Paulo Freire and Popular Struggle in South Africa

By Zamalotshwa Sefatsa

Republished from The Tricontinental.

Paulo Freire was a radical educator from Brazil whose work was tied to struggles for human freedom and dignity. He constantly experimented with and thought about how to connect learning and teaching among the poor and oppressed with the radical transformation of society. For Freire, this meant struggling for a world where everyone counts equally and is treated with dignity–a world in which economic and political power are radically democratised.

This dossier, which draws on interviews with participants in a range of struggles in South Africa, shows that Freire’s ideas have been an important influence in the Black Consciousness Movement, the trade union movement, and some of the organisations associated with the United Democratic Front (UDF). His ideas remain influential today, from trade unions to grassroots struggles.

From Brazil to Africa

Freire was born in Recife, a city in north eastern Brazil, in 1921. After his university studies, he became a schoolteacher and began to develop an interest in radical approaches to education, including projects to teach adult literacy. Freire saw the role of community and worker organisations and struggles as vital in the formation of the critical conscience that is required to overcome the domination and dependence of the oppressed.

In Freire’s early works, he wrote that the fundamental goal of radical pedagogy is to develop a critical conscience in individuals. The method of dialogical engagement that he developed from the 1950s onwards became an emancipatory and progressive alternative to the dominant school programmes sponsored by the U.S. government through agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an organisation that is notorious for backing coups against elected governments in Latin America and elsewhere.

In 1964, the Brazilian military seized control of the country with the backing of the United States and imposed a brutal right-wing dictatorship. Freire was among the many people arrested by the dictatorship. After seventy days in prison, he was released and forced to leave the country.

During his years in exile, he continued to carry out his practical work in other countries in Latin America, such as Chile, where he wrote his most important book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and developed adult literacy programmes. He also had significant contact with African freedom struggles. During this time, he visited Zambia, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde. He met with The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), and the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). He developed adult literacy programmes in Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, and Angola.

Freire read extensively about colonisation and its effects on the people, including the writings of African revolutionary intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. He felt a special connection to Africa and wrote that ‘[a]s a man from north-eastern Brazil, I was somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’.

Freire was also deeply critical of the capitalist system, which exploits and dominates the bodies and minds of the oppressed, and is a major force generating the material and ideological conditions that shape the domination of consciousness. This domination–which, of course, is entwined with racism and sexism–can seep into our being, our actions, and the way that we see the world. Freire argued that learning to fight to overcome domination is difficult but essential political work that requires constant learning.

Freire’s emphasis on the importance of dialogue as the basis for critical consciousness, and his stress on the essential role of popular struggle and organisation, both became important tools in grassroots struggles in Brazil during the 1970s and 1980s. In this period in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, popular education became synonymous with popular movements that used it as their main educational strategy, uniting political practice and learning processes.

In 1980, Freire returned to Brazil, where he became active in the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). When the party took control of São Paulo (one of the largest cities in the world) in 1988, he was appointed as the city’s secretary of education. He remained in this position until 1991. He died in 1997.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

In 1968, whilst he was in exile in Chile, Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed. During that year, youth revolts took place around the world. In France, where the revolt was most intense, many young people began to look at the intellectual work produced in the armed struggles against French colonialism in Vietnam and Algeria —including Fanon’s work on the Algerian revolution. This turn to Fanon influenced Freire too. In 1987, Freire recalled that ‘[a] young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’. Freire was deeply influenced by Fanon’s radical humanism, his thinking about the role of university-trained intellectuals in popular struggles, and his warnings about how an elite among the oppressed could become new oppressors.

Freire would write many books in the years to come, but it is Pedagogy of the Oppressed that quickly became and has remained a revolutionary classic. This book has had a powerful impact on popular movements around the world and remains the best introduction to Freire’s ideas.

In a talk given in Durban in 1988, Neville Alexander, who was an important radical intellectual in many fields, including education, explained that: ‘[f]or Freire, the decisive difference between animals and human beings consisted in the ability of the latter to reflect directly on their activity. This ability is, for him, the unique attribute of human consciousness and self-conscious existence and is what makes it possible for people to change their situation’. In other words, for Freire, all people are capable of thought, and critical thought, undertaken collectively, is the basis of organisation and struggle.

Freire argued that oppression dehumanises everyone–both the oppressed and the oppressor–and that emancipatory forms of politics–the strivings of the oppressed for freedom and justice–are, ultimately, a demand ‘for the affirmation of men and women as persons’. He would write that ‘[t]his, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well’.

But, for Freire, there is a danger that the person who is oppressed and wants to be free can come to believe that, to be free, she or he must become like the oppressor: ‘Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors’.(1) Freire believed that political education during a struggle is important in order to help prevent the elites among the oppressed from becoming new oppressors, warning that ‘[w]hen education is not liberatory, the dream of the oppressed is to be the oppressor’.

For Freire, the point of freedom is to allow everyone to be fully human; the struggle for freedom must end all oppression. It must be for the liberation of everyone, everywhere, and not just for some. But, he said, there are many different reasons why the oppressed do not always see this clearly. Sometimes the oppressed do not see that they are oppressed because they have been taught to believe that the way things are is ‘normal’ or is their fault. For example, they are taught to believe that they are poor because they do not have enough education, or that others are rich because they have worked harder. Sometimes, they are taught to blame something else (such as ‘the economy’) or someone else (such as ‘foreigners’) for their poverty.

True liberation must start by seeing clearly how things really are. For Freire, this is why radical and collective questioning, discussion, and learning are so important. He argued that, by thinking carefully and critically about how things really are (our actual lives and experiences), we can come to see oppression more accurately so that we can fight more effectively to end it.

The political work of encouraging critical thinking about our situation does not mean encouraging people to just criticise everything; it means always going beyond how things seem by constantly asking questions–especially by asking ‘why?’–to understand the root causes of why things are the way they are, especially things we feel strongly about. Asking questions allows people to draw on their own lived experience and thinking to find their own answers to the question of why they face situations of oppression or injustice. This is very different from traditional education that tries to fill the (apparently empty!) heads of the learners with knowledge that the powerful teacher thinks they need. Freire wrote that ‘[p]rojecting an absolute ignorance onto others [is] a characteristic of the ideology of oppression’. He called the model of education that assumes that the teacher has all the knowledge and the students have none the ‘banking’ concept of education and likened it to a teacher making deposits into an empty bank account. Freire wrote that:

The man or woman who proclaims devotion to the cause of liberation yet is unable to enter into communion with the people, whom he or she continues to regard as totally ignorant, is grievously self-deceived. The convert who approaches the people but feels alarm at each step they take, each doubt they express, and each suggestion they offer, and attempts to impose his ‘status,’ remains nostalgic towards his origins.

This is very different from many political education programmes organised by NGOs or small sectarian political groups which assume that the oppressed are ignorant and incapable of thought and that they will bring knowledge to the people. Freire argued that ‘[l]eaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organise the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress’.

Freire also realised that people cannot change situations of oppression and injustice on their own. This means that the struggle for liberation must be collective. He suggested that what he called an ‘animator’ could help. An ‘animator’ may come from outside the life situation of the poor and oppressed but plays a role that helps to encourage the thinking and the life and strength of the people who are in that situation. An animator does not work to assert their own power over the oppressed. An animator works to create a community of inquiry in which everyone can contribute to developing knowledge, and the democratic power of the oppressed can be built. To do this effectively requires humility and love; it is crucial that an animator enters into the lives and world of the poor and oppressed and, in doing so, enters into a true dialogue as equals.

Freire wrote that:

[T]he 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. 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.

In genuine dialogue, both the animator and the learners from among the oppressed bring something to this process. Through this dialogue, and through careful, collective, and critical reflection on lived experience, both the learners from among the oppressed and the animator come to be ‘conscientised’; in other words, they come to really understand the nature of oppression. But, for Freire, it is no good to just understand the world; ‘[i]t is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice’.

This action against oppression must always be tied together with careful thinking (reflection) on action, and what has happened as a result of action. Action and reflection are part of an ongoing cycle of transformation that Freire, following Karl Marx, called ‘praxis’.

The Importance of Freire’s Thought in South Africa

Paulo Freire was the key theoretician if you like. But we needed to bring Paulo Freire back from Brazil to the South African context. We knew nothing about Brazil of course except what we were reading. I don’t know of any similar text that we could have used in South Africa then as a way of understanding and engaging the South African context.

— Barney Pityana, a leading intellectual in the Black Consciousness Movement

Though Freire visited many countries in Africa, the apartheid state would not have allowed him to visit South Africa. However, he does discuss South Africa in his books and describes how South African anti-apartheid activists came to see him to talk about his work and what it meant in the South African context. Many of the organisations and movements involved in the anti-apartheid struggle used Freire’s thinking and methods.

The Black Consciousness Movement

Although the apartheid state banned Pedagogy of the Oppressed, underground copies circulated. By the early 1970s, Freire’s work was already being used within South Africa. Leslie Hadfield, an academic who has written about the use of Freire’s work by the Black Consciousness Movement, argues that the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first arrived in South Africa in the early 1970s via the University Christian Movement (UCM), which began to run Freire-inspired literacy projects. The UCM worked closely with the South African Students’ Organisation (Saso), which was founded in 1968 by Steve Biko, along with other figures like Barney Pityana and Aubrey Mokoape. Saso was the first of a series of organisations that, together, made up the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM).

Anne Hope, a Christian radical from Johannesburg and a member of the Grail, a Christian women’s organisation committed to ‘a world transformed in love and justice’, met Freire at Harvard University in Boston in 1969, and then again in Tanzania. After she returned to South Africa in 1971, Biko asked her to work with the Saso leadership for six months on Freire’s participatory methods. Biko and fourteen other activists were trained in Freirean methods in monthly workshops. Bennie Khoapa, a significant figure in the BCM, recalled that ‘Paulo Freire … made a lasting philosophical impression on Steve Biko’.

Between these workshops, the activists went out to do community-based research as part of a process of conscientisation. Barney Pityana remembers that:

Anne Hope would run what essentially was literacy training, but it was literacy training of a different kind because it was Paulo Freirean literacy training that was really taking human experience into the way of understanding concepts. It was drawing from everyday experience and understanding: what impacts it makes in the mind, the learning and understanding that they had.

For some of us, I suspect it was the first time that we came across Paulo Freire; for me it certainly was, but Steve, Steve Biko was a very diverse reading person, lots of things that Steve knew, we didn’t know. And so, in his reading he came across Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and began to apply it in his explanation of the oppressive system in South Africa.

Echoing Freire’s argument that it is only the oppressed who can liberate everyone, the BCM emphasised the importance of black people leading the struggle against apartheid. Freire had also stressed that, ‘[w]ithout a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle’. This, too, resonated with the BCM, which affirmed a proud and strong black identity against white supremacy.

The movement drew directly on Freire as it developed a constant process of critical reflection, part of an ongoing project of conscientisation. Aubrey Mokoape, who had a background in the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and became an older mentor to the students who founded Saso, explains that the link between Black Consciousness and ‘conscientisation’ is clear:

The only way to overthrow this government is to get the mass of our people understanding what we want to do and owning the process, in other words, becoming conscious of their position in society, in other words … joining the dots, understanding that if you don’t have money to pay … for your child’s school fees, fees at medical school, you do not have adequate housing, you have poor transport, how those things all form a single continuum; that all those things are actually connected. They are embedded in the system, that your position in society is not isolated but it is systemic.

The Church

In 1972, Biko and Bokwe Mafuna (who had been part of the training in Freirean methods) were employed as field officers by Bennie Khoapa. Khoapa was the head of the South African Council of Churches (SACC) and the Christian Institute’s Black Community Projects (BCP) and had also been trained in Freirean methods. The BCP’s work was heavily influenced by Freire. Both the BCM and the Christian Churches in South Africa drew on liberation theology, a school of radical thought which Freire had both been influenced by and contributed to. Rubin Phillip, who was elected as deputy president of Saso in 1972, and went on to become an Anglican archbishop, explains that:

Paulo Freire is considered one of the founders of liberation theology. He was a Christian who lived his faith in a liberating way. Paulo placed the poor and oppressed at the centre of his method, which is important in the concept of the preferential option for the poor, a trademark of liberation theology.

In South Africa, ideas drawn from liberation theology were–together with the black liberation theology developed by James H. Cone in the United States–a powerful influence on various currents of struggle. Bishop Rubin recalls that:

The one thing I took away from our conversation was a need to be critical thinkers. … Liberation theologians allude that theology, like education, should be for liberation, not domestication. Religion made us subservient, has made us lazy to use our critical faculty and connect knowledge to our everyday reality. So, education for him is about …. a critical way of life and about connecting knowledge to how we live.

The Workers’ Movement

The Black Consciousness Movement included workers’ organisations like the Black Workers’ Project, a joint project between the BCP and Saso. The workers’ movement was also influenced by Freirean ideas through worker education projects that started in the 1970s. One of these was the Urban Training Programme (UTP), which used the Young Christian Workers’ See-Judge-Act methodology, which had influenced Freire’s own thinking and methodology. The UTP used this method to encourage workers to reflect on their everyday experiences, think about what they could do about their situation, and then act to change the world. Other worker education projects were started by left students in and around the National Union of South African Students (Nusas). Saso had split from Nusas in 1968 but, although largely white, Nusas was a consciously anti-apartheid organisation that was also influenced by Freire, primarily through members who were also part of the UCM.

During the 1970s, Wages Commissions were set up at the University of Natal, the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of Cape Town. Using the resources of the universities and some progressive unions, the Commissions helped to set up structures that led to the formation of the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau (WPWAB) in Cape Town, the General Factory Workers’ Benefit Fund (GFWBF) in Durban, and the Industrial Aid Society (IAS) in Johannesburg. A number of left students supported these initiatives, as did some older trade unionists, such as Harriet Bolton in Durban. In Durban, Rick Turner, a radical academic whose teaching style was influenced by Freire, became an influential figure among a number of students. Turner was committed to a future rooted in participatory democracy and many of his students became committed activists.

David Hemson, a participant in this milieu, explains that:

Two particular minds were at work, one [Turner] in a wood and iron house in Bellair; and another [Biko] in the shadow of the reeking, rumbling Wentworth oil refinery in the Alan Taylor residence. Both would become close friends and both would die at the hands of the apartheid security apparatus after bursts of energetic writing and political engagement. Both were influenced by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and these ideas and concepts infused and were woven into their writings striving for freedom.

Omar Badsha was one of the students who was close to Turner and participated in setting up the Institute for Industrial Education (IIE). He recalls that:

Rick Turner was very interested in education, and like any intellectual we began reading, and one of the texts we read was Paulo Freire’s book that had just come out not so long ago at the time. And this book resonated with us in the sense that here were some valuable ideas about teaching and an affirmative way of teaching–taking into account the audience and how to relate with the audience.

In January 1973, workers across Durban went on strike, an event that is now seen as a major turning point in worker organisation and resistance to apartheid. Hemson recalls that:

Out of the dawn they streamed, from the barrack-like hostels of Coronation Bricks, the expansive textile mills of Pinetown, the municipal compounds, great factories, mills and plants and the lesser Five Roses tea processing plant. The downtrodden and exploited rose to their feet and hammered the bosses and their regime. Only in the group, the assembled pickets, the leaderless mass meetings of strikers, the gatherings of locked out workers did the individual expression have confidence. The solid order of apartheid cracked and new freedoms were born. New concepts took human form: the weaver became the shop steward, a mass organised overtook the unorganised, the textile trainer a dedicated trade unionist, the shy older man a reborn Congress veteran, a sweeper a defined general worker.

After the Durban Moment

The period in Durban before and during the 1973 strikes came to be known as the Durban Moment. With Biko and Turner as its two charismatic figures, this was a time of important political creativity that laid the foundations for much of the struggle to come.

But in March 1973, the state banned Biko and Turner, along with several BCM and Nusas leaders, including Rubin Phillip. Despite this, as unions were formed in the wake of the strikes, a number of university-trained intellectuals, often influenced by Freire, began working in and with the unions, which made rapid advances. In 1976, the Soweto revolt, which was directly influenced by Black Consciousness, opened a new chapter in the struggle and shifted the centre of contestation to Johannesburg.

Biko was murdered in police custody in 1977, after which the Black Consciousness organisations were banned. In the following year, Turner was assassinated.

In 1979, a number of unions were united into the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu), which was–in the spirit of the Durban Moment–strongly committed to democratic workers’ control in unions and on the shop floor, as well as the political empowerment of shop stewards.

In 1983, the United Democratic Front (UDF) was formed in Cape Town. It united community-based organisations across the country with a commitment to bottom-up democratic praxis in the present and a vision of a radically democratic future after apartheid. By the mid 1980s, millions of people were mobilised through the UDF and the trade union movement, which became federated through the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) in 1985.

Throughout this period, Freirean ideas absorbed and developed in the Durban Moment were often central to thinking about political education and praxis. Anne Hope and Sally Timmel wrote Training for Transformation, a three-volume workbook that aimed to apply Freire’s methods for developing radical praxis in the context of emancipatory struggles in Southern Africa. The first volume was published in Zimbabwe in 1984. It was swiftly banned in South Africa but was widely circulated underground. Training for Transformation was used in political education work in both the trade union movement and the community-based struggles that were linked together through the UDF.

Salim Vally, an activist and academic, recalls that ‘literacy groups of the 80s, some pre-school groups, worker education and people’s education movements were deeply influenced by Freire’. The South African Committee for Higher Education (Sached) also came to be strongly influenced by Freire. The Committee, first formed in 1959 in opposition to the apartheid state’s enforcement of segregation at universities, provided educational support to trade unions and community-based movements in the 1980s. Vally notes that ‘Neville Alexander always discussed Freire in Sached–he was the Cape Town director–and in other education circles he was involved in. John Samuels–the national director of Sached–met Freire in Geneva’.

From 1986, the idea of ‘people’s power’ became very important in popular struggles, but practices and understandings of what this meant varied widely. Some saw the people as a battering ram clearing the way for the ANC to return from exile and the underground and take power over society. Others thought that building democratic practices and structures in trade unions and community organisations marked the beginning of the work required to build a post-apartheid future in which participatory democracy would be deeply entrenched in ordinary life–in workplaces, communities, schools, universities, etc. This was what was meant by the trade union slogan ‘building tomorrow today’.

