningful collective responses to, the problems conspiracy theories suggestively outline. For instance, while casting Gates as an evil billionaire who wants to control people with 5G networks via microchips implanted in their bodies through mandatory vaccination is clearly absurd, there are many legitimate reasons to be concerned by the technocratic and paternalistic approach of the Gates Foundation towards addressing malnutrition, malaria and viral pandemics in Africa and, more broadly, the lack of control we have over the actions of the plutocrat class.

Anxieties around being controlled by technology may also be based on intuitions about the extent to which states and big technology companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so forth – have infiltrated, influenced and benefitted from our private lives while remaining almost entirely unaccountable, something researcher Shoshana Zuboff explores in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Similarly, the recent fears expressed by people who are convinced that the Covid-19 pandemic is part of a nefarious plot by global leaders acting in unison to push agendas that diminish our freedoms have at least some basis in what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism. Here, we would be quite unreasonable if we weren’t acknowledging that numerous states and corporate actors have leveraged the crisis to push forward anti-social agendas, the recent spate of illegal evictions of shack dwellers across South Africa and the loosening of environmental laws around the globe being just two examples.

Covert agendas

More broadly, we can discern the vague stirrings of a genuinely radical politics in some conspiracy theories. As Aufheben observes, these theories often express a genuine sense of estrangement from – and dissatisfaction with – capitalism, the state and other dominant social forces. While the world is not, of course, completely controlled by the Illuminati, the Rothschilds or lizard people, it’s not difficult to see the hints of a class analysis here. And when the staggering inequalities of wealth and power in the contemporary world have allowed the ruling class to live fantasy lives so utterly alien from our own, is it any wonder some of us have come to see them as almost inhuman?

Whatever truths they may loosely allude to, however, it remains the case that conspiracy theories, whatever short-term existential relief they may provide by assuring us that everything is easily understandable and under control, even if not in our interests, are deeply disempowering. If we set out with an incoherent understanding of how the world works, we quickly find ourselves unable to take much effective action to tackle its fundamental injustices or equalise its vast disparities of power, which is why the spreading of conspiracy theories usually results in apathy and fatalistic resignation.

More concerning, the same psychological drivers that make conspiracy theories so appealing also leave people susceptible to the influence of anyone – fascists, sociopaths, corporations and insincere spiritual gurus among them – offering an easy, comforting narrative that explains how things are and what we can do to make them better, usually in ways which, ironically, serve covert agendas.

Our approach to conspiracy theories should therefore be at least twofold. On the one hand, we can gently challenge the fallacious elements of conspiratorial thinking and encourage a more thorough interrogation of those aspects that correctly intuit real problems in the world. In practice, this takes the form of political outreach and radical pedagogy, the creation of collective spaces of learning and teaching through which we can tackle the problems we face at their roots without becoming tangled in them. The more we empower ourselves and each other with knowledge about how science, medicine, technology, politics and so forth function, the more we simultaneously hone our critical thinking skills, in turn cultivating personal agency – the sense that we can be meaningful participants in creating social change.

On the other hand, there is the more difficult task of offering assurance and support to those who find themselves drawn to conspiracy theories to make sense of a reality that seems to be slipping through their fingers. Here, we need to develop frameworks that offer sustainable forms of material, psychological and spiritual care. That the world is increasingly complex and uncertain means that very little is, or ever could be, orchestrated in the contrived ways conspiracy theorists propose, but it also means we have to become better equipped to deal with that complexity and uncertainty. While this may seem like a relatively solitary existential pursuit, a genuine sense of security is grounded in healthy, thriving communities of friends, lovers, families and comrades.

Building such communities is no simple task: they are at odds with the alienated and impoverished forms of social belonging that have become so prevalent in capitalist society and they require patient and careful interpersonal and political work. However, if we commit ourselves to learning more and communing more, we can slowly build herd immunity to the impoverished thinking of the present, whether it takes the form of conspiracy theories or dominant ideologies, and begin to cultivate something stronger than the multiple pandemics we currently face.

Covid-19 is a virus that attacks the lungs and many of those infected with it struggle greatly to breathe. Capitalism is an economic relation that attacks the social body and most of us forced to participate in it struggle greatly to live. The deep sense of existential disempowerment wrought by these conditions, especially when experienced together, renders us highly susceptible, however rational we think we are, to conspiratorial thinking and noxious ideologies.