Though there were strong Freirean currents in this period, they were significantly weakened by the militarisation of politics in the late 1980s, and more so when the ban on the ANC was lifted in 1990. The return of the ANC from exile and the underground led to a deliberate demobilisation of community-based struggles and the direct subordination of the trade union movement to the authority of the ANC. The situation was not unlike that described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

Today, the party’s mission is to deliver to the people the instructions which issue from the summit. There no longer exists the fruitful give-and-take from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom which creates and guarantees democracy in a party. Quite on the contrary, the party has made itself into a screen between the masses and the leaders.

Paulo Freire Today

Freirean ideas continued to thrive after apartheid in some of the fissures of the new order. For instance, in the early years of the democratic dispensation, the Workers’ College in Durban, a trade union education project, included some teachers who were committed to Freirean methods. Mabogo More, a philosopher with a background in the Black Consciousness Movement, was one of these teachers. He recalls that he first came to know about Freire as a student at The University of the North (also known as ‘Turfloop’) in the 1970s ‘through Saso’s concept of “conscientisation” used during formation winter schools organised by Saso. Later, S’bu Ndebele, a Turfloop librarian at the time, smuggled a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which, together with Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we surreptitiously read among ourselves as conscientised students’.

In 1994, More was able to attend a lecture by Freire at Harvard University in the United States. He says that ‘Freire’s lecture was fascinating and helped in modelling my teaching practice in line with the precepts articulated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed’.

Today, a number of organisations remain committed to Freirean methods, such as the Umtapo Centre in Durban. The Centre was started in Durban in 1986 as a response to the rise of political violence within black communities. It has roots in the Black Consciousness Movement and its work is explicitly based on Freire’s methodology.

Another organisation that uses Freire’s ideas is the Church Land Programme (CLP) in Pietermaritzburg, which has its roots in the liberation theology tradition and is closely linked to Bishop Rubin, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and a number of other grassroots organisations and struggles. CLP was established in 1996 in response to the land reform process taking place in South Africa and became an independent organisation in 1997. By the early 2000s, CLP realised that the struggle against apartheid had not led to an end to oppression, that the state’s land reform programme was not taking an emancipatory direction, and that its own work was not helping to end oppression. Therefore, CLP decided to incorporate Freire’s idea of animation and enter into solidarity with new struggles.

Zodwa Nsibande, an animator with CLP, says that:

In our engagements, we let people think because we do not want to take their agency. We ask probing questions to get people to think about their lived experiences. We embrace Paulo Freire’s thinking when he said that ‘problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming’. When we engage with communities using problem-posing methodologies, we seek to give them their power. Sibabuyisele isithunzi sabo, ngoba sikholwa ukuthi ngenkathi umcindezeli ecindezela ususa isthunzi somcindezelwa. Thina sibuyisela isithunzi somcindezelwa esisuswa yisihluku sokucindezelwa [We restore their dignity, for we believe that when the oppressor oppresses, he takes the dignity of the oppressed. We restore the dignity of the oppressed that is taken by the cruelty of oppression].

In recent years, connections to the Landless Workers’ Movement, or the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), in Brazil have reenergised the potency of Freire’s ideas in South Africa. Formed in 1984, the MST has mobilised millions of people and organised thousands of occupations of unproductive land. The organisation has built close relationships with the National Union of Metalworkers in South Africa (Numsa), the largest trade union in South Africa, and with Abahlali baseMjondolo, the country’s largest popular movement. This has meant that a number of activists from Numsa and Abahlali baseMjondolo have been able to participate in the programmes at the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF), the MST’s political education school.

There are direct connections between activists’ experiences at the ENFF and the establishment of political schools in South Africa, such as The Frantz Fanon Political School built and managed by Abahlali baseMjondolo on the eKhenana Land Occupation in Durban.

Vuyolwethu Toli, who is the Numsa JC Bez Regional Education Officer, explains that:

The schooling systems in South Africa and throughout the world use the banking method of education where there aren’t reciprocal or mutual learning processes. The teacher, or whoever is facilitating, positions themself as the dominant knowledge disseminator where they see themself as having a monopoly of wisdom. As comrades responsible for popular education in the trade union, we do not operate like this. We make sure there is collective knowledge production and that all sessions are informed by workers’ lived experiences. Our point of departure is that worker knowledge informs the content and not the other way around. We don’t believe in the banking method of education.

Freire’s ideas, first generated in Brazil, have influenced struggles all over the world. Almost fifty years after they began to influence intellectuals and movements in South Africa, they remain relevant and powerful. The work of conscientisation is a permanent commitment, a way of life. As Aubrey Mokoape said, ‘[c]onsciousness has no end. And consciousness has no real beginning’.

Acknowledgements

This dossier was researched and written by Zamalotshwa Sefatsa.

We would like to thank the following people for agreeing to be interviewed for this dossier:

Omar Badsha, Judy Favish, David Hemson, Aubrey Mokoape, Mabogo More, Zodwa Nsibande, David Ntseng, John Pampallis, Bishop Rubin Phillip, Barney Pityana, Patricia (Pat) Horn, Vuyolwethu Toli, Salim Vally, and S’bu Zikode.

We would also like to thank the following organisations for contributing to the research that informed this dossier:

Abahlali baseMjondolo, The Church Land Programme, Levante Popular da Juventude (‘Popular Youth Uprising’), The National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa, The Paulo Freire National School, and The Umtapo Centre.

We would also like to thank Anne Harley, whose pioneering work on Freire’s ideas in South Africa opened the door for much of the work done here, and who offered generous support to the production of this dossier.

Further Reading

Biko, Steve. I Write What I Like. Johannesburg: Raven Press. 1996.

Friedman, Steven. Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970-1984. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.1987

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin. 1976.

Freire, Paulo. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. 1993.

Freire, Paulo and Macedo, Donaldo. (1987). Literacy: Reading the Word and the World. Routledge. 1987.

Hadfield, Leslie. Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1996

Macqueen, Ian. Black Consciousness and Progressive Movements under Apartheid. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008

Magaziner, Dan. The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977. Johannesburg: Jacana. 2008

More, Mabogo. Philosophy, Identity and Liberation. Pretoria: HSRC Press. 2017.

Pityana, Barney; Ramphele, Mamphele; Mpumlwana, Malusi and Wilson, Lindy (Eds.) Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko & Black Consciousness. David Philip, Cape Town. 2006.

Turner, Rick. The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa. Johannesburg. Ravan Press. 1980.

Notes

1. In reading Freire’s writings and his use of gendered language such as ‘men’ to mean ‘human’, which was still common in the late 1960s, we must undertake the intellectual exercise of entering into dialogue with his gendered forms of expression with the aim of critical reflection and developing emancipatory alternatives.

About The Tricontinental

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. We seek to bridge gaps in our knowledge about the political economy as well as social hierarchy that will facilitate the work of our political movements and involve ourselves in the “battle of ideas” to fight against bourgeois ideology that has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.

How the Poor Continue to Die

By Kevin Van Meter

Republished from The Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Humanity has entered a period “where every day people are dying among strangers.”[1]  

Daily life itself has become “strange” and isolating as social distancing and quarantine measures are being lifted, then reenacted.  Federal troops operating as secret police in an attempt to occupy American cities, are repelled by protestors and the populace.  News cycles shriek and squall with nearly every pontification from the political class as they continue to carry out their “sacred mission,” which in recent memory is accompanied by squealing ineptitude in regard to improving the actual conditions of life.  Or, maybe they are not inept.  Months ago, at the onset of the pandemic, pundits and politicians had already declared that testing, treatments, and vaccines would not be offered to everyone.    

A pervasive level of violence, of frivolous intrusions into the routine behaviors of people of color, of a cruel disgust directed toward unhoused and poor peoples, of an impulsive need to regulate the expressions of those outside the gender binary, of a paranoid animosity toward immigrants and “antifa” and the “other” is being expressed by a particular sector of the population.  This sector – overwhelmingly good Christians, white, and middle-class – have been expressing this violence to such an extent that everyday life has been saturated by it.  For us “others” it is omnipresent, for many “others” it has been this way for five hundred years.  Yet, the poor continue to die, often “among strangers.”                      

In 1929 George Orwell was down and out in Paris and witness to the goings-on at a hospital that served the poor.  Seventeen years later he drew on his initial observations along with scribbled notes to complete the article “How the Poor Die.”  These words, published during the aftermath of the second World War, deserve our full attention in this moment: “However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.”[2]  Then, as now, the gallant efforts of medical personnel, front-line and essential workers are often performed with kindness and efficiency, and with haste.  Nonetheless, the poor died in 1929 and 1946 in the ways they have continued to die, have always died.  In hospitals amongst strangers and in the streets, shanty towns and derelict apartments, in asylums and prisons, reservations and Bantustans. And if at all possible, in these same places, amongst relations, chosen as well as blood.    

Currently the cruelty of COVID-19 is compounded not just by social isolation but the realization that those who will die from this disease will do so among strangers.  On ventilators, in isolation units, in nursing homes, without the comfort of loved ones or human touch.  If the projections are correct, even with the recommended medical and social interventions, the dead will overwhelm the living.  It is likely that you, the humble reader, will be called upon to bury the departed, deceased, dead.        

As the dead overwhelm the living, dead labor will attempt to overcome living labor. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” Karl Marx notoriously quipped, “and lives the more, and more labour it sucks.”[3]  What has become clear to large swaths of the populace, not just devotees to hundred and fifty year old texts, is that value and wealth in a capitalist society (the portion consumed in production and reproduction is dead labor) are produced only through the efforts and expended capacities of the working-class (which is living labor).  As Marx offered, “We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which [they] set in motion whenever [they produce] a use-value of any kind.”[4]  And the great promise of Marx, of all revolutionaries, is that we will produce ‘goods and services’ useful to human beings in accordance with their needs and all of our abilities collectively.   

An economic system hell bent on endless growth has seemingly been replaced, possibly only temporarily, by shortsighted kleptocracy.  Extending well beyond the current administration, bourgeois society has embraced law breaking for themselves and harsh, hard-hearted punishment of the poor for minor property and drug “crimes.”  While this has always been, the contemporary American political class now flaunts its wrongdoings in full view.  With the endless accumulation of capital cast aside for the immediate acquisition of wealth, the imposition of work has become more malicious.  Front-line and essential workers and those in the service industry are being forced back to work at the threat of being destitute, with mass evictions looming.  The tiny deaths of exhaustion and daily injury have been replaced by the alternating certainty of death by starvation or death by pandemic.  Major retailers call them “heroes” as they take away their hazard pay.  And even school children, the sacrificial but essential workers of the future, are being sent back to their desks as home instruction and homework has not been sufficiently disciplinary.  All of this is evident with the return of a slogan, a capitalist maxim: Arbeit macht frei, or work will set you free. 

Pandemic and poverty is becoming plague and privation; those who are penniless will soon face famine. Without work there are no wages, without wages there are few ways to obtain the means of survival, the means of reproducing life itself.  Nevertheless, social reproduction is essential, and the work required – often unwaged, racialized, and gendered – is indispensable.  Since workers expending labor-power in the production process is how capitalism produces value, social reproduction is central to the capitalist mode of production.  As a result, the worksite where this is produced has become of key interest to the bourgeoisie.  Feminist scholar Silvia Federici noted this in the historical record: “The body, then, came to the foreground of social policies because it appeared not only as a beast inert to the stimuli of work, but also as the container of labor-power, a means of production, the primary work-machine.”[5]  The body as machine has been a central metaphor of our capitalist society, now the cogs are being discarded willy-nilly with automation and information computational processes that require fewer and fewer workers.  

Of the numerous realities the pandemic has uncovered, few are as stark as how front-line, essential, service industry workers are not just seen as replaceable but as expendable.  And many are out of work.  When a member of the working-class is without wages and the paltry handouts from the government vanish, reproduction of one’s biological functions and faculties are still required.  Working in front-line, essential, service industries is work as is seeking to obtain work in such sectors.  Working to reproduce one’s own capacities is work as is working without a wage to reproduce waged workers along with the “nonwaged, underwaged, not-yet waged, and no-longer waged,” to quote a contemporary feminist scholar.[6]  Hence, all of life has become work, with its simultaneous, and seemingly contradictory absence and total permeation.  Returning to Marx again:      

“the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing it services.  Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of [their] whole life, and that therefore all [their] disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”[7]  

Our whole lives have been subsumed by capitalism, and now, for far too many of our fellow human beings, death has become just as alienating.  

* * *

In collective, common, liberatory moments of ‘great kindness and efficiency,’ ‘amongst relations, chosen as well as blood,’ we are given a glimpse of “a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”[8]  However, the means of communication, mutual aid, and social relations required to build such a paradise are often destabilize by the very forces that should be constructing them.  

Another underling reality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic is final confirmation that the Left in the United States has been historically defeated, the working-class decomposed.  Although generalized austerity, violent repression, mass incarceration, direct attacks on unions and community-based organizations, restructuring of everyday life toward neoliberal and individualistic ends, culture wars, drug wars, endless wars against the populace are partially to blame.  But the Left must take responsibility for its internal operational failures, nonsensical squabbles, unprincipled and self-servingly middle-class politics.  This has left working-class and poor people to their own defenses, with limited material resources, against the pandemic and unfolding crises.  In effect, the poor continue to die in part due to this ineptitude, purity politics, and too often defenses of middle-class ideals and irrelevant academic ideas.  

To define such a sector of the body politic would take many more words than can be allotted here.  Simply put, this includes those who are “practically minded” members of the Democratic Party establishment all the way leftward to include some of the newly articulated Democratic Socialist alternatives, along with much of organized labor, the non-profit sector, as well as do-gooders and providers of social services.  Where the formal Left begins and the bureaucrats, bourgeoisie, social workers, and middle managers of our misery end is unclear, as they are often indistinguishable and hence what that follows is imprecise.  Beyond the established Left there are ongoing mutual aid efforts, wildcat and rent strikes, and uprisings amongst everyday people, often led by young Black insurgents.  These radical, revolutionary, and daring, spontaneous but still organized, abolitionists, anti-capitalists, and commoners are outside of the formal body politic.

Defensive and self-serving reactions in the guise of “What about small landlords?” and “What about family owned businesses?” have erupted on the Left in response to calls for rent strikes, paid sick leave, hazard differentials, and a little workplace democracy with the same veracity as “What about good cops?” and “Don’t all lives matter?” on the right.  Universal demands for income, healthcare, and housing seemingly require an addendum that first we must distinguish between who are the deserving and who are the undeserving poor.  Then, typed into the social media fields of too many who know better: “I support unions but just not at my business or workplace,” “I support tenants’ rights but just not my tenants,” “I support Bernie but what about these horrible ‘__________.’”  While I am paraphrasing, we will get to those who fill these blanks shortly.  Since we have addressed how the middle-class Left and the bourgeoisie defends itself against the rabble informally, we must look at their formal practices.                 

Saving “establishments,” from restaurant chains to retail stores, “public infrastructure” from universities to the library and post office, “private associations” from business improvement districts and landlord lobbying groups to social service non-profits, as well as the facades of representative democracy and private property, are being managed by grinning neoliberal “little Eichmann’s.”  Or, possibly worse, those who wish they were.  Deep austerity measures have been instituted by and throughout these establishments, infrastructures, and associations while money flowing into them has been accumulated by bureaucracies impervious to worker or citizen demands.  

All of life has become work, and to manage this all of life has been infected by bureaucracy.  What is bureaucracy and why is it so pervasive?  Member of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, Claude Lefort, has an answer: “one overlooks the fact that in one and the same movement the bureaucracy establishes itself at the heart of social life and presents itself as an end, that it responds to a technical need and subordinates it to the imperative of power.”[9] Bureaucracies, even progressive and liberal ones, have sought to silence working-class voices: in social services they sought to silence those of unemployed people and welfare recipients, in trade unions expressions of working-class self-activity, political parties those of the masses, universities those of faculty and student shared governance, corporations those of workers initiatives and demands, healthcare those of the ill and infirm, landlords those of their tenants, the legal system and prisons those of prisoners, and then there are others.  At the moment you can hear bureaucrats mumbling out of the side of their mouths, a proverb: “we have effectively silenced them in life, how dare they not be silent in death.”              

Moreover, the desperate need to feel “right” and “moral” is cover for those who ignore structural inequalities and stark differentials of power that exist and are now amplified in our society.  Far worse, after five hundred years of struggle against capitalism and the state most of the Left is willfully ignorant how social change occurs.  Nearly immeasurable personal choices and consumerist acts – such as voting, buying local, eating vegan or organic, riding bikes, being sustainable or peaceful or mindful or, which is by far the worst, conscious – are held as the apex of political action.  Or, maybe by appealing to the “better natures” of bosses and landlords, billionaires and politicians or “speaking truth to power,” things will progress, improve, change.  Worst still, if our arguments are right and true, clear and concise, we will win in the free marketplace of ideas.  And finally, as a great comedic mind once offered, “rights are the last resort of a [person] with no argument” and the Left’s call for “rights” ignore how often they are suspended in times of crisis or have never existed for large swaths of the planet’s populace.  This should be absolutely apparent to anyone who has been on the streets of a supposedly liberal Pacific Northwest city over the past few weeks, or has simply been observing.  Now, that we have considered how the Left views how the actual lives and deaths of working-class and poor peoples as externalities in formal ways, the maliciousness of their informal practices should be noted too.  

A self-serving and moralistic politics has dominated the Left as of late, where faux outrage meant to condemn the personal lifestyles and decisions of the target while holding one’s own personal lifestyles and decisions as morally superior.  Meaning, the illusion of choice and free will results in a working-class bartender being scolded by their middle-class customer, who is in the midst of guzzling down another twenty-dollar cocktail, for taking a cheaper Uber / Lyft home after a twelve hour shift rather than the more expensive local cab company.  Notions of self-care, GoFundMe campaigns for medical bills, Buzzfeed articles and similar lists given as commandments – “20 Books You Must Read this Year,” “6 ways to be antiracist, because being ‘not racist’ isn’t enough” – are individual solutions, often impossible ones, to what are social problems.  These developments are often coupled with a crises of representation and measure along with the disappearance of class as an operating category.  ‘Interlocking oppressions’ and ‘identity’ were to augment and complement class as “new measures of oppression and inequality,” to use the apt words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, rather than replace it.[10]  Or, in fact, it is the middle-class assumptions of the contemporary Left and radical forces that have placed various issues outside of, above, and primary to class because it allows the middle-class to claim legitimacy within a fundamentally unjust and undemocratic system at the expense of working-class and poor peoples.  It is as if the Left has forgotten that, “Immigrant issues, gender issues and antiracisms are working-class issues.”[11]  Nevertheless there are issues neighboring these too.              

Behind call outs, privilege politics, and reinvigorated essentialisms, one can hear the tired slogans: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” and “Fight the People!”  According to various factions that splintered the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, of which the Weather Underground is the most pernicious, the American war in Vietnam was bad, so the Vietcong was good; politically conscious radicals were good, white working-class people were bad.  Purges, purity tests, self-criticism, or better off self-flagellation, immediately followed such recitations.  

Not then, and certainty not now, have such measures resulted in strong liberatory movements much less substantive, material or otherwise, gains for oppressed and working-class people.  Nor have movements themselves found transformative ways to address internalized oppression and behaviors, even with the gallant efforts led by women and trans people of color.  After fifty-years of such politics, one would think with the clearly observable historic defeat of Left and radical forces with the rise of incipient fascism other avenues would be explored, other ideas rediscovered and developed, other strategies and tactics deployed.  

In the streets many revolutionaries now call forth “fire from heaven,” not out of revenge or resentment but for our very survival.  Emile Zola was not so forgiving in Germinal: “There he stood with arms raised like an inspired prophet of old, calling down the wrath of God upon the murderers, foretelling the age of justice and the coming extermination of the bourgeoisie by fire from heaven, since it has committed the foulest crime of all and caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain.”[12]  Though, what is to be done when those who “caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain” are not just the political class, the bourgeoisie, Republican governors and liberal mayors but our fellow citizens?  Fellow citizens refusing to wear masks, coughing in the faces of essential workers and spitting on cashiers, setting up roadblocks to harass those fleeing wildfires, driving through crowds of protestors and arming themselves against their neighbors.  And, with particular vitriol, calling for and in some cases actively exterminating Black and Indigenous people of color, trans women of color, immigrant children, the elderly and infirm.  

As I have claimed herein, the Left not only lacks a concept of social change, it is entirely unprincipled.  But even without principles the Left is being educated nightly as it is struck over the head by police batons.  And the radical and revolutionary movements are discovering its principles and power in concert with thousands of others who have set the fires from heaven upon police stations. Banks, bosses, landlords will burn too.  

Where does one find prospects and possibilities within this plague?  Now, as always, in the new struggles that are emerging, and new social antagonisms being expressed.  As I sat down to write this it is the multitudinous mutual aid projects growing in barren landscapes, then those standing “with arms raised.”

For those of us who are radicals and revolutionaries, we will be called to do immoral things in this crisis. Immoral by the standards of the Left and progressive moralists and possibly immoral by our own standards.  It is clear that the Democratic Party establishment and Left which aligns itself with it has made peaceful revolution impossible.  Whereas the Left is more interested in its own self-preservation and defense of its position in the capitalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, settler colonial, property owning systems then a substantive redistribution of wealth, land, power.  Whereas much of the radical Left would rather confront each other over perceived slights than directly confront power and construct counterpowers.  Currently the streets of Portland, Chicago, New York along with the streets of rural towns are all bursting with protestors. They are refusing to delegate responsibility for their futures to agencies outside of themselves, to representatives and non-profits, to the so-called official organizations of the working-class.  However, now, rather than dying amongst strangers, thousands of unhoused, poor, women, trans and gender non-conforming people, people of color, Indigenous, immigrant, imprisoned, “others,” and militant accomplices who accompany them have chosen the possibility of death rather than certain death so that they may live. So that we all may live.     

An organizer, autonomist, and author, Kevin Van Meter is the author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (IAS/AK Press, 2017), co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents (AK Press, 2010), and is currently writing his next book Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (Forthcoming, AK Press, 2021-2022).  Van Meter can be reached via his website: www.readingstruggles.info.   

Notes

[1] George Orwell, “How the Poor Die” in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. (Boston: David R. Goodine, 2000), 232.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London and New York: Pengiun Books, 1990), 342. 

[4] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 270. 

[5] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 137-138. 

[6] Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London” Duke University Press, 2011), 121.  

[7] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 375. 

[8] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Build in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3. 

[9] Claude Lefort, “What is Bureaucracy?” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John B. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 119-120.

[10] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 4.

[11] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 216.

[12] Emile Zola, Germinal (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 413. 

‘Ecological Leninism’: On Waging War Against the Common Cause of Corona and the Climate Crisis

By Justin Reynolds

Republished from Curious.

What is the connection between the coronavirus and the climate crisis? Andreas Malm’s brilliant polemic Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, written within a matter of weeks as the worldwide lockdown took hold, argues that their common root and cure are in plain view, if we are willing to see, and act.

COVID-19 is not an act of God that came out of a clear blue sky, but, like climate change, the consequence of rapacious extraction of the Earth’s resources. As we pry ever deeper into the primordial wildernesses where viruses lurk for materials and animals to buy and sell, hacking down tropical forests, blowing up limestone caverns, and draining wetlands, we drive out the diseases and their carriers: bats, rats, mice, anthropods, mosquitoes and locusts. For Malm it’s ‘rather as if the human economy had resolved to lift up the container of coronaviruses and other pathogens and pour the load over itself.’

The book is shot through with biblical imagery of plague and pestilence, but Malm finds his lodestar in the urgent rhetoric of a 20th century prophet. The Bolshevik leader Lenin, surveying the desperate situation of Russia in September 1917, riven by war, famine and economic breakdown, urged that the powers of the state must be seized and directed against what he saw as the root causes of the crisis of his day–the chronic conflict generated by warring capitalist empires. Malm sketches an ‘ecological Leninism’ for today, a programme for marshalling the hard power of the state to rewire an economic system that is destroying us.

Use of the imagery of ‘war communism’ is bold even for the Marxist writer of Fossil Capital and The Progress of this Storm. But if Malm offends, that is his intention: ‘When there is a threat to the health or even physical existence of a population one doesn’t leave it to the least conscientious individuals to play with the fire as they want. One snatches the matches out of their hands.’

Disturbing the hornets’ nest

Our crisis, he argues, is systemic. Individual, companies, industries and nations do not intend to destabilise the conditions that support our civilisation by ripping up the planet’s ecosystems. The economic machine in which they are entangled is hardwired to do so. And as it careers onwards it disturbs more and more of the pathogens that have lived for millions of years in the depths of tropical forests, the recesses of cave systems, and the mephitic atmospheres of marshes, lagoons and swamps.

Most of those viruses have been contained within the luxuriant ecosystems that proliferate around the equator, able to move between thousands of hosts before exhausting themselves. There has always been the possibility of ‘Zoonotic spillover’, the process by which a microbe leaps from its habitual animal carrier to a human intruder. These transmissions are only as frequent as we allow them to be: so long as we don’t poke our hand into the hornets’ nest, we don’t get stung.

But as widening circuits of global trade have compelled the clearing of ancient forests, the mining of caverns and the bleeding dry of wetlands, the natural barriers between humans and the carriers of pathogens are breaking down.

Soaring demand for beef, soybean, palm oil and wood accounts for much of the depletion, as loggers and farmers cut into the heart of great forests such as the Amazon, the Ecuadorian Yasuni and the Indonesian Harapan. Some 70 per cent of the total agricultural land of Malaysia and Indonesia is now devoted exclusively to the production of palm oil. The hydrocarbons and mining industries have also established their presence, opening up timeless fastnesses such as the peatlands of the Congo basin, an ancient rainforest harbouring colonies of viruses that have slept undisturbed–until now.

And as the loggers and drillers move in, the pathogens and their carriers flood out: rats, mosquitos, insects, and, above all, bats, the most effective of viral agents, sheltering thousands of coronaviruses in dense roosts where as many as 3,000 individuals can congregate in a square metre.

The hollowing out of the world’s great biospheres has–and continues to be–primarily driven by demand from wealthy northern countries for ever more rarefied commodities:

[T]he American appetite for hamburgers is satisfied from pastures carved out of the Amazon. The import of coffee to the North presupposes deforestation in the tropical belt. Chocolate consumed in the most tremendous quantities in Switzerland, Germany and Austria and supplied by a mirroring top trio of Ivory Coast, Ghana and Indonesia comes from cocoa trees grown where wild forests once stood.

‘A drizzle of viruses’

Increasingly intense extraction has seeded a bloom of viruses. Since the turn of the millennium outbreaks have followed in quick succession: Nipah, West Nile, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika. The coronavirus is merely the first to move beyond their habitual seedbeds in Asia, Africa and South America.

The replication of northern consumption patterns in Southeast Asia provided the ideal conditions for the genesis of COVID-19. The wet markets of Wuhan have become ever more decadent and reckless in response to demand from prosperous consumers. Just as the western world increasingly demands novelties such as zebra steaks, crocodile sausages, whale, camel and python meat, so Wuhan’s wealthy patrons have come to expected ever more carnivalesque displays of pangolins, flying-foxes, racoons, dogs and rats.

Nearly 20 per cent of all the world’s species have now been commodified. And, as at Wuhan, viruses lurk among them. Unrestrained consumption ‘violently shakes the tree where bats and other animals live. Out falls a drizzle of viruses.’

Extraction means global heating, which means more viruses. Depletion of forests and wetlands diminishes their capacity to soak up and sequester carbon dioxide. And rising global temperatures open opportunities for the carriers of pathogens to move northwards beyond their ancient tropical habitats. An alarming story somewhat lost amid the noise when the pandemic took hold was the appearance of swarms of locusts more than 20 times larger than normal–embodying an area three times that of New York–across east African and west Asia. As temperatures rise they may even be able to glide over the mountain ranges that until now have confined them to southern regions.

The pandemic has inspired comparison with the great plagues of the past. But Malm suggests our predicament is different and, modern medicine not withstanding, in some ways worse. He acknowledges the parallels with the decline and fall of Rome drawn in Kyle Harper’s intriguing 2017 study The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, detailing how imperial expansion pulled in diseases causing outbreaks that shook the classical world’s foundations with catastrophes such as the Antoninian and Justinian Plagues.

But empires have risen and fallen and risen again. Today’s pandemics are entangled with climate change, a chronic ecological rupture. COVID-19 threatens to be one of ‘an avalanche of missiles’ that will continue to rain down over centuries. The process can only be stopped by inoculating ourselves against the unchecked extraction that Malm, in one of the book’s boldest images, suggests is itself a virus:

Capital doesn’t mean to destroy the intricate cellular structures of wild nature; it doesn’t have an intention formed in the mind and then engage in efforts to realise it–there is just no other way for it to replicate. … Unlike other parasites, this one cannot stay content with vegetating in the furs or veins of other species for millions of years of co-evolutionary equilibrium. It can subsist solely by expanding and, in this sense, it exhibits a sort of permanent pandemicity; it doesn’t return to lurk in the shadows until the next visitation, like Ebola or Nipah. Once it had leapt out its reservoir host on the British Isles, it commenced the long historical work of subsuming wild nature on this planet, be it in the form of a palm oil plantation, a bauxite mine, a wet market or a rat farm. All of these and uncountable other entities represent wild nature dragged into the chain of value, and given the biological fact that pathogenic microbes are constituent elements of such nature, capital must call them up too.

Impending catastrophe, then and now

Looking for a way forward, Malm, whose previous works have elaborated Marx’s concept of metabolic rift–the imbalance in our relationship with nature wrought by unsustainable production–turns to Lenin’s essay The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, written on the eve of the 1917 October Revolution.

There, Lenin, drawing on Marx’s stark assessment in the The Communist Manifesto that the fight for socialism will end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’, argued that the devastation wrought by the war was the inevitable endpoint of competition between empires for resources: humanity had to ‘choose between perishing’ or transitioning to ‘a superior mode of production’.

For Lenin the way out was both impossible and obvious: to dare to use ‘the rich store of control measures’ the Russian government, like the other warring nations, had already designed and exercised during the conflict to plan production and prevent food systems collapsing. But with a critical difference: rather than being employed to defend the status quo they should be used to overturn it. The powers of the capitalist state should be used against capitalism itself.

Like Lenin, Malm rejects the left alternatives of social democracy and anarchism as inadequate to the scale of the crisis. Social democracy is fatally entangled with a capitalist system of overproduction that is the root cause of our predicament. And by forsaking the power of the state anarchism denies itself the agency necessary to act at sufficient scale. Lenin urged something new: a state prepared to use its powers to wrench Russia onto a new path: to withdraw from the war, to commandeer the grain supply, to take control of the banking system, to redirect production for communal need.

Malm imagines what a systematic climate change programme charged with similar urgency might look like. It would audit supply chains and import flows to determine the extent of resource extraction from the south to the north. It would pare those supply chains down to a minimum of essential goods. It would redirect resources to the rewinding and reforesting of regions worn down by northern consumption. It would ban the import of meat, especially beef, investing plant proteins. And so on: in brief, it would do whatever is necessary to establish trade circuits that do not continually extract and exploit. Above all, it would require planning: ‘Comprehensive, airtight planning. Everybody knows this. Few say it.’

Malm points to recent instances of where a strong state has pushed through the noise and forced through effective climate change mitigation measures. During his tenure as Brazilian President, Lula oversaw a significant reduction in the deforestation of the Amazon, expanding protected areas and enforcing forest codes against illegal logging, measures that slashed Brazil’s CO2 emissions by some 40 per cent. And although the Chinese state’s prolific use of coal has been an environmental catastrophe, it has pushed through a massive reforestation programme.

Malm echoes Lenin’s call that ‘war must be declared on the oil barons and shareholders’. For Lenin that meant socialising the industry to ramp up production for the construction of a new Soviet state. Today we need public control to manage the sunsetting of the industry. But radically reducing fossil fuel production and phasing out carbon emissions will not be enough. We need to drawdown the excess carbon already in the atmosphere. The exceptional circumstances of the pandemic reduced emissions by some 5 per cent. But a 7.6 per cent reduction is needed every year over the next decade to keep within the Paris Agreement targets.

Only the state has the power to roll out the direct air capture technologies we need at sufficient scale. And only the state can redirect the oil and gas industry away from carbon production towards carbon capture and burial: ‘The demand for nationalising fossil fuel companies and turning them into direct air capture utilities should be the central transitional demand for the coming years.’

An ‘acid taste’

Malm acknowledges that the harsh language of ‘rationing, reallocating, requisitioning, sanctioning, ordering’ leaves an ‘acid taste’. But this is what needs to be done:

Here we truly are in the situation of Lenin’s September text: everybody knows what measures need to be taken; everybody knows, on some level of their consciousness, that flights inside continents should stay grounded, private jets banned, cruise ships safely dismantled, turbines and panels mass produced–there’s a whole auto industry waiting for the order–subways and bus lines expanded, high-speed rail lines built, old houses refurbished and all the magnificent rest.

The ‘classical Marxist dream of a humanity liberated in a land of abundance’–which finds contemporary expression in manifestos for a technologically advanced ‘luxury communism’–must be sidelined for the foreseeable future: ‘those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of these needs to happen, that there will be no sacrifices or discomforts for ordinary people, are not being honest.’

Lenin of course was that rarest of polemicists: one who got the opportunity to follow through on his words. And follow them through he did, not without brutality. Malm acknowledges the cruelties of ‘actually existing’ war communism: the authoritarianism, the food requisitions at gunpoint, the militarisation of labour, the summary executions to enforce discipline in the ranks. The experience ‘of civil war ‘deposited a poison of brutalised power in the heart of the workers’ state, to which it eventually fell victim’. Freedom of expression and assembly must be sacrosanct, however dire the emergency.

But planning allowed resourcefulness. At the start of the conflict the White and allied forces held 99 per cent of the coal and 97 per cent of the oil resources that had powered the pre-war Russian state. Surrounded on all sides, and forced to live completely by their own means by an import blockade, the Soviets marshalled the resources they did have effectively, constructing a functioning ‘biofueled workers’ state’ using the boreal forests that blanketed the Russia that remained to them for construction, heat and energy. And despite having to fell so much timber, they were conscious of the need to preserve, setting half of the forests aside as inviolable ‘monuments of nature’. That legacy persists: Russia still has more pure wildernesses than other nation.

Like Lenin’s essays, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is in the best tradition of the polemic: the anger controlled, the urgency palpable, the imagery vivid, the case emphatically made, agree with it or not. And like Lenin, Malm is writing at a time of emergency. The critical difference, of course, is that Lenin wrote in the knowledge that a revolutionary vanguard was close to power.

Today’s left, at least that section offering a transformative agenda, is nowhere near. For all the talk of Green New Deals, by and large progressives retain faith in the sufficiency of a gradualist path to climate mitigation, placing hope in renewables technology and market mechanisms: solar, wind and batteries, carbon pricing and capture. In his anger Malm does not acknowledge that there is a certain tough-mindedness in pragmatism too: we need to do what we can within the context of the current political and economic environment, with the imperfect tools it affords. That means pressing for more investment in clean energy, for carbon taxes, for market regulation, and perhaps even for nuclear power and some forms of geoengineering.

But as the crisis bites harder, governments will have to take some or all of the tougher measures Malm anticipates. And the right, not the left, might be positioned to use it. Nationalist authoritarianism of various degrees has already taken hold in several nations: China, Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the United States, and to some extent the United Kingdom.

The pandemic has illustrated the public will accept harsh measures if the threat is close by. Malm: ‘No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement … ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.’

The challenge for the left would seem to be to ensure that it, not the authoritarian right, has the keys to the state when the eye of the storm arrives. That day seems some way off. Whomever holds power, and whatever one thinks of his analysis, Malm, echoing Lenin, is surely right about this: it is necessary to act now–‘this very evening, this very night’.

Blood, Breastmilk, and Dirt: Silvia Federici and Feminist Materialism in International Law

By Miriam Bak McKenna

Republished from Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law

If the politics of gender have been dragged front and centre into public discourse of late, this shift seems to have evaded international legal scholarship, or legal scholarship for that matter. Outside feminist literature, discussions of gender continue to be as welcome as a fart in a phonebox among broader academic circles. Unfortunately, Marxist and historical materialist scholarship fare little better. Despite periods in the 1960s and early 70s when their shared belief in the transformative potential of emancipatory politics flourished, Heidi Hartman had by 1979 assumed the mantle of academic marriage counselor, declaring that attempts to combine Marxist and feminist analysis had produced an “unhappy marriage”. [1] Women’s interests had been sidelined, she argued, so that “either we need a healthier marriage, or we need a divorce”. [2] Feminists pursued the latter option and the so-called “cultural turn”–a move coinciding with the move away from the “modernist” agenda of early second-wave feminism towards postmodern perspectives.