When those around us fall prey to these insidious but increasingly endemic forms of magical thought we should, instead of ridiculing, judging or chastising them, remind ourselves that the word “conspiracy” comes from the old Latin term conspiraire, which means, simply, to breathe together. Breathing together, conspiring, we can create something far better than what currently passes for life.

This article was originally published at New Frame.

Profitability, Investment, and the Pandemic

[Photo Credit: REUTERS]

By Michael Roberts

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Last week’s speech by US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington was truly shocking.  Powell told his audience of economists that “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent”. One shocking fact that he announced was that, according to a special Fed survey of ‘economic well-being’ among American households, “Among people who were working in February, almost 40% households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March”!!!

Powell went on to warn his well-paid audience sitting at home watching on Zoom that “while the economic response has been both timely and appropriately large, it may not be the final chapter, given that the path ahead is both highly uncertain and subject to significant downside risks”. Indeed, if the continual downgrading of forecasts of global growth are anything to go by, then the number of optimists about a V-shaped recovery are beginning to dwindle to just the leaders of governments and finance.

Another study projects that US GDP will decline by 22% compared to the pre-COVID-19 period and 24% of US jobs are likely to be vulnerable. The adverse effects are further estimated to be strongest for low-wage workers who might face employment reductions of up to 42% while high-wage workers are estimated to experience just a 7% decrease.

And Powell was worried that this collapse could leave lasting damage to the US economy, making any quick or even significant recovery difficult.  “The record shows that deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy.”, said Powell, echoing the arguments presented in my recent post on the ‘scarring’ of the economy.

Powell reckoned the main problem in achieving any recovery once the pandemic was over was that “A prolonged recession and weak recovery could also discourage business investment and expansion, further limiting the resurgence of jobs as well as the growth of capital stock and the pace of technological advancement. The result could be an extended period of low productivity growth and stagnant incomes.”  See here.

And there was a serious risk that the longer the recovery took to emerge, the more likely there would be bankruptcies and the collapse of firms and eve n banks, as “the recovery may take some time to gather momentum, and the passage of time can turn liquidity problems into solvency problems.”

Indeed, last week, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report, in which it concluded that “asset prices remain vulnerable to significant price declines should the pandemic take an unexpected course, the economic fallout prove more adverse, or financial system strains re-emerge.”  The Fed report warned that lenders could face “material losses” from lending to struggling borrowers who are unable to get back on track after the crisis. “The strains on household and business balance sheets from the economic and financial shocks since March will probably create fragilities that last for some time,” the Fed wrote.  “All told, the prospect for losses at financial institutions to create pressures over the medium term appears elevated,” the central bank said.

So the coronavirus slump will be deep and long lasting with a weak recovery to follow and could cause a financial crash.  And working people will suffer severely, especially those at the bottom of the income and skills ladder. That is the message of the head of the world’s most powerful central bank.

But the other message that Jay Powell wanted to emphasise to his economics audience was that this terrifying slump was not the fault of capitalism.  Powell was at pains to claim that the cause of the slump was the virus and lockdowns and not the economy. “The current downturn is unique in that it is attributable to the virus and the steps taken to limit its fallout. This time, high inflation was not a problem. There was no economy-threatening bubble to pop and no unsustainable boom to bust.  The virus is the cause, not the usual suspects—something worth keeping in mind as we respond.”

This statement reminded me of what I said way back in mid-March when the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. “I’m sure when this disaster is over, mainstream economics and the authorities will claim that it was an exogenous crisis nothing to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure of society.  It was the virus that did it.”  My response then was to remind readers that “Even before the pandemic struck, in most major capitalist economies, whether in the so-called developed world or in the ‘developing’ economies of the ‘Global South’, economic activity was slowing to a stop, with some economies already contracting in national output and investment, and many others on the brink.”

After Powell’s comment, I went back and had a look at the global real GDP growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  Based on IMF data, we can see that annual growth was on a downward trend and in 2019 global growth was the slowest since the GR.

And if we compare last year’s 2019 real GDP growth rate with the 10yr average before, then every area of the world showed a significant fall.

The Eurozone growth was 11% below the 10yr average, the G7 and advanced economies even lower, with the emerging markets growth rate 27% lower, so that the overall world growth rate in 2019 was 23% lower than the average since the end of the Great Recession.  I’ve added Latin America to show that this region was right in a slump by 2019.