Not all feminists, however, took the cultural turn or wholeheartedly embraced postmodernism. Many continued to work within broadly materialist frameworks. Silvia Federici, known prominently for her advocacy of the 1970s Wages for Housework demand, continued the Marxist feminist momentum in her advocacy and scholarship by overseeing a revision or perhaps even reinvention of materialist feminism, especially in the United States. Federici’s work on social reproduction and gender and primitive accumulation, alongside a small but active group of materialist feminists (particularly Wally Seccombe, Maria Mies and Paddy Quick), brought a new energy to materialist feminism, making the capitalist exploitation of labour and the function of the wage in the creation of divisions within the working class (starting with the relation between women and men) a central question for anti-capitalist debate. Drawing on anti-colonial struggles and analyses to make visible the gendered and racialized dimensions of a global division of labour, Federici has sought to reveal the hierarchies and divisions engendered by a system that depends upon the devaluation of human activity and the exploitation of labour in its unpaid and low-paid dimensions in order to impose its rule.

In this post, I argue that Federici’s work offers a rich resource for redressing the conspicuous absence of a gendered perspective within academic scholarship on materialist approaches to international law. Materialist analyses of systematic inequalities within the international legal field are as relevant now as they ever were, yet the sidelining of gender and feminism within both traditional and new materialism has long been cause for concern. A gendered materialism in international law, which casts light on the logic of capitalist socialization and which affords the social reproductive sphere equal analytical status, allows us to access a clearer picture of the links between global and local exploitation at the intersections of gender, race, and nationality, and provides new conceptual tools to understand the emergence and function of international legal mechanisms as strategies of dominance, expansion, and accumulation.

A Brief Portrait of a Troubled Union

In 1903 the leading German SPD activist Clara Zetkin wrote: “[Marx’s] materialist concept of history has not supplied us with any ready-made formulas concerning the women’s question, yet it has done something much more important: It has given us the correct, unerring method to explore and comprehend that question.” [3] In many respects this statement still rings true. While Marxism supplied means for arguing that women’s subordination had a history, rather than being a permanent, natural, or inevitable feature of human relations, it was quickly criticized for marginalizing many feminist (and other intersectional) concerns. Feminist scholars in particular called attention to the failure of some forms of Marxism to address the non-economic causes of female subordination by reducing all social, political, cultural, and economic antagonisms to class, and the tendency among many traditional Marxist scholars to omit any significant discussions of race, gender, or sexuality from their work.

Marxist feminists (as well as critical race scholars and postcolonial theorists) have attempted to correct these omissions with varying degrees of success. The wave of radical feminist scholarship in the 1960s produced a number of theories of women’s domestic, sexual, reproductive, and cultural exploitation and subordination. Patriarchy (the “manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general” [4]) emerged as a key concept that unified broader dynamics of female subordination, while gender emerged as a technique of social control in the service of capitalist accumulation. Within this logic some proposed a “dual-system theory” wherein capitalism and patriarchy were distinct systems that coincided in the pre-industrial era to create the system of class and gender exploitation that characterizes the contemporary world. [5] Others developed a “single-system theory” in which patriarchy and capitalism “are not autonomous, nor even interconnected systems, but the same system”. [6]

During the 1970s, discussions turned in particular to the issue of women’s unpaid work within the home. The ensuing “domestic labour debate” sought to make women’s work in the home visible in Marxist terms, not as a private sphere opposed to or outside of capitalism but rather as a very specific link in the chain of production and accumulation. By exploring its strategic importance and its implications for the capitalist economy on a global scale, this analysis helped show that other forms of unpaid work, particularly by third world peasants and homeworkers, are an integral part of the international economy, central to the processes of capital accumulation. However, the Wages for Housework Campaign was criticized for failing to engage with broader social causes and effects of patriarchal oppression, as well as for essentializing and homogenizing the women it discussed. [7] These criticisms contributed to deep divisions between feminist thinkers on the left. A majority were to follow the lead of those like Hartman, arguing that Marx’s failure explicitly to examine domestic labour, coupled with the “sex-blind” analysis of most Marxist theorists, had prevented Marxism from adequately addressing women’s working conditions. Describing this period, Sue Ferguson noted that the “festering (and ultimately unresolved) issue” fueling socialist feminist thought was the place of Marxist analysis. [8] This shift, meanwhile, was overtaken by the cultural turn in social theory and the question of “how women are produced as a category” as the key to explaining their social subordination, in which materialist issues such as the debate over domestic labour were largely discarded. [9]

WWF: Wages, Witches, and Fanon

Among the Marxist feminist scholars who stayed the course during the broader scholarly shift towards structuralism, a small group of materialist feminists, including Silvia Federici, began to expand the debates over the relationship between patriarchy and capital by integrating the complexities of various forms of reproductive labour into their work. Led by such notable figures as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, and Federici herself, their work on the sphere of social reproduction, which had largely been neglected in Marxist accounts, brought new energy to the materialist debate. In particular, responding to the above-mentioned critiques, they shifted their perspectives to develop situated accounts of the role of women in the global geopolitical economy that incorporated overlapping issues of imperialism, race, gender, class, and nationality.

The arc of Federici’s scholarship mirrors to a large extent the broader shifts within late-twentieth century Marxist feminism. Inspired to pursue a PhD in the United States after witnessing the limitations placed upon her mother, a 1950s housewife, her arrival coincided with an upswing of feminist activity in U.S. universities. Federici’s first publication, titled Wages Against Houseworkand released in 1975, situated itself within the domestic labour debate, drawing on Dalla Costa and James’ arguments that various forms of coerced labour (particularly non-capitalist forms) and generalized violence, particularly the sexual division of labour and unpaid work, play a central function in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural dependence upon the unwaged labour of women, noted Maria Mies, meant that social reproduction is “structurally necessary super-exploitation”–exploitation to which all women are subjected, but which affects women of colour and women from the global South in particularly violent ways. [10]

In Wages Against Housework, Federici expanded these social reproduction insights into a theory of “value transfer”, focusing on the dependence of capital on invisible, devalued, and naturalized labour. Contrary to the prevailing ideology of capitalism, she argues, which largely depicts labour as waged, freely undertaken, and discrete, the reality is that–especially where women are concerned–labour is often coerced, constant, proliferating, and uncompensated. “We know that the working day for capital does not necessarily produce a paycheck and does not begin and end at the factory gates”, she explains together with Nicole Cox in “Counterplanning from the Kitchen”. [11] Capitalism infiltrates and becomes dependent upon the very realm that it constructs as separate: the private life of the individual outside of waged work.

Central to Federici’s thesis is the need to analyze capitalism from the perspective of both commodity production and social reproduction in order to expand beyond traditional spaces of labour exploitation and consider all of the spaces in which the conditions of labour are secured. As Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch, traditional Marxist categories are inadequate for understanding fully processes of primitive accumulation. [12] She notes that “the Marxian identification of capitalism with the advent of wage labor and the ‘free’ laborer…hide[s] and naturalize[s] the sphere of reproduction”, and further observes that “in order to understand the history of women’s transition from feudalism to capitalism, we must analyze the changes that capitalism has introduced in the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labor power”. [13] Thus, “the reorganization of housework, family life, child-raising, sexuality, male-female relations, and the relation between production and reproduction” are not separate from the capitalist mode of organization, but rather central to it. [14] The conflation and blurring of the lines between the spaces of production of value (points of production) and the spaces for reproduction of labour power, between “social factory” and “private sphere”, work and non-work, which supports and maintains the means of production is illustrated through her analysis of the household. Housework, Federici declares (and I am sure many would agree here) is “the most pervasive manipulation, and the subtlest violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class”. [15] Housework here is not merely domestic labour but its biological dimension (motherhood, sex, love), which is naturalized through domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, and most insidiously through “blackmail whereby our need to give and receive attention is turned against as a work duty”. [16] For Federici, the situation of “enslaved women … most explicitly reveals the truth of the logic of capitalist accumulation”. [17] “Capital”, she writes,

Has made and makes money off our cooking, smiling, fucking”. [18]

In Federici’s historical analysis of primitive accumulation and the logic of capitalist expansion, both race and gender assume a prominent position. For Federici, both social reproductive feminism and Marxist anticolonialism allow historical materialism to escape the traditional neglect of unwaged labour in the reproduction of the class relation and the structure of the commodity. As Ashley Bohrer has explored, Federici, like many other Italian Marxist feminists, has drawn explicitly on the work of post-colonial scholars, most prominently Frantz Fanon [19], in developing their theories of gendered oppression. [20] In the introduction to Revolution at Point Zero, Federici explains how she and others drew on Fanon’s heterodox economics in expanding their analyses beyond the scope of the traditional capitalist spaces:

It was through but also against the categories articulated by these [civil rights, student, and operaist/workerist] movements that our analysis of the “women’s question” turned into an analysis of housework as the crucial factor in the definition of the exploitation of women in capitalism … As best expressed in the works of Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial movement taught us to expand the Marxian analysis of unwaged labour beyond the confines of the factory and, therefore, to see the home and housework as the foundations of the factory system, rather than its “other”. From it we also learned to seek the protagonists of class struggle not only among the male industrial proletariat but, most importantly, among the enslaved, the colonized, the world of wageless workers marginalized by the annals of the communist tradition to whom we could now add the figure of the proletarian housewife, reconceptualized as the subject of the (re)production of the workforce. [21]

Just as Fanon recasts the colonial subject as the buttress for material expansion among European states, so Federici and others argue that women’s labour in the home creates the surplus value by which capitalism maintains its power. [22] Federici contends that this dependence, along with the accentuation of differences and hierarchies within the working classes for ensuring that reproduction of working populations continues without disruption, has been a mainstay of the development and expansion of capitalism over the last few centuries, as well as in state social policy. Colonization and patriarchy emerge in this optic as twin tools of (western, white, male) capital accumulation.

Expanding upon Fanon’s insights about the emergence of capitalism as a much more temporally and geographically extended process, Federici regards the transition as a centuries-long process encompassing not only the entirety of Europe but the New World as well, and entailing not only enclosures, land privatization, and the witch hunts, but also colonialism, the second serfdom, and slavery. In Caliban and the Witch, she presents a compelling case for the gendered nature of early primitive accumulation, by excavating the history of capital’s centuries-long attack on women and the body both within Europe and in its colonial margins. For Federici, the transition was “not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat”. [23] According to Federici, the production of the female subject is the result of a historical shift of economic imperative (which was subsequently enforced by those who benefited from such economic arrangements), which set its focus on women, whose bodies were responsible for the reproduction of the working population. [24] The goal was to require a “transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force” [25], and the means “was the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the ‘witches’”. [26] The witch–commonly midwives or wise women, traditionally the depository of women’s reproductive knowledge and control [27]–were targeted precisely due to their reproductive control and other methods of resistance. The continued subjectification of women and the mechanization of their bodies, then, can be understood as an ongoing process of primitive accumulation, as it continues to adapt to changing economic and social imperatives.

While a rich and engaging tradition of feminist approaches to international law has emerged over the past few decades, it has shown a marked tendency to sideline the long and multifaceted tradition of feminist historical-materialist thought. Similarly, within both traditional and new materialist approaches to international law, there has been a conspicuous sidelining of gender and feminism, along with issues of race and ethnicity. The argument for historical materialism in the context of international legal studies is not, as some critics have claimed, that women’s oppression ought to be reduced to class. Rather, the argument is that women’s experiences only make sense in the explanatory context of the dynamics of particular modes of production. However, this requires an adequate theory of social relations, particularly of social production, reproduction, and oppression, in order to sustain a materialist analysis that “make[s] visible the various, overlapping forms of subjugation of women’s lives”. [28]

It is my contention that Federici’s social-reproductive and intersectional theory of capitalism provides a path toward a more nuanced and sustained critique of the logic and structure of capitalism within the international legal field. This approach foregrounds the social–that is, social structures, relations, and practices. But it does not reduce all social structures, relations, and practices to capitalism. Nor does it depict the social order as a seamless, monolithic entity. Moving beyond traditional class-reductionist variants of historical materialism, capitalism emerges here as one part of a complex and multifaceted system of domination in which patriarchy, racism, and imperialism are fundamental, constitutive elements, which interact in unpredictable and contradictory ways.

As Federici’s scholarship has stressed, the importance of foregrounding social reproduction as part of the dynamic of capitalist accumulation, as facilitated by states and international institutions, is essential to any materialist analysis, including one of the international legal field. This is necessary for exploring women’s specific forms of oppression under capitalism, particularly as they are facilitated by the family and the state. For example, Federici’s insights into the domain of unpaid social reproduction and care work are useful for understanding women’s subordinated incorporation into labour markets, especially in the global South and in states affected by structural adjustment. Indeed, while the state largely facilitates women’s entry into the workforce, their categorization as “secondary” workers–“naturally” suited to care work and the fulfillment of physical and emotional needs, and “naturally” dependent upon men–has continually been reproduced to the detriment of their labour situation. [29]

While Federici’s social reproduction theory begins with women’s work in the home, she demonstrates that capitalism’s structural dependence upon unwaged and reproductive labour extends to regimes of domination predicated upon social control on the global plane (from slavery through the exploitation of immigrant workers to the genocide of indigenous peoples). In her account of primitive accumulation, power relations sustained through the construction of categories of gender, race, sex, and sexuality facilitate the creation of subjects predicated upon capitalism’s systemic needs. While the heterosexual family unit is one of the more visible ways in which this domination is socially reproduced, the relationship, Federici argues, is reproduced in many settings. The transformations of the neoliberal era–particularly the global reorganization of work fueled by the drive to impose the commodity form in ways that seek to harness and exploit labour in its unpaid and low-paid dimensions–are characteristic of this dynamic. Federici has also emphasized the fact that domestic workers and service providers have consistently been devalued as workers. [30] In doing so, she highlights one of the rhetorical gaps in the contemporary feminist movement: when women enter the waged work-force, they often enter into an exploitative relationship with other women (and men) with less social power. It is the latter’s labour, bodies, and time that provide the means for access to better conditions within the labour market.

This relation of exploitation is also prevalent in neocolonial forms of exploitation–called “the new enclosures” by Federici–which ensure that the affluent North benefits from social and economic conditions prevailing in the global South (for example, through transnational corporations’ access to cheap land, mineral, and labour resources). Capitalism, Federici argues, depends not only on unwaged housework, but on a global strategy of underdevelopment in the global South, one that relies upon the stratification of and constructed division between otherwise common interests. “Wagelessness and underdevelopment”, she argues, “are essential elements of capitalist planning nationally and internationally. They are powerful means to make … us believe that our interests are different and contradictory.” [31]

Federici’s depiction of patriarchy, the state, and capitalism as interacting forces, together with her focus on relational, overlapping regimes of domination and their attendant systems of control, points the way toward a new way of understanding intertwined techniques and discourses of power in the international legal field. Capitalism’s reliance upon multiple types of exploitation, multiple forms of dispossession, and multiple kinds of subjects is visible in broader themes of international law. It is, for instance, visible in the overlapping dynamics of control that mark the history of colonial expansion, as well as the emergence in the nineteenth century of sovereign hierarchies and various legal mechanisms that ensure patterns of dominance, expansion, and accumulation in the international sphere.

An examination of the historical and contemporary role of international law in perpetuating these dynamics of oppression prompts us to address the specific processes whereby these categories are produced and reproduced in international law. Examples include norms surrounding marriage and the family, the production of the category of the temporary worker, and the illegal immigrant whose disenfranchisement is the necessary condition of their exploitation. Much the same can be said for trade, property, taxation policy, welfare and social security provision, inheritance rights, maternity benefits, and support for childcare (or the lack thereof). In the context of the gendered dynamics of globalization, we can examine the manner in which the devaluation of female labour has been facilitated by international institutions, notably the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and through development initiatives such as micro-finance and poverty reduction strategies. Federici has also revealed the complicity of ostensibly neutral (and neutralizing) discourses such as development, especially when pursued with the stated objective of “female empowerment”, in glossing over the systemic nature of poverty and gendered oppression. These dynamics are ultimately predicated upon law’s power to create, sustain, and reproduce certain categories.

Usefully, Federici’s relational theory of subjectivity-formation also allows us to move beyond gender and race as fixed, stable categories, encouraging a new understanding that helps us detect more surreptitious gendered tropes and imaginaries in the structure of international legal practice and argumentation. One example is the set of narratives that surround humanitarian intervention. Indeed, as Konstantina Tzouvala has suggested, one of the glaring deficiencies in the socialist feminism proposed by B. S. Chimni is the absence of an explanation of how gender, race, class, and international law form an inter-related argumentative practice. [32]

Conclusion

Writing some ten years after David Schweickart lamented that analytical Marxism “remains a discourse of the brotherhood” [33], Iris Marion Young noted that,

[O]ur nascent historical research coupled with our feminist intuition tells us that the labor of women occupies a central place in any system of production, that the gender division is a basic axis of social structuration in all hitherto existing social formations, and that gender hierarchy serves as a pivotal element in most systems of social domination. If traditional Marxism has no theoretical place for such hypothesis, it is not merely an inadequate theory of women’s oppression, but also an inadequate theory of social relations, relations of production, and domination. [34]

Young’s defense of a “thoroughly feminist historical materialism” [35] is as relevant today as ever. While great in-roads have been made within materialist approaches to various disciplines, including international law, the continued tendency to marginalize issues of gender (along with issues of race and sexuality) greatly undermines the soundness of such critiques. In pointing to issues of social reproduction, racism, sexual control, servitude, imperialism, and control over women’s bodies and reproductive power in her account of primitive accumulation, Silvia Federici highlights issues that must occupy a prominent place in any materialist treatment of international law.

Miriam Bak McKenna is Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in International Law at Lund University.

Notes

1. Heidi Hartman, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” [1979], in Lynn Sargent (ed.) Women and Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism–A Debate on Class and Patriarchy (London: Pluto, 1981) 1.

2. Ibid., 2.

3. Clara Zetkin, “What the Women Owe to Karl Marx” [1903], trans. Kai Shoenhals, in Frank Meklenburg and Manfred Stassen (eds) German Essays on Socialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Continuum, 1990) 237, at 237.

4. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 239.

5. Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, “Class Is a Feminist Issue”, in Althea Prince, Susan Silvia-Wayne, and Christian Vernon (eds), Feminisms and Womanisms: A Women’s Studies Reader (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1986) 317. See, for example, Hartman, “Unhappy Marriage”; and also Sylvia Walby, Gender Segregation at Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988).

6. See, for example, Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Iris Marion Young, “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory”, in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981) 43.

7. See Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981).

8. Sue Ferguson, “Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition”, 25 (1999) Critical Sociology 1, at 2.

9. See, for example, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge, 1977) and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

10. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, 1st edition (London: Zed Books, 1986).

11. Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counterplanning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework–A Perspective on Capital and the Left (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 4.

12. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 8.

13. Ibid., 8–9.

14. Ibid., 9.

15. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 16.

16. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 20.

17. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 89.

18. Federici, Wages Against Housework, 19.

19. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004 [1961]).

20. Ashley Bohrer, “Fanon and Feminism”, 17 (2015) Interventions 378.

21. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 6–7 (original emphasis).

22. Ibid., 7.

23. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 64 (original emphasis).

24. Ibid., 145.

25. Ibid., 63.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 183.

28. Chandra Talpade Mohanthy, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28.

29. Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, Jill Steans, et al., “The New Materialism: Re-Claiming a Debate from a Feminist Perspective”, 40 (2016) Capital & Class 305, at 324.

30. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 65–115.

31. Ibid., 36.

32. Konstantina Tzouvala, “Reading Chimni’s International Law and World Order: The Question of Feminism”, EJIL: Talk! (28 December 2017).

33. David Schweickart, “Book Review of John Roemer, Analytical Marxism“, 97 (1987) Ethics 869, at 870

34. Iris Marion Young, “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of the Dual Systems Theory”, in Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham (eds), Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997) 95, at 102.

35. Ibid (original emphasis).

Hitler Is Not Dead: On Bourgeois Electoralism, Liberalism as the Left Wing of Fascism, and the Politics of Exceptionalizing Donald Trump

By Joshua Briond

“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. at the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.”

—Aimé Césaire, Discourses on Colonialism

We are in a sociopolitical moment where it is arguably more crucial than ever to challenge widespread, and often deliberate, misapprehensions regarding historical precedents, to avoid remaking past mistakes and repeating history when so much is at stake. Fascism is a socio-economic and political project and system of governing that began the moment Europeans first made contact with West African shores. The process continued when the Euro-American bourgeoisie further invaded Indigenous territory in conquest for expanding markets and sources of capital, and marked the creation of what we know today as America—the most powerful and technologically advanced hyper-militarized carceral-police state and exporter of capitalist, imperialist, and colonial violence and domination that the world has ever seen. The consequential violence and contradictions that have been exposed the last four years, which by many have been attributed solely to Donald Trump and co., are simply the demands and material consequences of capital and white supremacy (which go hand-in-hand, and are essentially inseparable). The exceptionalizing of Trump or his administration is short-sighted and dangerous. In reality, any US president would be tasked with such a role and responsibility.

Yet, what the liberal media apparatus and ruling class has spent the last four years doing to Trump—much like the West has historically done to Hitler—making him out to be an ‘exceptional’ evil, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, as a means of separating themselves from (what is largely described as exclusively Trumpian or Hitlerian) political crimes, represents an incredibly grotesque and ahistorical deliberation on the part of the elite. In other words, Hitler was not the first Hitler and Trump is not the first Trump. And they certainly won’t be the last. Trump, just as Hitler was, is not the exception but the rule of what white-supremacist-patriarchal capitalism is capable of, and what this system is willing to do (or produce) to maintain its naturalized order and rule. And if we allow them to continue to exceptionalize what Trump is doing, or has done up until this point—even if he’s doing it in unorthodox ways—we will be bamboozled yet again as yet another, more effective, less blatant Trump will inevitably rise.

What Hitler did, and what Trump is currently doing—as in their (racialized) political, economic, and war crimes—are not exclusive or unique to either of them as individuals, despite what Western (revisionist) history and the professional liberal media class would like to have us believe. But instead, racial terror, violence, and genocide, is and always has been the point of the Western (and American) project. It is built into the fabric of the of the West—it is all Euro-American’s have ever known, culturally and politically. And they will, as we have seen, continue their terror and violence because the political economy is sustained on such; until the entire project is brought to a halt. The global capitalist political economy is predicated on and sustained through racialized violence, and cannot be attributed solely to any one individual leader or figurehead. When I say that Hitler, or Trump in this case, are not exceptional evils, despite both being individually evil and worthy of our condemnation: it is to say that every western leader—namely in the context of US presidents—has blood on their hands. And all have, both individually and collectively, terrorized and massacred countless people, as their policies and upholding of US hegemony, by means of imperialism, [neo]colonialism, and global capitalism, has directly and indirectly led to such deadly consequences.

“When I switch on my radio and hear that black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. And finally when I switch on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been introduced and legalized, I say that truly they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead.”

— Aime Cesaire

I would like to preface the rest of this by stating that when I speak of Hitler, it is not just in the context of the individual—but an idea, as Aimé Césaire would describe it, both abstract and material, that is innate to western civilization and the maintenance of the regime which has global implications. Hitler was, quite literally on record, inspired by the United States’ treatment of Black and Indigenous people in America. But, the US, and the West at-large, has exceptionalized him, as if they are morally and politically above his crimes. How is what Hitler, and now Trump, did and are actively doing so unspeakable to the professional liberal apparatus, when such crimes have always been committed against racialized people on a global scale? How can we take seriously the largely performative outrage and condemnation that the Hitlers or Trumps of our world have incited in liberals when similar crimes have been enacted on racialized persons on a global scale by political leaders such as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama, all of whom they admire? What is Hitler to the African, whose enslavement, rape, theft, dispossession, and exploitation served as a template for what would be exported to other colonized nations and peoples for the purposes and demands of Western capital? What is Hitler to the Palestinian whose terror and ongoing genocide is being supported and funded by the US (and every single one of our politicians)? What is Hitler to the Iranian, Korean, or Chinese whose subjugated positionality is that of the result of US imperialism and global capitalism? What is Hitler to any racialized, imperialized, or colonized nation or peoples who have reaped the consequences of Euro-American capital and rule?

“During the Second World War the country became incensed against the Japanese—not against the Germans. The Germans were never incarcerated, the Japanese were. And now the Iranians and other people like that. Europe had nothing against Hitler and neither did [America] until he turned his guns against them.”

— James Baldwin

Fascism is not something that can be simply born or defeated via electoralism—in countries that are capitalist, colonialist, and/or imperialist from their inception, as was such in the case of the US and Germany. An able and willing fascist participant can absolutely run for office, uphold such an order, and maybe even advance it in a wide variety of ways. But there has not been a case in which fascism begins or ends with said individual or political act of simply voting. So while yes, the ruling class technically “allows” its subjects the illusive option to vote for and “elect” (with conditions, of course) whomever will be the upholder of said system, it is the system itself — that makes way for the empowerment and upholding of individuals, ideologies, and violence—that needs undoing, not just the figurehead representing it. Which, again, is what makes it ncessary to expose the liberal exceptionalizing of Trump’s regime of violence—because the capitalist ruling class will easily relieve Trump of his duties of upholding the white-supremacist fascist order and replace him with someone who will effectively maintain the white power structure with grace and class, just as liberals like it, in a way that is socially acceptable to the vast majority of American people (and the West at large). Because the vast majority of Americans are simply unaware of the extent to which political violence is exported globally. And the amount of violence, terror, and death that elected leaders—from the self-proclaimed progressives to the unabashed neo-conservatives—are directly responsible for.

To reiterate, the inevitable ascension into the fascist order began when Europeans set foot on the shores of West Africa—not the 2016 general election in the US. Germany, for example, alongside the Euro-Americas, enslaved and massacred Africans with impunity centuries prior to the unfortunate birth of Hitler, the individual, and yet we are to believe fascism began with Hitler? Or, in the American sense, with Trump in 2016? Despite the incessant crimes of capital, which as we know, as Marx taught us, “[came] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” throughout history, including such crimes that birthed the bastard child of Europe now known as America? If it took multi-country war and an immeasurable amount of bloodshed led by the USSR to defeat the fascist beast in Germany—never mind the reluctance on the part of the US to get involved until Germany threatened US hegemony with its prospects of expanding its rule on a global scale—how are we supposed to believe that fascism is something to be defeated by merely checking off a box?

America was born as a nation, as an ideological extension of a European bourgeois political, cultural, and libidinal desire to expand new markets to generate more capital—even if it meant resorting to the utmost diabolical means. Hitler is not dead. As the US's values, institutions, global legitimacy, and grip on the world—namely the colonized world—is in decay, there is far too much evidence of just this fact. And everything we are seeing that the professional liberal class has duplicitously yet meticulously attributed solely to Trump and his ilk, whether in reference to the political repression happening across the country on the part of the carceral police state, the neglect of millions of citizens in a midst of a global pandemic and economic turmoil, or the hypervisibility of armed white militia groups, is simply a product of white-supremacist capitalism and its reaction to, and delaying, its inevitable demise.

The state at-large, and its upholders—whether in the form of the institutionalized agents or vigilantes—is reacting to the desires and needs of capital and whiteness. And regardless of who is president, these contradictions will continue to rise in these times because the needs of capital and whiteness largely come at the expense of the non-white and super-exploited, rendering it unsustainable and almost always in a constant state of flux and turmoil, and constantly in need of protection and adaptation. Hitler is not dead.

“We must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.”

— Aimé Césaire, discourses on colonialism

Fascism—as well as the personification of such in the form of Hitler and Trump—is the inevitable outcome of a global capitalist system whose entire economy is predicated on constant racialized war, terror, and violence, and unsustainably expanding and creating new markets to achieve such a feat. Hitler is not dead. Fascism is simply “capitalism in decay.” If we want to end, or even remotely challenge fascism, we must work to eradicate capitalism.

The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positing of [neo]liberalism as in-opposition or an alternative to the fascist order. When in actuality, history has shown us that it is in cahoots with, if not, an actual strand of fascism in and of itself. Liberal democrats often spout rhetorical devices such as, “there is no middle ground; pick a side.” Such statements are not to emphasize the crucial sociopolitical moment we find ourselves in, which necessitates that we choose between fascism or socialism—in the face of pending climate doom and deteriorating material conditions—but to guilt us into voting for Democrats over Republicans.

It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule—who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large—while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates. There have been constant claims on the part of liberal democrats—and those sympathetic to their politics—of radicals being “child-like” and expecting “purity” for wanting a world without constant racialized violence, demanding political representatives that aren’t subservient to capital but to our material interests, and refusing to engage in lesser of two evils every election cycle. It is quite clear that liberal establishment democrats—and the opportunists who serve their rule—are categorically irrelevant to the dispossessed, colonized, racialized, super-exploited, and wretched of our world, beyond their attempts to postpone and/or flat-out hinder our drive to build a better world, and redirecting our aims back into the arms of the establishment.

Liberal democrats obediently assume their role as the “left-wing” of fascism—the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops.” The covert fascists versus overt fascists. But at the detriment to us all, the fact still remains that they are both still cops and they are both still driving a fascist system to its inevitable conclusion. Democrats represent the only publicly legitimized and acknowledged political “left” party despite being overwhelmingly ideologically right wing. They allow and endorse mild concessions that will help keep the racialized, colonized, dispossessed, and super-exploited slightly comfortable enough—at the expense of one another and persons in the Global South and Third World—to remain complicit in their subjugation. They will even give impassioned monologues on social media, or in front of the cameras, yell at Republicans’ blatant political violence—while doing nothing materially to actually offer resistance or represent an opposition to said violence beyond rhetorical moral grandstanding. While Republicans don’t even pretend to care about providing subjects of their rule crumbs through these concessions. They don’t pretend to care about whether or not you vote because they accept and relish in their bad cop role. But ultimately, both parties truly cannot exist and flourish without one another. They are both incredibly useful, in their own way, as agents of capital, to the sustainment and growth of fascism.

I’d argue “centrism,” “conservatism,” and “republicanism” are not even economic ideologies—in fact, their ideology largely rests on the premise that they have none—beyond the rule of capital. So why else—beyond the aforementioned reasons—would you need two parties? Both parties are one in the same—just differ in tactics and approaches—but are united under the banner of upholding economic [neo]liberalism, i.e., capitalism. Which is why the rhetoric of “we have a choice between neoliberalism or fascism”—which has been an ostensible liberal talking point—as if, again, neoliberalism is, or could ever be, an alternative, reprieve, or in-opposition to fascism. How could something that has historically worked in cahoots with fascism be an alternative to its rule?

The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized—especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations—in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand. The fascist order will remain intact regardless of who is elected into office on November 3rd—despite the hand-wringing and finger-pointing over which party is more at fault for white-supremacist capitalism’s ills being exposed. The public perception and liberal media coverage of certain events and political violence will adjust accordingly. What we are seeing now, and have been seeing for the last four years is simply a declining empire doing anything and everything it can to maintain its tight (but loosening) grip on its own people—as well as the rest of the world. As evidenced by not just the uprisings and rebellions happening across the country and the world at-large, but the failed coup d’etat attempts—namely in Venezuela and Bolivia—which the professional liberals condemned, not from an anti-imperialist stance but because of Trump’s inability to do imperialism effectively.

If Trump is Hitler, what is Obama to people of Libya? Or Syria? Or Pakistan? What is George W. Bush Jr. to Iraqis? What is Bill Clinton to the people of Sudan? Yuglosavia? What are any and all of them to migrants who have been caged and deported, or Black people who have been executed by police in the streets on a daily basis, or workers who have been left without means to sustain basic life, or tens of millions who are surveilled each and every day? These things occurred long before Trump and will continue to escalate long after Trump.

The empire lives. For now. And Hitler is not dead.

Women and Capitalism: Revisiting Silvia Federici's 'Caliban and the Witch'

By Natasha Heenan

Republished from Progress in Political Economy.

In high school, like many young women, my friends and I developed a fascination with witches. Years before we knew what feminism was, a sense of foreboding had developed among us, about our place in the world and our power relative to adults and to our male peers. As ambitious teen girls wary of how we were perceived in the adult world, we sought solace in the idea that we could harness a secret and subversive power to change things. After school we concocted potions, conducted rituals and created secret languages. For a time we believed in magic.

Unknown to us, in her ground-breaking book, Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries served to create and enforce a newly established role in society for women, who were consigned to unpaid reproductive labour to satisfy the needs of an ascendant capitalist order. Published in 2004 and based on a research project started in the 1970s with Italian feminist Leopoldina Fortunati, Federici draws upon an eclectic mix of historical sources, re-reading the transition to capitalism from a Marxist-feminist viewpoint.

Federici presents a close reading of the European witch-hunts, in order to re-appraise the function and nature of primitive accumulation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Her most important contribution in this regard is to reveal the mechanisms by which production was separated from reproduction, and how the resulting sexual division of labour had to be created and enforced through extreme violence. This account of primitive accumulation challenges Marx and other subsequent interpretations of the transition to capitalism as a progressive and necessary shift in social relations. Federici foregrounds the experience of women (painted as witches) and colonised people (the metaphorical Caliban, from Shakespheare’s Tempest) to show that this was in no way a progressive moment in changing social relations and that at every stage of capitalist expansion, new rounds of primitive accumulation involving violence and expropriation of land can be observed.

One of the most devastating parts about reading Caliban and the Witch is the recognition of everything that women lost in terms of social power in the transition to capitalism. Witches embodied everything “that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeah woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (p. 11). Federici documents the changes in women’s social status, how they were encouraged not to walk alone on the streets or sit outside their homes, how ale-brewing (traditionally women’s work) came to be seen as men’s work, how the word gossip shifted its meaning from ‘friend’ to acquire a negative connotation (also see Hanna Black who has written more about the etymology of the word gossip in this context here). This all formed a part of the “intense process of social degradation” women were forced to undergo, in order to be remade in the image of capital (p. 100).

One revelation of this book is that in numerous ways, women refused to take their place in the emerging capitalist reordering of society, just as they refused the reconstitution of the body as a machine. Women tore down hedges and fences and reclaimed the commons, they engaged in non-reproductive sex and led peasant revolts. They met at night on hilltops, around bonfires, stole food and clothing, and they gossiped. Federici argues that the witch hunts, rather than representing the last dying breaths of feudal order and the attendant superstitions of feudal societies, were a tool to discipline and shape the emerging working class and hence were integral to the transition to capitalism. Federici concludes that only by ignoring the experience of women, slaves and indigenous people in the transition to capitalism can primitive accumulation be viewed as progressive. The women singled out for public burning were often poor peasants accused by their landlords or other wealthy community members of witchcraft, which Federici links to documented instances of poor women begging for or stealing food. As Federici notes, “the witch-hunt grew in a social environment where the ‘better sorts’ were living in constant fear of the ‘lower classes’” and their potential for insubordination (p. 173).

Throughout the book Federici shifts between centuries, sometimes bringing us all the way to the present, in order to show how this violence continues in the form of structural adjustment programs and in new rounds of land enclosures in developing countries. In seeking to uncover a “hidden history that needs to be made visible” Federici foregrounds the “secret” of capitalism, women’s unpaid reproductive work, slavery and colonisation (p. 13). The use of violence in the witch hunts, allowed the state to establish a level of control over women’s bodies and lives that was unprecedented, as seen in the rise of census taking and population monitoring, and the demonising of abortion and contraceptives. Federici further argues that “the persecution of the witches was the climax of the state intervention against the proletarian body in the modern era” and that the “human body… was the first machine invented by capitalism” (pp. 143, 146). That the violence of slavery and colonisation in the New World was parallel to the patriarchal violence of Europe is a difficult argument to make and is one of the more unconvincing parts of Federici’s book. The relation between early capitalism and slavery and genocide is an area well explored by historians and critical race scholars, which could have been better utilised to extend the appraisal of primitive accumulation from the point of view of colonised people and slaves.

The members of this semester’s Past & Present Reading Group had diverse reactions to Caliban and the Witch. The book stimulated lively and important discussions about feminist re-readings of history, questions about the nature of feudal life, and critiques of Federici’s comparison between patriarchal oppression and white supremacy. Most of all Federici inspired a desire to question many other theories of history, to take her analysis even further back in time and trace developments in ideologies of racism, white supremacy, misogyny and witch hunting prior to early capitalism. The group ultimately received the book as it was given, that is, as a ‘sketch’ of a theory, needing further exploration and refinement, but powerful nonetheless.