So the world capitalist economy was already slipping into a recession (long overdue) before the coronavirus pandemic arrived.  Why was this?  Well, as Brian Green explained in the You Tube discussion that I had with him last week, the US economy had been in a credit-fuelled bubble for the last six years that enabled the economy to grow even though profitability has been falling along with investment in the ‘real’ economy.  So, as Brian says, “the underlying health of the global capitalist economy was poor before the plague but was obscured by cheap money driving speculative gains which fed back into the economy”.  (For Brian’s data, see his website here).

In that discussion, I looked at the trajectory of the profitability of capital globally. The Penn World Tables 9.1 provide a new series called the internal rate of return on capital (IRR) for every country in the world starting in 1950 up to 2017. The IRR is a reasonable proxy for a Marxian measure of the rate of profit on capital stock, although of course it is not the same because it excludes variable capital and raw material inventories (circulating capital) from the denominator.  Despite that deficiency, the IRR measure allows us to consider the trends and trajectory of the profitability of capitalist economies and compare them with each other on a similar basis of valuation.

If we look at the IRR for the top seven capitalist economies, the imperialist countries, called the G7, we find that the rate of profit in the major economies peaked at the end of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era in the late 1990s.  There was a significant decline in profitability after 2005 and then a slump during the Great Recession, matching Brian’s results for the US non-financial sector.  The recovery since the end of the Great Recession has been limited and profitability remains near all-time lows.

The IRR series only goes up to 2017.  It would be possible to extend these results to 2019 using the AMECO database which measures the net return on capital similarly to the Penn IRR.  I have not had time to do this properly, but an eye-ball look suggests that there has been no rise in profitability since 2017 and probably a slight fall up to 2019.  So these results confirm Brian Green’s US data that the major capitalist economies were already significantly weak before the pandemic hit.

Second, we can also gauge this by looking at total corporate profits, not just profitability.  Brian does this too for the US and China.  I have attempted to extend US and China corporate profit movements to a global measure by weighting the corporate profits (released quarterly) for selected major economies: US, UK, China, Canada, Japan and Germany.  These economies constitute more than 50% of world GDP.  What this measure reveals is that global corporate profits had ground to a halt before the pandemic hit.  Marx’s double-edge law of profit was in operation.

The mini-boom for profits that began in early 2016 peaked in mid-2017 and slid back in 2018 to zero by 2019.

That brings me to the causal connection between profits and the health of capitalist economies.  Over the years, I have presented theoretical arguments for what I consider is the Marxian view that profits drive capitalist investment, not ‘confidence’, not sales, not credit, etc.  Moreover, profits lead investment, not vice versa.  It is not only the logic of theory that supports this view; it is also empirical evidence.  And there is a stack of it.

But let me bring to your attention a new paper by Alexiou and Trachanas, Predicting post-war US recessions: a probit modelling approach, April 2020. They investigated the relationship between US recessions and the profitability of capital using multi-variate regression analysis.  They find that the probability of recessions increases with falling profitability and vice versa.  However, changes in private credit, interest rates and Tobin’s Q (stock market values compared with fixed asset values) are not statistically significant and any association with recessions is “rather slim”.

I conclude from this study and the others before it, that, although fictitious capital (credit and stocks) might keep a capitalist economy above water for a while, eventually it will be the profitability of capital in the productive sector that decides the issue. Moreover, cutting interest rates to zero or lower; injecting credit to astronomical levels that boost speculative investment in financial assets (and so raise Tobin’s Q) and more fiscal spending will not enable capitalist economies to recover from this pandemic slump.  That requires a significant rise in the profitability of productive capital.

If we look at investment rates (as measured by total investment to GDP in an economy), we find that in the last ten years, total investment to GDP in the major economies has been weak; indeed in 2019, total investment (government, housing and business) to GDP is still lower than in 2007. In other words, even the low real GDP growth rate in the major economies in the last ten years has not been matched by total investment growth.  And if you strip out government and housing, business investment has performed even worse.

By the way, the argument of the Keynesians that low economic growth in the last ten years is due to ‘secular stagnation’ caused by a ‘savings glut’ is not borne out.  The national savings ratio in the advanced capitalist economies in 2019 is no higher than in 2007, while the investment ratio has fallen 7%.  There has been an investment dearth not a savings glut.  This is the result of low profitability in the major capitalist economies, forcing them to look overseas to invest where profitability is higher (the investment ratio in emerging economies is up 10% – I shall return to this point in a future post).