The horrifying scale and brutality of the witch hunts is difficult to comprehend, especially given their status as “one of the most understudied phenomena in European history” (p. 163). In an ironic twist of fate (and clearly inspired by Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Witch), my friends and I embraced the idea of magic without fear that the charge of witchcraft would lead to our torture and death. Perhaps this is because today women’s unpaid reproductive labour is so immutable, capitalists no longer perceive witchcraft to be a threat to the sexual division of labour within firmly capitalist social relations of production. However, this does not mean that new, if at times more subtle forms of subordination and control of women aren’t apparent. On the contrary, renewed attacks on reproductive rights and rights to bodily autonomy, the violation of livelihood rights by mining and agricultural companies in developing countries, and the daily assault by the state on indigenous lives in Australia and black lives in the U.S, all work in different ways to reaffirm the marginalised status of women and people of colour (Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, has written powerfully on this subject and others here).

Caliban and the Witch is a reminder that it is the task of feminists and Marxists alike to demand that the sphere of reproduction and continuing forms of colonialism be seen as key sources of value for capitalism and therefore as key sites of struggle against it.

The FBI's War on the Left: A Short History of COINTELPRO

By Alex Zambito

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Throughout its history the United States has billed itself as an open society upholding the free exchange of ideas. We are told that, unlike people in less-enlightened countries, Americans do not have to worry about being persecuted for their political beliefs. Of course, this has never been true. From its very inception, the US government has been restricting free-speech through legislation such as the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798- not to mention the restriction on expression for the enslaved. Americans usually consider this a thing of the past, but political repression continued throughout the 20th century to this day, but in more covert forms. In this essay, I will explore the historical development of the US government’s system of covert domestic political repression, its consolidation, and its culmination in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

The FBI has its origins in the General Intelligence Division which was created in 1919 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to collect information on radical organizations. J. Edgar Hoover, who would remain in power for the next several decades, was appointed as its head.[1] The GID was immediately used in the infamous Palmer Raids- a series of mass arrests and deportations targeting “alien” members of radical movements. The raids began on November 7, 1919 when GID agents raided offices of the United Russian Workers across the country arresting 650 people and deporting at least 43 without due process.  The crescendo of the raids came on January 2, 1920 when GID agents descended on radical groups in over 30 cities across the country, arresting at least 3,000 people.[2] Much of this repression was directed at the Communist Party USA, with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson announcing on January 19th that membership in the CPUSA was enough to warrant deportation of immigrants.[3] The raids were finally ended by a court ruling in June 1920, but by then the damage had already been done. Left-wing organizations were effectively decimated with Communist Party membership dropping from over 27,000 in 1919 to just over 8,000 the next year.[4]

Along with the Palmer raids, the Bureau utilized numerous other methods to harass radical groups. In 1919, Hoover targeted Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Bureau employed several infiltrators in the UNIA to uncover information which could be used in trumped up criminal charges against Garvey. After numerous charges of criminal activity failed to stick, the Bureau managed to obtain a conviction against Garvey on mail fraud in 1925. He was deported to Jamaica in 1927.[5]

By the mid-1920s, Hoover was able to renounce the FBI’s past political operations. Aside from participating in repression of major strikes, the Bureau would be true to its word for the next decade. But as the Communist Party began to regain relevance- reaching 66,000 members by 1939- Hoover gained approval from President Roosevelt to resume repression of “subversive activities”. Although Roosevelt later altered this directive as the Soviet Union became a key ally in the fight against Nazi Germany, it would not prevent Hoover from using it as justification for later counter-intelligence activities.[6]

After World War II ended and the Cold War began, Communism became enemy #1 with the CP becoming a natural target. In coordination with the CIA, the FBI began a program of intercepting and inspecting the international communications of US citizens. This was particularly focused on the mail and cables between the US and Soviet Union.[7] Additionally, the Bureau would frequently use other forms of information gathering such as “surreptitious entry” and “bugging” CP offices.[8] The FBI also cooperated with the IRS to gather information on targeted groups and single them out for harassment from the IRS.[9]

Additionally, the FBI would perfect the divide and conquer techniques it would later use to great effect in official COINTELPRO programs against the CP. The Bureau used infiltrators to exploit internal divisions within the party, such as over Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin.[10] The Bureau also used “anonymous mailings” in various ways to disrupt party activities. Agents would send letters to party members warning about the treacherous activities of others in the party, hoping to stir up factional disputes.[11] This was also a common ploy in the FBI’s “snitch jacketing” technique to portray loyal party members as informants. This was also frequently accomplished by informants within the party spreading rumors, forged informant reports, or “interviews” where agents would publicly speak with a target to create the impression the party member was an informant.[12]

Anonymous letters and interviews would also be used to impact the personal lives of party members or disrupt alliances the party would make with other groups. Agents would contact the employers or landlords of party members in efforts to get them fired or evicted. Additionally, if the CP were seeking to cooperate with other organizations, agents would send derogatory information to these organizations to prevent an alliance.[13]

These were the FBI’s covert methods in the battle against domestic communism, but it also played a direct role in the overt repression. The FBI played an active role in the rise of McCarthyism by cultivating “friendly media” outlets which would be used to disseminate derogatory information about the CP. Further, the Bureau aided anti-Communist private organizations such as the American Legion and anti-Communist congressmen, with FBI agents even writing their speeches.[14]

These activities would create a general context for the US government’s legal attacks against the CP leadership. FBI agents would use selective law enforcement to harass the party and its members. Party members were frequently arrested for minor or spurious causes. For example, a secretary of the Alabama branch of the CP was arrested and convicted of possessing “seditious literature” for carrying copies of The Nation and The New Republic. He was sentenced to 100 days hard labor and fined $100.[15] This culminated in the government’s use of the Smith Act to prosecute Communist Party members. The Smith Act was passed in 1940 and created criminal penalties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the US government and required all adult non-citizen residents to register with the federal government. It would be used to prosecute eleven top Communist Party members in 1949. All eleven were convicted with ten being sentenced to five to ten years and one- a World War II veteran- sentenced to three.[16] Similar cases would occur across the country, with frequent FBI interference in the judicial process.[17]

The official COINTELPRO program would not begin until 1956, although this was just a formalization of already existing FBI practices. Even though the Communist Party had already been decimated by the mid-1950s, the majority of COINTELPRO operations were carried out against the party. However, the most impactful COINTELPRO activities in this period were against other left-wing and civil rights movements. Some of the groups targeted were called “Black Extremist” groups. The Nation of Islam was an early target of this program, with the FBI maintaining massive files on just Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. The FBI would go on to play a role in driving a wedge between the two.[18]

As would become a habit for the FBI, the parameters for which groups qualified as “Black Extremists” was expansive. Organizations that would eventually come under the COINTELPRO purview included the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC.[19] The FBI infamously wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and sent him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide.[20]
COINTELPRO would reach its zenith in the late 60ss and early 70s with the inauguration of COINTELPRO-Black Panther and COINTELPRO-New Left. As with its counterintelligence activities against the CP, the Bureau’s tactics ranged from the petty to the outright murderous. Bureau infiltrators of New Left student organizations were instructed to uncover evidence of members’ “depravity” to be publicized.[21] Agents would even contact targets’ parents to inform them of their child’s subversive activities. The FBI also sought to prevent these groups from exercising their first amendment rights by preventing speaking events and public demonstrations. Further, given that many of these groups were popular on college campuses, the Bureau targeted academics friendly to radical groups, seeking to get them disciplined or fired.[22]
The Bureau also attempted to instigate violence between target groups and violence-prone rival political organizations or criminal organizations. In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to FBI field offices instructing them to devise plans to exploit the conflict between the Black Panther Party and Ron Karenga’s Black Nationalist “US” organization.[23]

This was accomplished through infiltrators, anonymous mailings, and forged propaganda. For instance, the Los Angeles field office responded to Hoover’s call for proposals reporting:[24]

​“The Los Angeles Office is currently preparing an anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US’, and they, ‘Us’ members, in retaliation have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an ‘US’ and [Black Panther Party] vendetta.”

Agents also distributed forged propaganda meant to increase tensions between the BPP and US, such as this cartoon attributed to US:[25]

This strategy would bear fruits as hostilities between the two groups spilled over into violent confrontations resulting in the deaths of four BPP members, including prominent members John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Despite Bureau protestations that it never intended to encourage violence, the FBI continued to encourage hostility between the two groups even after these killings. This is illustrated by a 1970 report from the FBI’s Los Angeles office:[26]

​“Information received from local sources indicate that, in general, the membership of the Los Angeles BPP is physically afraid of US members and take premeditated precautions to avoid confrontations.

In view of their anxieties, it is not presently felt that the Los Angeles BPP can be prompted into what could result in an internecine struggle between the two organizations…

The Los Angeles Division is aware of the mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”

The Bureau used a similar technique with Operation Hoodwink, where the Bureau attempted to spark conflict between the Communist Party and the criminal organization La Cosa Nostra, as well as criminal elements within reaction unions such as the Teamsters. Fortunately, this attempt did not lead to any reported physical conflicts.[27] [28]

Additionally, the FBI liked to use a specific form of infiltrator known as “Agents Provocateurs” who would encourage members to commit violent or criminal acts. For example, a member of the Weather Underground arrested for a conspiracy to bomb Detroit police facilities was actually an FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl. Grathwohl reportedly instructed members on how to build bombs and participated in the group’s bombing of a Cincinnati public school.[29] One of the most famous provocateurs was “Tommy the Travler” Tongyai who traveled around college campuses in the northeast encouraging students to bomb military research facilities.[30]

As they did with the CP, the Bureau cooperated with local law enforcement to harass targeted groups and their members. Officials sought to stop targets frequently, hoping to arrest and convict them on minor charges. They would also attempt to frame targets for crimes they did not commit. This is exemplified by the case of Geronimo Pratt- a prominent member of the Los Angeles branch of the BPP. After numerous attempts to convict Pratt on trumped up charges failed, Pratt was accused of the 1968 “Tennis Court Murder”. On December 18, 1968, a white couple, Caroline and Kenneth Olsen, were robbed and shot by two black men on a tennis court in Santa Monica, California. Caroline Olsen would die a week later. In August 1969, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Los Angeles Police Department claiming Pratt had committed the murder and had been bragging about it. Pratt was also positively identified by Kenneth Olsen, leading to Pratt’s arrest and eventual conviction in 1972. Of course, the FBI was heavily involved in the trial. The anonymous letter turns out to have been written by Julius Butler, an FBI infiltrator, who would become a key prosecution witness. Additionally, the Bureau had at least one infiltrator in Pratt’s defense team keeping the Bureau informed on defense strategy. And the prosecution concealed the fact that Kenneth Olsen had initially identified another man, Ronald Perkins, as his wife’s killer and that police had purposefully influenced his identification. Pratt would remain in jail for a crime he did not commit until 1997 when his case was invalidated due to the prosecution’s suppression of evidence.[31]

But the worst of COINTELPRO was the Bureau’s use of violent raids and political assassinations. On April 6, 1968 a group of Panthers were confronted by police officers in west Oakland. Gunfire was exchanged and the police cordoned off the block. After an hour and a half, the Panthers attempted to surrender, but when unarmed ‘Lil Bobby Hutton emerged from a nearby basement, he was shot dead by police officers.[32] In a more overt case, Chicago police officers, with the assistance of the FBI, assassinated Fred Hampton in 1969. They were assisted by an FBI infiltrator, William O’Neal, who provided detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment.[33]

This is far from an exhaustive exploration of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs. The FBI targeted numerous groups such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, American Indian Movement, etc. that I was unable to cover here. While COINTELPRO was brought to light by the Church Committee in the 1970s and, subsequently, formally ended, the FBI has definitely continued its counterintelligence activities. In recent years, it has been revealed that the FBI maintains a list of “Black Identity Extremists”.[34] With this in mind, I think it is incredibly important for leftists to learn the history of COINTELPRO. With this knowledge we can more thoroughly safeguard our organizations against the inevitability of government subversion 

​Citations

[1]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 297

[2] Admin. (2020, July 24). AG Palmer Promises "War on Reds," Delivers Palmer Raids. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://todayinclh.com/?event=ag-palmer-promises-war-on-reds-delivers-palmer-raids 

[3]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 299

[4]“Communist Party Membership by Districts 1922-1950.” Accessed October 3, 2020. https://depts.washington.edu/moves/CP_map-members.shtml.

[5] Marcus Garvey.” FBI File on Marcus Garvey, Part4, document no. 190-1781-6, 10 Aug. 1922. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/marcus-garvey/marcus-garvey-part-04-of-12/view

[6] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. II. Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.transformation.dk/www.raven1.net/cointeldocs/churchfinalreportIIb.htm Accessed: 2020

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 45

[11] Ibid, Pgs. 33-49.

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] O'Reilly, Kenneth. "The FBI and the Origins of McCarthyism." The Historian 45, no. 3 (1983): 372-93. Accessed October 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24445173.

[15] Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. P. 318, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf 

[16] McElroy, Wendy. “Smith Act Tyranny Against Communists.” The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 5, 2018. https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/smith-act-tyranny-communists/.

[17] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 57

[18] Chicago. Bureau of Investigation. Chicago Letters. Chicago: Bureau of Investigation, 1969. http://docs.noi.org/fbi_january_22_1969.pdf

[19] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 5

[20] Gage, Beverly. “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 11, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html.

[21]  Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 24 

[22] Ibid, Pg. 56

[23] “Federal Bureau of Investigation – Initial Memo on Fomenting Violence Against Black Panther Party.” Genius. Accessed October 4, 2020. https://genius.com/Federal-bureau-of-investigation-initial-memo-on-fomenting-violence-against-black-panther-party-annotated.

[24] Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 218

[25] Los Angeles. Bureau of Investigation. Things to do Today. Los Angeles: Bureau of Investigations, 1969. http://collection-politicalgraphics.org/detail.php?type=browse&id=1&term=Black+Panther+Party&page=3&kv=54716&record=141&module=objects

[26] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III, Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_3_BlackPanthers.pdf Accessed: 2020, 24 

[27] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, part 1, document no. 100-159407, 29 Nov. 1967. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[28] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, par1, document no. 100-49252, 25 Jan. 1968. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[29] Newton, Michael. The FBI Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012, 133

[30] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 48.

[31] Ibid, 77-94

[32]  Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 118-120.

[33] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 64-77.

[34] Speri, Alice. “The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional ‘Black Identity Extremism’ Movement.” The Intercept, March 23, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/.

Five Finger Death Punch: A Case Study in Performative Working Class Aesthetics

By Matt Nguyen-Ngo

A common sentiment on the left is that many American working-class whites, largely made up of reactionaries, undermine their own best interests by adopting right-wing politics. It’s not hard to determine why; through its influence over American culture and education over the course of history, the owner class has managed to redefine “capitalism as freedom” and “socialism as slavery.” Of course, determining the “how” is just as important as determining the “why.” This article seeks to uncover the methods by which the owner class manipulates culture and aesthetics to reinforce capitalist ideology in the American white working class, using the metal band Five Finger Death Punch as a case study.

What is Class?

With the language of class struggle becoming increasingly relevant in the political landscape of the United States, it becomes necessary to clarify the delineations between socioeconomic classes. The dominant concept of class in the US is the liberal one, which bases class distinctions largely on income level. This concept divides people into lower, middle, and upper income classes. If we are to define class in this way, then what are the cutoff points that differentiate these three classes from each other? At what amount of annual income would someone transition from “lower” to “middle” class in this framework? Any answer to this question is by definition arbitrary. On the other hand, in the context of class struggle described by Marx as the conflict between opposing economic interests of the bourgeoisie (owner class) and the proletariat (working class)[1], it makes infinitely more sense to construct class lines based not on one’s fluid income level, but instead on one’s concrete relationship to capital. This article rejects the liberal class framework in favor of the Marxian.

However, regardless of which economic measurements we base our class delineations upon, these lines won’t always match up with class identity as perceived by the general public. In any given culture, an individual’s class is perceived according to their aesthetic choices, such as clothing, speech, activities and affiliations. In the modern US, a “lower class” or “working class” person might wear camouflaged cargo pants and a sports jersey, or a tradesman’s uniform when on the job. A “middle class” or “upper class” person might wear slacks and a button-up shirt, or a business suit and watch instead. In late Victorian England, a politician might wear a frock coat and top hat to convey their sophistication to voters, or a tweed suit and cloth cap to break social conventions and show commonality with the average citizen.[2] Regardless of cultural context, class identification is a performance.

In the United States there is a recurring phenomenon where members of the owner class perform as members of the working class by adopting working-class aesthetics. This can take the form of politicians like Lindsey Graham wearing a cowboy hat to evoke the ranchers of the “Old West,” or New York real estate investor and US President Donald Trump using laypeople’s language to appeal to the rural white working class. It can take the form of wealthy capitalists electing to drive luxury pickup trucks that are never taken off a paved road, instead of a high-end sedan or exotic sports car. And, more salient to the subject of this article, it can take the form of a heavy metal band like Five Finger Death Punch – made up of reactionary capitalists – wearing the cultural markers of the American working class to relate to them as a fanbase. Like all aesthetic choices made by all people, these are all deliberate performances of group identity: in this case, a working-class identity that does not line up with material (economic) reality. By superficially identifying themselves with the working class, the “everyman,” these capitalists perform working-class aesthetics to create a false sense of solidarity with the proletariat, reinforcing the dominant ideology that grants them their power and influence.

Working-Class Performance

One of the most elucidating examples of this phenomenon, which I call “working-class performance,” is the work of celebrity Mike Rowe, made famous by his reality television show Dirty Jobs. As the host of Dirty Jobs, Rowe travels to different businesses around the United States putting himself in the shoes of their employees. He performs these unpleasant, menial jobs as a spectacle for more advantaged viewers to vicariously experience the struggles of the less fortunate. In one episode of Dirty Jobs, Rowe visits a pig farm in Las Vegas that turns food waste into slop to feed the pigs. Despite claiming to showcase the experiences of the “everyman,” the star of the show (other than Rowe himself) is the farm’s owner Robert Combs, who walks Rowe through the slop production process. Combs mentions an employee by name – a man named Jose – but no employees are ever shown on screen. This is a recurring theme in Dirty Jobs and other reality television shows like it. While they supposedly celebrate the working class as essential people who do the jobs “we” are unwilling to do, they actually “push the human beings whose labor they nominally valorize to the margins,” opting instead to tell the stories of capitalists through a “ventriloquized working class.”[3]

Despite his portrayal as an “everyman,” Mike Rowe has a net worth of $30 million largely made from television and being a company spokesman, appearing in high-profile advertisements for automobile and pharmaceutical companies.[4] In his advertisements for Ford’s F-150 pickup truck, Rowe (who has no real-life construction or automobile expertise) appears on a construction site amongst a backdrop of workers on the job, explaining why the F-150 is superior to other trucks and the working class viewer should buy it over the competition.[5] In other words, Rowe uses this working-class performance to sell you something.

So too does Five Finger Death Punch. Like Rowe, Five Finger Death Punch uses working-class performance to sell their audience something. This “something” can be music, concert tickets and merchandise of course, but I am referring to something more intangible. One of the most commercially successful American metal bands in the 21st Century, Five Finger Death Punch has carefully crafted their brand to appeal to millions of common Americans, predominantly conservative, white, working-class men. In this case study, I will deconstruct the band’s hyper-American “everyman” image to demonstrate how they sell the promise of the “American Dream,” ultimately serving the interests of capital. It is my hope that this will help illuminate the impact of working-class performance on American class relations and class consciousness.

Who is Five Finger Death Punch?

Five Finger Death Punch, or “5FDP,” is an American metal band based in Las Vegas, Nevada that hails from the groove metal, thrash, and arena rock traditions of bands like Pantera, Metallica, and W.A.S.P. With albums like 2009’s War is the Answer and 2011’s American Capitalist, 5FDP has deliberately created a provocative, hyper-American, hyper-capitalist image. In the words of their rhythm guitarist and marketing mastermind Zoltan Bathory:

“We [the band] like to press buttons. When everyone was on the streets with signs saying ‘war is not the answer,’ [in reference to the war in Iraq] we released War is the Answer. When Occupy Wall Street was going on and socialism was growing in America, we brought out American Capitalist. That’s all intentional.”[6]

Despite their exaggerated all-American image in the most stereotypical sense of the phrase, many of their members are immigrants – including Bathory. Bathory immigrated to the US from Hungary shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and loves to tell stories of how he arrived in the States with “a bag of clothes, a guitar, and a few bucks in my pocket,” with no English skills.[7] His is a familiar, tired story of dragging himself by his own bootstraps out of “grey communist squalor” to seize his own emancipation in “the freest and fairest political and economic system” of American free-market capitalism, enabling him to live a life of “unchecked excesses.”[8] It is a story that has been told time and time again by the families of exiled Cuban slaveowners and the like. It is a story that affirms the belief that the US is a golden place of unlimited opportunity for social mobility, and purports that those who do not get ahead are merely lazy and unworthy of success. After all, the story goes, if an immigrant like Bathory could do it, why can’t you? In addition to Bathory, the band’s longtime lead guitarist Jason Hook is Canadian, and Hook’s replacement Andy James hails from Norfolk, UK.

Of course, I do not deny that immigrants belong to their new countries just as much as the native born. However, why this exaggerated display of American uber-patriotism from a band that is 40% foreign-born? Speaking from personal experience as a member of the Vietnamese-American diaspora, I know that immigrants and/or minorities often perform exaggerated “Americanness” to fit in, to prove that one “belongs” in the country. Additionally, Bathory’s life story – no doubt curated for the metal news interviews – is the perfect origin story for a band that promotes “bootstraps” ideology and American jingoism so zealously.

Unsurprisingly, the band aggressively advocates for the US military and law enforcement. They believe these groups are exploited and underappreciated by an ungrateful public and unscrupulous government. This message is succinctly captured in the lyrics to “No One Gets Left Behind.”

Politicians banking in their greed

No idea on how to be all they can be

…

Play your war games with other people’s lives

It should be you on the front line

In another interview, Zoltan Bathory shows his disdain for how the public treats US soldiers, in his view.

“They’re [the soldiers] merely just doing their jobs… just like when the guys came back from Vietnam [after the end of the US-Vietnam War in 1975], they had to put up with all kinds of shit [from citizens].”[9]

Setting aside Bathory’s comments about public treatment of soldiers returning from Vietnam (which was hardly universal), and setting aside the American atrocities that would have provoked such animosity, 5FDP’s narrative that US soldiers are exploited is correct to a certain extent. US soldiers, often working-class men with limited economic options, are indeed sent to die by social elites who benefit from war. But 5FDP’s analysis is missing one critical element: the reason these elites are sending these soldiers to die. Politicians do not merely send soldiers to war for some nebulous, aimless greed. What are these politicians greedy for? Perhaps we can find our answer by asking the military arms and logistics companies that profit from American imperialism, and their political partners in Washington like Dick Cheney, former US Vice President and CEO of defense contractor Halliburton.[10] Indeed, despite seeming to rail against war profiteering in “No One Gets Left Behind,” 5FDP’s very next album is the aforementioned War is the Answer, which conveys the exact opposite message.

Despite their message that clearly advances the interests of capital, Five Finger Death Punch presents themselves as the quintessential American working-class band. Their image and music speak to the people who are often pejoratively labeled “rednecks”: the white, predominantly rural American working class.

Take, for example, their music video for “The Pride” off of American Capitalist, a list-form song that namedrops companies like Facebook and Coca Cola, in which vocalist Ivan Moody proclaims the band is “not selling out,” but “buying in.”[11] Moody is presumably “buying in” to capitalism itself, not just the specific companies he names in the song. The music video depicts the band playing in front of a wall of television screens, flashing an endless stream of advertisements that light up the stage. The band members all wear NASCAR-style jerseys proudly emblazoned with the logos of corporate sponsors. It is important to pay attention to the stylistic choices being made here, as well as the specific companies 5FDP chooses to advertise. NASCAR, or The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, is an auto sports organization that is commonly associated with American working-class whites. The companies flashing on the television screens include Monster Energy and Fox Racing, both brands with similar associations. This melding of working-class aesthetics with the valorization of capital jives will with the band’s political philosophy, which contends that its own commercial success is proof that capitalism provides freedom and prosperity. This image is crucial to the band’s success; if they were to simply sing songs praising capitalism and the military without adopting this “everyman” aesthetic, it’s doubtful their audience would relate to their music so powerfully.

Five Finger Death Punch’s Central Message

We can synthesize all that was previously discussed into one concise sentence: Five Finger Death Punch’s central narrative is that they – the band – started out just like you – the audience – so if they were able to achieve fame and fortune in the capitalist system, you can too. True American Capitalists, 5FDP is selling the “American Dream” itself.

This is nothing new in marketing. Take, for example, this 1990 advertisement for a perfume named Heaven Sent, depicting the fragrance user bathing in celebrity status, coddled by servers and paparazzi as she steps out of a limousine onto the red carpet.[12]

The woman is the winner of a sweepstakes in which the grand prize is a one-day celebrity experience. Instead of merely selling fragrance, the perfume company is quite literally selling upward mobility.[13] It is useful to note that this advertisement was published well after the “Great U-Turn” in the mid-1970’s which saw a dramatic increase in wealth inequality and decrease in social mobility that continues to this day.[14]

Like the Heaven Sent perfume advertisement, Five Finger Death Punch’s “The Pride” is selling the promise of upward mobility to their working-class audience in the only way that seems attainable in the modern age: celebrity status. By “buying in” to the American capitalist system, so the band promises, you too can live large like Five Finger Death Punch: the monster truck driving, Monster Energy chugging guys you can rock out with now, and have a beer with later.

This narrative is, of course, inaccurate. Like I previously discussed, the band’s beloved American capitalism does not provide the freedom and opportunity that they claim it does. If “social mobility” ever even existed at all for the vast majority of people, the “Great U-Turn” killed it a long time ago. This is to say nothing of the economic exploitation inherent to the owner-worker relationship that defines capitalism, as described in Marx’s Capital.[15] Additionally, while 5FDP is right to mistrust the US government, they do so for the wrong reasons. The US government sends soldiers to die in war on behalf of the capitalists that 5FDP spends so much time praising. Regardless of whether or not the band intends to do so, or is even aware that they’re doing it, 5FDP’s message ultimately serves the interests of capital and sows false consciousness among the working class.

Alternative Narratives

Since Five Finger Death Punch’s music appeals to so-called “rednecks,” it may be prudent to examine the origins of that word. The term “redneck” was coined to describe white coal miners during the West Virginia Mine War, who wore red bandanas around their necks to show their allegiance to the miners’ union.[16]

The West Virginia Mine War was an armed conflict that took place in the early 1920’s between striking miners and the mine “operators” (companies) that exploited their labor in the Appalachian coal mines, and controlled every aspect of their lives in the company towns. After the miners in the independent town of Matewan unionized, the coal companies retaliated by sending in the Baldwin-Felts, private mercenaries that violently cracked down on the strikers. The miners took up arms against these corporate mercenaries, culminating in the Battle of Blair Mountain. The miners called upon the US Federal Government for assistance, but were unpleasantly surprised when the federal troops took the companies’ side instead. It is an oft-forgotten, but crucial piece of American working class history that demonstrates how the state works on behalf of capital – not against it.[17]

So, the rural white working class indeed has a history of resisting oppression and authoritarianism. But it is not the nebulous, aimless authoritarianism that Five Finger Death Punch describes in their music video “Living the Dream,” which argues that mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic are a slippery slope to tyranny.[18] It is actually capitalist authoritarianism, and government oppression on behalf of capital. Five Finger Death Punch’s narrative is a distortion of history that was expertly crafted by the capitalists before them, making the working class complicit in its own subjugation.

Conclusion

If socialists are to create class consciousness among American working-class whites, it is necessary to understand why their false consciousness exists in the first place so that it may be counteracted. By understanding Five Finger Death Punch’s working-class performance, we can understand the forces at play that sow false consciousness among the American proletariat. By advancing narratives that, using white working-class history, contradict 5FDP’s capital-serving message, we can obstruct the flow of false consciousness and promote true class consciousness for all working people.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

[2] Marcus Morris, “Class, Performance and Socialist Politics: The Political Campaigns of Early Labour Leaders,” in Politics, Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey and Jeffrey Richards, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 259-275

[3] Gabriel Winant, “Dirty Jobs, Done Dirt Cheap: Working in Reality Television,” New Labor Forum 23, no. 3 (Fall 2014): pp. 66-71.

[4] Celebrity Net Worth, “Mike Rowe Net Worth.” https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/actors/mike-rowe-net-worth/

[5] https://youtu.be/mDQpo23vfLw

[6] Zoltan Bathory, “When I Say That Nothing is Impossible, I Truly Believe It,” interview by Sam Law, Kerrang Magazine, March 30th, 2020.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Zoltan Bathory, “Interview: Five Finger Death Punch – Zoltan Bathory; Oslo, 2011,” interview by Guest, Musicalypse, January 10th, 2011.

[10] Jonathan Turley, “Big Money Behind War: The Military-Industrial Complex,” Al Jazeera, Jan 11th 2014. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/1/11/big-money-behind-war-the-military-industrial-complex/

[11] Five Finger Death Punch, “The Pride.” https://youtu.be/zuQGx1H1Qh8

[12] Erika L. Paulson and Thomas C. O’Guinn, “Working-Class Cast: Images of the Working Class in Advertising,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 644 (Nov 2012): pp. 50-69.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America, New York, NY: Basic Books, 1988.

[15] Karl Marx, “Part Three: The Production of Absolute Surplus Value,” Capital: Volume 1, 1867.

[16] Wilma Lee Steele, “Do You Know Where the Word ‘Redneck’ Comes From? Mine Wars Museum Opens, Revives Lost Labor History,” interview by Roxy Todd, Inside Appalachia, West Virginia Public Broadcasting, May 18th, 2015.

[17] Brandon Nida, “Demystifying the Hidden Hand: Capital and the State at Blair Mountain,” Historical Archaeology 47, no. 3 (2013): pp. 52-68.

[18] Five Finger Death Punch, “Living the Dream.” https://youtu.be/eOkkWIOkWl8

Bernie Sanders and the Left: What Happened?

By Mick Armstrong

Republished from Red Flag.

Bernie Sanders inspired hope among millions of working-class Americans appalled by the dire state of US politics. With his attacks on the billionaire class, his talk of socialism and his program of Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage and free university tuition at last, there seemed to be an alternative to far-right Republicans like Trump and despised pro-big business Democrats like Hillary Clinton.

Sanders tapped into a mood for change in an increasingly polarised US society. On the one hand, there was the growth in support for Trump and various far-right conspiracy theorists and outright fascist groups. On the other hand, there was a sustained increase in the number of people favouring some sort of socialist alternative to capitalism. As early as 2011, a Pew Research Center poll showed that most young people had a more positive view of socialism than of capitalism.

Sanders’ two presidential campaigns built on and reinforced these sentiments. His support was particularly strong among young people, a majority of whom now reject capitalism. This was an important development in a country where there is no equivalent to the Australian or British labour parties and where socialist ideas of all stripes had long been marginalised by the Cold War anti-communist consensus. A further reflection of this trend was the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, which now claims something like 70,000 members.

Socialists and Biden: an exchange

You don’t have to scratch too deeply beneath the surface to understand why this shift occurred. The 2007-08 global financial crisis resulted in millions of US workers losing their jobs and/or their homes. But the banks and the giant financial corporations that caused the crisis were bailed out to the tune of trillions of dollars by Democratic President Barack Obama. Workers’ taxes paid for those handouts. The US, like most of the Western world, has become an incredibly unequal society. The minimum wage is derisory. Today’s young people are set to be worse off than their parents’ generation. Compounding all that are endemic racism and militarism: the unrelenting police shootings of Blacks and the long decades of murderous wars from Iraq to Afghanistan, justified by rampant Islamophobia.

The bind was that there were limits to Sanders’ politics, which constrained and eventually reversed the radical potential of his campaign. By the standards of most other Western capitalist societies, Sanders was a moderate social democrat. He was, for example, nowhere near as left wing as Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. Sanders could seem much more radical than he actually was because of the abysmally right-wing nature of US politics. While his program put forward important individual reforms, it was not an anti-capitalist program and Sanders never called for getting rid of capitalism.

Sanders is not an opponent of US imperialism. He is a strong advocate of a hardline US stance against China, is pro-Israel and has longstanding connections with sections of the military industrial complex. From early in his political career in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was a strong backer of the police. So, unsurprisingly, he has refused to support the Black Lives Matter demand to defund the police.

These serious limitations of Sanders’ politics were glossed over or apologised for by most of his supporters on the left. Such an approach meant that newly radicalising young people were not educated in clear-cut anti-imperialist politics—vital for socialists in the US, which remains the number one imperialist power in an increasingly conflict-ridden world.

Furthermore, while Sanders called for building a movement, it was a movement aiming to get him and other progressive Democrats, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, elected to office, not a movement of workers and youth to fight in the workplaces and on the streets for major reforms or to challenge capitalism.

Is this the most important election ever?

The bigger problem limiting the radical potential of the Sanders’ campaign was that it remained trapped within the framework of the Democratic Party—the number two party of US imperialism. Born as the party of the southern slaveholders, the Democrats have always served the interests of the rich and powerful and of US military might. From Wilson to Roosevelt to Truman to Kennedy to Johnson to Clinton to Obama, Democratic presidents have waged war after war of pillage and plunder.

Attempting to reform the Democrats is an utter dead-end for socialists. What is vitally needed in the US is a genuinely radical working-class political alternative to the Democrats. Sanders could have helped build such an alternative if, after his defeat in the 2016 primaries, he had run as a social democrat against both Clinton and Trump. But despite facing a brutal dirty tricks campaign by the Democrats’ corporate establishment, Sanders offered no alternative to his many supporters. He called on them to back the despicable Clinton.

Despite his supposed “independent” status, Sanders incorporated himself deeper and deeper into the Democratic mainstream after the 2016 elections. He tried to build, not a left-wing alternative to the Democrats, but a mildly progressive faction very much loyal to this party of big business.

To prove his loyalty in the 2018 midterm elections, Sanders campaigned for liberal, centrist and right-wing Democratic candidates. And from the outset of the presidential primaries, Sanders made it clear that he would back whoever won the Democratic nomination, even a hardline conservative like Joe Biden. Although he was again savagely done over by the Democratic establishment, Sanders remained true to his word. Indeed, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have gone out of their way to praise Biden.

In order to get on board left-wingers hostile to Biden, Sanders and other liberal Democrats have painted Biden as some sort of saviour of workers’ interests against Trump. This is despite Biden making it crystal clear that he will not back any of Sanders’ policies and focusing his campaign on making concessions to right-wing Republicans worried that Trump’s behaviour discredits US imperialism’s standing in the world.

So rather than working for a break from the Democrats, Sanders and the likes of Ocasio-Cortez have acted as a safety valve for US capitalism’s B team. They have tried to channel a growing radicalism, especially among young people, back into the discredited Democrats. Following this same trajectory, the Democratic Socialists of America have been increasingly incorporated as the progressive wing of the Democrats.

Sanders has joined a long line of past liberals, progressives and social democrats who have helped prop up the Democratic Party in the face of mass upsurges of disaffection by giving it a seemingly radical face. These various progressives have played and continue to play a vital role in maintaining the stability of US capitalism. Their role is one of the key factors in explaining why US workers don’t have their own party independent of the two mainstream capitalist parties, even a pathetically inadequate one like the British or Australian labour parties.

Socialists should not vote for Joe Biden

The other significant negative impact of the Sanders’ campaign has been on the politics of sections of the socialist left. Thrown off balance by the surge of support for Sanders, important sections of the socialist left threw themselves largely uncritically into his campaign. They embraced it as a get-rich-quick scheme for mass influence. Softening their socialist politics to fall in behind Sanders did nothing to advance working-class struggle or mass campaigns like Black Lives Matter or to build the revolutionary left. It strengthened the hand of the reformists and liberals who dominated and set the political terrain of Sanders’ campaign.

Numerous leftists abandoned the longstanding stance of the radical and revolutionary left in the US—from the syndicalists of the Industrial Workers of the World to Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party to the early US Communist Party to the Trotskyist movement—of not voting for candidates of either of the two dominant capitalist parties. Initially many on the left, including leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, proclaimed that it was “Bernie or bust”—that they would campaign only for Sanders and not for a right-wing corporate Democrat like Biden.

But abandoning the socialist principle of not supporting candidates of openly capitalist parties in order to back Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez became a slippery slope. If you were prepared to vote for Sanders running as a Democrat on a mild social democratic program against Trump, it is no great further stretch to vote for the lesser evil Biden against the “fascist” Trump. Indeed, many of the former supporters of “Bernie or bust” have now caved in to the relentless campaign of the Democrats and the liberal establishment to back Biden.

But falling in behind Biden and the Democrats will do nothing to strengthen the hand of workers and the oppressed to resist the harsh attacks they will inevitably face, whoever sits in the White House after the presidential elections. Moreover, it will do nothing to counter the threat from the right, which has grown in the very soil of the harsh neoliberal capitalism championed by Democrats such as Biden.