What matters in restoring economic growth in a capitalist economy is business investment.  And that depends on the profitability of that investment.  And even before the pandemic hit, business investment was falling.  Take Europe. Even before the pandemic hit, business investment in peripheral European countries was still about 20 per cent below pre-crisis levels.

Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics, forecast eurozone business investment would fall 24 per cent year on year in 2020, contributing to an expected 12 per cent contraction in GDP. In the first quarter, France reported its largest contraction in gross fixed capital formation, a measure of private and public investment, on record; Spain’s contraction was also near-record levels, according to preliminary data from their national statistics offices.

In Europe, manufacturers producing investment goods — those used as inputs for the production of other goods and services, such as machinery, lorries and equipment — experienced the biggest hit to activity, according to official data. In Germany, the production of investment goods fell 17 per cent in March compared with the previous month, more than double the fall in the output of consumer goods. France and Spain registered even wider differences

Low profitability and rising debt are the two pillars of the Long Depression (ie low growth in productive investment, real incomes and trade) that the major economies have been locked into for the last decade.  Now in the pandemic, governments and central banks are doubling down on these policies, backed by a chorus of approval from Keynesians of various hues (MMT and all), in the hope and expectation that this will succeed in reviving capitalist economies after the lockdowns are relaxed or ended.

This is unlikely to happen because profitability will remain low and may even be lower, while debts will rise, fuelled by the huge credit expansion.  Capitalist economies will remain depressed, and even eventually be accompanied by rising inflation, so that this new leg of depression will turn into stagflation.  The Keynesian multiplier (government spending) will be found wanting as it was in the 1970s.  The Marxist multiplier (profitability) will prove to be a better guide to the nature of capitalist booms and slumps and show that capitalist crises cannot be ended while preserving the capitalist mode of production.

Conspiracy Theory vs. Socialist Logic

Originally published by Socialist Standard.

Conspiracy-theory, or conspiracism, has it that much of the world today is to be understood in terms of ‘conspiracy’ be it by scientists, extra-terrestrials, masons, or whoever.

Currently gaining credence among many is the idea that all accepted science is a conspiracy, for relativity theory and quantum physics are specialised subjects. Einstein is difficult to understand and the majority of us are not astrophysicists, or other types of scientist, but that is no reason to dismiss these theories.

Many in society seek solace in pseudoscience, and therefore in conspiracism, whereby they can feel in control over what they cannot understand. Conspiracism absolves you from having to undertake painstaking research where you are not willing to trust those who actually have expertise in a difficult subject. Conspiracism attracts people from an entire spectrum, eager to feel that they belong to something: right or left in their leanings, dependent on what they were before becoming conspiracist. The phenomenon appears to attract ‘truthers’ – those who know the ‘truth’ despite the facts. Some are avowedly Christian, others not. Some dally with other rehashed mythologies, interpreted to fit in with their modern conspiracism. Many are, in fact, as members of the working class, confused and vulnerable, and want to feel significant; which they feel modern scientific thinking cannot help them with.

It is tempting to draw some similarity in all of this to the declining years of the Roman Empire, so brilliantly shown in the film Agora, about the last days of the great Library of Alexandria. Science and learning were then the property of a privileged few, and this is largely how they are seen today by many attracted to conspiracism and ‘truthism’. Today we are bombarded, flooded, with ideas and theories via the internet, whilst actual reading has declined.  Some conspiracy theorists tend to deride books which contradict them, dismissing them as the propaganda of those ‘in on’ the ‘great conspiracy.’ Book-learning becomes associated with closeted academia and so is deemed irrelevant. So refutation of a conspiracist’s ideology from facts outlined in books is futile.

With many people feeling disenfranchised from intellectual life, as they are in fact disenfranchised economically (being born in the wage-slave class), old and new-style forms of fanaticism win converts. Conspiracism is an obstacle to socialist awareness. Vital to the spread of socialist awareness is the materialist conception of history and recognition of human scientific progress.

Marx knew this when he wrote welcoming and applauding the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, recognising science as the necessary ally of socialism. Above all, the scientific study of history is vital and paramount, as history is an evolutionary process.

Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It is a system that evolved through social and economic processes, just as socialism will have done. Capitalism, and class societies as a whole, do by definition encourage ‘conspiratorial’ behaviour, but they are historically, not ‘conspiratorially’, produced.

Everything grows from an antecedent and does not appear out of the blue.