What is vitally needed in the US is a fighting socialist movement to champion mass struggles like the Black Lives Matter movement and to build broader working-class resistance. Those struggles won’t be advanced by tailing the Democrats, no matter how seemingly progressive, but only by building a militant working-class political alternative.

What the Political Realignment Suggests About the Prospects for Fascism

By Ashton Rome

The multiple deep crises we currently face are producing huge fractures in the capitalist system's regular operation. In Wage Labor and Capital, Marx wrote that crises “carry the most frightful devastation in their train, and, like an earthquake, cause bourgeois society to shake at its very foundations.” The more fundamental the crisis, the more profound that everyday life and economic and political relationships are disrupted. Crises produce phenomena like we see today: the open calls for political violence, protests, and the growth of socialist and far-right groups; and the shifts in power within the global economic system. These phenomena play themselves out within political parties as the ruling classes and subordinate classes struggle to determine what direction the crisis will resolve itself. Within this process, the ruling class may attempt to reconfigure its hegemony through new political alliances and reformations, and new interplays between force and consent to bring social peace. This is what we see playing out as we see the realignment within the Democratic Party – or, more specifically, the shift of the traditional Republican establishment to Biden and the Democratic Party.

Organic Crisis

Gramsci used the term ‘organic crisis’ to describe periods where the capitalist system produces a crisis where the ruling class and its system can no longer function as it normally does. The crisis occurs at all levels of society – economic, social, political, and ideological. Because the ruling class cannot resolve the crisis, it poses challenges to the fundamental ideas, values, and organizations on which the previous order was maintained. A ‘crisis of representation’ also emerges where traditional parties are hollowed out because they lack legitimacy; and with them, the rules, norms, and legal constructions that they built. The depth of the crisis means that it is usually not enough to defend or conserve the “normal” but to construct a new settlement. The new settlement needs legitimation which simultaneously appeals to a new set of values and the “common sense” (ideology, beliefs, etc). They require cross-class alliances. Realignments typically occur in relation to crisis, as political parties attempt to respond to the new political, economic, and ideological conditions. They can occur as new parties emerge, or within traditional parties themselves.

The crises of the 1920s to the 1940s in the United States, for example, were resolved partially in the New Deal system - a coalition of unions, the black and white working class, white southern farmers, and intellectuals. To secure a U.S. global hegemony, the Brenton Woods system and security agreements like NATO were constructed. Once that system entered crisis, the ruling class used it as an opportunity to reshape relations which in the U.S. and Britain was settled firstly as Thatcherism and Reaganism and later on ‘Third Way’ and ‘New Labour’ as tech and financial service became dominant forces in the economy.

The Fascist Threat

There are debates today, like in 2016, about whether Trump is simply a right-wing populist, fascist, or traditional Republican. Furthermore, many have looked at whether he has a party apparatus or is an isolated leader. Many of those that are quick to call Trump a “fascist” reject the demands of the workers movement and especially their role in any anti-fascist struggle. For them, the key is securing the prevailing capitalist system through a vote for Biden. A discussion about the relationship of elites to parties is important for what it can reveal about the depth of the crisis, the balance of power between classes, and whether the ruling class sees the possibility of resolving it using existing institutions. The movement of part of the Republican establishment to Biden and the Democrats should not be looked at as temporary, but instead a representation of changing alliances in the face of multiple deep crises.

The danger lurking in a crisis period is that if the ruling class is not capable of maintaining power through its normal means, and the working class cannot take power, due to defeats, lack of organization and leadership, the emergence of ruling-class politics in the form of the far right becomes inevitable. The far-right in the form of authoritarian populism or outright fascism requires a crisis that radicalizes all subordinate classes, and a crisis of representation and authority, allowing its leader to speak in a sense "directly to the people" against a corrupt establishment. Trump proclaims to the middle and working class that the global elite and party establishment have embarked on policies of globalization which has offshored jobs and brought in cheap labor to drive down wages. According to the discourse of authoritarian populists like Trump, the existing institutions subvert the interests of the people and a leader, who reflects the will of the people, is needed to “make America great again”.

The movement from authoritarian populism to fascism as seen in Germany and Italy occurs when there is a socialist movement or more correctly the illusion of a strong socialist movement, which is threatening enough to mobilize an anti-socialist movement. It also requires a mass base to draw support from. As well it requires a ruling class convinced that it cannot rule through the existing democratic state apparatus. A September 22 poll from USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll that revealed that roughly 64% percent of respondents believe “protesters and counter-protesters are overwhelming American cities” should bring concern.

This is a laughable overestimation of the strength of the socialist movement today but one echoed by right wing media, Trump, the Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau Investigations (FBI) in particular. Unfortunately, the left enters this crisis in a position of weakness, despite the 2008 and 2016 periods of radicalization that produced the 2018/19 strike wave, massive increases in membership of left groups, a near win for a self-professed "democratic socialist" presidential nominee, and the recent election of several left democrats throughout the country.

So far, compared to the tasks ahead, the left has not been able to translate those gains into the needed mass movements or independent working organizations like unions or a workers' Party, which could be used to shift the balance of power. The unfortunate thing is that we have yet to shift the balance of power leftward from a four decades-long slip rightward. If Trump and his brand of authoritarian populism has captured the Republican Party, during this period of crisis, it would mean that the far right has a powerful tool to beat back any counter-hegemonic movement.

The 2020 Realignment

When it was evident in 2016 that Trump was the nominee, some delegates and establishment figures like Erick Erickson conspired to block his nomination. Many were skeptical of Trump's lack of political experience. Many were concerned about the unrest that his racist scapegoating of immigrants and his history of sexual violence and sexism would cause. Others were and still are concerned by his flirtations with the alt-right and fascists, and especially of his outright criticism of the Post-9/11 national security state and neoliberal commonsense. Trump represents to them a wild card that can not be easily managed. For the ruling class that supported him, Trump's outsider status was suited for the task of maintaining the current order. Once his nomination was official, about 20% of Republican House members refused to endorse him, and a significant numbers of establishment Republicans like Richard Hanna of New York and Meg Whitman rallied around Clinton.

The Republican Party is now the Party of Trump. Since assuming the office Trump has confirmed part of the establishment's fears and relaxed them in other regards.  He has worked to build a cabinet of loyalists and effectively remade the Party into his own.  For the first two years he had to battle the party establishment like John McCain and Jeff Flake, but by 2019 Trump built a cabinet of loyalists and won the trust of many that opposed his initial run. This was exemplified by the fact that every Republican member of the House opposed his impeachment. Also, by 2019, congressional GOP had become more and more aligned with Trump, as opposition members retired and were replaced by more pro-Trump figures. As well the 2020 Republican Party is simply Trump’s platform from 2016. Trump in office was able to reassure the establishment by governing largely according to neoliberal orthodoxy as with his Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and record stock market.

For the ruling class that supports Trump, he is useful. Trump's populism and discourse avoids naming and placing blame squarely on the capitalist system at the heart of the Great Recession and the austerity regime that gave rise to the anger that brought him into office. Trump, like other populists makes vague promises to various sections of society to win office and once in power, works to secure the position of the ruling elite and old power structure.  Trump's scapegoating divides the subordinate classes. His discourse whips up sections of the state and mostly middle class into action and violence against counter-movements like the left. This is crucial in a period of increasing polarization of wealth and more unequal distribution of wealth and goods.

The COVID19 pandemic, in accelerating crisis of legitimacy, and the dramatic decline of the Post World War 2 global system of governance has begged serious questions of Trump. The ruling class is concerned about the decline of the Post World War 2 institutions and alliances like North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), United Nations (U.N.), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and other multilateral cooperation that have sustained U.S. global hegemony. Though Trump has continued Obama's Pivot to Asia meant to challenge China's growing military and global influence, Trump has also undermined the alliances thought to be needed to accomplish it.

For years, Trump has allegedly spoken about withdrawing from NATO, and has questioned the U.S. commitment to allied states in the case of war. Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, Paris Agreement, took the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, and supported the commitment of right-wing populist figures in Europe to abandon the European project. 

At the same time, to some, Trump simply represents a hyper-realism about the possibility and sustainability of the post-World War 2 international order. Trump reflects a realization of the limits of American power and the domestic frustration of foreign conflicts brought by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. hegemony since WW2 is built on its monetary dominance, control of international institutions, expanding domestic consumer market, and through its full spectrum dominance (land, sea, air, space and cyber). The 2008/9 crisis exposed the limits of the U.S.'s ability to maintain that structure in the same way.

The ruling order is also concerned by the polarization and infights within and amongst governmental institutions like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI and intelligence agencies like the Central Intelligence, Agency (CIA). Some are concerned by Trump’s alleged usurping of the independence of Homeland Security and DOJ as seen in a recent IG complaint which alleges that top political appointees in the DHS repeatedly instructed career officials to modify intelligence assessments on the George Floyd protests to suit Trump's agenda.

With COVID, Trump's decisions have reflected a breakdown of normal governance. Trump and his administration, along with Democratic leadership, were able to inject Wall Street and the rich with $135 billion in tax breaks, $2.2 trillion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) in late March, $500 billion Federal Reserve program, and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Trump, however, has strayed away from mainstream capitalist economists and refused to continue negotiations on a second round of stimulus whilst promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation around the virus.

The Ruling Class Case for Biden  

One of the main tasks of the ruling class is to figure out how best to place the cost of the crisis on the backs of ordinary people without arousing their anger. One section of the ruling class sees the Democratic Party and Biden as the last hope of preserving the neoliberal order, using traditional institutions of power, negotiation, and reform. Having survived a 'civil war' that first erupted after the failed 2016 presidential election, the Party has shown itself able to manage the crisis and bring legitimacy back to the system. With Biden as the nominee and the establishment still retaining their leadership, the Democratic Party has seemingly accomplished the impossible – a revival of centrism in the midst of its collapse.

The economic crisis and pandemic have exacerbated the ruling class fear of a resurgence of labor militancy like in the 1930s and 1960s. The last economic crisis brought waves of protests, new political formations, and levels of organization. In 2008, Obama was able to use rhetoric and symbolism, along with repression, to stop the emergence of large-scale mass movements. Similarly, Trump has used his outsider status and promises to a portion of the bottom 90%, scapegoating, and repression to avoid creating mass movements. This ‘peace’ was initially helped to be achieved by low unemployment. The crisis and the potential for an explosion of movements has brought urgent questions about whether the ruling class can govern in the old way or if something new is needed. They hope that Biden will be able to bring a political equilibrium using the concessionary and coercive powers of the state. In the same way, on the economic front, there is a hope that Biden will be more “rational” and listen to his advisers, appointed from the banking industry and Ivy League institutions.

Biden and the Democratic Party may have enough union and social movement support to conceivably tame any movements that threaten to go outside of its boundaries. This is mostly because the Democratic Party elites hopes to utilize ‘lesser evilism’ and ‘popular front’ type anti-fascism strategies to defend the state. It is also because the reformist character of the left wing of the party feels that it needs a left consensus in the halls of power to put forth its agenda. To keep their positions, they will need to play it safe with the establishment or risk being primaried or facing discipline from the Party. They also hope that the left of the Party and labor unions will translate concessions into “reforms”, which will placate the working masses. But as Gramsci once warned, “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

As such, Biden has received numerous establishment Republican, national security, and finance establishment support heading into the 2020 election. At this years' Democratic National Convention, more of the establishment than 2016 came out in support of Biden; these included: Cindy McCain, John Kasich, Susan Molinari, and Meg Whitman, former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO, and former Republican Secretary of State Colin Powell. On the final day of the convention, groups of over one hundred McCain 2008 and thirty Romney 2012 campaign staffers endorsed Biden, in addition to a group of nearly two dozen George W. Bush campaign and administration staffers.

In addition, Biden received the endorsement of seventy-three former U.S. national security officials in the Republican administrations, including former heads of the CIA and FBI and Trump administration officials. A group of a hundred prominent Republicans and independents, including Todd Whitman, former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, launched ‘Republicans and Independents for Biden’ to campaign for Biden. With his support in the union and social movement, Biden is the only candidate that can seem like a political alternative to one element of their base, and a person capable of preserving the existing status quo to another. Although cross-party endorsements have been common in the last few conventions, the alliances have been temporary.

Trump and Authoritarian Populism’s Stable Base

Trump has been able to build a solid base amongst downwardly mobile white working and middle classes. It should be noted that working-class whites are not Trump’s only base or even main base. Though for example, neoliberalism was, as David Harvey argues a “political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites”, it required a new “common sense” and a cross-class alliance. Typically, periods of crisis lay bare the contradictions inherent in capitalist society and more specifically within uneasy coalitions such as Trump’s.

The middle class may feel dominated by banks and sections of big business, and workers may grow angry at the austerity that is a part of the ‘recovery’. One can see that the recovery packages were aimed at delivering for big business by giving bits to different sections of the base. When anger broke out that the 80 percent of the stimulus tax cuts went to millionaires and the Small Business Association’s Paycheck Protection Program largely went to powerful companies instead of providing relief to millions of American small businesses, Trump was able to divert the anger instead to the alleged intransigence of the Democratic Party and at governors who wouldn’t reopen the economy. It should be noted that the nativism Trump embodies was once relegated to a small faction of the Party (paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan), but has since been mainstreamed as neoliberalism has devastated their living standards. The nativism, as well as nationalism, acts in a way like W.E.B. Dubois’s “psychological wage”, used to maintain the middle class of the base that feels beaten down.

This nativism allowed Trump to secure so many union votes that Hillary Clinton lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Despite COVID and massive unemployment, Trump's approval rating has averaged around 40%. By comparison, a CBS News/New York Times poll showed President Bush’s final approval rating was twenty-two percent, due to views on the Iraq war and Great Recession. This shows that Trump and his authoritarian populism has a solid base, which could be mobilized. Conversely, an important caveat is there are indications from national polls and from swing states that working-class white voters aren’t as likely to vote for Trump as in 2016.

It should be noted as well that 2016 showed most of Trump’s supporters were largely affluent Republicans and come from the middle class. This is consistent with most authoritarian populists whose base is typically the middle class, who during times of crisis vacillate between the working class, which is engaging in struggle, and the capitalist class seeking to restore its order. Clearly, Trump, like other authoritarian populists, win support from sections of working class as well. This fact informs the prospect and strategy of building a socialist movement.

Right-wing populists use their platform to win the support of different classes to get into office. Once in office they accommodate to the old power structure and big business whose interests they try to protect, and whose financial support they require. Within the classical authoritarian populism of Italy, once in power, they supported the development of cartels and monopolies like FIAT and Montecatini.

There is nothing new about working-class whites supporting a Republican. The movement of working-class whites away from the Democratic Party occurred as the Civil Right's movement embraced the Democratic Party and its power was in decline. The Republicans starting in the 1950s were able to exploit the divisions that began to appear within the Democratic Party due to the Party's national leadership calling for de-segregation, while the Southern Party opposed it. The New Deal coalition undercut the Republican Party's traditional support in the industrial Northeast while maintaining the Democratic Party's base in the South. This left Republicans in the wilderness as exemplified by the fact that the Republicans only managed to win the White House in 1952 and 1956 (Pres. Dwight Eisenhower) and in 1968 and 1972 (Pres. Nixon) and controlled the Senate for only four years, 1947 to1949, and 1953 to 1955.

Trump was able to capitalize on the disappointment of Obama's failures to deliver on his progressive platform by partially playing on the racism latent in U.S. society. Obama's 2008 "Coalition" was unprecedented because it was built on a new consensus and a new set of alliances that brought in white working-class voters from the Midwest. With his 2008 victory, Obama included a big majority in the House and a post-neoliberal consensus that many thought would be the basis for a reversal of the 40 years of economic policy. Even though Obama lost the white working class vote by 18 points, this was a significant improvement over 2004 when they lost them by 23 points and he was able to win because of the turnout of voters of color and students. Obama’s election and subsequent base were buoyed by a movement to the left on war and health care issues and a discrediting of the neoliberal orthodoxy. If the New Deal Coalition was broken by “race” and white backlash to Civil Rights in the 1960s, Obama's victory seems to have meant a decrease in importance to “race” and the beginning of an economic populism.

Many people today forget the astronomical expectations of Obama when he got into office. Obama’s election occurred during the biggest recession since the Great Depression, which challenged the neoliberal “common sense” of the past four decades.  Obama’s popularity was nearly 80 percent on the eve of the election. His utterance that the “age of conservatism is through” seemed real. A USA Today/Gallup before the election showed that most Americans believe that Obama would be able to achieve every one of his ten major campaign promises, “from doubling the production of alternative energy to ensuring that all children have health insurance coverage.” However, because Obama and the Democratic Party weren’t willing to deliver a definitive break from neoliberalism, and the left wasn’t able to present a real political alternative, a year later, the Right were able to begin gain back seats and lay the basis for right populism.

Trump was able to win the backing of some white workers largely through playing on their disappointment and promises to reverse the past forty years of austerity and neoliberalism. Through theatrics and vague populist statements, Trump imbues the aura of fighting for working people instead of trimming around the edges like Obama.  A 2017 Harvard Business Review textual analysis of Trump’s campaign speeches showed that the word “workers” appeared more frequently than any other word other than “donors”, even going as far as promising to make the Republican Party a “Workers’ Party” .

The Republican establishment and the left backing Biden are on an impossible quest to defend institutions that no longer have legitimacy. Democrats like AOC are happy to frame the contest as one between ‘fascism’ on one hand and ‘democracy’ on the other. The left backing Biden tend to be reformist who see crises as cyclical but short term and don’t require radical change or the self activity (strikes, protests, etc) of working people. The capitalist economic and political systems are crisis prone, and will cause misery and pain in the service of finding a resolution. The huge unemployment rate, skyrocketing sovereign debt, global pandemic, and crisis of legitimacy, not to mention the ecological crisis, make it likely that this Recession will be deeper than even 2008.

As we have learned in other periods, things getting worse do not necessarily lead to increases in political struggle and victories for the left. The crisis of the 1970s brought a neoliberal settlement – a victory for the Right and capital.  The threat of fascism today can only be countered by a political strategy. Recognizing that the balance of power is by far stacked against the workers movement, the left must urgently provide the basis for a political alternative. The left must have an answer to unemployment, COVID, and the threat of war outside of simply defending capitalist institutions from the far right that seeks to remake them. It means taking away the fascist base.