Conspiracy theory backs up the bourgeois myth of an evil human nature (‘Original Sin’ rehashed for the modern age). To paraphrase Karl Marx, the morality of a given age is the morality of its ruling class. The cut-throat values of the capitalist class have us believing in a human cut-throat nature in which everyone is a potential conspirator, a potential thief, a potential brigand. Thus an ideology of brigandage, sustained by the viciously competitive nature of capitalism, leads people to see their fellow beings as either real or potential brigands.

Conspiracism reduces everything to a school playground view wherein everything is viewed as the machinations of some cartoon-like gang independent of history. Those who attempt to spread conspiracy theory do a disservice to the cause of achieving a better world, by further confusing already confused workers and by giving ammunition to those who label socialists as cranks and claim capitalism to be the end of history.

We urge our fellow workers to face reality, embrace knowledge, and recognise for what it is the ridiculous zealotry known as conspiracy theory. Emancipation from the system of wage-slavery, poverty, prices and profits requires a grasp of social history and of social and natural realities.

Art Without a Place, Labour Without an End

By Petar Jandrić

New roads and old milestones

When the coronavirus hit the world, many of us dusted our high-school or college sciences. What is a virus? What are the main differences between linear and logarithmic curves? What does it mean to flatten the curve? We also remembered our history. Spanish Flu, Black Death… how did our ancestors deal with these threats? We suddenly rediscovered movies such as Contagion, and ‘relaxed’ ourselves from horrifying news reports with equally (and often more) horrifying fiction. Those locked in their homes, without access to work, found themselves thinking how to pay the next rent. Those who could transfer their work online, such as teachers and computer programmers, faced various challenges pertaining to working from home. Those whose work was deemed necessary, such as doctors and firemen, found themselves working 24/7 while isolated from their families. We all discovered how to home-school our children, and we all faced the challenge of retaining our sanity locked between our four walls in an increasingly insecure world. We re-learned how to wash our hands. The world, according to social networks and news reports, seemed to breathe as one.   

While we collectively discovered new realities pertaining to our specific positions within the society, an ‘old’ reality just waited to be rediscovered. Those working from lush homes have it much better than those working from cramped apartments. Those working in companies with strong social provisions have it much better than freelancers. Those working in Third Wold countries face dilemmas such as ‘corona or hunger’ (Sanjai and Naqvi 2020). Class matters. Property ownership matters. Social provisions matter. Race matters. On our brand-new road towards discovering what is now popularly termed as ‘a new normal’, we found a good old milestone – Karl Marx.

The coronavirus has created the biggest social science experiment in our lifetimes (and I do hope that it will not be replaced by an even bigger one in near future). Diverse, contextual, and nuanced global experiences of lockdown will surely be described, classified, and neatly foldered in journals, book, project reports, and other academic formats. Together with this painstaking analytic breakdown of the pandemic into it smallest detail, we also need some ‘grand’ over-arching theories to help us make sense of all this. And here I don’t aim at old-concepts-new-clothes semi-prepared attempts such as Žižek’s (2020) Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world, but something along the lines of Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis (Workers Inquiry Network 2020). Of course, the latter “collection of short summaries and critical reflections of the policies taken in different countries to deal with the coronavirus pandemic that affect workers and the unemployed” (dВЕРСИЯ 2020) is just an initial take on the problematic. Yet we do need a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches and theories; it is only at their intersections, that we can make sense out of this global pandemic mess.  

Canary in a coal mine

I am an academic researcher in a transdisciplinary field which is hard to pin-down, epistemologically and practically. Yet my transdisciplinary approaches, just like many others, still pretend towards ‘science’ – while many of us understand that the arts are just as important as the sciences, it is a well-hidden fact that even the most open transdisciplinary approaches often do not give enough importance to the arts (Jandrić and Kuzmanić 2020). At a very personal level, however, I am blessed with a partner who is an active artist. We share our ideas, topics, and interests; our works often intersect at some level which is invisible to our audience but formative for our works. At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic I wrote an urgent editorial for Postdigital Science and Education (Jandrić 2020) and invited post-digital scholars to engage with our present crisis. I issued calls for 500-word testimonies, for shorter commentary articles, for full-length original articles… And at the same time, Ana Kuzmanić issued her own call. She had a previously signed contract to do an artist book for her forthcoming exhibition, and she decided to base her book on testimonies by artists, curators, and cultural workers about the future of the cultural sector after Covid-19. Her call, entitled Art Without Place, starts with following words:   

While the Covid-19 pandemic spreads all over the world, the ban of public gatherings has drastic consequences to many occupations including arts and culture. This is a frightening situation; our lives are endangered directly, but also our material and political existence has quickly become uncertain. Reality has become more fiction than fiction, and the idea of the arts in concert halls, cinemas, and white cubes, has become uncertain. Our profession as artists and cultural workers face major challenges. The idea of radical change in the political economy of the arts is no longer merely a utopian construction; it has become a real and urgent question. In this collective project, we would like to hear about the ways in which you—artists, curators, art critics and all workers in the cultural sector—experience this shift in the moment here and now. (Kuzmanić 2020)

Reading the call, one cannot help but recall conditions in the cultural sector before the pandemic. Artists in precarious positions, moving from one project to another, mostly without permanent employment or social security. Curators, some institutionalized and some not, fighting at the battlefield of commodified ‘cultural industry’. Steep winning curve, in which only a few can make a living from their work. Already before the pandemic, workers in cultural sector were amongst the most exposed to global capitalism. To add insult to injury, some of the strongest sources of income for these people, such as live performances (theatre, music…), exhibitions and showings (visual arts, film), and so on, are heavily place-based. Immediately after lockdown, many of these precarious workers have been left without income. While it is impossible to speak of exact numbers at this stage, global lockdown has put a large percent of the cultural sector on its knees. This can be depicted in a very simple equation:

No music, film, exhibition + no social security = quick bankruptcy   

Ana, and other workers in the cultural sector, are personally interested in their own futures. But for the rest of us working in other fields, it would be foolish to think that we are exempt from their fate – our world is too global, too connected, too intertwined. With their extremely high level of exposure to corona-related disruptions, workers in the cultural sector are not merely an unlucky group to be pitied. More importantly, for all of us, they are canaries in the corona-mines – when the artists stop singing, that means that breathing air for the rest of us is getting thinner and thinner.

Art without a place, labour without an end

All over the Internet, those who are lucky to still have access to paid labour report unimaginable levels of stress, fatigue, and overwork. Artists frantically polish their funding bids; researchers publish more than ever, teachers’ workloads have gone over the roof. While we do all that in our homes, using often inadequate equipment in often inadequate workplaces, employers – who admittedly suffer from significant drops in income – are paying less and less. Only few months into the pandemic, it has become clear that the ‘new normal’ for most of us consists of more work for less pay. For those interested in social justice, the pandemic is an opportunity to rethink our society towards more social solidarity. For those interested in profits, the pandemic is an opportunity to add even more to their already unbelievably large piles of money. Unfortunately, this is not my paranoia but our global reality – as the likes of Amazon now see their profits increase at an incredible speed (Evelyn 2020), billions of people lose their sleep over paying next months’ rent and groceries.

While we try to imagine the new post-corona normal, social sciences should finally expand its scope to take the arts seriously. Our friends and family from cultural industries are more than victims of collateral damage from the coronavirus pandemic – they are also the corona-mine canaries who clearly point towards our global future. There is some truth in these social media memes that we are all in the same social, political, and economic storm of the coronavirus pandemic – and this is where this naïve truism ends. Some of us ride fancy new boats which can sail the current storm smoothly, while others ride old rickety barges suitable for ship scrap-yards. But the sea is always stronger from the strongest boat, and effects of our current crisis are stronger than any protection offered by luckier labour niches (such as tenured positions at state universities). Taking care of cultural industries is taking care of all of us. So let us hear our canary friends’ song, and let us join together in a struggle against those who want to turn word’s increased misery into their profits.

Submissions to Arts Without Place project will be open by the end of May 2020. Please click here to leave your submission: http://artwithoutplace.com/.

References

dВЕРСИЯ (2020). Covid-19: Workers archive. https://dversia.net/5757/covid-19-workers-archive/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Evelyn, K. (2020). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos grows fortune by $24bn amid coronavirus pandemic. The Guardian, 15 April. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/15/amazon-jeff-bezos-gains-24bn-coronavirus-pandemic. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital research in the time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8.

Jandrić, P., & Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Uncanny. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 239-       244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00108-5.

Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Art Without Place. http://artwithoutplace.com/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Sanjai, P.R., & Naqvi, M. (2020). ‘We will starve here’: Why coronavirus has India’s poor fleeing the cities. The Independent, 3 April. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/coronavirus-india-poor-fleeing-cities-starvation-a9438401.html. Accessed 28 April 2020.

Workers Inquiry Network (2020). Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis. Workers Inquiry Network.

Žižek, S. (2020). Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world. New York: OR Books.